It was still dark as I pulled into the parking lot. 0500. I’d only been gone about four hours. I left late last night to try to get some shuteye, but I just ended up tossing and turning.
I couldn’t stop thinking about where Zody had ended up. There were two possibilities. He was either dead, floating out there in the Solar System somewhere, or he was alive somewhere out there, adrift between the planets. Assuming nothing interfered with the oxygen tanks he still had more than a day’s worth of air left. That gave us a limited window of time in which to find him and bring him home. The scientists had stayed to work the problem, but they told the pilots to go home and rest so they’d be ready for anything.
After a few hours of tossing and turning, I got up, took a shower, got dressed, and drove in to work. I didn’t have to be there until 0800, but like I said, I couldn’t sleep, and we had to find Zody before he ran out of air.
I took the elevator down to the underground level of the building that served as the makeshift headquarters of the Space Force. I made my way to ‘the office.’ That’s what the pilots called the room where our workstations had been set up.
“Jack!” I nearly jumped out of my skin. Mac had been standing about to open the door when I came in. When I recovered I noticed her brown eyes were brighter and more alert than when I last saw her. She had apparently been at her desk all night looking at the data we’d got back from the Eagle’s flight. “I’m glad you're back. I need your help.” She grabbed my flight suit by the sleeve and dragged me to her computer. The only other time I’d ever seen her this excited was when we were selected for the FTL flight program. She usually hid behind a veneer of sarcasm and self-assuredness. But not this morning. She was practically giddy.
“Were you here all night?” I asked.
“I think I’ve just figured it out!” she said, ignoring my question. “I’ve got a theory. I was just sitting at my desk, listening to music when ‘Endless Love’ by Diana Ross and Lional Ritchie came on my playlist-”
I snorted.
“-Hey. Don’t judge me. It’s been a long night. I was clearing my head. Anyway, I had a thought. A ship using our FTL drives creates a gravity tunnel through space, right?”
I nod. “The gravity generators create two graviton fields outside the ship. An outer layer on top of an inner layer. The outside propels the ship faster than light. It was like the ship was falling through space at superluminal speeds. The inner layer was to insulate the ship from the relativistic effects of going so fast.
“Right. So, what if the gravity layers accidentally harmonized?”
“Wait, what?” I wasn’t prepared to jump into a technical discussion at 5 am. “Are you saying there was a problem with the gravity fields?”
“I’m saying the flight data we got from the Eagle’s buoy shows that the outer layer was out of alignment, and I think that misalignment created some kind of harmony with the inner layer that made them more efficient.” She looked at me, her eyes sparkled, her mouth slightly. She was in awe of this discovery.
“You mean we accidentally made a faster FTL drive?
“Yes, but it’s only a theory.” She sat down and began typing furiously. “We’ve never tried to send this much mass at these speeds before.”
“This makes our rescue mission a little more difficult. ” The possibility that Zody could be way out in deep space hadn’t even occurred to me.
“Actually, it couldn’t be simpler. All we have to do is head in a straight line and we should be able to find him. All I have to do is make a few final calculations.”
“We’d better go talk to General Layton. ”
***
“You wanna run that past me again?” Layton asked after Mac explained her theory to him. We stood in his office. It was nice for a subterranean office. The dark wood paneled walls shining in the lamp light. Even if Layton’s office had windows, it was still dark outside. But my mind was racing now, despite lack of sleep. The three of us stood in front of Layton’s large oak desk.
“We can take the DSRV,” I said without hesitation. I’d been thinking about it as Mac explained what we’d already covered in the office. Honestly, I’d been planning this rescue mission even before Mac’s theory. I just didn’t know how we were going to get there until now. “With a few modifications–”
“The DSRV hasn’t even been tested yet!” Layton roared. “We can’t launch a rescue mission to who-knows-where to find a ship that could be anywhere using a ship that’s never been anywhere!”
“Sir,” I said, “We built the Deep Space Rescue Vessel to rescue a pilot in deep space.”
“The engines don’t work, Major. We just proved that!” General Layton had the kind of voice that sounded like he was yelling, even when he wasn’t. I honestly couldn’t tell if he meant to yell that last part.
“Sir,” Mac interrupted, “with all due respect, all we have to do is make a few modifications to our FTL calculations. We’ve got Eagle’s last known heading, and I stayed up all night tweaking the calculations based on the telemetry we received from the Eagle’s buoy.”
“The Joint Chiefs will never sign off on this.” General Layton walked back around his desk and sat down in the fake leather chair heavily, apparently giving up. “I don’t even know how to begin explaining this to them. And I do NOT want to be the guy to bring this to them.”
How did he even get this job if he wasn’t willing to take risks? “Sir,” I protested. “Zody is out there. We’ve got to bring him home.”
“You're assuming he’s still alive. With his engine imbalance like that, isn’t possible that the Eagle broke into a thousand pieces?”
“Sir,” Mac tried one last time. “The gravity waves between the inner layer and outer layer were resonating. If I’m right, that gave the Eagle a huge speed boost. I think we accidentally built an engine capable of far greater speeds than we thought. The Eagle is still in one piece, in a straight line from where he started. I’m sure of it. The engines just took Zody farther than we predicted.”
“I will not send you out on a wild goose chase in a ship that has the same engine that just malfunctioned and lost us a pilot. I won’t lose two more pilots on a hunch.”
***
“Let’s steal the DSRV,” I said.
“What?” Mac asked between bites of her hamburger.
“It will only be a small court martial.”
“Nope.” She took another bite of hamburger.
“I don’t know how you stay so skinny when you put food like you do.”
“Shut up.” Mac said. “And thanks, I guess. It’s called working out. Something you could use a little more of.”
“I’m serious. You’ve got the calculations. Let’s just fly out there and check it out.”
“Layton said no.” She put down her lunch. ”He shut us down. Hard. Besides,” she looked down as she picked up a couple of fries and swirled them around in ketchup, “my calculations are far from complete.”
“You told Layton you knew where Zody came out of FTL.”
“Yeah, well, I may have exaggerated a little bit...”
“You lied to General Layton?!” I asked in mock outrage.
“No!” She glanced around the officer’s mess to make sure no one had heard me and thought I was serious. Then she glared at me. She hated being teased when she thought it might make her look bad in the eyes of her superior officers. Forget the fact that I was her superior officer, but that didn’t seem to matter. She was a captain and I was a major, but we’d been flying together too long. We weren’t part of a traditional squadron of pilots, so the lines had become a little blurred. We were all equally ambitious pilots, and General Layton was our commanding officer. That was all that mattered.
“I just have a few final calculations to make. From the telemetry transmitted by the emergency buoy I know the power consumption rate. But the gravity fields were not behaving as predicted. And it looked like the fields weren’t in perfect harmony. The Eagle’s engines may have overloaded. I’ll need to run some simulations to figure out the energy coefficient.”
“How long will that take?” I ask.
“A couple of days.”
“A couple of days!?” The time for joking had passed. “Zody’s only got about 14 hours of air left!” I tried to keep my voice down. I didn’t want anyone overhearing my plans to steal the DSRV. Zody may have been a pain in the rear, but I wasn’t going to let him die out there. Unless he was dead already.
“I know, but what can we do?”
“Skip the simulations. Let’s figure it out on the way.”
***
So we stuck around and pretended to work until the night shift. Layton thought we were still working out a way to save Zody. In fact we already had a way, and we just needed to wait until most people went home for the night. Then we made our move.
Mac and I walked casually to the flight prep room where all of our flight gear was. Nothing suspicious about that, just a couple of pilots walking into the locker room.
We put on our G-suits and survival vests. We paid special attention to the connectors that would be plugged into the DSRV in case of a hull breach. There was a good chance that this was going to be a rough ride.
“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Mac said as she tightened the straps on her suit.
“Hey, this was your idea,” I reminded her as I pulled on my gloves.
“No, I just figured out with a high probability of success where Zody is. You’re the one who said let’s steal the prototype that’s never been tested before and probably blow ourselves up in the process.” She did a deep voice to parody my admittedly insane idea.
“Don’t do impressions of me. You sound ridiculous.”
“So do you, so I’d say it’s an accurate impression.”
“Gah, you’re the worst.”
“Hey,” Mac said, stopping what she was doing. She looked me right in the eyes. “All joking aside, I just need to know you’re not on a suicide mission.”
I stopped dead. She was serious. She didn’t get serious with me much. For a second I was hurt. Of course this wasn’t a suicide mission. This was a pilot in the Air Force. We don’t leave our people behind. I was going to rescue Zody, even if he had been a pain in the backside since the day I met him.
I was about to reply with something like how dare you, or what the heck is that supposed to mean? But then I stopped. I thought about her question anew. Maybe it wasn’t a suicide mission. But I was being reckless. Going up in an untested spaceship with an engine that was proven to be unreliable just yesterday. No ground support. And I was dragging Mac with me. Was I so desperate to get to space that I was taking too many chances.
“Your silence is inspiring.” Mac must have seen the hesitation in my face. “Look, I’m all about the ‘leave no one behind’ rhetoric, but I gotta know we’re on the same mission here.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, readopting my pilot swagger, trying to put more confidence in my face than I felt. “I’m planning on flying us back here in time for Layton to court martial us.”
***
We’d gotten into the DSRV without anyone in the hangar seeing. There really weren’t many people around. Just a few airmen working maintenance.
The DSRV was clunky looking for an aircraft, but it was designed to be extremely efficient as a rescue vessel in space. The nose was large and blunt. It was actually just a covering that could open up to reveal an airlock that could extend a docking collar that could magnetically seal to just about any hatch. The flexible docking collar could even seal around the canopy of the Eagle. The cockpit sat above the airlock, which made the craft look like a C-5 Galaxy cargo plane. But where the wings would have been, there were just two large bulges where the gravity FTL drives were located.
The rear of the ship came to a wide tapered edge where the linear aerospike engines were. These engines would do most of the work getting the ship through the atmosphere and into space. The gravity drive was still largely untested and nobody was comfortable using them for the ship’s main propulsion in the atmosphere yet. But once we got to space, we’d let ‘er rip.
We went through the preflight checklist without any difficulty. The ship seemed like it was in good condition. But so had the Eagle and look how that flight had gone.
I flipped the switches to warm up the aerospike engines, and to spin up the gravity drives. All the lights were green. Mac hit the controls to open the hangar doors. As the doors opened I pushed the throttle forward. The aerospike engines roared to life. As we began rolling forward I could see the airmen who had been working maintenance look up, surprise on their faces. One of them moved towards us waving his arms for us to stop. I hoped he’d have the sense to move out of the way as I pushed the throttle forward a touch farther.
I enjoyed it more than I should have when he had to dive out of the way as the DSRV charged past him. The other airman was probably on his way to sound the alarm, but it wouldn’t matter. By the time anyone knew what was happening we’d be halfway across the Solar System.
The DSRV rolled out of the hangar into the cool night. As soon as we were clear of the hangar I set the gravity drives to lift off and we started gaining altitude quick. It was quicker than in the simulators, though Mac and I hadn’t actually done this in real life before. It was exhilarating!
We had reached 10,000 feet before I realized the landing gear was still down. I pulled the lever to retract the landing gear. Then I pushed the throttle forward. The ship surged forward under thrust from the Aerospike engines. I pulled back on the yoke and angled the ship up. We cleared the cloud cover and the stars burst into view.
I couldn’t believe it when I looked out the side window and saw the curvature of the Earth. And it was falling away quickly. I had this amazing swelling feeling in my chest, and an overwhelming peace flooded through my body. Everyone and everything I had ever known was down there. Everything I had ever done had been about getting here.
I almost had to remind myself to breathe. It was incredible. I was in space. And if all went according to my half-baked plan I would be in deep space soon. We would be leaving the Solar System. It was an insane thought. I mean, I’d always fantasized about beaming up to a starship and zooming off at warp speed, but to actually do it?
“I’ve uploaded the course to the DSRV’s navigational computer,” Mac said from the copilot’s seat to the right of me.
Mac! I had been so caught up in that transcendent experience that I had completely forgotten about her. To be fair, I’d almost completely forgotten about everything. It was only know that I stopped and realized what I had asked Mac to do, and to fully realize what she was giving up by being here. Her career was on the line. Sure, so was mine, but I didn’t expect to have much of a career after this, no matter how it turned out. We might be facing court martial. We might never fly again. Heck, I might even get to go out in that blaze of glory that I had been thinking about. But I couldn’t allow myself to think like that. We had a mission to complete. I had to keep my eye on the prize, that’s what a former squadron leader used to say. A plane tends to go where the pilot is looking. So don’t take your eye off of the goal, or you might end up crashing.
“I’ve still got a few simulations to run,” Mac was saying as I refocused myself, “but I’ve got a few educated guesses on the variables we’ll need for the outer gravity field.”
“Educated guesses?” I asked?
“Hey, you know what you were getting when you asked me to come on this flight.”
“Hey,” I looked at Mackenzie right in her big brown eyes. “You’ve got this.” She was brilliant, but I knew that she had a tendency to doubt herself when it came to all-or-nothing moments like these.
“We’ll see,” she said. Then her fighter jock bravado took hold again and she looked up from her screen. “I hope so. Otherwise we may never make it to that court martial you promised me.”
We’d always kept our friendship playful. That’s just how fighter pilots are with each other. That, plus anything else with Mac felt awkward to me. There was always competition between the two of us and Zody, but I liked her as a person a lot more than Zody. She was kind beneath her wisecracking, pilot exterior. There was something about her that drew me in. That was rare for a fighter pilot. Usually we’re all so cocky that we don’t let anyone get close. But the more time we spent in this program, the more I wanted to get to know Mac.
We spent a few hours in high orbit. We’d received dozens of radio calls from the Space Force Control CenterI, but I’d maintained radio silence. I kept the radio tuned to my helmet’s headset only. Mac didn’t need the distraction.
“Got it!” Finally Mac looked over at me. “I think this is going to work.”
“Good enough for me,” I said.
“But for this to work, we’ll need to trace Zody’s flight path as closely as possible.”
I piloted our ship to the same coordinates the Eagle had started from. I deactivated the engines and set the FTL to standby.
“Ready?” I asked.
“Ready.”
I flicked the comm switch on. “Hill, DSRV, we are engaging our FLT drive. We’ll bring Colonel Zody back home.”
Then I pushed the throttle forward.
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