A tiny bleed of the controls that no one had taught him. That no one could teach. That came only from a man who had spent his whole life learning exactly where the edge of death was, and how to fly 1 in away from it forever. The banking turn completed. The crowd exhaled.
And in the control room, Evelyn Carter realized she'd been holding the edge of the console so hard her fingers had gone numb. 12 minutes. She said quietly to no one. He has to do this for 12 minutes. The time was 11:01 in the morning.
The hover to dash transition came next, the maneuver where the aircraft goes from a dead stop in the air to maximum forward acceleration in seconds. And this was the one Daniel feared most because the sudden power demand slammed the rotor RPM upward faster than any other maneuver in the profile. Marcus set up for it. He brought the aircraft into a stable hover, and the crowd went quiet, and even the people who didn't understand aviation understood that something difficult was about to happen. Here we go, Daniel said.
This is the bad one. Watch the RPM. " Marcus dropped the nose and rammed the power forward and the aircraft leapt across the sky like something alive. And the RPM shot up and everyone watching the telemetry saw it spike 100.1 and Daniel made a sound like he'd been punched and then the number reversed so fast it was almost impossible to believe back down to 98 because Marcus had anticipated the spike before it happened and bled the power a half second before the instruments even caught up flying. Not the aircraft that existed, but the aircraft that was about to exist a fraction of a second in the future, the way only the very best pilots in the world can do. How did he Daniel stared at the screen.
He pulled it back before it even spiked. He knew it was coming before it came. That's not possible. That's not people can't do that. "He can. " Colonel Hollis said, standing beside him now, his old eyes bright with tears and pride.
"That's what made him what he was. He doesn't fly the aircraft, he flies where the aircraft is going to be. I've seen exactly two men in my life do that and I'm watching the second one right now. " The dash completed, the aircraft came screaming across the front of the crowd at full speed, low and clean and thunderous and 600 people flinched and then broke into spontaneous applause and the government men were grinning, now actually grinning, and Harmon was watching with his arms crossed and an expression on his face that said he was witnessing something he would be talking about for the rest of his career. But Marcus wasn't finished and neither was the aircraft's hunger for the node. The time was 11:04 in the morning.
8 minutes in, four to go. And that was when it happened. That was when the thing that no one had planned for, the thing that wasn't in Daniel's calculations or Marcus's flight plan or anyone's worst case scenario, reached up out of the sky and grabbed the aircraft. A gust, a hard sudden crosswind, the kind that comes off the Texas plains without warning on a bright spring morning, slammed into the SR-9 from the side just as Marcus was setting up for the rapid descent recovery, and the aircraft yawed hard, and the rotor loaded up violently to compensate, and the RPM shot toward the node faster than any maneuver had driven it all day. 100.5 No, Daniel said, 100.9.
No, no, no, 101.1. The number crossed into the killing zone, and the low harmonic tone in the airframe changed. And Marcus felt it change. Felt the aircraft begin to sing the note. It could not survive singing.