Vance looked over and saw Yuri Andreevich Androv's bandaged arm lying limp on the sidestick, lightly hemorrhaging. He'd passed out from the upward rush of blood.
"He has disappeared from the Katsura radar again, Mino-sama. I think he has taken the vehicle back on the deck." Ikeda's face was ashen as he typed in the computer AI override command one last time, still hoping. The Flight Control operations screen above him was reading "System Malfunction," while the engineers standing behind were exchanging worried glances. Who was going to be held responsible? The master screen above, the one with the Katsura radar, no longer showed the Daedalus. Androv had taken it to thirty thousand feet, then down again. He was playing games.
Tanzan Mino was not wasting time marveling at the plane's performance specs. He turned and nodded to General Sokolov, who was holding a red phone in his hand. The MiG 31 wing wasn't flying military power; it was full afterburners, which was pushing them to Mach 2.4. If Daedalus stayed on the deck, they might still intercept.
"We have no choice," he said in Russian. "Order them to give him a chance to turn back, and tell him if he refuses, they will shoot him down. Maybe the threat will be enough."
Sokolov nodded gravely. But what if Androv was as insane as every indication suggested he was? What if he disobeyed the commands from the Sakhalin interceptors? What then? Who was going to give the command that unleashed AAMs to bring down the most magnificient airplane—make that spacecraft—the world had ever seen. The MiG 31, with its long-range Acrid AA-9 missiles, had a stand-off kill capability that matched the American F-14 Tomcat and its deadly AIM-54 Phoenix. Since the AA-9 had its own guidance system, the pilot need not even see his target. One of those could easily bring down an unarmed behemoth like the Daedalus as long as it was still in the supersonic mode, which it would have to be at that low altitude.
A pall of sadness entered his voice as he issued the command. Androv, of all people, knew the look-down shoot-down capabilities of the MiG 31. Maybe there was still a chance to reason with him. The Daedalus had no pilot-ejection capability. His choice was to obey or die.
Reports from the hangar said he'd taken some automatic-weapons fire from the CEO's bodyguards. How badly wounded was he?