ZEN’S HEAD SPLIT BETWEEN THE FLIGHTHAWKS AND THEIR
plummeting mothership. Hawk Two had snapped out of trail, aware that the EB-52’s actions were not normal. Zen pulled Hawk One back toward the stricken plane, setting its course on a gradual intercept. Then he jumped into Hawk Two, tucking it down to get a visual on whatever damage had been done to Quicksilver. In the meantime, he checked the radar, scanning to see if they were followed or if other missiles were in the air. The threat bar was clean; somehow, that didn’t seem reassuring.
Quicksilver was still descending rapidly, her right wing tilting heavily toward the earth. Two streaks of red flared near the front fuselage.
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They were on fire.
Hawk Two passed through five thousand feet; Quicksilver was about a thousand feet ahead. If they were going to bail, they were going to have to go real soon.
“Quicksilver? Bree?” he said.
There was no response.
UNTIL NOW IT HAD FELT LIKE A SESSION IN THE MEGA-fortress simulator in the test bunker. Breanna sniffed something—the metallic tang of an electrical fire—then decided the computer had either gone off line or malfunctioned. She hit the hard-wired cutoff, initiating the backup hydraulic system. The backup control gear had been installed thanks to a malfunction she dealt with some months before. Something clunked beneath her, as if she were driving a very large truck that had been switched on the fly into four-wheel drive. The stick jerked against her hand so hard she nearly lost her grip.
“My control. We’re on hydraulics,” she told Ferris.
She wrestled the plane for a few seconds, momentum and gravity working against her. The EB-52 began to shudder—the plane was approaching the speed of sound.
The rocks below grew exponentially.
Breanna felt herself relax as the pedals jerked against her feet. She ignored the panel of instruments, ignored the warning lights, ignored everything but the immense aircraft. It became part of her body; her face was squashed by gravity, her sides compressed by the buffeting wind. She brought herself to heel, leveling off at a bare two thousand feet, clearing a mountaintop by thirteen feet.
It was only when she came level that she realized they were on fire.
“Chris?” she said calmly. “Chris?”
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When he didn’t respond, she turned and saw him slumped forward against his restraints. Bree looked over her shoulder—O’Brien was fighting off his restraints.
Long, thin ribbons of smoke filtered from one of the panels at the rear of the flight deck.
“Stay where you are,” she told O’Brien over the interphone circuit.
Either the circuit wasn’t working or he didn’t understand. Breanna waved at him emphatically; he saw her finally and settled back down.
The Megafortress was equipped with two fire suppression systems. One injected high-pressure foam into non-crew areas of the aircraft; this worked automatically. The other, a carbon-dioxide system designed to deprive a fire of oxygen, required a positive command from the flight deck, since anyone not on oxygen would be smothered along with the flames. Breanna could see that everyone was okay on the flight deck, but she had no way of checking downstairs. Zen would certainly have on his gear, but the techies who flew with him almost never did. Which meant that fighting the fire might very well kill Jennifer Gleason.
Her father’s girlfriend.
“Jen—get on oxygen,” she said. “Everyone—now! We have a fire.”
There was no acknowledgment. The plane’s com system was dead.
Breanna pressed the manual warning switch. The cockpit was supposed to flash red but it didn’t.
Smoke was now pouring into the cockpit. She had to put it out.
“Fire suppression!” she shouted as she reached over and thumbed the guard away from the button.
*
*
*
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DALE BROWN’S DREAMLAND
JEFF HEARD THE METALLIC HUSH OF THE CARBON-DIOXIDE
fire suppression system, then felt his teeth sting—the sound was remarkably similar to the sound of a dentist’s suction tool, amplified about a hundred times. The sudden change in the pressure as the gas whipped in made the cabin feel like a wind tunnel.
There’d been no warning light or tone.
Jennifer—she never wore the gear. She’d be breathing pure carbon dioxide.
“Trail Two,” he told the Flighthawk computer. He pushed up his visor and turned toward her station.
She wasn’t there.
Something cold hit him on his right shoulder. He turned and saw her standing there, shaking her head vig-orously up and down, a mask on her face.
BREANNA RESTABILIZED THE PRESSURE IN THE CABIN, REstored the normal airflow, then began dealing with the caution lights on her panel, assessing the damage. Fuel tanks were intact. Environmental controls—the AC system—was on backup. Oil pressure in the number four engine was now high, but just barely in the yellow. The flight computer was off line, as were the interphone and the radios. All of her backup instruments were operating.
The flight controls felt a bit kludgy on hydraulic backup, but otherwise were fine. The interface with the Flighthawks, which forwarded data from the robots’ sensors, was out.
Small bits of shrapnel had burst through the cockpit; one had apparently hit Ferris in the helmet, knocking him unconscious. There was some blood on his arm, but judging from his breathing, he was okay. Habib and O’Brien both gave her thumbs up.
When Breanna pulled off her mask to talk to her two RAZOR’S EDGE
223
crewmen, her nose tingled with the metallic smell that lingered from the CO2 system. Power to the radar tracking station had been cut completely; Habib’s eavesdrop-ping gear had been knocked off line, but some circuits still had power. Breanna told O’Brien to go downstairs and see about the others while Habib worked to see if he could get something from the radio.
“God, let Jeff be okay,” she found herself saying as she ran a quick self-check on the INS. “Don’t let him die. Not after everything else.”
JENNIFER HELD HER MASK TO THE SIDE TO TELL JEFF WHAT
she’d found at the circuit locker at the rear of the Flighthawk deck. The breaker on the lines regulating the com link between the Megafortress and the Flighthawks had blown out and wouldn’t reset, but otherwise they had full power. Whatever had hit the Megafortress seemed to have taken out the right underfuselage quadrant of the Flighthawk’s wide-band antennas, but his backups should be sufficient.
“We have full power on the monitoring suite, but the interphone system is off line,” she told him. “I think they’re on backup.”
“The fire,” he yelled, still facing forward and controlling the U/MFs.
“I think it’s out.”
“It is if you can breathe.” Zen pulled his mask off and looked up at her. “What the hell hit us?”
“No idea. Should I go up and see if they’re okay on the flightdeck?”
“Yeah,” he told her. “Tell them I’ll survey the outside and pipe it up. Something hit the fuselage on the right side—I saw the fire. Jen—” He grabbed her arm as she started for the ladder. “It may be pretty brutal.”
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“No shit.” She pulled free, then bolted for the ladder.
Someone was coming down. “Hey!” Jennifer yelled, stepping aside.
“Hey, yourself,” said O’Brien. “You guys okay?”
“Yeah—what’s going on up there?”
“My gear’s out. Captain Stockard’s okay. Captain Ferris got hit by something, knocked cold.”
“Radio?”
He shook his head.
“Where was the fire?” Jennifer asked.
“Not sure.”
“Come on, we have to check the gear in the rear bay.”
“I’ll go,” said O’Brien, spinning around and charging up the ladder to the rear area.
Jennifer clambered after him, reaching the top in time to hear him scream in agony.
“My hand! My hand!” he yelled, rolling on the metal grate of the floor and cursing in agony.