All aircrew personnel at Sky Masters Inc. had extensive training in aircrew survival, including twice-a-year ejection seat qualification. Lindsey Reeves was not prior military, like John Franken, but she had been so thoroughly indoctrinated by Patrick McLanahan and his staff that every flying scientist was as thoroughly familiar with aircrew survival procedures as their military counterparts.

She did hesitate when he said it once—every crew member has a moment of disbelief when they hear that word. But the real command to eject was the word “Eject” three times. So when Franken gave the proper command to eject, Lindsey Reeves didn’t hesitate again. She sat back in her seat, pressed her head, back, and butt as deeply into the seat as she could, jammed her heels back, kept her elbows in tight, tucked her chin down, rotated the ejection handles upward, and squeezed the exposed triggers. Her overhead hatch ripped away, and the seat disappeared in a cloud of gray-blue smoke that disappeared in the sudden vacuum as quickly as it appeared, replaced by a cold fog and an impossibly loud roar of wind.

“Hope you make it okay, kiddo,” Franken said into his oxygen mask. He entered some commands into the attack computer—a complete system data dump, sending the entire mission’s worth of stored system information to a satellite, where the engineers at Sky Masters Inc. could retrieve and analyze it. That was something Lindsey would do, if he had given her a chance to do it. She turned out to be a pretty good crewdog, Franken decided—she overcame her fear and nearly debilitating airsickness enough to take an untested warplane into combat halfway around the world. Amazing. The least he could do for her is to make sure that everything she worked and sacrificed so long and hard to build survived.

There were dozens of warning and caution indications on the instrument panel, but Franken no longer cared. He turned the AL-52 Megafortress north, toward the oncoming MiG-29 fighters. At this closure rate—the MiGs were flying at almost twice the speed of sound to catch the MV- 22—he would catch them in no time.

Sure enough, Franken could actually see two bright flashes of light, then two more, as the lead MiGs fired air-to-air missiles. He saw the four streaks of fire arc across the sky—but suddenly the sky seemed to brighten, as if dawn was approaching, but at ten times the normal speed. The dawn then seemed to turn silvery and warm.

The Dragon, the four missiles, and then all four MiG-29 interceptors disappeared in an uncontrolled plasma field that had formed, expanded to nearly ten miles in diameter, engulfed its prey in a cloud of free electrons and ions, and then disappeared without a trace—all in the space of a few millionths of a second.