Captains Billy Kellar and Jennifer Falster jogged across the hangar floor, staying between the yellow lines that ran in front of the vast bombers which the massive hangar sheltered. The B-2 faced outward, as large as a football field. It was designed to be flown by two people, a pilot and a mission commander, who sat in a cockpit mounted at the apex of the vast Delta wing that gave the B-2 its unique profile. There was no door on the B-2. Under the nose was one of the three large hatches on the bottom of the plane that housed the landing gear. Two much larger bay doors allowed the plane to deploy its huge payloads. At rest, the nose gear hung down from the very tip of the plane’s nose, exposing the space where the big wheels tucked away during flight. With the gear deployed, a small secondary hatch on the inside of the wheel housing was the main access hatch to the cockpit, and it was through here that the pilots climbed in and out of the plane.

Billy and Jennifer came to a halt in front of their plane, B-2 21070, codename Ice Maiden, and started to go through their preflight checklist. Billy and Jennifer had received the scramble order along with ten other flight crews and were two minutes into the ten-minute countdown to takeoff. They would be briefed en route, but their order package had said that they were being set to DEFCON 2, and dispatched on standard defensive vectors in the Atlantic and Pacific arenas.

Jennifer Falster, the pilot for this mission, began her customary inspection of the outside of the plane while Mission Commander Billy Kellar climbed into the cockpit and began his preflight weapons check. As Jennifer walked around the huge plane, she chatted with various ground crew members doing final preflight on the plane. They had six minutes to takeoff, but even in critical times like these the flight crew was trained to take these last few minutes slowly, making sure everything was set. In the end, when all was said and done, they were responsible for the safety of the plane and they needed to be confident that everything was as it should be.

Finishing her wing inspection, Jennifer bowed her head and walked under the plane to the payload doors. At this point in the preflight protocol, they were already closed and sealed, the technicians actually painting over the door seals with a waxy, absorbent grey paint that would help further minimize their radar signature. She nodded to the tech who said, “Two minutes, ma’am.” from behind his facemask, prompting the captain to get on board.

The captain nodded. That paint smelled awful anyway, she thought, and went to join Billy in the cockpit. As she mounted the ladder under the hatch, she heard the thrumming of the four leviathan engines starting up, echoed by the engines of her colleagues’ planes powering up to either side.