Brian didn't answer him. He simply pulled into the next turn, forcing another three and a half G's on them and missing the side of one of the mountains by less than half a kilometer. He could feel himself tense up uncomfortably. For the first time in hundreds of flight hours, it seemed like he was fighting to control the plane instead of reacting as if it were a part of his body. He spun them around another one of the mountains and then was flying high above a valley. Within two seconds the instruments began to pick up the tones of active search systems.
'You're too goddamned high!' Matt yelled in frustration. 'They're getting a hit on us!'
'Shit,' Brian muttered, pushing down on the stick and putting them into a steep dive. He pulled up just 50 meters above the valley floor, leveling out. The tones went silent once again but before he could even take a breath of relief, the next turn was suddenly upon him, forcing him to cut sharply right. This had him aimed directly at another mountain.
'You're off course now,' Matt said, real fear in his voice for the first time. 'Pull up!'
Brian, seeing the large red mountain looming in his view, acted more out of instinct than anything else. He pulled up and cut to the right, putting the plane through a narrow gap in a ridgeline, the left wingtip missing the side of the mountain by less than thirty meters this time. The tones from the ESM set began again as soon as they were clear.
'Way off course now,' Matt said, his hands gripping the armrest. 'And they've got a solid hit on us with a search set. Probable detection.'
'I know what the fuck that means!' Brian yelled at him as he tried to dive back down out of the coverage. 'Shut your ass while I get us back on course.'
'You wouldn't be off course in the first place if you'd let me do my fucking job!'
'I said shut up!' he said, cutting hard left again, trying desperately to get the carrot to swing back towards the center. It refused to do so. They were now well off their path and there were too many mountains between them and the route back to it.
'We're off course, Haggarty,' Matt told him. 'I need to go manual and plot us a new path or we're never gonna find the targets.'
'You're not plotting shit,' Brian told him. 'Computer, switch to manual mode and give me an overlay of the terrain on my HUD. Make sure that the course path is marked on it.'
'What in the hell are you doing?' Matt demanded. 'The only time you're supposed to put a course overlay up is if your sis is incapacitated. That's a fucking emergency measure.'
'I said shut up!' Brian said. 'You say another word and I'm cutting your goddamn intercom off!' In front of him, a faint outline of the surrounding terrain appeared, partially obscuring the windscreen. The course that he had plotted to the target area was marked in red. The blip in the center of the view, which was what represented their current position, was now more than thirty kilometers from that line.
'You can't run a mission this way, Haggarty,' Matt said. 'The map overlay is just so you can find your way clear if I get hit.'
Brian ignored him, knowing deep down that his inexperienced, vermin system operator was right, but not wanting to admit it. He couldn't divert his attention away from the terrain they were flying through long enough to figure out a path back to his course. To take his eyes off of the mountains and ridges even for a second would cause him to fly into one of them. Still, he tried for almost a minute, turning and diving, banking and leveling, his hands and feet moving automatically, the aircraft rising and falling, pushing them back and forth.
'You're gonna kill us, you asshole!' Matt said in terror. Though he had long since gotten over the motion sickness that he had experienced early in training, he felt it returning to him now, a swelling nausea in his stomach as the G-forces slammed him this way and that, as rocky hills flashed by on both sides.
They got no closer to their target area or their course. They just went further and further into the mountain range, where the terrain became even more dangerous. Finally Brian was forced to acknowledge that this was getting him nowhere. With a frustrated sigh he pulled up and put on power, putting the plane into a steep climb. Within seconds they were above the highest of the mountain peaks and the ESM was beeping steadily.
'They've got a lock on us,' Matt said disgustedly from the back seat.
'No shit,' Brian said.
'And they've got a clear line of sight. If those would've been Earthlings they'd be blasting our asses out of the fuckin sky right now.'
'Well, they're not Earthlings though, are they?' he responded, keying his radio transmitter. 'Flight Alpha 7, aborting mission and returning to base.'
'Flight Alpha 7?' the controller back at the MPG base asked, alarm in her voice. 'Your status? Are you declaring an emergency?'
'Negative,' he said, flipping on the transponder switch. 'We're not declaring an emergency. We just need a vector back to the landing pattern. We were unable to complete our mission.'
'I copy,' she said slowly. 'I have your transponder now. Your course is 95. Please maintain Angels zero-eight until the pattern.'
Twenty minutes later, the aircraft was touching down on the runway and rolling towards the airlock. Twenty minutes after that, Brian and Matt were in their shorts and T-shirts once again and standing in Major Jorgenson's office giving him a debriefing on their aborted mission.
Brian was basically an honest person, not prone to assigning blame to others. True to his personality, he did not try to field the blame for what happened on Mendez. He told the exact truth in a sterile, monotone voice while Jorgenson listened in disbelief.
'So you're telling me,' Jorgenson summarized when he was finished, 'that you refused to let your sis participate in planning the mission?'
'Yes,' he agreed.
'And that you threw together a flight course of your own in twenty minutes?'
'Yes.'
'And that once you were up in the air, you refused to receive navigation inputs from your sis, refused to allow him to manually guide you back on course once you strayed from it, and that you actually tried to continue a mission on pilot manual mode?'
Brian swallowed nervously, realizing, now that Jorgenson was saying it back to him, how asinine his behavior had been. 'Yes,' he said.
Jorgenson looked over at Matt. 'Is that the way it happened, newbie?' he asked him.
'Well... uh...' he started, his voice hesitant. One of the unwritten rules that had been pounded into the students during training was that what happened in the cockpit stayed in the cockpit. As a former gang member, Matt understood this code well. Even if Haggarty was a raving asshole and a cop to boot, he had no desire to squeal on him. 'I'm not sure if... that is to say that maybe it wasn't... uh...'
But Jorgenson wasn't having any of this. 'Don't you try to soft-pedal what happened for this asshole,' he said. 'I just want a straight answer. Is that what happened?'
'Yes,' Matt admitted.
Jorgenson put his fingertips to his temples and massaged for a moment. He then looked at Brian. 'I honestly don't believe what I'm hearing here, Brian. I've known you for years and you're one of the best pilots that we have. And now you come in here and you tell me that you just violated no less than five rules of flight, that you decided that you could disregard basic navigation and attack tactics, that you risked your aircraft and your highly trained lives. What in the hell were you thinking? What in the hell were you doing?'
'All I can say, Frank is that I have a personality conflict with my sis. I don't trust him to navigate me or to plot courses for me.'
'A personality conflict?' Jorgenson said. 'A personality conflict? How in the hell can you have a personality conflict with a man you just met today? You've spent less than three hours with him and you haven't said anything to him in that entire time except to tell him to shut up and to call him a few nasty names.'
'We already had a discussion about why I have a personality conflict,' Brian said. 'And you'll recall that I asked for a reassignment.'
'And you'll recall that I denied it,' Jorgenson said. 'And I'm sure you'll also recall why I denied it. We simply don't have time for this kind of shit, Brian.' He looked at Matt. 'You're vermin, right Mendez?'
'Yep,' Mendez confirmed.
