"The liquid hydrogen tanks are in there. You could blow the whole hangar to hell if you use afterburners. You must be crazy!"
"The bastards gunned him down, Sergei." He caught a sob. "It was my fault. I should have warned—"
"What are you talking about? Gunned who down?"
But Yuri Androv's mind was already elsewhere, drifting into a grief-obsessed dream state.
"Engine start complete," he continued. "Beginning pre-takeoff sequence."
Will he be able to get this thing off the ground? Vance was wondering. He's shot up and now he's falling apart.
Guess we're about to find out. The fuselage cameras are showing an empty hangar. Everybody's run for cover.
"Eva, want to take that seat? I'll take this one. No free drinks in this forward cabin section." He was speaking through his upraised helmet visor as he eased himself into the right-hand G-seat.
"And buckle up for safety." She settled herself in the left. "Let's just hope he can still manage this monster. It's a Saturn V with wings."
"He's got his talking computer, if she'll still cooperate. Do me a favor and translate now and then."
"Machines are supposed to translate for people, not the other way around. We're in space warp."
"I believe it."
As he pulled down the overhead seat straps, he found himself wondering what Daedalus would feel like in full afterburner mode. Those turboramjets made a Boeing 747's massive JT-9Ds look like prime movers for a medium-sized lawnmower.
"Power to military thrust." Androv was easing forward the twin throttles, spooling them up past three-quarters power. Daedalus had begun to quiver, shaking like a mighty mountain in tectonic upheaval.
"Prepare for brake release."
The screens on the wall above reported fuel consumption edging toward three hundred pounds of JP-7 a second.
"Yuri," the radio crackled, "don't—"
"Pavel's got his men out of the hangar, Sergei. I can see on my screen. I'm going cold mike now. No distractions. Just wish me luck."
There was a click as he switched off the communications in his helmet. He missed a new radio voice by only a second. It was speaking in English.
"Dr. Vance, what is going on? He's just cut his radio link with Flight Control. He's deranged. I order you to halt the flight sequence. He could destroy both planes by going to afterburners in the hangar. I demand this be stopped."
Vance glanced up at the TV monitors. An auxiliary screen showed Tanzan Mino standing at the main Flight Control console, surrounded by more kobun, who had muscled aside the Russian technicians. He also noticed that a lot of Soviet brass were there too.
"Looks like you've got a problem."
"I'm warning you I will shut you down. I can activate the automatic AI override three minutes after takeoff. The plane will return and land automatically."
"Three minutes is a long time." Vance wondered if it was true, or a bluff. "We'll take our chances."
"You'd leave me no choice."
"May the best man win."
"Petra, brake release." Yuri Androv's voice sounded from beneath his helmet.
“Acknowledged.”
Vance looked across to see his left hand signal a thumbs-up sign, then reach down for the throttle quadrant. The vehicle was already rolling through the wide doors of the hangar, so if there were an explosion now, at least they'd be in the clear.
Androv paused a second, mumbled something in Russian, then shoved the heavy handles forward to Lock, commanding all twelve engines to max afterburner. The JP-7 fuel reading whirled from a feed of three hundred pounds a second to twenty-one hundred, and an instant thereafter the cockpit was slammed by the hammer of God as the monitor image of the hangar dissolved in orange.
Chapter Twenty
"One small step for man."
Vance felt his lungs curve around his backbone, his face melt into his skull. He didn't know how many G's of acceleration they were experiencing, but it felt like a shuttle launch. He gripped the straps of the G-seat and watched the video feed from the landing-gear cameras, which showed the tarmac flashing by in a stream of gray. The screen above him had clicked up to 200 knots, and in what seemed only a second the Daedalus was a full kilometer down the runway. Then the monitors confirmed they were rotating to takeoff attitude, seven degrees.
They were airborne.
Next the screens reported a hard right-hand bank, five G's. The altimeter had become a whirling blur as attitude increased to twenty degrees, held just below stall-out by Petra's augmented control system.
When the airspeed captured 400 knots, the landing gear cameras showed the wheels begin to fold forward, then rotate to lie flat in the fuselage. Next the doors snapped closed behind them, swallowing them in the underbelly and leaving the nose cameras as their only visual link to the outside. The screens displayed nothing but gray storm clouds.
Landing gear up and locked, came Petra's disembodied voice.
"Acknowledge gear secure," Androv said, quieting a flashing message on one of the screens.
No abort so far, Vance thought. Maybe we're about to get away with this.
The airspeed had already passed 600 knots, accelerating a tenth of a Mach number, about 60 knots, every five seconds.
That's when he noticed they were still receiving wideband video transmissions from the Flight Center. The screen showing Tanzan Mino remained clear and crisp. Surely not for much longer, but now at least the uplink was intact. And the CEO was returning the favor, monitoring their lift-off via a screen of his own. Vance watched as he turned to some of the Soviet brass standing next to him and barked orders. What was that about?
For now though the bigger question was, What do we do?
Androv was still busy talking to Petra, issuing commands. Vance realized they were assuming a vector north by northeast, out over the ocean. They also were probably going to stay on the deck to avoid radar tracking, with only passive systems so that no EM emissions would betray their heading.
He glanced up at the screens and realized he was half right. They were over the ocean now, at a breathtaking altitude of only five hundred meters, but Androv had just switched the phased-array radar altimeter over to start hopping frequencies, using "squirt" emissions. Pure Stealth technology. No conventional radar lock could track it.
"Dr. Vance, I am giving you one more opportunity to reconsider." Tanzan Mino's voice sounded through the headphones. He was still standing at the main Flight Control console, though his image was finally starting to roll and break up. "You must return to base. The consequences of this folly could well be incalculable."
"Why don't you take that up with the pilot?" Vance answered into his helmet mike.
"His receiver has been turned off. It's impossible to communicate with him. He's clearly gone mad. I will give you another sixty seconds before I order the on-board guidance computer switched over to the AI mode. Flight Control here will override the on-board systems and just bring the vehicle back and land it."
Again Vance wondered if he really could.
Then a screen flashed, an emergency strobe, and Petra was speaking. The Russian was simple enough he could decipher it.
Systems advisory. You are too low. Pull up. Acknowledge. Pull up.
Androv tapped the sidestick lightly and boosted their altitude a hundred meters.
"Michael," the voice was Eva's coming through his headphones. "She — it — whoever, said—"
"I figured it out. But did you hear the other news? Mino-san just advised he's going to override Petra. We're about to find out who's really flying this baby."