Myles rolled his eyes. “Beck, everybody would be angry with us if they knew of our whereabouts. Positively furious, in fact. Lazuli would revoke our parole. Mother and Father would ground us, at the very least. Even Artemis would probably have the gall to lecture us from space.”
“So why aren’t we where we’re supposed to be?” wondered Beckett.
Myles defied the rules of air-travel safety to unclip his belt and stand.
“Because we are Fowls,” he declared, pointing a stiff finger skyward, melodrama being his weakness. “And Fowls always do the unexpected.”
Beckett thought about this and then deflated Myles’s moment with one of his trademark truisms. “Which is only to be expected.”
“That is not accurate,” Myles argued. “There are a finite number of expected actions in any situation, whereas there are an infinite number of actions that would be unexpected.”
“But you know, in general,” Beckett persisted, which was not like him unless he felt Myles would be irritated. “If you do loads of unexpected things, then unexpected loses its un. Which just leaves expected.”
Myles was perfectly aware that winning this debate would be more difficult than convincing a flat-Earther that the globe was in fact a globe, so he was actually quite relieved when NANNI posted an alert on the lenses of his smart glasses, giving him a genuine reason to change the subject.
Myles transferred the alert to the jet’s front windshield and magnified it with an expanding pinch gesture.
“Look, brother mine,” he said, pointing to a streamlined cylinder streaking toward the plane. “There is a missile headed our way, and it has locked on to us.”
“A missile!” said Beckett gleefully. “Wonderful. We’ll get back to the argument you’re losing later.”
And, with the flick of a switch, he launched the Tachyon’s regular countermeasures without waiting for the order, as switch-flicking was one of his favorite pastimes. Beckett even had a plank fixed to the wall in the twins’ shared bedroom to which he had screwed various switches, and he would spend hours flicking them on and off, which sent Myles’s misophonia into overdrive.
But back to the countermeasures. Missile countermeasures are very popular, especially among pilots who are eager to remain alive, and those of the Tachyon took three forms:
Form the first was a burst of infrared flares that presented a heat-seeking missile with multiple targets, to trick it into blowing up something else superhot besides the jet engine it was aimed at, because, despite the Tachyon’s impressive thermal shielding and bypass engines, it was inevitable that enough heat bloom would leak out for a sophisticated missile to lock on to.
The second countermeasure was a confetti of shredded aluminum, plastic, and paper that, when released, could possibly bamboozle the radar lock of a missile.
And the third effort to confuse rockets was an electronic countermeasure pod in the jet’s nose cone that would jam the radar of the incoming seeker if the confetti failed.
These measures were nowhere near trustworthy enough for Myles, however, relying as they did on proximity, the missile’s own particular guidance system, and fuel reserves. So Myles had, with NANNI’s considerable input, augmented the Tachyon’s countermeasure systems with two more of his own design.
The first of these was a half dozen high-speed drones with holographic capabilities, which would project six alternate Fowl Tachyons into the sky for any remotely piloted missile to target, and the second was a pair of rail guns that were capable of firing projectiles at speeds in excess of Mach 5. Myles’s rail guns were concealed behind retractable panels on both wings. The starboard gun was a plasma model and fired hot ionized particles that would punch a hole through almost anything they encountered, and the port gun fired cyber weapons in the form of limpet pods that would clamp on to their target’s hull and assume control if possible and shut down all systems if not. Some months ago, Myles had presented Beckett with the acronym BCRYPTs for these ingenuous pods. He’d informed his twin that BCRYPT stood for Ballistic Cyber Recon pods with Yottabyte Potential Transfer capabilities. Myles had also rather smugly explained that the acronym was something of an Easter egg for tech enthusiasts, as Bcrypt was the name of the robust algorithm employed after the infamous 2016 Yahoo hack. If Myles had been expecting a pat on the back for his clever wordplay, he was sorely disappointed, as Beckett declared the acronym to be both stupid and ridiculous. Beckett had just learned about scarab beetles in Egyptian history and decided the pods looked like big beetles and therefore should be called SCARABs. Thus Myles was forced to come up with a justification for this new name and eventually settled on Systems for Cyber Attack Re-task And Breach, which he had to admit was both more to the point and catchier.
So, even though there was a missile streaking toward the Fowl Tachyon at six miles per second, neither Fowl twin was particularly anxious, as they had a few tricks up their sleeves, or in this case, wings.
Myles very sensibly sat down and fastened his seat belt, as he was aware that Beckett might launch into evasive maneuvers whether or not they were needed. His twin had once pushed the Tachyon through a barrel roll simply because he’d had a cold and thought the flying pattern might unblock his sinuses.
NANNI’s avatar appeared on the windshield and confirmed what the twins could already see.
“The missile has cleared the first countermeasures,” announced the superintelligent AI. “It is not interested in our flares, jammers, or confetti, apparently.”
“Unbelievable,” said Beckett. “Everyone loves confetti. It’s like a party in the sky.”
Indeed it did seem that the missile had no interest in sky parties and refused to be distracted from its target. It was still streaking toward the Tachyon, an unusual purple afterburn trailing it.
“Twenty seconds to impact,” said NANNI. “Maybe we should do something?”
Do something? thought Myles. That’s not very helpful. But what he said was “Launch the holograms, brother.”
“Really, brother?” said Beckett, seeming uncharacteristically reluctant to flip a switch. “Maybe we should—”
Myles reckoned there was no time for maybe we shoulds at this juncture and flipped the switch himself, ejecting six tiny drones from the fuselage.
These drones had been programmed to project high-res images of the Tachyon that would be opaque even in full sunlight and might confuse a remote pilot. And perhaps this ploy might even have worked had the drones projected what Myles had originally scanned into their drives. But instead of holographic jets, there appeared in the troposphere six free-floating versions of one crudely animated humanoid figure who appeared to be pooping through his index finger.
Myles was close to dumbfounded, but only close. “Beck, is that Alien Pooping Boy?”
Beckett nodded. “I was bored, so I put him in the computer. I thought he would be more distracting than jets.”
Myles glared at his brother. “Tell me the truth now, brother. Did you animate this yourself?”
“I did,” said Beckett. “It was easy. I used the code you taught me.”
Myles was tutoring Beckett in several areas, including algebra, the notion that actions have consequences, and coding.
Myles felt his eyes tear up a little, not because they were seconds from death, but because his twin had actually applied learned knowledge.