The Apollo Academy

by Kimberly P. Chase

  Zane met Sky’s eyes, and a silent understanding passed between them. But the longer they stared, the more it turned into a challenge, and Zane realized he might actually have some competition if he ever tried to pursue Aurora. Even though the thought of that sent slices of pain through his stomach, it might actually be funny to watch. From the stories he’d heard, Aurora would rather leave Sky locked in a hypobaric chamber at fifty thousand feet than hook up with him.

  It would almost be as funny to watch them as it would be to watch Zane, an unknown orphan, attempting to date the daughter of Collin Titon.

  Zane realized they were silently staring at each other and looked away, not wanting to be part of a pissing contest. What was wrong with him? But Sky’s face was unashamed and open when he broke into a smile and laughed.

  Neither of them said anything more on the topic as they left the room. Soon enough they made their wait out of the Apollo Academy’s front entrance where Sky had managed to get a hovercar to take them to the SpacePort.

  The hangar was as silent, dark, and deserted as a tomb. It was a little after midnight, and everyone sensible was already in bed. Even in the dark, Zane saw the silhouette of six twin-engine fighter jets sitting alone in the hangar. The XT-101was a sleek airplane with its swept back wings, and the titanium-alloy coating made it look as if it had been dipped in silver. The combination of the wings, narrow body, and semi-flush engine air intake vents gave it a stealthy appearance, but Zane knew it was also technologically advanced. The XT-101s had once been one of the military’s fastest and most covert aircraft until, like most things, it had been surpassed by the newest technology.

  They were both standing at the entrance door as they verified what they suspected, that they were truly alone. When they stepped past the threshold, an automatic sensor noted their entrance, illuminating the hangar in a brilliant light.

  Zane flinched and quickly closed his eyes when he saw the retinal scanner. Sky moved forward to complete the required scan. If Zane had come alone, he would have overridden the entire system, jeopardizing his position with the Academy.

  When the scan beeped, Zane opened his eyes again.

  He nodded to Sky in unspoken thanks, but Sky shrugged his shoulders like it was no big deal.

  As Zane moved farther into the hangar, he saw that one of the airplanes had several compartments open, revealing interior components, and assumed this partially dissected plane had been Aurora’s. The airplane’s metal cowling had been taken off and placed on the hangar floor. Someone had hastily begun to screen the aircraft for problems but had given up before getting to far. Apparently, the maintenance personnel felt the problem would still be there in the morning, just as Zane had hoped.

  Well, it was time to get some solid answers. Zane stood before the aircraft, contemplating where to begin. “You said she lost cabin pressure, right?”

  “Yeah, she experienced a rapid decompression and an instrument panel failure. But that was after the UAV link failed.”

  Zane grabbed a computer tablet link that lay on a side cart and climbed up into the cockpit. The glass panel that displayed the cockpit instruments had been removed, revealing many wires and black-boxed instruments that held gyros. Some of the equipment was a little old fashioned, but the older instruments were always great back up, as well. The maintenance crew had left a lot of the panel exposed, so Zane easily linked the tablet into the aircraft’s instrument display and was soon tapping away.

  Several minutes later, Sky stood on the side ladder that led up to the cockpit, watching Zane work. “What are you doing?”

  Zane looked up, surprised. He’d been so lost hacking into the aircraft’s flight recorder box that he forgot he wasn’t alone. He wasn’t used to working with an audience or having to explain in laymen’s terms what he was doing. “I’m overriding the flight recorder’s programming so that I can visualize on my tablet her failures as they happened. I’m tricking the aircraft into giving up the last hour of flight information, which fortunately was Aurora’s.”

  Sky’s eyebrows rose up high on his forehead. “Holy shit, I didn’t even know that was possible.”

  Zane shrugged. He wasn’t really paying attention to Sky because he was completely focused on the tablet in his hands, fingers tapping away until finally the tablet began to display the information in binary code from the flight recorder box. He pursed his lips, deep in thought, but Sky interrupted by leaning over and looking at the tablet.

  “What do all of those zeros and ones mean?”

  “Oh, right. Sorry.” Zane sometimes forgot that most people couldn’t understand binary code. And actually, now that it was so blatantly pointed out, he realized he hadn’t met anyone else who could. It was amazing that he hadn’t noticed stuff like this before. It wasn’t until he had been irrevocably told by a licensed professional that he was different, that he began to understand how different he truly was. He hit a few keys on the tablet and switched the information to something Sky would be able to understand better.

  The tablet showed that the instruments themselves were properly functioning throughout the entire flight, despite the reports of an instrument failure.

  “Sky, you said Aurora lost her instruments, right?”

  “Yeah, she managed to tell me she lost her instruments right before I lost communication with her.”

  Zane thought this over. In order to lose all of her instruments simultaneously, something would have had to disrupt power from the main avionics bus before the current reached the display panel. That type of failure could cause Aurora’s visual loss of her air speed indicator, altimeter, heading indicator, and engine performance gauges and leave her virtually blind. But according to the flight recorder that was not the case.

  Zane watched the instrument recordings for the entire flight and still didn’t understand. All of her instruments appeared to be functioning and reporting accurate information throughout the flight. Even the loss of oxygen didn’t make sense. There were warnings that would alert the operator that the aircraft was losing pressure, but there were no indications of that.

  “So the aircraft lost pressurization, causing Aurora to black out?”

  “I guess so. All I know is that at fifty-five thousand feet she said she wasn’t getting enough oxygen, but she passed out before she could clarify.”

  So everyone was assuming that the only cause for lack of oxygen would be an aircraft pressurization failure. It was a legitimate answer, but again it wasn’t what he was seeing from the flight recorder.

  He moved on to the next issue, the UAV link failure. The UAV was on a completely separate electrical bus and had been specifically designed that way to prevent failure. In fact, Zane thought, if Sky had actually tried to use the program, it would have probably worked. The only explanation was that it was an inaccurate warning. The ground pilot program was operational. It was just the cautionary alarm that had failed.

  “Sky, did you even try to engage the drone pilot?”

  Sky, who had been studiously watching everything on the tablet, appeared shocked by the question. Zane hadn’t meant to make him feel bad for not thinking of it, but someone probably should have ensured it was not operational instead of just automatically listening to a warning light.

  “Actually, no, I didn’t.” Sky’s face went white. “I guess I panicked because the thought to try to use it never even crossed my mind.” He shoved his hands back through his hair in what Zane was coming to recognize as a nervous habit. “Are you telling me that it would have worked?” He jumped down from the ladder and began pacing back and forth across the glossy hangar floor.

  Zane watched him from the seat in the cockpit, as he contemplated what to say. He wasn’t one hundred percent certain that it would have worked, but it would have been one of the first things he tried to do.

  “Yeah, I think it would’ve worked.” Zane shrugged his shoulders and told Sky what he found. “According to the flight recorder, everything was functioning properly and accurat
ely throughout the flight. It shows the warning light that the ground pilot went offline but shows no indication of actual failure.”

  Sky stopped pacing and fisted his hands into tight balls by his sides. “Fuck.” He began pacing again. “What exactly are you saying happened then?”

  Zane thought back through the flight path he had just relived. Even watching it secondhand through a transcript of numbers, he knew it would have been a hell of a flight. His hands began to sweat when he remembered it was Aurora in the airplane.

  Pushing his own feelings out of the way, he thought it all out.

  After the initial ground pilot warning light went off, the instrument panel had accurately depicted the remaining flight. For some reason, Aurora felt she no longer had an accurate instrument panel. So she pushed the nose of the aircraft down in an attempt to descend to a lower altitude for more oxygen, but she had inadvertently lost consciousness before she was able to also lower her air speed. The combination of lowering nose and throttles would have been a great recovery tactic, but without reducing power simultaneously with her descent, she instead entered into a mach tuck.

  From what Zane understood, at fifty-five thousand feet the XT-101 would be on the far edge of its design limitations. Any type of failure at that altitude and speed would be disastrous. Zane remembered reading somewhere that a mach tuck was an aerodynamic effect that occurred when the nose of an aircraft pitched downward, causing the airflow around the wing to reach supersonic speeds.

  This had caused the instrument recordings to plummet as they rapidly changed, showing in its own numerical way how the aircraft had descended in an uncontrollable flight until about seven thousand feet when the readout stopped its constant change, indicating that Aurora regained consciousness. The instrument readout then steadied itself as Aurora maneuvered the aircraft and recovered from the mach tuck, showing only two thousand feet above the ground when she had regained complete control over the airplane.

  Damn, he was thinking about Aurora again. He knew the Academy and the Alliance would put them in dangerous scenarios, but Aurora’s flight was too real. What if she hadn’t recovered? Never had the seriousness of their training been so apparent. She could have died.

  Again, Zane had to shove those thoughts away.

  What caused that harrowing flight that would have assuredly killed a less skilled pilot? Zane knew that her instrument panel was functioning accurately and most likely the ground pilot program as well. There was no indication of an aircraft depressurization, but something had caused Aurora to lose consciousness. What was it?

  “She said she lost her instruments, right?” Zane knew he was repeatedly asking this question, but he needed to talk through the problem.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, they were working just fine. Why would she report that?”

  Sky thought for a second. “She lost sufficient oxygen at about the same time as she said she lost her instruments. And in her inexperience she was probably relying heavily on her HUD when her oxygen failed too. Maybe she was only talking about her mask?”

  “That actually makes sense.” Zane turned around in his seat and began looking for the mask Aurora would have worn over her head and face.

  He found it discarded haphazardly on the floor with all of the cords still attached to various parts of the aircraft. The long tube that extended down the back of the helmet provided the oxygen into the mask, and Zane followed it all the way back to the oxygen unit stored behind the cockpit. Everything seemed fine, but he still followed all of the cords with his hands until he was satisfied that they had all been attached properly.

  But when he looked at the helmet, Zane thought he saw a balled-up silver object with long legs wrapped around the back wiring. That didn’t look right. He needed to take the thing completely apart in order to see what was there.

  Sky was still wearing a path in the hangar floor when Zane yanked the helmet and all of the cords out of the cockpit. “What are you doing?” Sky asked.

  “I’m going to need to get a better look inside.” He gestured to the helmet and its various attachments, as if the answer should have been obvious.

  Sky glanced down at his techiwatch and didn’t appear to be happy with what he saw. Zane followed suit and realized it was only a few hours before his first class of the day. People would shortly be arriving for work. Zane was going to have to take his work home with him, so he wrapped the cords around the helmet and jumped down to place it on the hangar floor.

  The next forty-five minutes were spent putting the aircraft back to the way he had found it, which wasn’t too hard to accomplish because it had been left torn apart to begin with. No one would know the operator head mask was missing. It probably wasn’t even a part of the routine maintenance inspection.

  His hands were covered in oil and other goo by the time he was finished, but for the first time it didn’t embarrass him.

  Zane picked up the helmet, tucked it under his arm, and strode out of the hangar along with Sky.

  It was no longer a surprise to Zane when Sky quickly managed to acquire a hovercar to take them both back to the Academy. As Zane sat in the backseat, he couldn’t wait to get his hands inside the helmet, but it would have to wait until he got back to the privacy of his room.

  Zane looked over at Sky who could barely keep his eyes open. Zane knew he wouldn’t sleep until he had answers. What was the silver spider thing he’d glimpsed entangled in her helmet wiring?

  AURORA

  Aurora fluffed her pillow up behind her head as she flicked through the broadcast selections, hoping to find something to take her mind off things. She just wanted to zone out, but so far all she thought about was how close to death she had come earlier today. On top of that, she couldn’t stop thinking that something wasn’t quite right about how it all happened.

  As soon as she had those kinds of thoughts, she would berate herself for being so paranoid. It was absurd to think that anyone would want to target her. In fact, she felt conceited just thinking about it.

  Besides, who would the suspects be anyway? TerraUnited had yet to attack the Academy and if they did, they would definitely take credit for it. Could Sky be responsible? He was the only person she knew of that had a grudge against her and the opportunity to do something about it, but after his bizarre reactions today, she was pretty confident he wasn’t involved. And she didn’t even want to think about what his change in behavior could mean.

  So that left her being a conceited, paranoid, scared girl who was losing her mind.

  It had to be the shock and pressure finally getting to her. That was the only explanation for her ludicrous thoughts. Just because people watched her everywhere she went didn’t mean that someone wanted to hurt her. Sure, it was creepy when people stared, but it was never done in a physically harmful way. Apparently, people couldn’t help but look at the cadet with the last name of Titon, the only girl in the flight program.

  The only other person that seemed to hold a grudge was Hailen. Was it possible she had something to do with today? Hailen openly disliked her and was mean to her whenever possible, but was she smart enough to know how to disrupt aircraft components? Aurora sighed; her mind was doing that paranoid rambling thing again.

  Laughter and applause filled her room, and she turned her attention back to the monitor hanging on the wall. Ugh, she was obviously tuning out the 3D comedy that was halfway popping out of the glass screen. She lifted her arm so it could be seen and swiped her finger across the air so she could scroll through the channels without having to get up.

  Her door flew open, slamming against the wall.

  She jolted up, wincing. Her dad came storming through the room wearing a wrinkled business suit and tie. He stopped short when he spotted her lying on the bed.

  “Dad, what’s wrong?” Aurora lay back down. Sudden movement like that was so not a good thing for her right now. She should have expected him to pay a visit. The Academy kept him informed of everything.

 
; “Ms. Lovell just informed me that you had an accident today.” Her father sat down on the edge of her bed, trying unsuccessfully to smooth out his suit. He looked around the room. “Where’s your luggage? Why aren’t you packing?”

  “Whoa, slow down. What do I need my suitcase for?” Aurora swallowed.

  “You’re coming home with me,” he stated, as if that were really an option.

  Aurora twisted the airplane on her necklace, studying her father’s face. There seemed to be more wrinkles around his eyes. “Dad, I’m okay. It was just a maintenance malfunction—”

  “How is a malfunction normal?” Her father hopped off the bed and began pacing the room. Someone had obviously explained to her father that the malfunction had caused her to lose control.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Jackson said this type of thing happens every once in awhile. The airplane’s down for maintenance.” Aurora wasn’t about to bring up her own crazy ideas if he was this worried already. He would insist she go home, and that was not an option. He certainly couldn’t make her, but he could probably make her life at the Academy hell.

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “Dad, would you really want me to be the kind of person who quits when things get tough?”

  Her dad thought about it for a moment before sighing.

  She pressed on, determined to make her point. “You do realize I’m eighteen and not a little girl anymore, right?”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m going to be happy about it.” He laughed, rubbing a hand through his thinning hair.

  “Are you sure that’s why you’re so stressed? Is there something else going on?” There had to be. He couldn’t have just realized going into space might be dangerous.

  Her dad stopped his pacing to face her. “You’re right. It’s more than just your accident. I’m worried about the Frontier Solutions’ bankruptcy. They’re desperate for any attention, and when I heard you almost crashed, I worried they had something to do with it.” Her dad rolled his eyes. “Of course, Ms. Lovell thought I was being ridiculous.” He twisted his hands together. “I just can’t ensure your safety here.”