Mermaid Pirate Dispatch

[Read part one first.]

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Jess Rutherford tried to convince herself it was just another day at the Regional Tornado Monitoring Station. As the RTMS director, she knew that all they could do was monitor the incoming stream of sensor data and coordinate zone crossovers between licensees when necessary. But as a mother, she couldn’t help but think about the new 16-year-old licensee with the home-made aircraft. Her own son, Mike, went to school with Amber and had even helped with some of the build. Her stomach had a knot in it. She cleared her mind and checked her monitoring station.

There were a few potential hot spots, low pressure zones across a few different counties. But so far there were no cyclone winds with any real potential. She breathed a sigh of relief.

One of her station monitors lit up and her heart jumped. The agent clicked on his microphone. “Uh, I’m seeing a mesocyclone forming.” She checked his monitoring zone. It was zone 21, Amber’s zone. Her heart sank.

“Probability of touchdown?” she ordered.

“The computer is estimating 100%, max wind speed, 250 miles per hour.”

Her eyes bulged. “That’ll be at least an F3, possibly F4.” She immediately started checking the readiness reports of the surrounding zones, putting them on high alert to go in and assist if needed. Then the audio channel clicked again.

“This is zone 21 licensee Amber Strickland, checking in. I’ll be on site in two minutes.”

Jess felt little hairs stand on end all over her body. The girl sounded so young.

---

Amber’s heart was pounding wildly in her tight chest as she pulled her helmet on and diligently marked off a few items on the pre-flight checklist. She’d already cleared the Turbocida for flight earlier that morning. She was ready to go.

She climbed up into the cockpit in the main body of the craft, a cylindrical structure surrounded by a large cuff connected to four wings, which did double duty as generator vanes.

Once inside, she checked off a few final items, flicking toggle switches left and right as lights came on and electrical systems hummed to life. She started the engines, switched to internal power, ejected the berthing cables, and waited. The electric whine of the engines bathed her ears in a silky smooth blanket of comfort. She loved the way they sounded in flight, and she couldn’t wait to get airborne.

The flight computer reported 100% system health and gave a green check for launch. Jittery and ready to go, she throttled up and the Turbocida smoothly rolled out of the hangar and onto the short runway.

As she taxied she pulled up the RTMS app on the main cockpit screen. It hadn’t even been a minute and a half since she’d checked in. She smiled. She’d make it within the two minute mark. Her helmet audio clicked. “Hey Amber, how are you feeling?”

It was her dad. She sighed. “I’m fine dad. I’ll be on site in thirty seconds.” She checked her alignment with the runway and throttled up. The engines screamed to life, throwing her back in the pilot’s seat as the craft rocketed down the runway. Easing the stick back she felt the wings cutting into the air, gently lifting the aircraft off their homemade runway.

She flicked a switch to retract the landing gear and tapped the nav screen, which was already highlighting the nearest low pressure area within her operating zone. Without backing off from full throttle, she banked toward the potential twister and scanned the horizon for her target.

The airframe shuddered as she hit her first pocket of turbulence. Then the whole aircraft suddenly dropped, her stomach floating into her lungs before the wings bit into the air again. She estimated she’d dropped about fifteen feet. She held her course, having spotted the beginnings of a funnel cloud up ahead, a slender tendril of swirling air and water slowly pushing down from a thick, dark layer of clouds.

Raindrops smacked the canopy and streaked back toward the collar behind her. As she got closer, the rain turned to hail, a thousand tiny rocks of ice hammering on the rolled steel nosecone and thick acrylic cockpit. Another dip sucked the air from her lungs as she plunged toward the ground. It was like cresting the top of a roller coaster and suddenly flying down the incline. The flight computer angled the flaps and once again she was flying level with the ground.

She aligned herself with the cyclonic winds, watching the tip of the funnel cloud on her port side as she banked left and began to ride the winds. This one was big. She knew the air speed indicator would just give garbage data, but the ground tracking radar showed that she was going a lot faster than she’d expected. Doing a rough calculation in her head, she estimated the winds were close to 200 knots.

She gripped the flight stick with white knuckles, occasionally rotating a hand in or out to wipe the sweat from her palms. The whole aircraft was trembling. She remembered an early high wind sheer test where the wings had nearly been torn from the cuff. She’d reinforced the joints and was confident… on paper, that they could withstand these loads, but in the back of her mind she was wishing she had done more stress tests.

The speakers by her ears crackled. “Zone 21… not detecting touch down… report. Repeat, zone 21 licensee… touch down at this time. Please…” The transmission was littered with hissing, crackling, and static.

She clicked on her mic. “This is zone 21. The cyclone cloud is close to ground level. I am awaiting confirmation of touch down. Repeat, the cyclone cloud has nearly reached ground level. Will not engage until touch down is confirmed.”

The chaotic beauty of the storm swirling and spinning outside her window was mesmerizing. She stared at it, marveling at the way the sun’s light reached into the bowels of the clouds, scattering to reveal a deeply textured inner world. Almost no light made it through completely though, with the landscape below looking more like night than day. The shuddering and creaking airframe faded into background noise as she soaked in the wonders of nature’s awesome power.

She was yanked back to reality when an alarm went off on her console. It was a deep, growling buzzer that shook the walls of her heart and made her feel lightheaded. “RTMS this is zone 21, I have touch down. Please confirm.”

Static. Nothing on the radio.

“This is zone 21. I have visual confirmation of touch down and sensors have confirmed. Proceeding with takedown procedure.”

She’d practiced this a thousand times in a simulator and a thousand more times in her daydreams. This was the moment she’d spent the last several years preparing for. She banked hard into the storm and aimed for the heart of the cyclone. Fierce winds battered and shook the entire craft as she plunged in toward the center of the twister, its massive inverted cone swirling and snaking in a deadly, powerful dance.

She flipped a switch to charge the gyroscopic stabilization. She flicked another to pre-warm the hypercapacitor banks. She checked readouts showing pressure and temperature values all over the ship. Her eyes locked onto the master charging switch that would deploy the wings to their charging vane configuration and prepared to flick it.

The world around her vanished into a tumultuous blur of black and gray streaks and sounds so loud they registered as visual noise. The weight of her helmet snapped and bounced about, jostling her head in ways the simulator never could. She found the charging switch again and reached for it, watching her hand bounce wildly in front of the blurry, vibrating console.

She toggled the switch.

Instantly the gyroscopic stabilization system exploded to life, doing its best to lock the body of the vehicle in space while the rotation cuff unlocked allowing the wing assembly to rotate around the body acting as a giant generator. The computer angled and trimmed the wings for maximum rotational momentum while the whole vehicle slowly spun, inevitable gyroscopic precession which was made more extreme by the violent shaking from the storm.

Amber’s inner ear was not happy. She began to sweat and she grew queasy almost immediately. The hypercapacitor banks were charging at a good, steady rate. She kept her eye on their power levels, waiting for the green light to fire her custom high energy pulse detonator. In tests, the pulse detonator had been able to disrupt the low pressure zone and dissipate several real tornadoes, though the test conditions weren’t quite as rough as this real-world situation. She felt lightheaded and ready to throw up. She began wishing. She wished she’d thought to bring barf bags. She wished she’d built more automation into the system. She wished… Green! The bars were full!

Quickly lifting the protective cover over the pulse detonator’s activation button, she unceremoniously mashed it down. The spinning violently ceased and her ears popped as an incredible burst of high pressure air exploded out from her vehicle. She was suddenly in free fall, alarms beeping and warning lights flashing, but quickly she found herself spinning aggressively, the angry cyclone gripping her craft in its dark winds.

It didn’t work. The storm was still strong. Without thinking, she engaged the gyroscope and flicked on the generator mode again. The queasiness resumed and she felt herself turning green along with the hypercapacitor charge indicators. Once again, the green lights lit and she fired the pulse detonator.

This time she found herself falling through dark but clear skies. A readout on her weather tracking system showed normalized exterior air pressure. Quickly she engaged the flight recovery system, which automatically deployed flaps, air brakes, and anything else required to restore normal lift conditions. The ground approached fast, and with every passing microsecond she grew more nervous. A ground impact alert began to sound. The airspeed indicator was struggling with messy data. The turbulence in the air shook her bones within their warm, meaty enclosure.

At almost the last possible minute, she felt the wings grab hold of the atmosphere and she pulled back maniacally on the flight stick, the lower set of wings seemingly barely missing collision with the empty fields below. She banked, feeling several Gs of pressure as she turned to observe the short scar her twister had carved into the earth.

Her twister. She had successfully taken it down.

She clicked the mic on. “RTMS, come in. Can you confirm takedown?”

Static. She tried again. “RTMS, this is zone 21 with a successful takedown. Please confirm.”

---

Jess breathed a sigh of relief. She and several others had gathered around the zone 21 monitoring computer where Brett, the poor agent manning the computer, surely felt cramped and sweaty. She was packed in on her knees, right next to him, and all she wanted to do was stretch and get some fresh air. She stood, pushing against the crowd with her back, and shot everyone a look that gently suggested they all get back to work.

“Well?” she asked Brett. “Can you confirm the take down?”

He shook his head, eyes wide. “Uh… Yeah. Yeah, I can confirm it.”

Jess chuckled. “Well go ahead then, confirm it for the poor girl.”

He clicked on his mic. “Zone 21 licensee, this is RTMS. We have confirmed your takedown of an F4 cyclone that touched down at 9:55 am on March 15th. Please confirm funds transfer upon receipt.”

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Amber was beaming when she climbed out of the Turbocida just outside of her hangar. Her dad ran up and grabbed her, pulling her off the ground as he spun her around.

“I’m so proud of you kid!” he cried, actual tears streaming down his cheeks. “An F4 on your first go? That’s amazing!”

She squeezed him hard and laughed, unable to form words.

When he finally set her down, his face went serious with only a hint of a smile. “How much?” he asked in his best business voice.

She tried to calm herself, but a powerful grin forced itself onto her face. “One point five million,” she said, laughing again.

“Woah!” her father exclaimed, clapping. “And that’s just the first one of the season!”

Her mind was racing still, running back over everything that had happened. She went to work towing her aircraft back into the hangar, hooking up the umbilical, and inserting all of the protective covers to keep mice and birds out. As she wrapped up her work, she stood back and admired her tough, ugly girl. The Turbocida, an actual tornado slayer.

With a jump she remembered the most important step after a successful takedown. She grabbed her paints and a brush and pulled the ladder up to the starboard side and carefully painted a simple, swirly spiral indicating her first victory. She climbed down, pulled the ladder away, and gazed up at it with satisfaction. With a glowing smile, she went into the house for lunch, looking forward to her next adventure in the Turbocida.