“Lemme guess,” says Chief Investigator Dooley of the NTSB, peering over my shoulder at the crystal ball. The image inside it is distorted because of the curvature of the crystal, but it’s recognizably the cockpit of a Boeing 737. Or the remains of one. “It’s the langoliers.”
“It’s not the langoliers. I’ll let you in on a little secret, Dooley, I’m not actually supposed to be telling you this, but it’s never the fucking langoliers.”
“You disappoint me, Stacy,” he says. “I want my expectations managed with more integrity. Okay, so what the hell is it?”
“Well, that bit there’s supposed to be the circuit breaker panel, except for the fact that it’s completely detached from the wall. And over here we got what used to be the airspeed indicator—”
Inside the crystal, a moray eel undulates across the picture from right to left. It must be four feet long. “Dang,” says Dooley. “Big sucker. My point is, what transpired to bring about the current situation vis-a-vis the location of the cockpit and presumably the rest of the bird on the floor of the fucking ocean, including the hitherto elusive black boxes? We kinda need to get an answer on that part.”
“You don’t say,” I tell him, bone-dry, and straighten up so he has to quit looking over my shoulder. “That’s not why you assholes pay me, or anything. Listen, Dools, I kinda need to concentrate here, so if you don’t mind I’d appreciate a little peace and quiet?”
“My sincere apologies, Contingency Communications Specialist Stacy,” he says, enunciating. “Do let the rest of us know when you’ve consulted the goddamn oracles and got us a probable conclusion, okay?”
I flip him a salute, and keep my face straight until the door shuts behind him—and then I don’t really care if the security cameras pick up my fuck you, jerkwad grin. Wayne Dooley and I have been working together on and off for three years now, and the fact that he is an asshole of the purest ray serene kinda makes it okay for me to be an asshole right back.
Let me back up a little. I’m Devin Stacy. Yeah, I know “Devin” is supposed to be a girl’s name, and yeah, I’ve heard literally every single Stacy’s Mom joke the living and the dead can come up with. What the Board actually pays me for is billed under the job title of contingency communications specialist because somehow freelance necromancer just doesn’t have that bureaucratic ring to it. I get brought in when the rest of the National Transportation Safety Board—scene investigators, lab scientists, analysts, the whole boiling of ’em—can’t figure out why a plane went down. All of their tests are coming up clear, or the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder show absolutely nothing of use, or they simply don’t have the physical evidence to determine a plausible explanation for the crash: that’s when I get the phone call. We got one, Stacy, and these days it seems like it’s always Doolarino on the other end of the line, instead of any of the other investigators I’ve worked with. Which chaps his ass about as much as it does mine, but what can you do when the Board’s biggest dickhead seems to be the one catching all the unsolvable cases?
The current problem I’m looking at in my storied crystal ball is what made a FedEx 737 decide to go swimming somewhere in the South Pacific with only a couple tiny bits washed ashore to show for it like in that Tom Hanks movie, and they’re lucky as hell they even have those tiny bits, because without them I wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing. I don’t have the range or sensitivity on my astral projection needed to scour thousands of miles of super-deep water—but with a piece of the plane to use as an anchor, I picked up where the rest of it was in about twenty minutes. What I’m trying to do now is locate the black boxes, which stopped pinging their radio locator beacons a while ago. The plane went down six weeks back and they couldn’t find it within the limited lifetime of the beacons, even with towed sonar and remotely operated robot subs tracing expensive search patterns across the ocean floor. That is, in a nutshell, why they called in yours truly: I cost less per hour than the robot subs and I’m way more entertaining.
The cockpit is the first thing I’d managed to get, holding the shred of purple-and-orange metal in my left hand and cupping the crystal in my right. The cockpit’s always the first to come, because it’s the soul and center of the plane, its brain and heart: it’s the heaviest weight on reality. But I think I can find Dooley his recorders, if I put enough effort into it. I know I’m gonna wind up with a migraine in return f
or that effort—this shit is not easy, not by any means—but hey. Three people died in this crash, and there’s enough of this goddamn plane species still flying that we really need to know what brought this one down.
(At least it’s not a passenger flight. At least that. The accident airplane’s flight plan had a cruising altitude of 36,000 feet, and falling from that height makes water as unyielding as solid rock. If this plane had been full of people, we’d have a hell of a lot of empty caskets getting buried. Three’s bad enough; three hundred would have been a whole lot worse.)
I change my grip on the shard of metal and focus, pushing my conscious awareness through my gaze into the crystal and out the other side, to the place I’m seeing—and I’m prepared for it, but the sudden shock of cold as I’m surrounded by the psychic equivalent of seawater is still enough to make me gasp. In a way I’m there, two miles down, in the unrelieved darkness of the deep ocean; if I lean on this hard enough I’ll come back to find myself drenched in actual seawater. In my jacket pocket are a couple of battery-powered radio-transmitter beacons; if I do find the black boxes I’m supposed to push those through to mark their location so the searchers can pick them up. It’s a balance, keeping enough of myself this side of the crystal to maintain control, shoving enough of me through to get a good image of what I’m observing.
The debris field is … well, it feels wide, and the pieces of wreckage aren’t all of equal size. Some of the cockpit had been intact, if damaged, but most of the bits I’m looking at now are barely the size of a sheet of paper. Because this wasn’t a passenger flight I don’t have the additional challenge of a whole chorus of three hundred screaming ghosts frozen in the middle of a terrible death; it’s eerily silent, for a wreck. The crew, all three of them, aren’t really here anymore. Once they hit the water at pulverizing speed, there’s little left but fragments, and three weeks at the bottom of the ocean turns even substantial human bits into something unrecognizable, even to someone like me. I can sense a faint queasy anguish and terror in the water, but nothing I can ask useful questions of.
I reach out further, feeling for the knots and snarls of time and space that are the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder. This is the part of the job that’s most exhausting … and the part that often winds up with me lying down in a dark room for hours until the sparklies go away.
The boxes stand out to me, to the kind of sight I’m using; it’s not exactly like seeing a light in the darkness, or feeling a source of heat in the cold, but that’s the closest I can come to describing it. I could actually—probably—pull the recorders themselves back through with me if I tried very hard, but the paperwork involved in that kind of stunt makes even the most jaded Board agent go funny colors and I’m not sure I wouldn’t have a stroke, so all I do is plant the radio locator beacon device on each. That hurts, moving physical objects from plane to plane is like lifting weights with your brain, and I’m falling backward out of the trance. I open my eyes then immediately regret this, ...
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