For a long, frozen second, it looks like their plane is going to crash right into ours.
I can just see it through the broken window. It’s coming in off our left wing, rising up from below. I can’t see into the cockpit, but the door in the side of the plane is open, and one of the Nomads is leaning out. He has a rifle, and he’s trying to get a bead on us again, trying to steady his shot against the buffeting air.
He fires. The bullet goes wide, and the plane drops out of sight.
“It’s OK,” Harlan shouts, his mouth next to my ear. “First shot was lucky. Son of a bitch’ll never—”
The second seaplane collides with us.
The bang feels like the world tearing apart. My stomach plummets as our plane lists to the left, tilting sideways. It’s all I can do to keep my balance. With a roar, the second plane appears on the right, its wingtip only just missing ours.
Whoever is flying that plane is insane. He’ll take both of us out at once. A hit in the right place will damage an engine, shear off a wing.
The other plane drifts away, as if it’s taking a run-up. Then it banks towards us, filling the windows.
There’s an angry shout from our cockpit. Eric is leaning across, hands wrapped around the control yoke, pushing the Nomad pilot aside. We tilt again, the nose dropping, and the incoming plane roars above us.
The Nomad in the cockpit grabs Eric’s head by a fistful of hair, smashing him into the yoke. Eric is in an exposed position, bent over, and he can’t reach around to stop the attack.
I launch myself up the body of the plane. Finkler is just behind me, almost rolling across the wall. I can’t do anything about the attacking plane, but I can do something about the Nomad in the cockpit.
I reach through the gap between the two front seats, and wrap my arm around the man’s throat.
He tries to fight me, tries to push me off. But I brace my knees against the back of the seat, and pull. He can’t stop himself being hauled upwards, even as his fingernails rake across my cheek.
I twist my body sideways, dragging the man through the gap between the seats and into the body of the plane. I can just see the other seaplane through the cockpit glass–it’s coming up from below us, trying to find an angle. Eric is trying to haul himself into the pilot’s seat, trying to grab the yoke.
The attention slip costs me. The Nomad lands a blow on my eye socket, setting off a burst of stars in my vision. He’s wriggling out of my grip, his chin pushing against my arm.
Finkler and Harlan are grabbing his arms and legs, trying to hold him down. But we’re all awkwardly balanced, the confined interior of the plane not letting us move around. The Nomad takes the advantage. With a sudden burst of strength, he rips out of my grip, his body swinging sideways. He nearly falls out of the open door, but manages to grab on, his fingers snagging the edge.
His eyes meet mine, and I can see him getting ready to move, getting ready to throw himself back inside. The second seaplane is in view, moving in from behind us, coming in fast, a white ghost against the dark sky.
I don’t think. I just move. My foot slams into the Nomad’s chest. He swings sideways, his fingers ripped from the edge of the door, just like the one who tried to climb in off the platform. Except this time there’s nothing to break his fall.
The shock and anger on his face are unbelievable. Then he’s falling, tumbling out. Slamming into the other plane.
Its wing takes him at his waist. For an instant, he just hangs there, stuck fast by the rushing air. Then he slips sideways, his upper body dropping right onto the whirling propeller.
There’s a grinding bang. The propeller knocks the Nomad sideways, his body spinning out of view. The engine starts to tear itself apart. Grey smoke billows out of it as the housing comes apart in shreds, the propeller curved inward now, starting to tear up the wing itself.
The plane tilts, as if the mangled engine is pulling it to the ground. Then it’s gone.
For a moment, I’m perfectly balanced in the plane’s unstable interior, hands just touching the wall. I’m reliving the Nomad’s expression again–that horrified shock as he realised he was falling. That was me. I did that.
I don’t feel anything. Not a thing. And for the first time, that doesn’t bother me.
“Eric!” Harlan shouts.
The sound drags me out of my thoughts. I turn to see Harlan leaning into the space at the back of the cockpit. Just past him, I can see Eric in the pilot’s seat, hands on the controls. He’s gripping them so hard that his skin has turned white.
He’s never flown a plane before–never even been inside one, for all I know. He might have the knowledge, gleaned from books, but that’s all he’s got. And now he’s at the controls, a thousand feet up. The plane starts to tilt, its nose pointing towards the ground.
I stagger up towards the cockpit, squeezing through the opening and slipping into the seat on Eric’s right. It used to be fabric and foam padding, but it’s been worn down to a bare skeleton, and the struts jam into my back. There’s a second stick in front of me, moving in tandem with Eric’s. I can just make out the dark shapes of mountains through the smeared cockpit glass.
The plane levels out a little. We’re still descending, but more slowly now. Eric is staring straight ahead, mouth open. Sweat drips from his chin, landing on his vise-grip hands.
I say his name, but it gets lost in the roar of the engines. When I reach out to grab him, I find that he’s trembling, his shoulder vibrating under my hand.
Finkler shoves his way through the opening, hunting for something. He reaches up behind me and jams something over my head. A pair of headphones, huge and bulbous, catching my hair and trapping it against my scalp. I adjust them, pulling the microphone stalk down as Finkler puts another pair on Eric’s head.
The sound of the engine is muffled now. I feel on the stalk for the transmit switch, clicking it into place. A thin crackle of static emerges over the engine.
“Eric,” I say. I have to repeat his name before he looks at me, and, when he does, there’s naked terror in his eyes. This isn’t the commander I saw back at the hospital. This is someone who is coming face to face with his worst fear.
I see his lips moving, but I can’t hear him. I point to the stalk, and after some fumbling his voice comes across the channel: “—do it. Can’t do it.”
“Yes, you can,” I say.
He shakes his head, letting go of the control yoke and gripping the mic stalk with both hands. The plane dips even further, sliding me forward in my seat. I grab my own control yoke, moving more on instinct than anything else, pulling it backwards. We start rising, but I’ve pushed it too far, overcorrecting the movement. The yoke feels heavy in my hands, the plane both sluggish and impossibly sensitive.
“Eric, listen to me,” I say. “I can’t do this by myself. I don’t know how.”
“You think I do?”
“You’ve read the books. You know how this thing works. Eric, please.”
“No.” He’s shaking his head. “We need to go back to Whitehorse. We’ll find someone else.”
It would be so easy to get angry, to scream at him. It’s not just that I could–I want to. But getting angry isn’t going to work–not this time. I don’t have the first clue what I’m doing. Eric needs to figure out how to fly this thing, and soon, or we’re going to crash. I have to help him understand that he can do it.
A memory tugs at me. Carver, back on the station. We’d been captured by Mikhail’s Earthers, and to escape I’d taken a little girl hostage. Ivy, her name was. I held her round the throat, used her to buy us some time. Carver gave me hell for it, told me that I was trying to handle everything myself, acting before my friends could help me.
I reach out, grabbing his hands, pulling them gently off the stalk. Then I place them on the control yoke, holding them tight, before returning my hands to my own controls.
My eyes meet his. “We’re going to do it together,” I say. “We’ll pull it up. All right?”
The terrified expression hasn’t left his face. But after a long moment, he nods.
“Here we go,” I say. Together, we pull back on our control yokes.
The plane levels out, and then slowly begins to climb.