least for the immediate future.
Still, the more United States Air Force Major Michael Holloran pondered the facts as he knew them, considered what was housed, aft in their superbird, the more he believed he harbored some dark bent toward suicide. Or was it simply his nature, he wondered, a hyperachiever in his own right, pushing the limits of personal reality and talents to the edge, a middle-finger salute to fate to dare force him to stare into the abyss, face his own mortality? Certainly, he knew, whatever drove him to chase the next figurative or literal horizon had cost him two marriages, rendering him a man alone now among the gods of ultratech, transcended in some way beyond the norm he couldn’t quite define, but could surmise he wasn’t sure he liked all that much, given what he knew.
Get a grip, he told himself. He had a job to do.
They were sailing along at supersonic speed, Mach 5 to be exact, eighty thousand feet and change above the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, bearing down on the U.S. border; ETA a little over three minutes and counting. With what he knew lay ahead, those anxious thoughts began whispering louder over everything that could go wrong, near hissing, he imagined, like the highly flammable pure oxygen being pumped into his helmet. This was, after all, the maiden voyage of a classified prototype and ultrafighter jet that shouldn’t—and officially didn’t—exist.
Three years earlier a celestial mystery had fallen to the continental U.S., and it now powered the craft. And lent it properties far exceeding the narrow prism of Man’s understanding.
Thus, lack of knowledge about unknown properties and alloys—and he knew whatever the truth was being jealously guarded from those who now bore the task of flying the thing, as in himself and his copilot—should provide fear enough for him to reconsider the sanity of all involved.
For instance, the reinforced glass—if that’s what it even was—was as classified as the fuel that could propel them to Mach 10, more than three times faster than the now-retired SR-71 Blackbird, which had previously owned the world’s speed record of plus Mach 3. Officially—sort of—the fuel was classified as supergrade JP-7, the juice that kept the Blackbird aloft and a streaking black blur beneath the heavens. Why, then, was it pumped into the wings from a massive lead-encased tanker by hazmat suits in a hangar guarded by both armed sentries and batteries of surface-to-air missiles and M-1 Abrams tanks? Or was the answer so obvious…
The visor trapped the sound of his own grim chuckle.
In practical working theory, he knew they shouldn’t have even gotten off the ground, but the superjet and its power source defied all laws of aerodynamics, nuclear physics and gravity. Whether or not the reactor was a prototype, for instance, scaled down to near-dwarf stature in comparison to the mammoths that powered nuclear plants, it was still housed in a steel container, wrapped, in turn, by thick concrete walls. Therefore, the tremendous weight alone should have created drag enough to virtually snap off the tail.
Oh, but there were answers, he knew, as unbelievable as they might sound.
Yes, perhaps they believed him, in the dark and blissfully ignorant, those black-suited DOD superiors, their armed goons and aerospace engineers contracted out by Lockheed, but he’d caught on the sly the floating rumors. Since no secret was really ever such, he’d come to know that what they referred to as “the Divine Alloy” was a molten ore of some type from deep space. Whatever the unknown substance, he knew it was blended somehow with carbon-fiber laminates and aluminum and titanium, stem to stern on their ultratech ride. Likewise, cockpit and reactor housing were coated with the Divine Alloy. Which, believe it or not, made the superjet, code-named Lightning Bat, lighter than air, but able to withstand all the mass, thrust and gravity that Earth could pound mortal flesh with, once the shield was activated prior to takeoff. Moreover, their shield, sealed inside by the alloy, converted the cockpit into some vacuum of space, spared them G-force that should have crushed their insides to pulp. Rendered weightless by the Divine Alloy, they would have floated to the ceiling, pinned there, if not harnessed into their seats.
Holloran checked the instrument panel. All green, all systems go, he found. Comprised of intricate supercomputers, once the codes were punched in, he knew from two years of 24/7 training and virtual reality flight simulators that technology did roughly ninety percent of the work. From speed to navigation, down to calibrating the payload in the fuselage, Lightning Bat nearly had a mind all its own.
So why did that disturb him?
It was just about time, he knew, checking the digital readout to countdown, aware their audience was anxiously waiting back at Eagle Nebula, ready to monitor the test flight via camera link-up, once Lightning Bat descended and leveled out within a hundred miles of the area in question.
He was about to look over at Captain Thomas Sayers when he glimpsed something flash across the cockpit shield.
“Did you see that?”
“What the hell?” Holloran wasn’t sure what it was, but he would have sworn blue lightning had just streaked past Lightning Bat’s tapered nose. They weren’t low enough for any bolts of lightning, no storm systems to factor in, according to their Doppler radar. A shooting star, then? Meteor fragments?
Sayers repeated the question over the com link, Holloran staring up into the infinite black of the cosmos, when blue light jagged, but flashing this time, he believed, from inside the cockpit. Or did it shoot from the instrument panel? he wondered. After too many sorties in combat to count, having seen flying “things” he had more than once been warned by nameless spooks to never speak of, he wasn’t one to push panic buttons. But he felt the hairs rising on the back of his neck just the same, instinct warning him that something was either wrong or about to go south.
“Check all of our computer systems, Tom,” he told his copilot. “A to Z.”
“Roger, sir.”
“While you do that,” he said, wrapping one black-gloved hand around the side-arm controller, while tapping in the access code to the electro-optical navigational computer, “I’ll start dropping us down and prepping this puppy for its big audition.”
Holloran hoped he sounded confident, relatively gung-ho to the younger man, but he’d been dumped on the receiving end of too many SNAFUs to not trust his churning gut.
“PROTOSTAR EAGLE NEBULA Central Command to Lightning Bat Alpha. We are confirming your altitude and speed. Four thousand feet and holding steady, but you will have to decrease your speed to well below subsonic. Give us four hundred, Lightning Bat Alpha, and we can track you with visual confirmation.”
As the pneumatic doors hissed shut behind him, Gabriel Horn found he was just in time for the big show. The ground control station of Eagle Nebula wasn’t exactly the sprawling network of NASA’s command nerve center, he knew, but there was eyes-only supersophistication enough here to warrant all hands signing blood pacts for a black project so secret only a dozen men in Washington were aware of Lightning Bat’s existence. And, as head of Special Action Service, it was his duty to make damn certain all knowledge here either stayed under the compound’s roof or went to the grave with these people.
In that exclusive realm, however, there was critical mass, and building beyond the Eagle Nebula nest.
Easing up on their six, his rubber-soled combat boots padding silent as a ghost over sheer white concrete, Horn counted twelve aerospace brainiacs. The Chosen, he thought. Or the damned, depending on how well they held their tongues in check, though in his experience, considering at least three of the Seven Deadly Sins—pride, greed and envy—a couple of them, maybe more, would find a nasty and mysterious fatal accident in their futures. He could always count on the worst in
