“Seasick? No, I don’t suffer from that problem generally. Look, what’s–?”
“Good,” Thorne snapped, cutting him off. “You’re not likely to chuck everywhere if the flight gets a little rough, are you?”
“Certainly not…!” Trumbull replied with mild indignance after a pause, during which he managed to work out what the man meant by the term ‘chuck’. “A gentleman never drinks to such an excess!”
“Yeah, well you’d better not!” Thorne warned, feigning irritation in an attempt to conceal amusement and a building nervousness of his own regarding what they were about to do. “You barf in this cockpit and you’ll be cleaning it up yourself! God help you if you get any on me!”
A few moments later Thorne was also strapped into his own seat and engaged in running the Lightning through its start-up sequence.
“Look here…” Trumbull began, beginning to feel annoyed at being purposefully left in the dark. “What exactly is going on? What’re you up to?”
“Don’t get shitty,” Thorne grinned as he secured his flight helmet and the cockpit canopy began to close. “I won’t lead you astray.”
“You play things too bloody close to the chest sometimes, Max,” Trumbull observed with irritation, the fact that he’d uncharacteristically used a mild profanity not lost on an amused Thorne. The two men were fast becoming natural friends, but there was still a great deal Trumbull didn’t know about this enigmatic man from the future.
“So Jack Davies sometimes tells me…” Thorne quipped lightly as he kicked the engine over and a rumbling whine began to build behind them that quickly rose to a fully-fledged roar.
“Jack Davies likes telling me things too, but I don’t understand many of them…!” Trumbull offered in return with a wry smile, showing just a glimpse of a capacity for dry wit that he rarely displayed in public. “What are we doing?”
Thorne dismissed his question with another. “Are you really sure you want to help us here? You have to be certain…”
“Of course I’m certain!” Trumbull frowned, thinking the question silly. “All this futuristic stuff is like some kind of Jules Verne novel…and I’ll be getting a real shot at Jerry into the bargain! You couldn’t drag me away!”
“Okay then…that makes this trip necessary.”
As the cockpit lowered on them and sealed, Thorne released the wheel brakes and began to taxi the F-35E off its allocated hardstand and straight out onto the runway that lay directly adjacent, waiting just long enough to be reassured by the radar operator on duty that the sky ahead was clear before jamming the throttle forward. As there was no need for a short take off, he let the aircraft have its head and allowed it to build up plenty of speed before easing back gently on the stick. With no weapons and carrying only a partial fuel, the F-35E was quite lightly loaded, and as a result it practically launched into the sky without any need for afterburner. Within moments, Thorne was turning to the south-west, cruising out over the Pentland Firth at an altitude of 5,000 metres and continuing to climb.
“Commander Donelson is quite a beautiful woman,” Trumbull observed over the intercom after a long period of silence, trying to make a little conversation rather than resigning himself to sit pointlessly quiet in the rear cockpit with nothing to do.
“She’s certainly that,” Thorne agreed vaguely, concentrating more on his instruments and controls.
“She and Captain Davies seem awfully friendly…are they ‘going steady’? Is that what the Americans call it?”
“Eileen and Jack…?” Thorne scoffed, Trumbull momentarily obtaining his almost undivided attention with that one, and the RAF pilot noted how quickly and definitively the Australian returned his answer. “Christ, no…! They’re just old drinking buddies from way back. Within a week of meeting up at Hindsight, they discovered a similar passion for Jack Daniels and we haven’t been able to get a sensible word out of either of them since.”
“Hmm… that would explain the incoherence of Jack’s conversation earlier…” Trumbull mused, making another attempt at humour that was ignored. “She is an enchanting lady though…” he soldiered on, trying to get a reaction of some kind out of a distracted Thorne. “I’d consider courting her myself, were I a few years older… or she a few younger…”
“I’d be interested to see how she reacted to being ‘courted’,” Thorne said with a broad grin, finding that concept amusing and totally incongruous with his image of Eileen.
“She speaks very highly of you.”
“Well… she never was all that bright…” Thorne dismissed the statement, the rapport already growing between the two men ensuring Trumbull understood what he really meant. The remark was no slight on Eileen Donelson at alclass="underline" it was instead a defence mechanism a humble man might use rather than risk the possibility of a compliment. Thorne let his answer go at that and went back to fiddling with the dials and readouts on his instrument panels, although the statement sounded as if there might be more to add.
Trumbull craned his neck to one side around the pilot’s seat in an effort to see what Thorne was doing. He could see the Australian punching information into buttons on the upper face of a strange, cantaloupe-sized apparatus mounted on a swinging arm attached to the cockpit canopy. Grey-coloured and with a scalloped surface much like that of an enlarged ‘Mills Bomb’ grenade, it appeared to have some kind of a tiny, rectangular readout on its top face.
“What are you doing? What’s that thing you’re fiddling with?”
“This, my dear fellow, is a Temporal Displacement Unit.” Thorne informed, punching in the last piece of data and pushing the throttle forward to almost full power as the aircraft levelled out at fifteen thousand metres on automatic pilot. “I’m just entering a new destination time.” It took a moment or so for that information to sink in, and as Trumbull began to make a protest Thorne added “Hold on!” and pressed the large, flashing green button on the TDU beside him.
It seemed to Trumbull that his whole world was suddenly turned inside out. Everything within the cockpit became a brilliant blue-white, and even with the aid of the helmet’s darkened visor that he hurriedly snapped down over his face, the brightness still hurt his eyes. His insides felt numb and strange, and a desire to retch indeed coursed through him, although he resisted it. His head began to spin and he could feel and hear a roaring in his ears as his blood pressure rose dramatically.
Clenching his teeth against the suddenly hostile environment, he screwed his eyes tightly shut as his hands clawed reflexively at the legs of his flight suit. A moment or so later, just when it seemed he could take no more, there was the sound of a tremendous thunderclap in his ears and the sickness and roaring sensation vanished. He gingerly opened his watering eyes and was presented only with the normal green glow of the instruments and the night sky around them.
“My God…” he whispered, feeling a little dazed and ill from the after-effects. “What was that?”
“That…” Thorne replied after a moment’s silence, his breathing equally heavy and laboured, “…was a temporal jump.” As he began to regain his senses fully, he then added: “Wait a minute before you start asking questions, ‘cause I’ve only got a very limited amount of time to sort a few things out right now!” He quickly dragged the Lightning into an 180̊ turn, banking and diving at a rate that made Trumbull’s stomach churn once more as they began to lose altitude quickly and descend toward the dark southern coast of Hoy below, near Tor Ness. “I’m going to have to drop you on the beach for a bit, but there’ll be someone along to collect you shortly. I won’t be able to hang about either way. I’ll explain everything when I see you on the ground, okay?”