by Nick Cook
‘Have the other Astras engaged the Tic Tac?’
‘Yes. The alien ship sensibly got out the hell out of here, but one of them is on its tail.’
‘And the third craft?’ Alice asked.
‘Now to the really bad news. I’m afraid it’s on its way up to you right now. It seems they managed to get a visual lock on you whilst you were departing.’
‘Understood. We’ll take appropriate measure,’ Alice replied, her tone suddenly iced-water cool. She glanced across at me. ‘I would say hang on, but the gravity-disruption field will deal with most of the G-force. So just pray to whomever or whatever you believe in instead.’
My fingers sought out the Empyrean Key and I clung on to it like a talisman. ‘You’ve got this, Alice.’
‘I hope so, for both our sakes.’
She pushed the control egg forward and curved us away as a red box appeared on the cockpit floor beneath us.
We sped down in a steep arc, the flight-deck gimbals compensating to keep us level.
‘Hostile craft is closing,’ Delphi’s voice said calmly from the cockpit speakers.
‘Then it’s time to shake things up a bit,’ Alice said. She yanked the egg control in reverse and we slapped into our harnesses as Ariel jinked backwards. The gimbal motors whined as the ship rotated rapidly around us.
‘Oh my goodness, this craft is something else,’ Alice said as we hurtled backwards as fast as we’d been flying forward a moment ago.
But the enemy Astra raced up to the same altitude as us, visible on the forward-facing cockpit screens. The red lock box overlaid on them began to grow bigger as they closed the distance rapidly.
‘They’re beginning to reel us in,’ Alice said, her brow ridging.
My mouth grew dry. ‘Can you go any faster?’
‘I’m already redlining the multimode vector thrusters. If I push them any further, we’ll destroy them.’
‘That will be academic if they blow us out of the sky. Do whatever you have to do to shake them. And don’t worry about me losing my breakfast.’
‘In that case it’s time to show them just how good we are.’ Alice slammed the egg control hard left and we shot immediately sideways. But when I glanced to the left I saw the Astra had almost instantly switched directions to match our change.
Alice began to zigzag through three dimensions, quickly overloading my senses with a blur of movement as Ariel spun round us in every axis. The motorised gimbals whined ever louder as they fought to keep the flight deck level. But whoever was flying that Astra was damned good too. They matched us move for move as we buzzed about the sky like two crazed wasps trapped in a jar.
‘OK, if you really want to play…’ Alice said to herself. She gritted her teeth, threw the throttle wide open and lifted the egg control hard up. I sank into my chair as we sped upwards into the darkening sky. Pinpricks of stars grew stronger around us as the Earth steadily became a globe below.
We were so high now I could see a large storm system sweeping towards the west coast of North America. We had to be at an altitude equivalent to the orbit of the International Space Station. Unfortunately, even that incredible manoeuvre hadn’t shaken the Astra off our tail. Through the floor of spherical cockpit I could see it rising fast towards us.
‘Power successfully rerouted to chameleon system,’ Delphi announced.
‘Not a moment too soon,’ Alice said. She threw Ariel back towards the Earth at the same point as hitting a button.
‘Chameleon system engaged,’ Delphi announced.
‘Now let’s pray we can lose that hotshot pilot,’ Alice said. ‘The good news is they haven’t opened fire on us yet despite having several clear chances to do so. Maybe they have a weapon malfunction.’
We sped away as the pursuing TR-3B slowed to a stop and a light beam lanced straight out from it, sweeping the darkening sky like a lighthouse lamp.
‘Now our cloak is operating again, it looks as if they’re using that fancy sensor to try to locate us,’ Alice said.
I nodded. ‘It looks like that searchlight beam we saw the Tic Tac use back in Peru.’
‘Very interesting… Delphi, can you give me a magnified view of the craft?’ Alice said.
‘Digitally enhancing image,’ Delphi replied.
A window on the display opened up to reveal a triangular craft floating against the stars above us. As it slowly rotated I spotted a red panel in its grey belly, as if someone hadn’t yet painted it the black of the rest of the craft. Three round orange engines glowed towards the tips of the ship’s belly. In the middle was an inward-facing dome lined with square panels, which was emitting a fainter light, presumably something to do with their magnetic gravity-reduction drive. Unlike the Tic Tac, this ship had a man-made feel to it.
A beam of light lanced out again from the Astra through the sky, just over Ariel.
‘Let’s make sure we don’t get into its path,’ Alice said. She tipped Ariel on to her nose and we began to speed straight down towards Earth.
I felt the tension release from my jaw when the Astra stayed put and their sensor beam shot out in the opposite direction.
I relaxed into my chair. ‘It looks as if we lost—’
My words were cut off by a warbling alarm from Alice’s control console. It immediately lit up with red lights.
Alice began to flick switches. ‘No, no, no!’
Intuition was screaming at me that something spectacularly bad had just happened. ‘Talk to me, Alice?’ I yelped.
‘The REV drive is going offline. I pushed it too hard and for too long.’
A vibration shuddered through Ariel and then, as if someone had thrown a switch, gravity suddenly yanked my body from left to right within my seat as the ship went into a flat spin.
‘I’m losing control!’ Alice shouted, her face ashen as she moved the control egg in every direction to no effect.
Ariel started to tip forward, the leading edge of the craft now pointing straight down. The prototype ship began to corkscrew as it dropped. We were thrown around in our flight seats as the G-force was no longer cushioned by the REV drive. The gimbals were fighting a losing battle to keep our flight deck level – it had begun to pitch violently from side to side like a boat in a wild, stormy sea. This was no longer a computer game where we were passively watching the action on a screen. This had just got far too real.
An altimeter flashed up on the HUD as alarm after alarm joined the first and we sped ever faster. An audible scream of air was coming from outside as there was now no gravity bubble to protect us. The cockpit had already grown noticeably warmer and sparks rushed past on the screens as we re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere. I knew enough about spaceflight to realise that the leading edge of the saucer-shaped craft was probably glowing red hot right by now. The sparks faded as the world outside became blue again.
‘Alice, we’ve got to abandon ship and use the escape pods,’ I said.
There was no response.
I looked across to see her expression frozen like a mask. Her hand was still clamped on the egg control, unmoving.
The altitude display whipped past 100,000 feet.
‘Alice, talk to me!’ I shouted.
She was shaking but remained mute, fear etched into her every feature as we hurtled below 70,000 feet. A canopy of clouds rushed up to meet us.
I felt the burn of bile at the back of my throat as Alice’s arms dropped away from the controls of her flight seat and she closed her eyes. We were going to die.
Chapter Seven
The whole craft shook with a cacophony of groans and screeching metal coming from the titanium airframe around us. Alice and I rose up into our seat harnesses as Ariel plummeted towards the ground. We had at best less than a couple of minutes before we slammed into the rapidly expanding patchwork of prairies beneath us. But my most pressing problem was that Alice still seemed locked into some sort of catatonic state.
‘Alice, you have to bloody well do something!’ I shout
ed.
Her lip trembled but she didn’t respond. What had happened to her ice-maiden control of only a few minutes before?
I tried to reach across towards her control panel, but I couldn’t fight the sharply increased G-force. Maybe voice control would still work?
‘Delphi, initiate escape pods,’ I said.
‘Pilot authorisation needed to abandon vessel,’ Delphi replied.
‘Bloody override it. This is an emergency and we need to evacuate the ship!’
‘I’m afraid I’m unable to do that, Lauren,’ the ship’s computer replied.
‘Oh, don’t go all HAL on me!’ I forced my head over to stare at Alice. ‘Alice, you have to issue the command!’
Alice’s expression remained a mask, her eyes locked on to the view of the prairies of Illinois growing larger beneath us.
I needed to grab hold of the woman and shake her out of wherever she’d disappeared to in her shock. But that wasn’t physically possible in the negative G-force induced by our rapid descent. It was doing its best to drag my body out of its harness and hurl me up at the ceiling of the circular cockpit and pin me there. But I realised there was one last thing I could try…
‘Lucy, we could really do with your help right now. We’re about crash and are unable to eject.’
No reply came back. Maybe she was too busy – or something worse had happened.
Shit, shit, shit!
My mouth was glued up with saliva as the altitude indicator sped below 5,000 feet. We were close enough to the ground now for me to see a lone blue tractor kick up a cloud of dust behind it as it trundled along a track. Maybe the tractor driver would be the first on the scene to pull our smashed bodies from the crash site, not that there would be a lot to recover if we hit the ground at our current speed.
There was literally nothing I could do to stop this happening.
Some deep animal instinct took over and something inside me relaxed as my subconscious registered that death was inevitable. And of all things that I could have spent my last moments thinking about, Jack’s face filled my mind. How could I have left things as they currently stood? Now he would have no idea just how much he meant to me. I had to leave him a message.
‘Delphi, do you have a black box recorder?’
‘Affirmative,’ Delphi replied.
The black box would record the final data from Ariel before it ploughed into the ground – along with cockpit voice recordings. If anything could survive the impact, it was the black box.
I cleared my throat. ‘This message is for Jack Harper…’ A deep breath. ‘Jack, I want you to know how crazy I am about you, so crazy, in fact, that I didn’t trust myself to tell you whilst keeping focused on trying to get the job done.’
I watched as a flock of swallows spiralled over the tractor, but my attention was snatched back as the G-force ramped up and I was barely able to breathe.
Damn it, I needed to tell Jack how I really felt. ‘Jack…I…love…you,’ I ground out through my clenched jaw. My vision started to go red as the blood rushed to my brain.
‘If that’s how you feel, then you should tell him in person,’ Lucy’s voice said from the cockpit speakers.
Before I could reply I spotted a blurring bubble of air that was her otherwise invisible craft speeding up towards our plummeting ship.
‘Lauren, you need to activate that teardrop icon to override my drive safety protocols,’ Lucy said.
‘Got it. Delphi, initiate carrier tone.’
‘Carrier tone initiated,’ the ship’s AI replied.
Barely audible over the rushing air outside, a chiming tone filled the cockpit and the teardrop icon appeared over the Empyrean Key. Fighting the G-force, with muscles cabling in my arm, I moved the icon into the selection window and flicked my wrist forward.
Just like that the world outside hurtled to an abrupt stop. As the negative gravity released, we were suddenly floating against our harnesses in zero G.
‘Got you!’ Lucy said. ‘I’ve extended my antigravity field and enveloped you with it. Told you I could do it.’
I gulped in a breath. Ariel was now hanging in mid-air, pointing straight towards the ground that was just a few hundred metres below us.
‘I disappear for a few minutes and look at the trouble you get yourselves into,’ Lucy said.
With a gentle hum lights lit up all over the control console. Alice slowly blinked and then licked her lips.
‘I’ve also just had a quick tinker with your systems to bring the REV drive back online,’ Lucy continued.
Her star-shaped craft came to a gliding stop just beneath us. She was only visible because of the slight distortion in the air that outlined her.
‘I’m handing over autopilot function back to Delphi and retracting my antigravity field so you can now fly under your own power again.’
‘Affirmative,’ I replied.
There was a slight vibration as the shimmering air around us disappeared. Then once again gentle gravity took hold of our bodies and pulled us back down into our seats.
‘Thank you, Lucy,’ I said. ‘I thought it was all over there for a moment.’
‘Evidently, if your declaration of love to Jack is anything to go by,’ Lucy replied.
‘You weren’t meant to hear that.’
‘It’s already forgotten.’
A shaking gasp came from Alice and she placed her hands over her mouth as tears blossomed from her eyes. ‘Oh my god!’
I reached across and touched her arm. ‘Are you OK?’
She took a shuddering breath and nodded. ‘I’m so sorry, Lauren. I’m not sure what happened there. It felt as if my body turned into a block of stone and I couldn’t move.’
‘That sounds like a freeze response to me,’ Lucy said.
‘A what?’ Alice asked.
‘It’s a variation of the fight or flight response you humans sometimes experience in a dangerous situation. To quote your medical text books, “in a hyper-aroused state that could threaten a person’s sanity”, such as ploughing your prototype ship into the ground, for example, “the body secretes endorphins and other chemicals to function as an analgesic”. Basically it’s your body’s way of dialling down the experience and allowing you to disappear into yourself before death. That’s the physiological explanation; however, this is way out of character for you, Alice.’
This didn’t sound like the Lucy I knew, more like a psychological expert who’d stepped into her shoes for a second. But then again anything was possible with her. She was an AI after all.
Alice breathed through her nose. ‘For a computer sometimes you are far too sharp.’
‘Hey, I’m multitalented,’ Lucy replied, sounding more like her old self again.
I peered across at Alice. ‘Is this something to do with an old trauma that triggered you?’
Her eyes locked on to mine. ‘And it would seem you’re very perceptive too, Lauren Stelleck.’ She gestured towards her legs. ‘You’re both right – it had everything to do with how I did this to myself.’
‘You’ve never spoken about that before, Alice,’ I said gently.
‘There’s a good reason for that. Even today it’s too raw. When I lost control of Ariel just now, it took me straight back to the most awful time of my life. You see, I used to live for aerobatics. During an air show, when I was doing an inverted loop, my plane suffered a catastrophic structural failure. Half of the rear tailplane sheared off and my plane, Suzie Q, veered straight towards the crowd. I had a split second to make a decision – either take a forced landing on top of those poor people watching me or try to pull the plane round, back to the airstrip. But I knew the latter would mean I would almost certainly stall the aircraft.’
‘And you chose that option, didn’t you?’ Lucy’s voice asked.
‘Of course I did. My last-ditch desperate manoeuvre killed what little airspeed I had left and I stalled straight into the strip. I should have died that day, but somehow I survived. It may have lef
t me unable to walk, but I’ve tried to make the best of it. I’ve never piloted an aircraft since then – until today.’
‘Oh good grief, Alice.’ I forced myself to keep my annoyance in check because that wouldn’t help anyone right now. Instead, I used the most compassionate tone I could in the circumstances. ‘No wonder just reacted the way you did.’
She nodded. ‘I wouldn’t normally admit this to anyone, but I often relive it in my nightmares, waking up drenched in cold sweat.’
‘So why put yourself through flying Ariel after experiencing something like that?’ Lucy asked.
‘I thought it would be my way back. I even designed the flight controls of Ariel so I could fly her. She held within her my dreams of being able to fly again.’
‘You’re saying that in the past tense now?’ I said.
‘Oh, Lauren, do you think I can really take to the air again after this?’
‘Guys, I hate to interrupt, but there’s a tractor getting closer to us by the second. Even though your chameleon drive is back online, at such close proximity the driver might notice something in the air. We’d better make ourselves scarce before they get here.’
Alice’s face paled. ‘I can’t fly Ariel, not now.’
‘If you prefer, I can take over your flight systems again and get you back to Eden, Alice?’ Lucy asked.
Alice bowed her head and nodded. ‘Please do that.’
Her sense of relief was palpable. But I also knew that if she didn’t face this fear down in the immediate aftermath she probably never would dare try to fly again.
The tractor was a only a mile away as I tightened my gaze on her. ‘Actually, I don’t think that’s a good idea. I know you might not want to, but as my actual Aunt Lucy once said to me when I managed to crash my motorbike, when you’ve been thrown by your horse you need to get straight back in the saddle.’
Alice, that ever confident powerhouse of a person, bit her lip. ‘I’m not sure I can, Lauren.’
