She looked at Marcus across the hangar, and the gratitude in her eyes was so raw, it was almost painful to see. And she mouthed two words to him that the crowd couldn't hear. Thank you. Marcus nodded once, and then he turned toward the aircraft. The time was 10:52 in the morning.
Daniel Okafor met him at the cockpit. The young engineer had a tablet in his hands, and his face was tight with focus, all the exhaustion burned away by adrenaline. "Final numbers," Daniel said low and fast, just for Marcus. "The resonance node is at 101.5% RPM. Your safe ceiling is 100%.
Your floor for the performance profile they want is 96. That's your window. 4%. You go above 100, even for a few seconds, and you start feeding the node. You know what happens after that? " "I know what happens after that," Marcus said.
"The government wants to see high-speed forward flight, hard banking, turns a hover-to-dash transition, and a rapid descent recovery. " Daniel swallowed. "Every one of those maneuvers wants to push your RPM up. Every single one. You're going to be fighting the aircraft's own tendencies the entire flight to keep it in the window. It's like It's like driving a race at full speed with your foot never quite all the way down.
For 12 minutes. " "Then I'll drive the race," Marcus said, "with my foot never quite all the way down. " He put his hand on the edge of the cockpit. And then he stopped, and he turned to Daniel, and he said something the young man would remember for the rest of his life. "Whatever happens up there," Marcus said, "you did your job. You did it right, and you did it when it was hard, and you did it when it might have cost you everything. Don't ever let anybody tell you that you're just an engineer.
You're the reason this aircraft is going to come home today. You. Remember that. Daniel couldn't speak. Marcus climbed into the cockpit.
He settled into the seat and his hands found the controls and this time there was no rust, no hesitation, no 9 years of silence between him and the machine. There was only the pilot and the aircraft and the sky waiting above them and everything else in the entire world fell away. He reached into the breast pocket of the flight suit and he touched the two photographs there, the one of his wife and the one of his daughter and he pressed them once against his heart. Okay, baby girl, he murmured too quiet for anyone to hear. Let's show them your daddy can fly.
He started the engines. The rotors began to turn and across the city in a second grade classroom, an 8-year-old girl named Lily Bennett had no idea that her father was strapping into the most dangerous flight of his life, but she'd woken up that morning with a strange, sure feeling in her chest. And when her teacher asked the class to draw a picture of something that made them happy, Lily had drawn, without knowing why, a helicopter in a bright blue sky with a stick figure in the cockpit and underneath it she'd written four words, "My dad is flying. " The rotors reached idle speed and the low harmonic tone began, the same tone Marcus had heard for 3 weeks while mopping the floor and now he was inside it feeling it come up through the seat and into his body and he understood it the way you understand an old enemy. He knew exactly where it lived. He knew exactly how to stay away from it.