UNLIMITED ( pete mitchell.. )

000 ━ PROLOGUE..

Everyone remembers the Wright brothers. December 17, 1903. The glorious beginning of aviation.

However, a world away from the American breakthrough, history was perhaps instead written on February 16, 1903 instead, when the Science Academy of Paris rejected the project of Traian Vuia entitled "aeroplane-automobile". At thirty-one years old at the time, the Romanian student dreaming of flight had come too long of a way from the village life of his country to let the French scientists stand in his way. He earned copyright over his project in May and with his family's financial support, he started building his plane regardless. His first successful take-off was registered and marked on March 18, 1906 and the reason why it echoes as a massive success to the whole world of aviation still is that while the world was making planes that required external assistance like catapults for take-off, Traian Vuia made the first plane that flew off the ground with only the help of its own engine.

The first mechanical flight.

Right next to the bust of Traian Vuia, as their steps carried them down a long hallway, followed another one. Henri Coandă, 1910, the mind behind the first jet plane engine. Another few deafened steps thudded away on floor colored in reassembly to unripe olives, dusted over by time, dirt and the pattern of white dots; with these new steps, new busts appeared to the right of the two visitors of the museum-like wing of the spacious command building of Air Force Staff, military base in Bucharest, Romania.

Aurel Vlaicu, ambitious pilot. Elie Carafoli, Adrian Adamiu...

It was a long hall. Spacious enough to hold many cornerstones of Romanian aviation, as well as several of the names of importance that have passed through here, left a mark, even though, for financial reasons, busts rather quickly turned to plaques and eventual pictures.

His name was there, at the end of the hallway.

So was hers.

"No one's making you do this," the man pleaded, his Romanian tough, a mouthful of sorrow and heartache. Age clung to his skin in spots, wrinkles and paleness that did not help with the silver of his rather rare hair. "You have your whole life ahead of yourself. A good life. A good pension, Cdr." His boots creaked against the floor and their walk came to a stop, meters away from even being close to reaching that distant exit into the main hallway of the secondary wing, where the NATO representative waited for his answer: would he return with a pilot or without one.

His eyes were fixed on her locked jaw; her eyes were immovable from staring at the doors ahead, even as a soft smile threatened her lips. With all her willpower, she fought back the flinch and kept her seriousness as concrete as the straightness of her posture.

"With all due respect, sir," she begun, voice but a single nuance above a sigh, a respectful whisper amongst the ghosts of legacy, "I have never refused a mission."

"Precisely why I am concerned. Why ask when they can just order your presence as a team leader?" Alas, his accentuation had enlightened something worthwhile for the woman to turn towards her superior. Before her stood Vice-admiral Apostol Tomescu, the Chief of the Romanian Air Force; a short man, in his late 70s, now pampered into his decorated official uniform, yet carrying the scents of an unslept night, immediately giving away the reason of the obscurity in the hallway: outside, the dead of night sung crickets over the cold 2AM.

Before Tomescu, however, for the respect in his eyes demanded acknowledgements, stood Romania's first pilot to graduate from the Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program overseas, more commonly known as the infamous TOPGUN. An OF-5 by NATO Code, Comandor Monica Sollomovici was the jewel of the Romanian Air Force, with twenty-six flown missions, and currently, the Vice-admiral's only pillar of solidarity in a decaying institution.