“Time to impact, ten seconds.”
Mach 4.8.
He reached down and manually locked the pitch on the compressor fan blades into a neutral configuration. They immediately stalled out, causing Daedalus to shudder like a wounded animal. Then he heard the voice of Petra, and a new signal flashed on his helmet screen.
“We have nominal scramjet geometry. Commence ignition sequence.”
She'd reconfigured the turbines, meaning Daedalus was go for hypersonic. He grappled blindly behind the throttle quadrant and flicked the large blue switches that initiated the hydrogen feed. But would the supersonic shock wave inside the engines fire it?
“Time to impact, six seconds.”
"Let's go." Reaching for the throttle quadrant, he depressed the side button and then shoved the heavy handles forward, sending a burst of hydrogen into the scramjets' combustion chambers. . . .
Daedalus lurched, then seemed to be tearing apart, literally disintegrating rivet by rivet.
"We have detonation," Colonel Arkadi reported into his helmet mike. His twin-engine Foxhound was already in a steep fifty-degree bank.