"just talk Petra through any problems you have. And try to capture an attitude of sixty degrees alpha . . ."
"Yuri, are you ready for us to escort you back?" The radio voice, speaking Russian, sounded through the cabin.
"I'm still thinking it over," he answered.
"Don't be a fool. I have orders to down you with AA-9s. My weapons system is already turned on. Warheads are locked. You're as good as dead. If I push the fire button here under my left thumb, you're gone in fifty seconds."
"You just made up my mind," he said, and nodded to¬ward Vance. "Go."
"Firing one and two," was the radio response.
Vance grabbed the throttles. "Petra, do you read me?"
“Yes,” she answered in English.
"Give me alpha sixty." He rammed the throttles for¬ward, 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, air¬speed, 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 Fox¬hound'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.
"Give me RWR and IRWR, screen one," he commanded.
The liquid crystal panorama inside the helmet immedi¬ately flashed, showing the unfriendly radar and infrared interrogations. The two Acrid AA-9s—that's what they had to be—were gaining altitude, tracking them like blood¬hounds. One was radar locked, while the other