The Weapon - Apocalypse - part 17
By Diana the Valkyrie
Party with the flyboys


Duncan:

"Yum, great curry. Wendy, is there anything you're not good at?"

"Cross-stitch, Duncan. Fancy a night out, hon?"

"Out? Where?"

"We got invited round for a couple of beers by a friend of mine."

"Oh, OK, I'll just put a sweater on."

She forgot to tell me that the friend was in California, halfway around the
world - the suborb flight took half an hour, wrapped in her warm embrace with
her cape keeping out the cold and vacuum, and pulling no more than three G's.
She forgot to mention that it was on a US Air Force base. She forgot to
mention that a "couple of beers" turned out to be drunken binge with a bunch
of hard driving, hard drinking fighter jocks who only had two subjects of
conversation, women and aircraft, and sometimes it was difficult to know which
topic they were on. And she forgot to say that there were no women allowed on
the base. Wendy, of course, isn't a woman, so that rule wasn't being broken.

I felt very out of place. Most of these kids were half my age, and between
their American accents and the fighter-jock jargon, I didn't understand most
of what they were saying.

"So I pulled eight gees, greyed out, by the time I was ..."

"Flameout at nine k, no Zippo, took twenty to get fire in the hole ..."

"So she flipped on her back with my nose in her crack ..."

"So I pushed my joystick forward as hard as I could ..."

"They like it when you ride them hard ..."

"Hey, Weapon, what's your ceiling?"

Wendy was, of course, the center of attraction. I sat in a corner, sipping at
a beer so cold that I couldn't taste it, which was probably just as well, and
they plied her with questions about her statistics, performance, endurance and
weaponry. Funny. They were in their twenties, and they saw her as an advanced
airplane, rather than a hot sexy woman. I'm an old fart on the right side of
fifty, and even I know, whatever she was, she wasn't an airplane.

I thought about this while I watched. I suppose that they were right, in a
way. When I first met her, she was very much The Weapon, and I even thought
about her in that way, but now to me she was Wendy, wife, mother and guardian
of all humanity.

Then things livened up. The flyboys started playing some game that involved
one of them being picked up by four friends and hurled across the room, to
land on a sofa ... or not. Injuries were minor until they started soaking
their socks in brandy and setting fire to them before take-off.

"Wendy?" I beckoned her over. "What's up, Duncan?" "Wendy, someone's going to
get hurt." "No, Duncan, they do this all the time, maybe a few bruises is
all." "Wendy, this time it's different. They're showing off because you're
here. I've been watching, they look round before they do a stunt to make sure
you're looking at them. This is going to end in tears, can you do something?"
She frowned and looked thoughtful.

It's hard to explain how impressed I am when she does that. You see, it's all
fake. The frown is because that's what we do when we have a difficult problem,
so she does the same. The thoughtful look, is meant to show that she's taking
it seriously, that's also faked. And the long pause while she thinks it out is
the biggest fake of all, I've seen how fast she can think. She isn't using
slow electrochemical reactions to drive her brain, it's electrons, photons and
gravitons. And the reason I'm impressed is that she goes to the trouble to do
all that faking just so that she can maintain the illusion of being human,
sufficiently well for me to be able to continue my suspension of disbelief. Or,
to put it another way, she does it because she loves me, and to help me love
her back.

She went back to the group of pilots, and got their attention by clapping her
hands. They didn't notice, so she did it again, only this time it sounded like
a thunderclap. "Who'd like to go flying, right now!" she asked. I thought, oh
no, a couple of dozen drunk jet jockeys in planes, this was looking to turn
into a major disaster. And one of them said so, "Hey, Weapon, I'm smashed,
we'd get canned for flying tonight." The others nodded, they'd all had a
skinful of beer by now.

"Only if you fly in airplanes," she said.

There was a silence, while they thought about that. "It's OK for you," said
one of them, "but I need a candle behind me and wings on my back to get high"

"No you don't," she said.

They all trooped outside; in several cases, they staggered. I went and stood
in the doorway; I had some feeling for what she might have in mind, and I
didn't think I wanted to get involved, but I thought it might be worth
watching.

She picked up one of them under each arm, and flew up into the sky with them.
She was back several seconds later, without them, and picked up the next pair.
She continued to do this, with several seconds between each pickup, until they
were all up high in the air, and flying. Or as I would have put it, falling.

It's really a matter of wording. A brick will fly if you throw it, it just
doesn't fly very well. A human being has atrocious flight characteristics and
a glide angle not much better than a brick, but if you ask any free-fall
parachutist, you can do some aerobatics as you descend, and you can have some
control as you glide down. Not much, but some. And these were airmen, so they
had some idea what to do, even if they'd never done it before.

The first two fell towards the ground about a minute or two after she'd given
them their initial boost. She collected them as they fell, and hauled the two
of them up into the sky again. Then she came down fast enough to get the next
pair.

Looked at one way, you could say that she was juggling two dozen experienced
airforce pilots. Looked at another way, they were flying. I guessed they
thought they were flying. They certainly seemed to be enjoying it, from their
yells as they got close to the ground and she lofted them up again.

I started to get a bit surprised at how long she continued this game. Then I
got puzzled. Then I did a few rough calculations, and got worried. I went back
inside, and picked up the phone; Wendy can emulate a telecoms system, and
there's a phone number that she monitors.

"Wendy, you have a problem, yes?" "Oh, Duncan, I'm so glad you called. I'm a
bit stuck. There's a limit to how much G force these guys can take, I don't
want to hurt them. Problem is, I can turn them round at the bottom of the arc,
but I can't land them fast enough to be able to give each one a soft landing
before the next one needs catching. Oh, Duncan, help! Three of them have
vomited already, and one of them keeps screaming for his mother."

"Dammit, Wendy, you should have worked this out before you started." "I thought
about the startup and the steady state, I didn't think about the end
conditions, I thought it would be the same at the end as at the start,
symmetry. But I could start them up in twos, and I can only catch them in
ones. Duncan, you can spank me later, what do I do now? I can't get them all
down safely."

Gack. If we lose a few pilots, we won't be very welcome next time we visit.
The problem was the end condition; the fact that the projectile (the man) had
to be moving at approximately zero velocity at the same time as he was at zero
feet, without subjecting him to an acceleration of more than, more than ...
wait a minute ...

"Wendy, what G force are you taking as the maximum?" "Three G, same as I do
with you, love." The solution was obvious. "Wendy, I'm twice their age and a
quarter as fit. If you give me more than three G, I'll get circulation
problems. But these kids are rated up to six G in short bursts. You can handle
them a lot more roughly than you do me." "Duncan, you're a champion"

Several minutes later, she had them all safely on the ground. She was wrong
about three of them vomiting, it was more like ten, and several of those still
had dry heaves, having already ejected anything ejectable. Two of them were
still crying, and the rest were embracing the ground like they never wanted to
let go again. "Duncan, we ought to do something." "Damn right, love, we ought
to get out of here before they get their voices back. They'll be alright now,
and they've learned a valuable lesson." "What's that?" "If you drink, don't
fly."

She was a bit subdued as we took the suborb home. "Duncan, I can't help
thinking how stupid I was, what if you hadn't suggested about the extra Gs?"
"Then I'd have suggested moving the whole circus over the Pacific; they'd have
had a bit of a wetting, but nothing life-threatening." "You know what?"
"What?" "That's why I'm just the Weapon, and you're the Wielder." I didn't
comment on that, I had more than a suspicion that she was perfectly capable of
thinking up those to ideas for herself, plus probably some others I hadn't
thought of, and that she was just trying to boost my ego.

In some ways, everything she did was faked, I had to accept that. She wasn't a
woman, she wasn't actually talking when I phoned her, she didn't think like I
did, she pretended to have emotions based on her estimate of what she ought to
be feeling if she were a woman, and so on and so on. But she did it very well,
it was such a good emulation that I could completely suspend my disbelief and
treat her as if she was a human being. Most of the time. And not counting her
amazing power.

But, on the other hand, she obviously did have a personality, feelings and
thoughts. They just weren't like mine, and I guessed that they didn't even map
onto mine in any meaningful way. We see six colours (it isn't seven, that's
just a mystic number). But she could see outside the spectrum that I could
see; what did that look like? Did she see additional colours, or did the same
six kind of spread out more? Or were the sensations she got, anything like
colours at all? Probably not. Same with emotions, hers were probably nothing
like mine.

Thoughts like that rapidly overheat my brain, like a flywheel without a
governor or load. You can't even ask a human being "What does red look like to
you?" and get any useful answer; the questions I pondered about Wendy were
mostly unanswerable. Not all questions have answers. Some questions do,
though. "What's the time back home," I asked her. "Soon be midnight, Duncan,
time for bed, we'll be home in five minutes."

She didn't need to sleep, but she usually held me in her arms while I slept.
That made me feel good, and apparently, she got the backwash from that; she
liked making me feel good. Is that love? What is love? I know what sex is, but
do different people feel love in the same way? That's the same question as the
one about colours, no way to tell. So how did she experience love? No way to
tell, no way to map it onto what I felt. And why do I ask all these bloody
stupid questions, when the real question I should be asking is perfectly
obvious. "Wendy, do you feel like having sex?" which is, of course a
rhetorical question, just another way of saying "I want us to fuck", because I
already knew what her answer would be, she was on top of me, surrounding me
and I was enveloped in her arms and her legs and her cape and her fragrance
within moments, and all philosophical thoughts were driven from my head by her
skilful manipulations of various parts of me, some of which are not usually
considered to be genital.

She didn't stop when we arrived back home, but there's some things that you
can do on a bed that you can't do in midair (and there's a lot of things that
are better when all that's between you and the ground is a cloud or two and a
couple of miles of air). She shifted smoothly from the mid-air sexual mode to
the on-bed mode without missing a stroke, brought me close to orgasm, and then
held me on the edge, tantalising me with her hair and her nipples until I
screamed at her, "Dammit Wendy, NOW! NOW! NOW!", but she held me close and
whispered her oath into my ear, "My strength is your strength. My power is
your power. I will love you and protect you and obey you. Until the end of
time" while still keeping me on the very edge of the precipice of pleasure.
"WENDY! NOW! OBEY!" but she just laughed and held me helpless while I writhed
and squirmed, then begged and whimpered, until finally her heart melted and I
screamed "WENDY!!!" as she dropped me into the furnace of lust that she'd
created and let me burn to a cinder. After which, of course, I fell asleep in
her arms.

...