The Apollo Academy (15 page)

Zane wasn’t sure what he wanted, whether he should forget this entire conversation and go back to being a semi-normal person or explore who he truly was. He wasn’t one to hide from difficult things, but what if he didn’t like what he found out?

Clearly sensing Zane’s internal debate, Dr. Stevenson added, “It will help me determine exactly what has been added into your DNA. And I’m going to do everything I can to find out who did this. It may even lead me to your parents.”

Yeah, he would like to have a nice long talk with whoever had done this to him, but he desperately hoped this person and his parents weren’t one and the same. Hesitantly, Zane agreed. “Okay.”

Dr. Stevenson’s techiwatch began beeping an urgent message, halting their conversation. He looked down and with a frown read the message. He quickly jumped up, knocking his chair over. “I’m sorry, Zane, but I’ve got an emergency down at the SpacePort. We’ll talk again soon.” He grabbed his bag and ran from the office. Zane had never seen the doctor so flustered or in such a hurry.

Zane’s tumultuous thoughts were torn from his inner drama to what could have caused the doctor to leave in such a hurry. It took a moment before the words sank in. In horror, he remembered that Aurora was training at the SpacePort.

AURORA

T
he sky was perfectly clear this high up, and Aurora had to look down to see the cirrus clouds that dotted the lower atmosphere. She was cruising at twenty-five thousand feet, and the world seemed like such a small place from this viewpoint. The towering buildings that covered the ground blurred away in patches of gray. Up here, just as she’d always hoped, she felt completely free. She could go anywhere, and nothing would tie her down.

So far the flight was going smoothly, but she should have known that wouldn’t last. She was almost finished with her training for the day and was taking a few moments to enjoy the view. She’d left the autopilot disengaged for the majority of the flight in order to manually recover from all the emergency procedures she had been told to simulate. She wasn’t actually experiencing a real emergency because that would be too dangerous, but she was following the procedures as if she really had.

The XT-101 performed beautifully with only the slightest touch on the joystick. Sitting inside such a powerful machine that was pushing her forward at four hundred miles an hour was invigorating.

Aurora was thankful that no one had yet designed an autopilot or artificially intelligent pilot program that was one hundred percent reliable. She couldn’t imagine a time when aircraft would be flown without a live pilot, like the driverless hovercars.

Sky’s voice boomed over her headset. “November Five Five Niner Tango Charlie, climb and maintain FL 420.”

“Roger, FL 420.” She pushed the throttles full forward, pitched the nose of the aircraft up into an eight thousand feet-per-minute ascent. The engines thrust her back into her seat. The Gs on her body were comforting because her flight suit allowed her to maneuver with no ill effects. She couldn’t help but laugh in delight.

She leveled the aircraft off as she reached her designated altitude of forty-two thousand feet and cruised straight and level, waiting further instructions. The only things she heard were the slight sounds of the engines humming behind her and her constant breathing through her mask. She felt totally alone up here but in a way that was refreshing. There was a sort of freedom in being so far away from the prying eyes that watched her. Up here she was confident. The desire to continue her ascent right on out of the atmosphere so close above her was overwhelming.

Despite her straying thoughts, she kept up her constant scan of her primary instruments that were displayed not only on the glass instrument panel before her, but also on her heads up display in order to maintain situational awareness. Everything looked in order.

Interrupting her comfortable solitude, Sky’s voice came again over her headset. “N559TC, climb and maintain FL 550.”

Aurora was a little uncomfortable with this new altitude directive, but she increased her speed and pulled the nose of the aircraft up. Usually for safety a pilot above fifty-five thousand feet would need to be in a pressurized suit, but she knew she wouldn’t cross the sixty-two thousand foot Armstrong Line, where her blood would boil without the suit. She considered questioning Sky, but really she had no choice other than to complete the exercise. It was a high-altitude training unit meant to test her abilities.

Aurora was very careful to ensure that she maintained the best airspeed and angle of attack for her ascent. She was entering the extreme limits for the aircraft and was brushing the threshold of stall territory with this higher altitude.

“Roger, N559TC up to FL 550,” Aurora confirmed when she leveled off again. They really needed to give call signs before graduation. She couldn’t imagine spitting out November Five Five Niner Tango Charlie for the next year and a half.

Aurora left thoughts of call signs and concentrated on maintaining the proper airspeed, trying to keep from getting too close to the XT-101’s stall speed. From her studies, she knew that she was trying to fly in conditions very close to what was known as Coffin Corner. The flight controls at this altitude were so sensitive that Aurora had to barely put pressure on the joystick to change pitch. In fact, she should probably place the aircraft on auto-pilot, but that would defeat the point of her lesson. She needed to prove to herself and everyone else that she was capable of handling the aircraft without help.

She was so focused on her main instruments that it took her a second to understand the yellow warning light that began flashing in her peripheral vision. Once the light registered, she looked over to see what was causing it. Just a cautionary alarm indicating that the aircraft had lost touch with the ground pilot system. It wasn’t anything to get too worried about because she would only need the UAV to take over if she were unable to handle an emergency situation.

Although the warning was not a dire one, it was standard procedure to notify someone of the situation. Her partner probably saw the exact same warning flashing on his screens below, but she needed to maintain communication with him.

“N559TC Ground, I’m getting a warning that the UAV is off-line.”

“Roger that, N559TC. I have the same warning. Stand by. I’m determining the cause of the malfunction.”

While she waited to hear back from Sky, Aurora scanned her instruments, trying to find an indication as to what caused the failure.

She blinked her eyes. The edges of her vision seemed a little blurry, and her focus was too narrow, as if she were in a hallway looking toward a fixed point. Everything around her was dark and distorted, but her focal point remained clear. She shook her head. She thought she noticed her electronic display of instruments on her HUD beginning to significantly dim.

Her UAV link and now her instrument display were going out? “N559TC Ground, there must be some sort of an electric failure. My instrument panel is dimming.”

This wasn’t going to be good. She needed her instrument panel functioning properly in order to maintain her precarious position. This had better not be a part of her training; she wasn’t supposed to be put in any real danger. She needed to descend, but before Aurora could request a lower altitude, her instrument panel blared multiple red warnings right before everything blinked out.

With her instrument panel no longer functioning on her HUD, she tried to focus on the instrument panel displayed on the glass screen in front of her, but again focusing was difficult and her breathing felt laborious. With a squealing hiss, her oxygen unit quit pumping air into her lungs and in horror she realized that she wouldn’t have any air to breathe this high up. Her hands went ice cold. She’d only have a few more seconds to take action before—

“Mayday, mayday,” she choked out. “Experiencing a major electrical failure and loss of oxygen. Get the UAV link back up before I black out.”

With shaking hands, she yanked the mask off her face because it was inhibiting her sight. She tried taking a breath, but the air was just too thin, and coldness swept over her body. She quickly breathed in and out, trying to get enough oxygen to her brain.

The only thing she had time to do was pitch the aircraft for a lower altitude. The darkness she was trying to fight off won, pulling her under until there was nothing but a deep black abyss.

Distant panicked shouting and air far too warm swirled around her, causing her to startle awake.

“Aurora, wake up!”

“Aurora!”

“Damn’t, Aurora! Answer me!” A final plea thick with emotion finally broke through the blackness that surrounded her.

Aurora listened as someone kept screaming her name. She felt like she was going to be sick, her stomach practically in her throat. And then she became aware of the horrible
tick tick tick tick
that repeated over and over. The overspeed warning! Flashing lights and buffeting wings alerted her to the horrible fact that she was still in the airplane and not safely on the ground.

At first, she didn’t understand the gauges on the instrument panel because there was no way they were functioning properly. But they would make sense if she’d entered into the mach tuck she’d desperately tried to avoid. The knot in her stomach coiled tighter as her nausea began to make sense. She was falling in a steep uncontrolled descent, and if she didn’t regain control, her only option would be death or deployment. Either way she would destroy a multi-million dollar aircraft.

Sky frantically screaming her name wasn’t helping her think straight, so she ignored him for the time being. Why hadn’t he taken over the aircraft from the ground?

Oh, right. It would be her luck that she would somehow find herself in a highly unrecoverable mach tuck while her UAV link was down.

Ignoring her pounding headache and the unlikelihood of a full recovery, she yanked the throttles back and deployed the spoilers, hoping to slow her rapid descent. If only she had pulled them back before passing out the first time. A sick shrieking of metal tearing apart warned her that the spoilers had ripped off the wings. She cringed. She didn’t have time to think about what that meant for her landing and she couldn’t just flick a switch to pull her out of the flight.

This was really happening.

Aurora gently pulled the nose of the aircraft up, trying to slow her descent, without tearing the wings off the airplane. She was going way too fast to just yank the nose up. Even with her light pitch-up attitude, the G’s continued to increase on her body, pushing her down in the seat. If she didn’t recover soon she was going to have to deploy, and she had a feeling that was going to hurt, especially the ocean landing.

Slowly the XT-101 began to recover altitude, and Aurora finally pushed the throttles forward to regain some of her lost altitude. She knew when she was given the fifty-five thousand foot altitude that the aircraft was bumping up against Coffin Corner, but now she had a completely new understanding of the term. Fully recovered, she glanced at the altimeter. Two thousand feet. That was nothing. But she was stable again.

The only reason she was even awake right now was because the aircraft had plummeted to such a low altitude, where there was enough oxygen to breathe. Thankfully her descent happened over the ocean. If she had been over land, she wouldn’t have recovered in time. There were buildings over two thousand feet tall.

“Aurora!” Sky’s deep voice was still booming over the aircraft’s communication unit and was now being broadcast throughout the small cockpit since she’d removed her head gear. Now his constant yelling was beginning to vibrate the air around her. She could no longer ignore the voice that literally shook the aircraft with his tremendous emotion.

“
Aurora!
”

Aurora wanted to laugh. Sky had abandoned proper protocol. He was no longer referring to her as N559TC. The calm, cool, I-know-everything Sky was nowhere around. She’d finally managed a way to shake him. She just wished it hadn’t taken a near-death experience.

“Aurora, damn it, answer me!”

She decided to end his frantic screaming. She put her head set back over her head, left the mouth portion open so she could breathe, and activated the mic.

“Mayday, mayday. N559TC requesting immediate clearance to land on runway 7L.”

Her hands began to shake uncontrollably, and her breathing sounded labored. She tried to slow her breathing rate down, but her body wouldn’t cooperate. Despite how much she wanted to have a complete breakdown, she would not do so over the radio. Besides, she was pretty sure that if she gave in to asking Sky what the hell had just happened, all of her tightly-wound emotions would spring free as assuredly as a bullet from a loaded gun.

“Oh, thank the stars.” Sky’s professional demeanor had all but vanished, but he attempted to regain composure as he continued. “You have clearance to land. No one is anywhere near you anymore. We’ll talk once on the ground.”

She nodded even though no one could see it and managed to squeak out, “Roger. I’ll be landing on runway Seven Left.” She focused on landing the airplane, all the while trying to calm her racing heart and the tears that threatened to spill down her face at any second. Pure bravado was the only thing keeping the tears at bay. Afraid her voice would crack, she didn’t make any more radio calls on her landing progress. It didn’t matter, though, because the airspace had been cleared for her emergency, and she already saw the emergency teams gathering on the airfield below.

The task of landing the airplane kept her from completely losing her cool. She knew what caused a mach tuck, but she was having trouble making sense why it had happened.

Airspeed . . . set Vref plus twenty. She was still coming in fast. She couldn’t afford to pull the throttles back because of all the parasitic drag the damaged spoilers were causing. She was going to be landing hot and fast.

Gear down.

GPS localizer captured.

Altitude call outs guided Aurora down. Five hundred feet, one hundred, fifty, thirty, twenty.

Her landing, while a little too fast, was perfectly smooth. She was back in control of the aircraft. People were already running out to meet her, a tall blond male in the lead. The hands that had been steady for her landing now shook full force as she forced herself to release the death grip on the joystick.