Chapter 28 - The Supersonic Escape
"Canopy sealed! Port engine spooling up to eighty percent!" I announced, my hands moving with muscle memory drilled into me by my father since I was twelve years old. While Victoria had forced me to sort baggage tickets, I had secretly spent every night studying my father’s flight simulator manuals, mastering every airframe Northstar ever conceived.
"Hangar doors opening ten percent!" Marcus warned from the co-pilot seat, watching the perimeter camera. "We have three technical trucks blocking the runway apron! They're setting up surface-to-air anti-materiel emplacements!"
"Hang on to something!" I shouted, dropping the throttle forward into afterburner detent.
The *Valkyrie One* surged forward with a monstrous, gut-wrenching thrust that pinned us back into our leather seats. The prototype’s specialized carbon-titanium nose cone smashed through the hangar's emergency service doors in an explosion of fiberglass and glass.
We burst onto the sleet-slicked tarmac at 140 knots. Ahead of us, two armored SUVs attempted to cross our taxiway to cut off our takeoff roll.
"Rotate!" Marcus yelled.
I hauled back on the yoke. The nose pitched skyward at an aggressive thirty-five-degree climb. The main landing gear clipped the roof of the lead SUV, shearing the vehicle's light bar off in a shower of sparks, before our supersonic cruiser leaped into the freezing Swiss sky.
"Warning! Radar lock from trailing gunships!" the automated threat board screamed.
Through the cockpit side window, I saw two sleek, unmarked attack helicopters banking sharply to pursue us, their chin-mounted 30mm cannons pivoting toward our engines.
"Not today, Sterling," I muttered, flipping the encrypted tactical relay switch my father had secretly wired into Northstar’s transponder array. "Activating civil-military air corridor override: Code Blue Sky."
Instantly, the airspace above Lake Geneva came alive. Northstar's commercial fleet—dozens of massive commercial airliners flying within two hundred miles—received the emergency beacon. Their transponders synchronized, flooding the Swiss air traffic radar with hundreds of mirrored ghost signatures.
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The gunships' target acquisition systems went blind, scrambled by the overwhelming sovereign network interference. We punched through the thick gray cloud deck at Mach 1.4, leaving the storm, the bullets, and the ruins of my past far behind in the freezing mist.
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