It was descending at around 2,300 feet per minute, something he soon realized he could confirm by using one of the few instruments on board that didn't require electricity to feed it: the altimeter, with its subsidiary ascent and descent readout, triggered by the simple pressure of the air rushing past the aircraft.
You don't just fall out of the air.
The land below was flat and low — no mountains, no all-covering cloud, and thank God for that. There was time to think this through. There was time to act.
Seabright looked at his first officer seated next to him. Mulligan was a mess, his face mask smeared with dried blood, his white short-sleeved shirt stained too, big sweat patches coming out under the arms. The Irishman stared mutely back at him, not flinching, and Seabright felt grateful. Jimmy Mulligan was not a man to let you down.
Gingerly, Seabright removed the mask from his face, took a deep breath, tried to judge what it felt like. Instinct told him the aircraft was not depressurizing, that it would be okay for him to work without the mask that he found annoying. The atmosphere felt fine. The masks had actually fallen due to some electrical fault, not a pressure failure. What was now pumping oxygen into the cabin was the movement of air through the engines, and that would be enough for now. This would keep them alive as the aircraft continued its descent, and by the time you got down to 18,000 feet or so it didn't matter anyway. There was enough oxygen around at that altitude to keep you awake, keep the blackouts away.
Mulligan waited for the instruction, then took his own mask off.
Seabright spoke rapidly, thinking ahead all the time.
'I want you to go back, find Ali, tell her to get the rest of the crew together, to brief the passengers that we are working on the problem, we expect to have it fixed. But just in case, they should prepare for an emergency landing in around fifteen minutes from now, they should get the drill card out of the back of the seat and memorize every word on it, memorize the brace position, keep aware of what's happening out the window. Tell them they can take their oxygen masks off but they should keep them on their laps, use them if they need to. It might just keep the panic down a little if they don't have those damn things around their faces. Tell them not to expect any announcements. The intercom's down. They know that already, but make sure they don't expect it to come back up. Tell them we're in fine weather, descending onto flat, open terrain, not mountains. And we can see down every inch of the way.'
'Sir.'
'Then get back here pronto and help me get this bugger back flying again.'
'Done,' Mulligan answered, then took off his shoulder harness, wriggled out of the seat, and was out the door.
Seabright looked at the blank LCD screens in front of them. Still no sign of life, no indication that there was, anywhere within the aircraft, an amp of usable current. Not even hoping for any joy, he felt the yoke. Dead too. This was fly-by-wire. You needed the power, you needed the servos to shift the ailerons and elevators and rudder, to adjust the flaps and slats that kept the beast on its correct, three-dimensional journey through the air. Without electricity, the machine was locked in whatever attitude it held when the circuits failed, in this case the cruise configuration, which, just then, was the best he could hope for. Had the freeze occurred when they were climbing, the results would have been cataclysmic in a matter of seconds. The aircraft would have set itself a high angle of attack, expecting the thrust to keep it flying, keep it going up all the time at a healthy airspeed. Without the engines, and without the ability to trim for the glide, it would have flown itself straight into a stall in under a minute, shuddered to a halt in the air, ceased to be an object that flew, and turned into one that fell, like a brick, straight out of the sky.
Seabright knew this was a time to improvise. This was a machine — a very complex one, but a machine nonetheless. Its circuits and pulleys and servos, its huge fan-driven engines, the reservoirs of volatile aviation fuel that now sat leaden and useless in its wings, were just overcomplicated cogs in a child's toy. The way you got them working was by finding some means to re-establish the links that made them live. You had to use the tools that came in the box. You couldn't kick-start this beast back into being. You couldn't wind up some rubber band. You had to think alongside the system, not against it.
He was still staring at the dead grey panels, watching the altimeter unwind at the corner of his vision, when Mulligan returned, and that worried Seabright. He was the captain and he was taking too long at this. His mind wasn't working straight. He could have done something. Punched some buttons, tried the radio, punched anything.
Doesn't work like that, Seabright told himself. This wasn't some gigantic fruit machine waiting for the right combination by accident. There were too many sequences available, in the mass of buttons and dials in front of them, for that. You had to think your way through.
'We'll go through the start-up sequence, Jimmy. What's it like back there?'
'Pretty calm.' Amazingly calm, he thought, and Jimmy Mulligan wished his head hadn't made that analogy when he saw the people, strapped so tightly in their seats, just waiting. With the same blank, hopeless look you saw on animals making their way to the slaughterhouse.
'Ali's coping,' he added. And she was. Of course she was. Just.
Seabright had started to work the grey, lifeless panel.
'Sir…'
'I know. It's dead. We don't have time for explanations. Let's just see what happens.'
And so they spent a minute racing through the sequence, punching the dead buttons, reading through the list, faster than they'd ever done, so fast the company's chief pilot would carpet them on the spot if he'd ever heard it rushed in this way. Then they activated the final switch, sat back, and waited.
After five seconds, five seconds that seemed like a lifetime to both men, Seabright said, very calmly, no panic in his voice, 'Okay, Jimmy. Now we do it the other way round. We run through the shutdown sequence. Then we try the start-up once more. See if we can fire something up in this bloody thing.'
'Sir…?'
'Jimmy.' Seabright glared at him with a fierceness Mulligan had never before seen. 'Do you have some other idea?'
Mulligan said nothing.
'Right. Well, let's get to it, then.'
It was almost the reverse of the start-up routine. A few extra switches. A few extra procedures. By the time they had finished, the altimeter had wound down to 11,000 feet. It would take another minute or more to run through the start-up routine again. This would bring them down to close to 8,000 feet. There might be time enough to try this thing once more. There might be time to try something else. If he could think of something else, and right now there was nothing in his head except this repetitive set of actions that should, in a universe that worked by the rules, bring the aircraft back to life.
'That's it,' Mulligan said quietly.
The two men stared at the dead panel, lost for words. Then Ian Seabright closed his eyes, let his mind look into the blackness there, and wondered: What next? Do we keep on punching in this little chant all the way down to the ground? Or do we just sit back and wait? Let it all happen around us, in this dead plane, with its frozen controls, its burned-out circuitry, and close to 340 helpless people waiting to die? 'Sir.'
Mulligan's voice was urgent now. The first officer was tugging at his sleeve.
Seabright looked up, cursed the light coming through the window, the bright, piercing sunlight that made his eyes hurt, then saw something, recognized what it was, and found his mind coming back to him from that black, hopeless place it had found a moment before.