Free Pure Heat by M. L. Buchman Page B

out. It felt like the beginning of a heckle.
    â€œSounds odd. Just take a second to check it out.” He moved in to inspect the engine. He started with the foot-long, three-blade propeller, which looked just fine. He leaned in to check out the spinner cover, ignoring his own reflection in the chrome-bright cone at the center of the props, and wiggled it. Nothing loose there.
    Then he spotted the problem. He blinked and looked again. That wasn’t right. He stepped over to the gray case he’d slid back on the lowest shelf in the truck after pulling out the drone. He read the code descriptions stenciled on the side of the case.
    â€œH.E.” Hush engine. They’d given him the quieted engine option, a pretty damned expensive option. Why would they do that? You didn’t need to be quiet near a forest fire; you needed earplugs. Then he glanced up at the two black cases atop the rack that he still hadn’t opened. Something odd was going on here, but now was not the time. Maybe they sent him the wrong truck. No, it had opened to his code and the birds had been MHA-logoed.
    â€œSo, we gonna see some flyin’ today, boy?”
    â€œSure, TJ. Sure. Just hold on to your seat.”
    â€œShoulda brought a Barcalounger. Be a damn sight more comfortable than this here ladder you gave me.”
    â€œWouldn’t need a seat if you knew how to avoid falling trees.” It was a low blow, but it got a good round of laughter from everyone, including TJ. Everyone except Carly. Damn, he’d offended her again. It wasn’t as if he was bragging about saving TJ. He’d just…
    Let it drop.
    Focus.
    Steve returned to the launcher and hit the power switch again. The engine purred to life. For a hush engine modification, it sounded exactly right. That’s what had bothered him. You could talk over the noise of an H.E. even when it sat on the catapult. You had to shout to be heard over a standard engine.
    He hit the release on the catapult launch, and the bird was gone. At three g’s acceleration on the track, it jumped to flight speed in just over a second. Flying ninety miles per hour, it was simply gone. Little noise, especially with the quiet engine, and no fuss. Nothing in its wake except the mild smell of engine exhaust.
    Just gone.
    There was a universal exclamation followed by excited talking, not that he’d done anything yet. But the drama of it was pretty slick and he never tired of it.
    He climbed up the back step of the truck and sat at the console. He left the drone on auto-climb for the moment. Locater and altimeter were good. Just crossing fifteen hundred feet above ground level. Ground here was at twenty-five hundred feet, so at fifteen hundred AGL, that put the bird crossing four thousand ASL, above sea level.
    The only thing around here that the bird couldn’t fly over was Mount Hood. The drone capped at ten thousand feet. Better performance if he stayed below eight thousand with the hush engine. Mount Hood punched through eleven thousand.
    The dual camera was giving him a clear feed. He swung once over the airfield and felt that surreal bit of vertigo when he spotted the truck and the figure sitting in the back. It was always odd to watch himself on the screen through the drone’s eye view.
    He also spotted the shot of bright blond hair about to climb into the truck behind him.
    â€œHi, Angel.”
    â€œHave you got eyes in the back of your head?”
    He rolled back the observation stream on the side screen, like the best TiVo ever. Everything recorded and instantly available. The active view still rolled on the center console. The flight data showed as a broad sidebar displaying temperature, airspeed, speed over the ground, and altitude.
    He paused the side frame and rolled the trackball to zoom in. Blond ponytail pulled through the back of his black SF Giants hat. Had she forgotten it was his? How odd was it that she’d kept it? He could imagine her