by Bobby Akart
“Come again, Major?” said the civilian inquisitively. After a short pause in which Gunner didn’t respond, the civilian said, “We’ve performed every programmed maneuver for this test session.”
At first, Gunner hesitated. He could return to Eglin and call it a day. Maybe he’d stop by the Bayview Club and have a beer. Or he’d head back to the beach and relax. But that wouldn’t help future pilots who might find themselves being pursued by a superior Chinese J-20. He had to know what this bird was capable of, something the simulator couldn’t recreate.
Gunner closed off the communications system so he wouldn’t be distracted. He checked the aircraft to make sure she was ready. Then he began to climb, forcing the aircraft upward at full power, a steep ascent that resembled a rocket taking off into space.
The F/A XX responded, providing him the thrust he needed to make the vertical climb, fighting through the drag, as the new design was aerodynamically superior to any aircraft he’d ever flown. A smile came across his face as he took the plane toward the stratosphere, climbing to forty thousand feet, alone in the sky, with only space in his field of vision.
The set ceiling height for the F/A XX in its new configuration was fifty thousand feet. He used the aircraft’s maximum acceleration to overshoot this ceiling and then some. He’d never reach the one hundred twenty-three thousand feet achieved by the Russian MiG-25 Foxbat, but he’d get close enough. Close enough to see.
Gunner was forced into the back of his seat, the gravitational forces taking their toll on his body.
Fifty thousand feet and climbing.
Mach 2.
Gunner pressed forward, shutting out the world underneath him.
Fifty-five thousand feet.
Still faster as the F/A XX began to shudder ever so slightly.
Mach 2.5.
Fifty-eight thousand. Then sixty.
The Russian MiG-29 Fulcrum nearly hit Mach 2 when it achieved an altitude approaching sixty thousand feet. At that height, a pilot could see the curvature of the Earth.
Gunner wanted to see, too. He wanted to experience what she experienced. He looked to the Moon. It was sharper, more defined than what the naked eye could see on Earth. The horizon appeared curved. The G-forces were almost unbearable.
Mach 3. Sixty thousand feet. Sixty-five.
The F/A XX climbed higher, through the atmosphere and into the ozone layer that hovered over the planet like a blue fog.
Still holding Mach 3. Incredible, at this altitude, Gunner thought to himself.
Seventy thousand feet. The sky began to turn very dark, with the sprinkling of innumerous stars, an incredible view that only a few people had experienced.
Eighty thousand feet, near the stratosphere, where temperatures fell to sixty degrees below zero and winds approached a hundred thirty miles per hour.
Gunner became mesmerized, lost in his thoughts, as he flew the F/A XX to the edge of space, into the stratosphere. It was the screaming of the aircraft’s warning alarms that brought him back to Earth.
Chapter 3
Sunday, April 1
Eglin Air Force Base Test Range
Off the coast of the Florida Panhandle
I could never understand why someone would want to jump out of a perfectly good aircraft.
If Gunner had said it once, he’d said it a thousand times. Yet he’d done it on many occasions. Oftentimes by choice, sometimes not. To be sure, it was part of his training. He’d performed multiple jumps and followed planned ejection procedures during his years in the Air Force. He’d been shot down in combat twice.
His first jump, while on his honeymoon, he’d dove with his wife’s encouragement. He’d almost died that day, but for the quick thinking of his wife, who rescued him in midair when his parachute failed. Otherwise, she would’ve been widowed and he would’ve been squashed like a bug on a rug.
“Well, crap,” Gunner muttered as he regained consciousness. “The damn thing’s falling apart.”
The F/A XX was quite literally losing its composure. The onboard computers, the so-called artificial intelligence, were having nothing short of a conniption fit.
As the aircraft began to shake violently, the plane’s onboard systems attempted to take over the controls, assuming that its pilot, Gunner, was asleep at the wheel. Granted, he was lost in his thoughts for a moment, so to speak, but he was clearly wide awake and alert at this point.
“Time to go home, girl,” he whispered as he began a long sweeping bank to the left in an effort to create somewhat of an orbital trajectory before he returned to Earth.
Relieved that the plane responded, Gunner slowly began a descent before turning a little sharper toward the Gulf of Mexico, which eventually came into view through the haze of the ozone layer.
That was when the F/A XX began to disintegrate.
The single-wing structure, a myriad of tiny subassemblies that were bolted together to form an open, latticelike framework, began to chip away, taking the thin layer of polymer material with it. Thousands of tiny triangles of matchstick-like struts, the aircraft’s metamaterial, began to fly off the wings.
Warning! Abort! Warning! Abort!
“No kidding, really?” said Gunner as he focused on the instrument panel, with the occasional glance toward the smart skin that was peeling off before his eyes.
Eject! Eject!
He was still traveling at Mach 2.5, and his descent was approaching sixty thousand feet. And his plane was disintegrating. His probabilities of survival at this altitude and speed were single digits.
He had to stay with her, trying to maintain control while ignoring the AI’s pleas to eject. Everything seemed to unfold in slow motion, even though it had only been a few seconds since he’d reached the apex of his ascent.
The disintegration process accelerated, and Gunner had to take the chance. At fifty thousand feet, he ejected and was propelled away from the aircraft into the Earth’s troposphere. He somersaulted, tumbling over and over again, momentarily catching a glimpse of the F/A XX as it began to shred, shedding its skin like a snake.
He never saw the explosion when the remains of the aircraft hit the Gulf of Mexico at Mach 1. The rush of air and darkness overwhelmed him. The fact that he was tumbling meant that the initial stabilizing chute had not deployed. The main chute was designed to open automatically at fifteen thousand feet, but Gunner began to doubt whether the automatic-opening function would perform as it should.
Gravity began to pull him back to Earth, causing his six-foot, two-hundred-pound frame to soar at nearly three hundred miles per hour.
Gunner considered opening the faceplate of his helmet, trying his best to gauge his distance from the water. He decided against it, knowing that at this rate of descent, contact with a wayward bird would smash his face, killing him instantly.
Then, without warning, the stabilizing parachute opened, arresting his free fall slightly. It had been two minutes since he ejected, and he tumbled through the atmosphere. Remarkably, he didn’t pass out, nor did he become nauseous. He’d never trained for something of this magnitude, but his body seemed to adjust and handle it admirably.
At fifteen thousand feet, the main parachute opened and he slowed to a drift, miles away from where his aircraft had smashed into the Gulf. He could make out the shoreline and quickly identified Apalachicola. The bay and barrier islands were within view now. He was over a hundred miles east of Eglin AFB, the prevailing winds and the jet stream carrying him far away from where his plane probably crashed.
As Gunner’s adrenaline calmed, he contemplated this whole skydiving thing. In a way, it was peaceful. There were no honking horns, or lawn companies cutting grass, or any evidence of the human interaction that continuously invaded our private world. He understood the allure.
Naturally, there were those who jumped out of perfectly good aircraft for the thrill. You know, the adrenaline-driven, crazed bunch of thrill-seekers for whom a roller coaster isn’t good enough.
Gunner w
as experiencing a freedom that he’d never imagined. It was a feeling that went far beyond the rush. It was a moment, even if for only a minute or two, when you see the world at a completely different angle. From a perspective that was hard to explain.
In his final mile of descent into the turquoise green waters off the Florida Panhandle, Gunner Fox smiled, now understanding why she did what she did.
Every day is a good day when you’re floating.
Chapter 4
Sunday, April 1
Deerlick Astronomy Village
Crawfordville, Georgia
Since the beginning of man, humans have yearned to live among the stars. With the advent of space travel, followed by the development of larger and more powerful rocket systems, the concept of colonizing the Moon, and even Mars, became a realistic possibility.
While the ability to reside in space, whether aboard the International Space Station or the newly created outpost on the Moon, was unattainable for the vast majority of the human race, there were places on Earth that were so desolate, so devoid of ambient light, that they were ideal locales to study the heavens.
One such place was the Deerlick Astronomy Village in Northeast Georgia. Located just north of Interstate 20 that travels between Atlanta and Augusta, Deerlick was a small planned community development that catered to amateur and professional astronomers alike.
Skywatchers purchased parcels where they could build tiny homes, or live in recreational vehicles, with a minimal number of restrictions. One thing all of the astronomers uniformly agreed upon was to keep light to a minimum. The developers of the community even negotiated with a small nearby town to adjust their public streetlights to point downward, thus protecting the dark skies above Deerlick.
On this night, nearly everyone who owned a parcel within the community was present, using their telescopes to gaze upward at one of the most significant celestial events to occur in their lifetime—the passing of the so-called next Great Comet.
Since the turn of the century, two prior Great Comets—Comet McNaught in 2007 and Comet Lovejoy in 2011—had graced the Southern Hemisphere skies while a generation of Northern Hemisphere astronomers made do with photos of these grand events. For stargazers in America, Comet Hale-Bopp, a significant celestial event, but one that fell short of Great Comet status, was the most memorable in recent years.
Until now.
This new arrival to Earth’s neck of the universe had a rare combination of brightness, even more so than Comet McNaught or Comet Lovejoy, coupled with an unusually long tail of more than thirty degrees.
Tonight, the world would be treated to its first glimpse of Comet Oort, which was easily going to be the comet of the century and a once-in-a-lifetime event. Coupled with a brightness exceeding famed Comet ISON that was visible during the daylight hours, and the extraordinarily long tail of Comet Hyakutake discovered in 1996, the newest Great Comet had set the world abuzz.
Ordinarily, comets are named after the astronomer who discovered it. Comet Oort, however, was named after its probable source of origin because so many discovered it all at once due to its extraordinary characteristics.
The Oort Cloud, a thick bubble of icy debris that surrounds our solar system, extends a third of the way from our Sun to the next star, or nearly a hundred times the distance from Earth to the Sun.
Every now and then, something disturbs the debris in this icy world and it begins a long fall toward the Sun. This debris, known as a comet, may travel for hundreds of thousands of years in its orbit around the Sun, and on rare occasions, it might come close enough to Earth to be viewed through telescopes.
While this type of scientific discovery bored many, it excited young Nathaniel Phillips of Thomson, Georgia, a senior honor student at nearby Briarwood Academy. His father, the chief of staff at the U.S. Army Cyber Command at Fort Gordon in Augusta, had purchased a parcel at Deerlick for his son, who’d always shown an interest in astronomy. His mother, a plastic surgeon, encouraged her son’s interest in scientific endeavors and had given him a new telescope for his birthday the month prior.
Nate Phillips rallied his best buddy, Kevin, and their girlfriends to come to Deerlick that night to observe Comet Oort through his new telescope. He was one of thousands of amateur astronomers around the U.S. who were being trained to study the skies, constantly remaining on vigil for previously undiscovered near-Earth objects.
Several years ago, a small meteor had swept by Earth unnoticed until it crashed into a Russian global navigation satellite in an intermediate circular orbit at twenty-two thousand miles above sea level. The destruction of GLONASS almost caused an international incident, as the U.S. had complained to the United Nations on previous occasions that the satellite was being used for spying, in violation of several international treaties.
Because the meteor that struck GLONASS had not been discovered, the Russians jumped to the conclusion that the Americans had destroyed the satellite using one of their newly deployed laser weapons utilized within the Space Force.
It wasn’t until NASA provided uncontroverted, documented evidence that the meteor had destroyed the satellite that the Russians backed off their allegations. The chill between the two countries, however, remained.
“Check it out, Kevin,” said Nate cheerily as he finished making the adjustments on his new Celestron EDGEHD 14 optical telescope assembly. Nate stood out of the way and motioned for his friend to look into the lens.
Instinctively, the younger boy grabbed the lens and accidentally altered the eyepiece. He’d already downed two beers and was feeling the effects, as were the two girls who accompanied the teens that evening.
Nate, who’d avoided the alcohol because he wanted to remain focused on watching Comet Oort, playfully pushed his pal out of the way and jokingly admonished his best friend. “Dork! Don’t touch, just look.”
Kevin laughed and said, “Yeah, that’s the same thing you said at that strip club in Panama City during spring break.”
“You should’ve listened to me then, too. You got us thrown out, remember?”
“Yeah, whatevs,” replied Kevin as he stepped up to the telescope and took another gander after Nate made the necessary corrections. Within a few seconds, he emitted a genuine wow.
“We wanna see,” insisted one of the girls. They grabbed Kevin around the waist and pulled him away, a hug the teenage boy truly enjoyed.
The girls took turns studying Comet Oort, commenting on how bright it was and how the tail extended beyond the telescope’s view.
“It seems so close,” one of the girls commented as she stood and approached Nate. “You’ll protect us when it pummels the planet, right?”
Nate scoffed at her remark. Truthfully, he didn’t particularly like this particular girl, not like that, anyway. She was fun to play with and was never at a loss to show him lots of affection. He wasn’t too keen on the drinking aspect, especially when he was driving, but his friends always had a ready supply of cold beer. Tonight was no exception, as was evidenced by Kevin and his girlfriend popping the tops on another round for themselves.
“Come on, Nate, let’s party,” pleaded Kevin as he and his girlfriend began to kiss each other.
The other girl cozied up to Nate and whispered in his ear, “Yeah, it’s too busy around here tonight. Let’s go to my sister’s place in Washington. She’s out of town and I have the keys right here in my pocket. Wanna feel?”
She took his hand and slid it down the outside of her shirt toward her jean shorts. Nate felt the typical stirrings of a high school boy and resisted the urge to engage in a make-out session like Kevin. For now, anyway.
He reluctantly took a beer from his buddy and downed half of it to get the night started. He took another moment to study Comet Oort while he let the alcohol soak into his body.
Then he saw something.
An object. Out of place. Moving.
Nate stood up and looked toward the night sky, rubbing his eyes as if a speck of dirt had caused the a
nomaly.
“Come on, man,” implored Kevin. “The girls are ready, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, hold on. I saw something.”
“What you saw was an opportunity with a hot girl slipping away, probably forever, you dang science nerd.”
“Shut up,” Nate shot back.
He looked through his telescope again, making minor adjustments so that his field of vision took Comet Oort, and its extraordinary brightness, out of view. Instead, he focused on the tail.
“Kev, something’s not right here. I mean, there’s something else in the tail, or behind it.”
“Man, the only tail you need to worry about is sitting in the passenger seat. Come on, or I’m taking your car and leaving your dumb ass here.”
Frustrated, Nate exhaled and swigged down the rest of his beer. He took another look through the telescope and then approached his MacBook. Using the astroimaging camera attached to the EDGEHD, he set the MacBook application to begin recording.
As he locked up his small shed that securely held his equipment, he vowed to come back first thing in the morning to study the recorded footage more closely, using his video-editing software to isolate and enlarge the object that he’d seen.
Nathaniel Phillips never got the chance.
Chapter 5
Monday, April 2
The Tap Room
Apalachicola, Florida
“I heard they fished you out of the Gulf yesterday,” said Sammy Hart, the longtime bartender at The Tap Room, a neighborhood grill and bar located on the ground floor under its more upscale counterpart, The Owl Cafe. The two restaurants, a part of the Oyster City Brewing Company enterprise developed by a local group of entrepreneurs, had been a mainstay in downtown Apalachicola, Florida, since 2011.