Chapter 8

For the next couple of weeks, both Jane and I “spoiled Karen rotten.” We concentrated all of our efforts to let her know that she was a valued member of our family and was never going to be discarded. We also insisted that she go every day to be checked by the medical computer.

The computer reported a steady improvement in Karen’s physical condition, and the pseudo morning sickness faded as the depression was driven away. The computer said that we had done a wonderful job of helping Karen recover from her depression. It was filing Karen’s records near the top of its file in case the problem ever developed again with Karen or any of the children. Of course, that made Jane and me feel very good, and it didn’t take long for us to return to being a single happy family.

At the end of the two weeks of Karen’s rehabilitation, Jane announced that she was ready to learn to fly. We were all getting a little cabin fever, so we were glad for the opportunity, no, make that “excuse”, to get outside and be doing things. AF1 was the ideal training plane, and there were no rules and customs to be learned to keep air traffic moving, so there was no need for a conventional ground school. Jane had been through many Air Force classes in her job as Load Master, so Karen and I figured that she was ready to begin the actual flying lessons.

Besides having two experienced pilots in the plane with her, AI was there to take over in the event of an egregious error. I was going to do most of the training, but AI was there as a safe and sure backup.

We spent the first day simply flying around letting Jane get comfortable with the controls. We flew high to allow plenty of room for recovery from errors and at a normal cruising speed of 190 MPH. Jane said that she loved every minute of it, and she did so well that we figured that she was ready for more taxing studies.

Like Karen and me, she was eventually going to be doing a lot of solo flying in her own plane, so she had to learn all of the aerobatics that fighter pilots learned. She enjoyed those even more than she had the straight and level flight that she had done on the first day. The pterodactyls did not have guns to shoot at her, so they had to get close enough to ram or bite, so there were a lot of things that she did not have to worry about. However, there would be occasional dogfights, but we could work on that sort of thing toward the end of her training.

We spent three weeks going through my repertoire of maneuvers, and Karen said that she had nothing to add to that, so we began the training in takeoffs and landings. We had left those till toward the end of the training period simply because they were more work than fun, and we wanted Jane to enjoy the early part of her training as much as possible. Besides, AI could do the takeoffs and landings better and more consistently than any human, so that safety feature was always with us.

However, to guard against all eventualities, it was necessary for Jane to learn the techniques of taking off and landing. We spent the first day of that phase of the training doing nothing but touch and go drills, but after that, Jane taxied out of the hanger and into the air on her own. The routine was to do a takeoff, one or two of the aerobatic maneuvers, and follow that up with a touch and go landing and takeoff. That was when Jane found out just how exhausting flying could be for a fighter pilot, but that was what she was going to be once she had her own plane and was operating solo.

One of the new laser machine guns was mounted in AF1 firing through the propeller spinner. Considering the range and sheer firepower of the X-ray laser, we figured that a single gun was all that was necessary. We could mount more of the guns if we needed to, but we were going for simplicity with our first try. We had all of the radar and other weapons installed and felt in complete command of the situation.

Jane was in the pilot’s seat, I was in the copilot’s seat, and Karen was in the rear seat to be our lookout and backup shooter if Jane ran into trouble that she could not handle. Karen’s guns were quipped with safeties to keep her from accidentally shooting our own tail off during the excitement of the fight. Her display and fire controls could be shifted to any of the guns as needed.

A new wrinkle was added to the display to show the aiming point of the active gun, even if it was not pointing at anything that would reflect the target-designating laser beam. The red dot would appear on the display so that the aimer would have some guidance as to where to point the gun. In the interest of saving useless expenditure of energy, the gun would fire only when it was registered on the target. We didn’t worry about lag here because the laser beam was moving at the speed of light, and that lag was virtually unmeasurable by the computer controlling the firing.

Yes, the guns could have been fully automated since they were computer controlled, but that would be no fun. If there were no human involved in the chain, then why bother? If there were no humans in the chain, then we could just send out fully automated drones and blast all of the pterodactyls from the sky. None of us wanted to do that.

We had finally reached the stage in which we were going to look for a pterodactyl for Jane to hunt, so we were headed in the general direction in which we expected to find the creatures. By being in the copilot’s seat, I could take over if the task became too much for Jane, but we did not expect that to happen.

We got lucky and had a warning from the radar long before we could see the creature. Jane got a vector from the radar and headed in that direction. In her excitement, she put on full speed, but I let her go. I figured that this was the good kind of buck fever, so I let her run with it.

The pterodactyl had seen us and was barreling toward us at maximum speed, and we were barreling toward it at maximum speed. That was a combined speed of close to 400 MPH, so we figured that this was a female pterodactyl. We figured that she was defending her territory and possibly even defending her nest. In any case, this was a big one and needed to be killed for our safety.

We closed quickly and Jane slowed down a bit at my suggestion. The ability to put on a burst of added speed could come in very handy. Jane activated her nose gun and registered on the pterodactyl. The atmosphere was quite calm at the moment, so there was little bouncing around. At 1,000 yards, Jane fired. The display said that the gun was pointing directly at the pterodactyl’s head at the moment Jane closed the trigger connection.

It seemed that instantly the pterodactyl lost its head. As we expected from a beast with a distributed nervous system, the wings flapped a few more times. We continued to close with the pterodactyl for a few more seconds, and a collision was imminent! Jane jerked us into a steep bank and turn away from the pterodactyl, and it just missed us.

It was then that she said, “Now I understand why you insisted that I learn those aerobatic maneuvers. I damned near crashed us into that thing, and I admit to being both embarrassed by the situation and thrilled by my first kill as a pilot.” She giggled nervously as we congratulated her.

Jane said that she wanted to continue hunting for more pterodactyls, so I suggested that she slow down to cruising speed while we hunted for the nest I was sure that we would find if we worked at it.

We flew back and forth over the only tall hills that could be seen in this area. We speculated that the tall hills were the reason for the pterodactyls being around since they habitually picked high places to nest. After nearly an hour, I could see that Jane was approaching exhaustion, so I took over the flying to give her a rest.

All of a sudden, the radar went wild with registering bogies. There were seven of them, and they were all around us. That was just too many for us to take on individually, so I did something I had hoped that I would never have to do—I activated computer control of the guns. Meanwhile, Jane killed the screeching of the radar—there was no question that we needed more warning about the scads of pterodactyls attacking us.