Hot Point by M. L. Buchman Page B

her. Attitude to the horizon, air speed, heading—those were obvious. The navigation codes, not so much. She was a Visual-Flight-Rules pilot. Under her VFR license, she could bop around an airfield to make sure everything was working properly, but she did little more.
    She reached out and tentatively tapped the Heads-Up Display toggle switch on the front of the cyclic, doing her best not to jar the joystick control. A vast array of engine information flashed across the visor. At least this she understood. Everything looked well within operational ranges including a solid green “HUMS” in the corner of her display. The chopper’s health management system wasn’t seeing any problems either.
    Another tap of the HUD button and the world jumped into sharp relief, forcing her to gasp in surprise. A thousand shades of green painted the landscape roaring by below them. She could see the terrain’s shape as ridges rose to greet them, then were left below and behind. Her vision was narrow, limited to thirty degrees ahead, which made her feel as if she were roaring down a tunnel at ten times normal speed.
    â€œFound it, did you?” Vern chuckled. “Turn your head side to side, or it gets nauseating.”
    She did and was able to see in any direction she looked. Always the same width, but a sweeping view. It was as if she had her hands cupped to either side of her eyes.
    But she could see…right through the console as if it weren’t there.
    As if her legs, her seat, even the floor weren’t there.
    She was sitting in the air with nothing holding her up.
    As if she was going to fall and fall and never land until—
    â€œLook back up!” Vern order was sharp and she did.
    The world slowly made sense again. Though her heart still pounded.
    â€œIt takes some practice. The cameras are on the outside of the bird, so they don’t see the dashboard or the hull and it feels—”
    â€œIncredibly scary.”
    â€œRight. Like last night when you were driving back up the mountain.”
    God, but he made her laugh.
    * * *
    Vern wanted to take Denise’s laugh and wrap it around himself. He wanted to wrap himself around Denise. He wanted…
    No! What he needed was a distraction.
    â€œYou know”—which had to about the lamest conversation opener ever discovered by man—“there’s something weird going on.”
    â€œYou mean other than the two of us flying across three states in the middle of the night?”
    He really liked the way “the two of us” sounded. “Yeah, even stranger than that.” Vern double-checked their course off the Columbia Gorge VOR radio beacon. It matched his GPS position neatly. “Do you know anything about Steve having a second kind of drone? I thought he just flew the same thing every time.”
    â€œMaybe.” She didn’t sound very sure about it.
    â€œMaybe?”
    â€œI’m thinking.”
    Vern kept his mouth shut. Using the infrared image projected on the inside of his helmet, he looked down toward his belly. Locators inside the cockpit noticed the movement of his helmet’s position. Outside, on the nose of the chopper, the infrared camera shifted to look down and a little back to offer the view below.
    Denise’s shop-box was visible. It hung smoothly at the end of the long-line, dragging through the air a hundred feet down and twenty back. All looked good. He looked forward again.
    â€œLast year…” Denise began. “You remember the New Tillamook Burn?”
    â€œNot really. It was only three weeks of hell to kill the worst Oregon wildfire in half a century.”
    â€œSorry.” She went all meek.
    â€œDenise, stop apologizing. I was teasing. I know about it because you kept my chopper in the sky for three straight weeks without a single fault when everything else in the world was going wrong.”
    â€œSorr—that’s a hard rule to