Chapter 48 - The Coordinates of the Damned
The pre-flight checks on the *Phantom-X* were conducted with ruthless efficiency. While Clara wired Victoria to the hangar communications console to maintain the illusion of an ongoing hostage situation, my father and I loaded the tactical armaments into the interceptor’s belly.
"You're not staying here, Father," I said, tightening the seals on Arthur's high-altitude pressure suit.
"You think I'm letting you board that ship without me?" Arthur countered, securing his oxygen mask around his neck. "Evelyn spent five years poisoning my food with micro-doses of neurotoxins to make the board believe I had dementia. She made me watch as she systematically erased your mother from the company history. I am boarding that carrier, Lucas. And I am going to look her in the eye when the balance sheet hits zero."
Clara ran up the boarding ladder, slipping into the rear weapons systems operator seat. "The *Valkyrie* just pinged our decoy signal. Victoria’s voice-clone passed the preliminary handshake, but Evelyn’s chief of security is demanding visual confirmation within twelve minutes. We need to be airborne right now."
I climbed into the captain’s ejection seat of the *Phantom-X*. The cockpit was an intoxicating blend of analog tactical switches and bleeding-edge heads-up displays. When I flipped the master avionics switch, the instrument panel came alive with an electric blue hum that filled the dark cockpit with cold, crisp illumination.
"Engines one and two, spooling," I called over the headset.
The twin scramjets ignited with a subsonic roar that shook the very foundations of the mountain hangar. Outside our canopy, the external Arctic blast doors ground open to the howling snowstorm. The sub-zero wind blasted inside, but the jet's thermal shields absorbed the shock without a shudder.
"Lucas," Clara's voice crackled through my helmet. "Radar has the *Valkyrie* painted at Sector 4-Echo, altitude 49,000, heading true north. Speed: 520 knots. She’s flying with a four-ship escort of mercenary MiG-29s."
"They have fighters?" Arthur asked from the jump seat behind me.
"They have fighters," I smiled beneath my oxygen mask, feeling the familiar, razor-sharp focus that had carried me through hundreds of combat flight hours. "Too bad they don't have our speed."
I shoved the dual throttles all the way to the firewall.
The *Phantom-X* did not roll down the ice runway; it detonated forward like an artillery shell. The g-forces slammed me back into the seat as the scramjets kicked into full afterburner, ripping us out of the cavernous hangar and into the teeth of the Arctic blizzard.
Within four seconds, the ground vanished beneath us.
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Within ten, we punched through the storm clouds at an eighty-degree climb, tearing past Mach 1 in a sonic boom that scattered the mountain snow for twenty miles around.
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