Conflagration

Just a Normal Day in the Darklands

Erin was busy. She had never done this, and she'd only ever seen it done once before. Behind her, she was only peripherally aware that Lyssa had strapped herself into one of the two fold-down jumpseats. Erin watched the two engines she'd shut down and when she was sure they had both flamed out, she reopened the fuel flow to them but left their ignitor boxes off. With the engines off, but still spinning from their own momentum, great gluts of highly explosive spaceplane fuel were flowing through them and being dumped, unburnt, out into space behind them.

Meanwhile, the energy from the one engine still running, No. 2, was being directed to the TFG capacitor. This wasn't a serious attempt to charge the TFG. This was merely to keep No. 2 from igniting the trail of fuel they were leaving behind them until she was ready for it to blow. Tolbert had been able to simply shut down the fighter's single engine, but with her APU inoperative, Erin couldn't do that. If she shut down all three, there was a good chance she wouldn't be able to get them restarted.

"You sure you know what you're doing?" Lyssa asked.

"I'm a pilot. This is what I do," Erin said. It was mostly not false bravado. She shifted in her seat. "Tolbert called it a 'Darklands Sunrise'."

"You're the pilot," Lyssa said. Erin couldn't tell if she heard respect or resignation in Lyssa's voice.

Both, she decided. She put all that out of her mind and focused on her job. She watched the core speed readouts on the engine instruments. The two offline engines' cores had lost most of their momentum. They were now at around 2% max speed, but still spewing their fuel out into space.

"Here we go. Hold on," she warned Lyssa as she held the control stick firmly in her left hand and reached up to the engine ignition switches on the overhead panel. She quickly flipped first the No. 1 and then the No. 3 ignitions on and braced herself for the explosion.

But nothing happened.

Fear and bile rose up in Erin's throat.

She'd let the engines get too slow. They had failed to restart and ignite the trail of fuel behind them.

She repositioned herself in her seat.

She tried to think of what to do.

And then she remembered.

The No. 2 engine.

It was still running, just ducted to the TFG.

She moved her hand to a different section of the overhead panel, the section that controlled the engines' magnetic output ducts. She switched the No. 2 engine's duct from the TFG CAP position to the THRUST position. The moment she did, the energy outflow from the hardpointer's only still-running engine began shooting out into space behind them and ignited the trail of fuel.

There was a tremendous jolt of speed as the shockwave of the exploding fuel hit the hardpointer. Erin felt pinned to her seat as the plane was subjected to more Gs than the inertial stabilizers could compensate for. She felt the stick buck out of her hand. She tried to grab it again, but the G forces pinned her hand back against her own chest She was worried she might lose consciousness. She tried to remember the limited amount of high-G training she'd received in spaceplane school. She tensed the muscles in her legs and did the breathing exercise she'd been taught. Her field of vision narrowed and nearly closed, but she ultimately managed to retain consciousness as the plane, pushed along by the explosion, accelerated ever faster. Gradually, the G forces reduced as either the plane ceased accelerating so much or the inertial stabilizers caught up with the load. Her field of vision widened and she found she was able to lift her arm off her chest.

Erin grabbed hold of the control stick and stabilized their course. She glanced at their speed and saw that they were now moving at 24milliC. She wondered if that was a sublight speed record for a hardpoint freighter. Likely it was.