My stepmother thought I was broke, so she treated me like her personal baggage handler and laughed as she sent me to Economy / Chapter 41 / 53

Chapter 41 - The Midnight Divergence

Gravity vanished.

Loose glasses, service carts, and loose gear slammed into the ceiling as Flight 01 plummeted into a near-vertical dive. Outside the windshield, the horizon was an ink-black abyss dotted with the swirling aurora borealis of the northern latitudes.

I clawed my way across the cockpit center console, the intense negative G-forces trying to tear me from the deck. The altimeter was unwinding at an apocalyptic speed: *32,000... 28,000... 24,000...*

The captain lay unconscious between the seats, knocked cold by the impact against the flight controls. In the right seat, the co-pilot was slumped forward over the yoke, zip-tied and unresponsive.

"OVERSPEED! OVERSPEED!" the computerized cockpit voice wailed, accompanied by the clattering rattle of the stick-shaker. "PULL UP! TERRAIN!"

I hauled myself into the left captain’s chair, grabbed the control yoke with both hands, and slammed the four engine throttles forward into maximum thrust.

"Come on, you bastard!" I screamed through gritted teeth, planting both boots on the rudder pedals.

My father had made me spend hundreds of hours in the Northstar simulator when I was twelve years old, testing my limits while Victoria complained that flying was no work for a lady. *“Feel the wings, Emily,”* his voice echoed in my memory. *“The airplane isn't steel. It’s an extension of your will.”*

I reached up and pulled the emergency speed-brake lever, deploying the wing spoilers to arrest our supersonic descent. The airframe groaned with a terrifying, metal-twisting shriek as the aerodynamic drag fought against the dive.

Slowly, agonizingly, the heavy nose began to rise.

*14,000... 11,000... 9,000 feet.*

The radar altimeter screamed its final warnings just as the aircraft leveled out, skimming the tops of the freezing Arctic cloud deck with only four thousand feet to spare above the black, churning waves of the Barents Sea.

The G-forces slammed me down into the seat cushions, pinning my lungs. I gasped for air, fighting off gray-out, and stabilized the flight path onto a true heading of 010 North.

The cockpit door creaked open. Clara, her uniform soot-stained and her face covered in carbon dust, dragged herself inside. She kicked the pilot’s limp body out of the cockpit entryway and collapsed into the co-pilot’s seat.

"Guards?" I managed to ask, my knuckles white on the yoke.

"Subdued," she breathed, wiping blood from a split lip. "Secured with cargo restraints in the crew rest area. Victoria is curled in a ball under Row 3, crying like a child."

"Navigation status?"

Clara looked at the auxiliary radar display. Her breath caught in her throat.

"Emily... look."

On the multi-function display, three radar contacts were closing in from the northeast at Mach 2.5. They had no transponders. No national identifiers.