“Yes,” she answered in English.
"Give me alpha sixty." He rammed the throttles forward, clicking them into the Lock position, igniting the afterburners. Next he yanked the sidestick into position.
The cockpit rotated upward, automatically shifting to compensate for the changing G-forces. In front of his eyes now was a wide liquid crystal screen that seemed to be in 3-D. The left side resembled the heads-up display, HUD, common to jet Fighters, providing altitude, heading, airspeed, G-forces in a single unified format. The right side showed a voice-activated menu listing all the screens along the wall.
"Read me fuel," he said, testing it.
Immediately the numbers appeared, in pounds of JP-7 and in minutes, with and without afterburners. The G-force was now at 3.5 and climbing, while the digital altimeter was spinning.
“Systems alert,” Petra announced suddenly, ”hostile radar lock. And hostile IR interrogation. Two bogies, closure rate nine hundred sixty knots.”
They weren't kidding, Vance thought. He glanced at the altitude readout. Daedalus was hurtling through thirty thousand feet, afterburners sizzling. But an AA-9 had a terminal velocity well over Mach 3. Add that to the Foxhound's 2.4 . . .
"Petra, give me estimated time of impact."
“Extrapolating closure rate, I estimate impact in forty- three seconds.”
Their acceleration had reached 3.8 G's, but fuel was dwindling rapidly, already down to twelve minutes.