“Great speech, Major,” said Ong, who’d sprinted out to oversee one of the engineering crew’s most important pre-flight tasks—brewing coffee in their zero-gravity Mr. Coffee.

“I thought you guys fell asleep on me,” said Zen. “I heard some snores.”

“No, seriously. Thanks.” Ong tapped his shoulder. “You’re damn right.”

“Thanks,” said Zen.

“Oooo, Mr. Coffee is smiling,” said Jennifer, climbing in. “Smells like we should use that for fuel.”

“Too corrosive,” said Ong.

Zen wheeled over to the nighthawk station, carefully setting the brake on his wheelchair before snapping the special restraints that locked it in place. The mechanics had cleared a pair of seats and reworked the control area so his seat could be locked in place.

Zen reviewed the hard-copy mission data Ong had left for him before getting ready for takeoff. Placing the Flighthawk computer in static test mode, he took hold of the mirror-image flight sticks, working quickly through the tests with the dedicated mission video tube at the center of the console. He limbered his fingers—they were always cramping like hell—and then pulled on the heavy flight helmet for a new round of checks.

The ground crew, meanwhile, had wheeled the Flight-hawk and its portable power cart out onto the runway. With the control systems operational, Jeff and the computer began yet another round of tests, making sure that both sets of flight computers and the link between them were optimal. Only when this new round of tests was finished did the ground crew fire up the Flighthawk engine, powering the small plane with a “puffer,” or power cart specially designed for it. The Flighthawk’s miniature engine needed a large burst of air running through its turbines before it caught fire.

The UM/F purred like a contented kitten. Impatient to get going, Jeff ran through the control surfaces quickly, flexing the flaps and sliding the rudder back and forth. He split the top screen of the visor into feeds from the forward and tail cams for the test, confirming visually the computers’ signal that all the surfaces were responding properly. He revved the engine one last time, checking temps and pressures.

Preflight finally complete, he put his visor screens back into their standard configuration. Blue sky filled the top half, with a ghosted HUD-like display in the middle and engine and flight data in color graphs to either side. The bottom was divided in three, with radar, flight-information, and instrument screens left to right. If he were flying two Hawks, the typical layout would feature the second plane’s optical or FLIR view on the left, and a God’s-eye of both planes and the mother ship in the middle.

“Let’s get this show on the road, Captain,” he told Bree.

“Acknowledged, Hawk Commander,” she said. “Hell of a speech, Jeff. Everybody appreciated it.”

“Uh-huh.”

The jerk of the aircraft as it moved toward the main runway always took him by surprise; he was so absorbed by the Flighthawk’s stationary view that the sensation was momentarily disorienting.

“Fly the prebriefed orbit,” he told Breanna as they waited for the tower to give them final takeoff clearance. “I wouldn’t do otherwise,” said his wife.

“Anything else you want to say?”

“No,” replied Bree.

“I stayed in the officers’ guest suite. I was too tired to come home.”

“I wasn’t asking,” said Bree.

Zen waited silently as Boeing lifted off and began to circle across the range. Hawk One continued to idle, waiting for its mother ship to hit its first way marker before coming up.

“Point Alpha reached,” said Breanna finally.

“We’re good, Jeff,” said Jennifer, monitoring the systems a few feet away from him. “It’s your show.”

“Flighthawk Control to Dream Tower, request Clearance B for Hawk One, takeoff on Lake Runway D, per filed plans,” he snapped.

“Tower confirms, Hawk Control. Hawk One, you are clear for takeoff,” said the controller. “Unlimited skies, we have no wind at the present time. Not a bad day for a picnic. Good aviating, Major.”

“Thanks, Straw,” Zen told the controller. He brought the Flighthawk to takeoff power and let off the brake. The slope graph indicating speed galloped upward as the ground flew by in Jeff’s visor view. By 120 knots the Flighthawk was already starting to strain upward. Zen pulled back on the joystick and the aircraft darted into the sky, eager to fly.

How could they kill this plane? he thought. It needs less room to take off than a Piper, is harder to find than a Raptor, and can turn twists around an F/A-18.

Hawk One’s speed and altitude built exponentially as the P&W powering it reached its operating norms. Zen flew to five thousand feet, steadying his speed at five hundred knots. He began banking into an orbit approximately three miles south of the mother ship, Boeing’s tail appearing in the top of his screen. The techies would run through a series of signal tests here before proceeding with more difficult maneuvers.

“Data flow is good,” reported Ong. “Ninety seconds more,” said the engineer. Physically, he was somewhere to Zen’s left, but he seemed a thousand miles away, back on the ground.

God, to be flying again, Jeff thought. To feel the g’s hitting you in the face as you yanked and banked, to hear the roar of the engines as you went for the afterburners and shot straight upward, to gag on the kerosene as the smell of jet fuel somehow managed to permeate the cockpit.

Okay, some things he could do without.

“We’re ready to push it,” said Gleason.

“Pilot, proceed to second stage,” Zen told his wife. “Proceeding,” said Breanna.

Smith was gone. Jeff hadn’t said anything to her about the SOB that night—what was there to say? Who could blame her for going somewhere else?

He would have preferred anyone else in the world. But you didn’t get to choose who your wife had an affair with.

“Major, we’re ready. If you can bring your altitude up to ten thousand—”

“I’m on it,” he told Ong, pulling back on the flight stick and nudging the throttle slide.

They were going to simulate an air launch with a roll and tumble beneath the mother ship—not the preferred, smooth method, but a necessary test to make sure the improvements to the communications system held. Jeff pushed away the extraneous thoughts, pushed his head into the cockpit, into the unlimited sky around Hawk One. He was flying again, and if he didn’t smell the kerosene in his face or maybe feel the g’s kicking against his chest, his head was there, his mind rolling with the wings as his eyes fought for some sort of reference, his sense of balance shifting and almost coming undone as the small plane inverted beneath Boeing to kick off the test pattern.

“Good, good, good,” sang Jennifer. “Oh, Mama, we’re good.”

“Yes!” said Ong. “Solid.”

“Hawk One copies,” said Jeff, swinging around and heading into a trail pattern behind Boeing as briefed.

“Drop simulation was perfect,” added Ong.

“I got that impression.”

“You want to push it? We can try that penetration test we put off yesterday,” added the engineer. “I think our game plan was way too conservative.”

“Copy. Bree?”

“I’m game, if you tell me what you want.”

“Circle back and just begin again. I’ll take it from there.”

“Roger that,” she said.

Jeff took the Flighthawk off toward the west end of the range, zooming near Groom Mountain before heading back on a high-speed intercept with the mother ship. As he came around, the search-and-scan radar bleeped out a big, fat target for him, painting Boeing as if she were an enemy bomber trying to sneak in for an attack.

Fit this sucker with some decent missiles and it would be a front-line interceptor.

“Beginning Test Phase,” Jeff told the others as he closed behind the Boeing at a rate of roughly fifty miles an hour. “Ten seconds.”