“Engine spikes reversing,” Nadia confirmed. “Turbofans spooling up.”
No sooner had she said that than two muffled bangs rattled through the spaceplane’s fuselage. This time, the Shadow rolled sharply left. More red warning lights blossomed across her multifunction display. “Engine failure on numbers two and five,” she snapped, tasting blood from where she’d bitten the inside of her lip. As she strained against her safety harness, her fingers danced across the screen, hurrying to shut off their last operational engine before it could drag them into a dizzying spiral down toward the waters of the Pacific Ocean far, far below.
The comforting roar of their engines died — replaced by the keening noise of thin air rushing past.
With great difficulty, Vasey regained control, bringing the S-29 back onto an easterly heading and slightly nose down. “APU status?” he asked coolly.
“The APU generator is on,” Nadia confirmed. With all five engines dead or shut down, the S-29’s auxiliary power unit was crucial. It was now the only source of the power needed to operate their computers and flight controls.
“Engine status.”
She paged through diagnostic screens, rapidly evaluating the data provided by the spaceplane’s internal and external sensors. “It looks like we lost multiple fan blades in both numbers two and five,” she reported. “But the fan cases themselves held. The damage seems to have been contained inside the engines themselves. I show no fire or fuel-leak warnings.”
Vasey nodded slightly. That was a small blessing. Using technology developed under a NASA grant, the turbofan casings for the S-29’s massive LPDRS engines were manufactured out of triaxial carbon braid. That made the casings both stronger and lighter than if they had been made out of a more conventional metal, like aluminum. “Let’s try for a restart on numbers one and three.”
Nadia tapped in a series of commands. If they could power up the two engines that hadn’t actually failed, one under each wing, they should still be able to limp back to Battle Mountain. But when she hit the restart icon, a new row of red caution and warning lights lit up. “Psiakrew! Hell! Both of them show fuel-pump failures. They will not restart.”
“Well, that tears it,” Vasey muttered. He called the control center again. “Sky Masters Control, this is Shadow Two. We are negative return to Battle Mountain. I say again, we are negative return to Nevada. I’m afraid that we’ve just become a rather oversized and somewhat clumsy glider.”
“Copy that, Two,” Brad radioed. “Standing by for your emergency abort field decision.”
Nadia switched her display to show the onboard computer’s evaluation of their flight status and glide ratio. At their current supersonic speed and high altitude, the S-29’s ratio was abysmal — something on the order of 3:1… so for every thousand feet they descended, they’d cover just three thousand feet on the ground. But that would improve substantially when they got down into thicker air and slowed to subsonic speeds. In theory, they ought to be able to come close to the glide ratios achieved by modern jet airliners that had lost all their engines, somewhere between 15 and 17:1. By trading airspeed and elevation for distance, she estimated their probable maximum glide range at around one hundred and sixty nautical miles.
Given that, one quick glance at a digital navigation map showed their two best options for an emergency, engines-out landing. She flagged both in order of priority and sent them to Vasey’s own display.
The Englishman’s eyes narrowed for a split second in concentration as he ran through his own internal calculations. Then he nodded. “Sky Masters Control, this is Shadow Two. Submit we head for SFO, with OAK as the alternate field.”
Both international airports, San Francisco and Oakland, had long runways that more than met their minimum parameters. Now that the spaceplane couldn’t brake using reversed engine thrust, the flight manuals said they needed at least seventy-five hundred feet of smooth, hard-surfaced runway available for a safe landing.
“Wait one, Shadow Two,” Brad answered.
A minute passed, feeling like an eternity to Nadia.
“Two, this is Sky Masters Control. Regret unable to approve requested abort to SFO or OAK,” she heard Brad say. “ATC says they can’t clear the airspace in time.”
“Bugger,” Vasey said under his breath. With dozens of scheduled passenger and air cargo flights crisscrossing the skies above the Bay Area at any given moment, that wasn’t especially surprising. But it was still very bad news.
“Can you make Travis?” Brad asked, sounding concerned now.
Vasey shot Nadia another glance. Frowning, she shook her head. Based on their projected rate of descent and airspeed, they would slam into the ground about eight miles short of Travis Air Force Base. Unfortunately, no other airport within their glide range had a runway that met the S-29’s specified emergency requirements.
“Unable, insufficient range, Sky Masters Control,” Vasey replied, sounding very cool, almost icily detached, now.
“Copy that, Two,” Brad said. “Suggest you prepare to eject over the ocean. We’ve alerted the coast guard. They have two MH-65 Dolphin search-and-rescue helicopters on alert.”
“Stand by on that, Sky Masters,” Vasey said. He turned his head toward Nadia, with a single eyebrow arched in an eloquent, unspoken question.
Nadia shook her head. The thought of so casually abandoning this expensive and badly needed spaceplane was abhorrent to her. There must be another option, something else they could try. But what?
Through the forward canopy, a brownish haze now marked the far horizon. They were down to around sixty thousand feet and roughly one hundred nautical miles from the Northern California coast. Something about the word nautical tugged at her mind. Realizing what it was, she turned excitedly to Vasey. “You were a Royal Navy pilot, yes?”
He nodded with a slight, wry smile. “For my sins, I was.”
“Then you have landed on aircraft carriers?”
Again, he nodded. “Hundreds of times.” His smile grew wider. “But that’s a nonstarter, Major. Even a madman like me has some limits. I may be a damned fine pilot, but no one on God’s good earth could put an ungainly beast like this one down on a patch of deck only a hundred and fifty meters long!”
Nadia shook her head impatiently, but with a grin of her own. “That is not enough, I agree.” Swiftly, she scrolled through her computer’s maps and satellite photos of different Bay Area regional and municipal airports. Settling on one, she flicked a hand across her display, sending it to Vasey’s MFD. “But this one, you see?”
Intrigued, the Englishman studied her find. Sonoma County’s Charles M. Schulz Airport, about fifty miles north of San Francisco, had a decent six-thousand-foot-long runway, with another six hundred feet or so of hard-packed dirt extending beyond it. Going strictly by the book, that was still too short, but flight safety manuals always built in a margin for pilot error. He whistled softly. “It’s doable, by God.” He flashed her a madcap grin. “So then, by God, we’ll do it!”
While Vasey alerted Brad to their new plan, and secured both his reluctant approval and grudging clearance from the relevant air traffic controllers, Nadia locked the airport’s Runway 32 into the S-29’s flight computer. New steering cues blinked onto Vasey’s HUD.
Following them, he banked the big spaceplane, turning a few degrees more to the east-northeast. They were descending rapidly now, slanting toward the ever-closer coast.