“For a spin, sir?”

“You think you can arrange a test flight?”

Mendoza’s cheery manner vaporized. “Well, we’d have to check for the satellite window and—”

“I looked at the satellite window already,” Dog told her. “It’s clear until three.”

“And then the prep time involved—”

“I understand there were some landing gear issues to be gone over, and you had slotted a test flight.”

“Well, yes, but we’ve already prepped that mission.”

“You don’t think I can handle it?” Dog asked.

Mendoza narrowed her eyes. With Mack’s departure, her stock had skyrocketed; clearly she didn’t want to be bothered by a puny lieutenant colonel.

Bastian struggled to keep his poker face.

“Of course you can handle it, sir,” said Mendoza. “The JSF is a pleasure to fly. It’s just that Captain Jones is already upstairs and ready to go.”

“Jonesy doesn’t mind,” Bastian said, enjoying the sight of the air deflating from her cheeks. “I already had him brief me on the flight. He’s flying chase in my F-16.”

While Dog felt pretty full of himself as he hustled into his flight gear, he hadn’t pulled rank just to annoy Mendoza and upset the flight-test crew. He had decided that if Dreamland’s future was tied to the JSF, he should at least feel how the seat felt beneath his fanny.

It felt fairly good, actually. Stonewall One—one of the three F-119 testers—had a newly modified ejection seat that featured a form-molded back and bottom. It wasn’t possible to make the padding on an ejection seat very thick; the force of the seat as it rocketed out of the craft would bruise a pilot’s butt, if not break his bones. But this was by the far the most comfortable pilot’s chair Dog had ever sat in.

Unfortunately, that was about the only superlative the plane deserved. The sideseat control stick, familiar from the F-16, felt sloppy from the get-go. The plane was supposed to be optimized for short-field takeoffs, but the engines were sluggish. Even with a reduced fuel load and no payload, Dog found himself struggling to get into the air.

Airborne, things seemed even worse. The plane lumbered rather than zoomed. In a turn, the wings acted as if there were five-thousand-pound bombs strapped below them—and maybe one or two above. Worst of all, the AC wasn’t working properly; Bastian kept glancing around the cockpit to double-check that he wasn’t on fire.

All of these things could and would be fixed. An up-rated engine was under development, though its weight and some maintenance issues made it unattractive to the Navy. The present avionics system—stolen from an F-16—would be replaced eventually by a cutting-edge system that would do everything but fly the mission for the pilot. And on and on.

Still, the plane itself seemed like a tugboat. Dog tried yanking and banking as he completed his first orbit around the test range at six thousand feet. The F-119 moved like a toddler with a load in his pants, waddling through maneuvers that would be essential to avoid heavy flak while egressing a target.

Not good.

It did somewhat better at fifteen thousand feet, but it took him forever to get there. Dog thought back to the complaints of the A-10A pilots during the Gulf War, when standing orders required them to take their heavily laden aircraft well above the effective range of flak as they crossed the border. Those guys hated going over five hundred feet, and they had a point—their airplanes were built like tanks and carried more explosives than the typical World War II bomber.

The JSF, on the other hand …

Dog sighed. The politicians were in love with the idea of a one-size-fits-all-services-and-every-mission airplane. The military had to suck it up and make do.

Did they, though? And what would those politicians say when the people who flew the F-119 were coming back in body bags?

He checked his instruments and position, then radioed in that he was ready to check the landing gear.

“WE WERE NEVER OFF THE BRIEFED COURSE,” BREANNA repeated. She folded her arms and stared across the makeshift conference room. Zen continued to glare at her; she felt sure that if she turned she’d find the plasterboard wall behind her on fire.

“I didn’t say you were off course,” he said.

“Well, you implied it.”

“I think we did fairly well,” said Ong, clearly as uncomfortable as the other techies in the room debriefing the mission. “We have to go through the downloads and everything else, but we were out at seventeen miles before the connection snapped.”

“I think I can tweak the corn module some more,” said Jennifer. “We’re definitely on the right track.”

The scientists continued to talk. To Breanna, it was as if they were speaking in a room down the hall. She could feel Jeff’s anger; it was the only thing that mattered.

But why? The scientists were saying they’d just kicked butt on the test.

That was what they were saying, wasn’t it?

So why was Jeff frowning?

He was pissed at the world because of his legs.

“We keep bumping up against the limits of the bandwidth,” said Jennifer, talking to Bree with what was probably intended as a sympathetic smile. “The degradation of the secure signal is difficult to deal with in real time. If we didn’t have to encode it and make it so redundant, we’d be fine.”

“We are making progress,” said Jeff. “The changes you made worked.”

It seemed to Breanna that his manner changed as he spoke to the computer scientist. He was more like himself.

“We can make it better.” The young scientist twirled her finger through one of the long strands of her light hair. Maybe she did it absentmindedly, but the way she leaned against the table at the same time irked Breanna. Her shirt was at least a size too small.

Why didn’t she just yank it off and be obvious?

“What’s the big deal whether it’s ten miles or twenty?” said Breanna.

“Because the mother ship is a sitting duck,” snapped Jeff, turning on the glare again. “A MiG or a Sukhoi at ten miles could crisp Boeing before it even knew it was there. We need to push out to fifty at least.”

“You’re supposed to be flying with combat planes,” said Breanna.

Ong started to explain about the size of the computer equipment, but Breanna cut him off.

“Yes, I know. Right now you need a lot of space in the mother ship for the control computer and the communications equipment,” she said. “What I’m suggesting is, you make the mother ship survivable.”

“A JSF with a trailer,” joked one of the engineers.

No one laughed.

“Megafortress,” said Breanna. “Twenty miles, even ten, would be fine.”

“Yeah, well, get us the flight time,” said Jeff. “We’ve had a total of two hours with Raven in two weeks. And before I got here, there had been two drops in three months.”

“I’ll try “

Zen nodded. For an instant, maybe half an instant, his anger melted away. Breanna thought she saw something in his eyes, something she hadn’t seen in a long time.

She might have imagined it. She knew in that second that she truly loved him, that she wanted to help him past this—past everything. She loved more than his legs. She loved his mind, his spirit, the way he laughed, the way he said everything was bullshit when it was. The way he actually listened to her—listened to anyone, no matter what he felt toward them.

Breanna felt more and more like an outsider as the debriefing session continued, the crew and engineers picking over different possibilities for improving their connection. Jeff was very businesslike, rarely joking; it seemed to her he’d become colder since the accident, and not just to her.

She followed him into the hall as the meeting broke up. “Jeff’ she called as he started into the men’s room.

“I got to pee. It’s full,” he told her. He pointed to the small pouch he carried at the side of the chair—a piddle-pack.