Kitty was nervous as hell. This was her first time at the controls of the real X-Jet, though she’d spent dozens of hours in the simulator. Unlike Bobby and the other male recruits, who always started making crazy-ass maneuvers and crashed, Scott had told her that she was progressing well. She’d only crashed a few times.
Of course now there was more at stake than getting a “game over” and a bad score. If she fucked up now the game would really be over. Bits and pieces of her and her teammates would be scattered over a wide area of the landscape below. Impact at Mach 4 tended to do that.
But she wasn’t alone. Mr. Logan was in the other position. He didn’t seem to be paying attention, reading a Hustler, but she knew he was monitoring her every move, and would step in if she did something really stupid.
She was determined to make sure that he had no reason to do anything other than just sit there. Kurt had learned how to do this. So could she.
The two of them were very competitive, being the youngest members of the real team. Well, Evan was younger, but he had freaked out and wasn’t on the team any more. He was slogging around in sewers these days, hanging out with those creepy Morlocks. Kitty knew it was bad to think about other mutants that way, given that ordinary humans considered all of them weird and creepy, but she couldn’t help it.
She jumped when Mr. Logan spoke for the first time since she had taken the controls. “Mind your panel, Half Pint.”
Damn it, she thought in anguish. I’m already fucking up!
She hurriedly looked at the tactical display. All of the little blips represented other aircraft in the vicinity. Sure enough, one of them had turned yellow and was blinking. She touched the screen there, and a data readout appeared. It was a Lear Jet, bound for Chicago. They were far from the regular lanes, so contacts tended to be smaller planes like this.
On their present course, they would be passing too close to it. Of course, no one could detect them, but there was still the sonic shock wave, which was pretty fucking powerful at Mach 4. Even though they were at a much higher altitude, it would give even an airliner quite a thump, might break something on a smaller plane.
Kitty had a few minutes to make a decision, so she carefully evaluated the available avoidance paths. Finally she dialed in a course change, plus a second time-delayed correction to get them back on course after going around the Lear. She took a deep breath and hit “execute”, fully expecting Mr. Logan to yell at her and cancel it.
But he just continued flipping through the pages. She started breathing again.
It continued on like this for another half hour or so. Mr. Logan switched magazines a couple of times, while she weaved the SR-77 around three more slow movers.
Finally, Mr. Logan spoke again. “I’ll take it from here, Half Pint. We’re coming up on the coast. Traffic’s building up. You can have more flight time later.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. She leaned back, intending to observe, but he told her to go on back into the cabin.
Disappointed, she obeyed. “Ya did good,” he said, which made her feel a little better. She looked around the cabin, but Scott and Jean weren’t where they had been when she took over the controls. They weren’t in the cabin at all. They had to be in the back compartment. Where else could they be? Only Kurt could teleport somewhere else, and the altitude was too high for that anyway. Read the rest of this entry »
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