Vance felt his lungs curve around his backbone, his face melt into his skull. He didn't know how many G's of acceleration they were experiencing, but it felt like a shuttle launch. He gripped the straps of the G-seat and watched the video feed from the landing-gear cameras, which showed the tarmac flashing by in a stream of gray. The screen above him had clicked up to 200 knots, and in what seemed only a second the Daedalus was a full kilometer down the runway. Then the monitors confirmed they were rotating to takeoff attitude, seven degrees.
They were airborne.
Next the screens reported a hard right-hand bank, five G's. The altimeter had become a whirling blur as attitude increased to twenty degrees, held just below stall-out by Petra's augmented control system.
When the airspeed captured 400 knots, the landing gear cameras showed the wheels begin to fold forward, then rotate to lie flat in the fuselage. Next the doors snapped closed behind them, swallowing them in the underbelly and leaving the nose cameras as their only visual link to the outside. The screens displayed nothing but gray storm clouds.
Landing gear up and locked, came Petra's disembodied voice.
"Acknowledge gear secure," Androv said, quieting a flashing message on one of the screens.
No abort so far, Vance thought. Maybe we're about to get away with this.
The airspeed had already passed 600 knots, accelerating a tenth of a Mach number, about 60 knots, every five seconds.
That's when he noticed they were still receiving wideband video transmissions from the Flight Center. The screen showing Tanzan Mino remained clear and crisp. Surely not for much longer, but now at least the uplink was intact. And the CEO was returning the favor, monitoring their lift-off via a screen of his own. Vance watched as he turned to some of the Soviet brass standing next to him and barked orders. What was that about?
For now though the bigger question was, What do we do?