Chapter 4 - Nine Thousand Feet of Silence
The sudden silence inside the cockpit was far terrifying than the roar of the flames had been.
Without the engines, the only sound was the low, ominous whistle of air bleeding through the damaged seals around the emergency hatches. The primary glass displays went dark for two agonizing seconds before flickering back onto emergency battery power, illuminating Travis’s soot-stained face in a cold blue glow.
Audrey sat frozen in the jumpseat, her breath hitching in her chest as the artificial horizon indicator tilted ominously.
"The... the engines," she whispered, her corporate authority completely shattered. "Can you restart them?"
"No," Travis said flatly, his hands moving across the overhead switch panel with practiced, mechanical precision. "The fuel lines didn't starve. They were shut down by the flight control computer."
He reached up and flipped the manual fuel pump overrides. Nothing happened. The digital switches were locked out.
"It's a remote command override," Travis added, adjusting his grip on the control yoke to maintain a stable glide angle of two hundred knots. "Someone on the ground just sent a hard shutoff signal through that unapproved diagnostic module I warned your maintenance director about."
Audrey stared at the back of his head. The pieces were beginning to fit together in her mind, forming a terrifying picture. "Russell said that module was a factory upgrade..."
"Russell lied to you," Travis replied coldly. "Or he was paid enough not to ask questions."
He pitched the nose down slightly to keep the aircraft from stalling. The Asterion 900 was descending at fifteen hundred feet per minute. At their current altitude, they had roughly six minutes before impact with the water.
"Where are we?" Audrey asked, leaning forward to look over his shoulder at the blank primary navigation map. "Can we glide back to Redwood Airfield?"
"Redwood is behind us, buried in fog, and we don't have the altitude to execute a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn without stalling," Travis said. "Our only option is Point Reyes Navy Auxiliary Field, twelve miles dead ahead."
"Point Reyes was decommissioned five years ago!" Audrey protested. "The runway is unlit, abandoned, and surrounded by cliffside radar towers!"
"It has two thousand feet of cracked concrete," Travis said, tapping the glass on the mechanical altimeter. "And right now, cracked concrete is the only thing standing between you and a freezing grave at the bottom of the Pacific."
He clicked the radio transmitter on the yoke. "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. This is Asterion Experimental N-900LA. Dual engine failure. Declaring emergency. Gliding toward Point Reyes."
Static hissed through the cockpit speakers.
Then a crisp, professional voice broke through the noise. "Asterion N-900LA, this is NorCal Approach. We show you descending rapidly through seven thousand feet. Be advised, Point Reyes is an uncontrolled, closed facility. No emergency services are available on site."
"Understood, NorCal," Travis replied calmly. "Tell the Coast Guard to send a boat to the south beach just in case I miss the threshold."
Audrey watched him. His heart rate seemed impossibly steady. His hands didn't shake, his voice didn't crack, and he handled the dead-stick aircraft with a calm familiarity that no ordinary freelance maintenance technician should have possessed.
"Who are you?" Audrey asked softly, her voice cut through by the low chime of the low-altitude warning system. "You aren't just a contract mechanic from an agency."
Travis didn't look back at her. His eyes were locked on the thick bank of grey clouds below them as the altimeter unwound past four thousand feet.
"My name is Travis Barlow," he said smoothly. "Six years ago, I was the Chief Test Pilot for Langford Defense Systems. Until your current Chief Operating Officer, Bryce Callaway, fired me for refusing to sign off on a flawed flight-control architecture."
May you like
Audrey’s breath caught in her throat. "Bryce?"
"The very same flight-control architecture," Travis added, leaning the yoke forward as they broke through the floor of the clouds into the rainy coastal gloom, "that is currently locking us out of our own flight controls."
