Conflagration

Falling out of the Sky

"Alright, the safeties are off. If you get us killed, I'm kickin' your ass." Lyssa said over the intercom from back in the engine room.

"Good thing is, if we blow up, we'll never know it," Erin said. "Get strapped in."

"Ooo! Thought you'd never ask."

With the plane so heavily loaded, Erin had never thought she'd be using the vertical thrusters this trip. Now, those vertical thrusters might just save their lives. If she could just slow the plane down a little bit more, it might be enough to stop the bounce and drop down into atmosphere. What they would do after that, she had no idea. One thing at a time.

The plane was already oriented in the proper position for this maneuver: nose towards the planet and the belly meeting the oncoming, ultra-thin, upper atmosphere. She reached down to the lever beside her seat and lifted it up slightly. The collective, according to legend, was originally developed for an ancient Earth flying machine called a "helicopter," but it's debatable if such a machine ever really existed on ancient Earth. Erin doubted if the ancients ever really developed such advanced machines. Nevertheless, on modern spaceplanes, the collective was the lever that controlled the vertical thrusters and normally allowed for hovering flight. Today, Erin was going to see if they could provide deorbit thrust if all the safeties were removed.

She felt the thrusters come on, but the altimeter showed that they were still climbing very slowly. 113.0km. 113.3km. She lifted the collective to the halfway point and felt the push of the thrusters from beneath the plane. Even with the collective lever only halfway up, the thrusters were already producing more thrust than they were rated for. If she overdid it, if even one of the thrusters exploded, it would probably take the the belly fuel tank and entire plane with it. 113.7km. 113.9km. 114.0km. She needed to get that altitude to start dropping. She lifted the collective a little more and a warning alarm sounded in the cockpit. Beep-Beep-Beep-Beep. The MultiFunction Display automatically switched over to the vertical thrusters panel. All eight of the big hardpointer's vertical thrusters were showing overspeed and overheat warnings.

And the altitude was still climbing. 114.2km. 114.3km. 114.4km. It was climbing more slowly, but it was still climbing. She had to stop it.

She lifted the collective a little more and she could swear that the Beep-Beep-Beep of the alarm was getting more insistent. 114.5km. 114.5km. 114.6km. 114.6km.

A bright flash of light came in through the cockpit windows and then a second later the plane lurched violently. Erin blinked away the stars in her vision, surprised that she was still alive.

"Was that one of my thrusters?" Lyssa asked over the intercom.

Erin checked the MFD and saw that all eight of the thrusters were still online, though any one of them could blow at any second.

114.9km. read the altimeter.

It was the TCAS that told the story. The hardpointer, 788NC, was a civilian freighter, not a military spacecraft. The TCAS was nothing like a tactical display that a military spaceplane would have; it just showed the locations of nearby spacecraft for the purpose of collision avoidance. TCAS couldn't tell the whole story, just some of it. Erin had to intuit the rest for herself. Where before there had been only two blue dots above them, now there were four. The pirate fighters had apparently been reinforced by two of their comrades and had just shot a live missile at Erin's stricken hardpointer. But why had the missile exploded near to them and not hit them? Erin knew she must make an easy target. Had it been warning shot, perhaps?

She had a nagging feeling that there was something else going on here, but she didn't have time to figure it out now. She had a crippled plane to fly.