Chapter 93 - Drop into the Abyss
At sixty-five thousand feet, the sky was not blue; it was an abyssal violet that bled into the infinite black of outer space. The curve of the Earth gleamed below, wrapped in a shimmering veil of auroral green that danced across the frozen North. The interior of the Osprey depressurized with a deafening, chest-crushing roar that sucked the cabin temperature down to sixty degrees below zero.
Claire stood on the lip of the lowered ramp. The wind screamed past her visor like the cries of the millions of innocent lives hanging in the balance. Below her, the dense, churning ceiling of cloud cover looked like an angry, boiling ocean.
"Target aircraft is five minutes out from the Ekofisk dead zone!" Miller’s voice sounded thin through the pressurized suit's internal speakers. "Claire! You’ll have a two-second window to deploy your magnetic grapples on their dorsal fuselage! If you miss, you fall into the North Sea at terminal velocity. Survival chance is zero!"
"I stopped calculating survival chances the day I took the Black Oath," Claire responded. She adjusted the twin carbon-fiber dive wings folded against her back and checked the magnetic tether coils mounted on her wrists. "Keep the Osprey on the perimeter. When that aircraft comes down, I don't want Margaret slipping out in an auxiliary pod."
"God be with you, One-Eighty-Seven," Miller whispered, coming to attention and snapping a rigid, formal salute despite the violent turbulence threatening to throw him from the deck.
Claire didn't hesitate. She pushed off the edge.
The fall was absolute terror disguised as silence. For the first twenty seconds, there was no sound—only the blinding acceleration as gravity dragged her toward the frozen planet at over two hundred miles per hour. The atmosphere thickened violently as she plunged through thirty thousand feet, the air howling like a pack of wolves against her dive suit.
Her HUD lit up with targeting telemetry. Through the dense cloud banks, a massive, triangular shadow cleaved the mist at twelve hundred miles per hour. Margaret’s stealth transport.
Claire extended her stabilizing wings, adjusting her pitch by millimeters, feeling the brutal G-forces threaten to tear the ligaments in her shoulders. She was dropping directly out of the sun’s blind spot, matching the transport's descent vector with precision that only hundreds of hours in black-budget kill schools could forge.
Five thousand feet. Two thousand feet.
The black, radar-absorbent skin of the Aurora prototype expanded beneath her like a flying continent of steel. Claire inverted her body, firing the high-velocity pneumatic grapples from her gauntlets.
*CLANG-THUMP.*
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The twin magnetic nodes struck the titanium dorsal plating of the jet with bone-jarring impact. The tether went taut instantly, the violently turbulent air current snapping Claire’s body down onto the cold metal skin of the enemy craft. Her boots hit the fuselage, the high-power electromagnets in her soles locking her down against the Mach-1 slipstream.
She was on the beast.
