Chapter Two
Though it was a holiday, the Space Centre was still open and fully staffed. Escorted to the mission control centre by an armed guard, they Kim and Ron were led to where Bob Hutchins - the centre's director - sat. He was seated in a large leather chair at the topmost of three computer banks, all facing a large concave wall covered by movie theatre style screens. One displayed an oval map of the world, with dashed blue lines to indicate where each of the Centre's satellites was above the Earth. But the other, usually devoted to a constant readout of each craft's telemetry and speed, displayed a huge map of the contiguous United States. A northward curving line from Middleton to New York City was superimposed on the map - what Kim guessed to be their route that night - along with a series of figures, and the word MRBT1.
"Ms. Possible, I appreciate you two getting here so fast," Hutchins them, rising from his seat to shake hands.
Kim was still wearing her party clothes - having not had the opportunity to change - and the middle-aged, unmarried man's eyes roved over her body. But she tried to ignore it while speaking:
"Not a problem. Now, Wade told me he'd arranged for a ride to New York from here. I hope we're not causing too much trouble in asking for one."
"Oh of course not!" he assured her jovially. "After helping us with that faulty space shuttle we're more than willing to lend a hand."
"That was so not a big thing," Kim said humbly. "It was just skydiving from ninety thousand feet onto something with a surface temperature of over one thousand degrees Fahrenheit. I'm just glad I packed oven mitts and a bottle of water."
"And for some reason I wasn't there for that one," Ron observed. "Wonder why?"
"So, how do you plan to get us to the Big Apple Mr. Hutchins?" Kim asked, trying to get him to stop staring at her chest, practically drooling onto his shirt. "I heard it was completely snowed in."
"It certainly is," he agreed, tapping a few keys to bring up a moving satellite image of the current weather. The entire east coast was a massive swath of white, and Kim could see another storm primed to pounce on Middleton. 'At least we're going to have a very white Christmas this year,' Kim thought to herself.
"Dr. Drakken's ultimatum means that there is no possibility of getting you there in time by either ground or conventional air travel," explained Hutchins. "So we've decided to let you try out a new toy of ours that's just begun its flight tests."
"What type of toy?" Ron asked doubtfully.
"It's called the Medium Range Ballistic Transporter, or the MRBT for short," Hutchins replied, tapping a few more keys to pull up a 3D model of the craft on the large screen. "It launches like any other rocket at the Centre, but its short burn-time means that it doesn't achieve normal orbital altitudes. Instead, once it reaches about 100,000 feet ASL the engines shut off and it slowly arcs back down to Earth. You can see from the imagery I've put up that it's designed to glide very easily, which is what it does on the descent leg. Like a normal aircraft it's equipped with a landing gear, flaps, airbrakes and small thrusters in the rear in caaassss. ewwww. nee." Hutchins voice trailed off, his speech slowing to nothing - his jaw even had dropped open half an inch as he spoke, all the while staring at the adolescent girl in front of him. Kim waited a few moments, watching in annoyance as he stared at her tits.
"Like my top, Mr. Hutchins?" she asked sweetly. "It's green, now get over it," she continued coldly, crossing her arms in front of her bust. This snapped the man out of his trance, and he continued to talk as though nothing had happened - completely unembarrassed.
"The craft is equipped with a GPS system so you'll be given a path to follow on the electronic map. Since we've also put in a flight director system all you have to do is follow the red markers on your artificial horizon and the moving map on the central pedestal. With both of those working you should be fine."
"All right," Kim said, unsure about Hutchins after his lack of embarrassment at being caught staring at an underage teenager. Either it was from a lack of sleep - it was almost midnight now - or simply that he was a dirty old man, but either way she was wary of him.
"I don't need to go over any of it again?" he asked.
"No, its okay," she assured him. "I got most of it, and we'll figure out the rest once we're up there."
"That doesn't sound very encouraging," Ron whined, causing the director to chuckle.
"You kids these days." he said, thinking Kim had been joking about figuring the controls out 'on the fly'. "I'll just let you go over and see Tom Weldon, our MRBT chief - he'll give you a quick run-through of the cockpit and get some flight-suits for the mission."
Hutchins pointed to a man of about Dr. Possible's general age and size, only with less hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses - a typical rocket scientist.
"Thanks again for the help," Kim said before walking over to where Weldon stood talking to a few colleagues.
"Did you see him?" she whispered to Ron once they were out of earshot. "What a perv."
"Hey, don't knock him," Ron replied. "Maybe his wife isn't giving him any. You know, withholding it until he paints the house or something."
Kim snickered quietly, imagining the tall, gangly man pleading on his knees with his naked wife. "Ron! That's really mean!"
"No it's not," he corrected. "It's really true. He's a dirty old man - admit it."
"Be quiet, people can hear you," Kim shushed him as they approached Weldon, and tried to keep a straight face. The MRBT chief was calling out orders to his subordinates while checking items off a clipboard - all the time glancing up at a large digital clock on the wall with a harried expression.
"Now, I need you to get the ship prepped, and fill the tanks immediately - we launch in twenty minutes," Weldon ordered as they approached. His voice was calm and composed, yet his face showed the strain the mission was placing on him. "And would someone find me Ms. Possible; I thought she was supposed to be here half an hour ago."
"Right here," Kim piped up from behind him. Weldon turned around and quickly shook her hand and led them into a side room. From the benches in the centre of the room, and the coat hangers set against the walls they could tell it was clearly a mission prep room.
"Good to see both of you," he said, closing the door once they were inside. "We don't have enough time to go through all the finer points of flying the MRBT, so hopefully the computer should be able to help you with everything. But you've both flown before, right?"
"Correct," answered Kim. "We had to land the experimental plane my dad had designed - it was during that whole Monkeyfist in space thing."
"Good, so you know where all the basic controls and instruments are?"
"Yup."
"What about airbrakes, flaps, thrust levers," Weldon asked.
"All on the central pedestal, right?" cut in when a puzzled look crossed Kim's face.
"Correct," Weldon confirmed before turning around to open a closet filled with orange flight-suits.
"How'd you know that," Kim asked Ron quietly, surprised at his answer.
"Hours and hours of playing Flight Simulator," he replied.
"So you think you can fly this thing?"
"Not a chance."
"Why?"
"I'm really good at remembering where everything is, just not at how to fly the plane," he told her sheepishly.
"Oh," Kim said, glad she was a little more experienced.
"Yeah."
"Ms. Possible, Mr. Stoppable," Weldon said, turning around with two of the suits in his hands. "I need you to get changed into these pressure suits for the ride."
"Pressure suits?" Ron asked suspiciously. "Why pressure suits."
"You may need them - in case of a bail-out," Weldon explained.
"No one ever said anything about a bail-out," Ron observed suspiciously.
"Ron," Kim hissed when Weldon left the room. "Don't worry. These people are just really careful - I swear it's not that dangerous."
"Yeah, kinda like you swore that Monkeyfist was 'a really nice guy'," he hissed back, imitating Kim's feminine voice by raising his a few octaves.
"Very funny," she replied dryly as they began to get dressed.
"Thanks," they said as he walked out. Kim opened the duffel bag she'd brought along from home and pulled out her mission clothes. Ron had already managed to struggle into his on the car ride over, but Kim opted to wait and not give herself a wedgie. Now she quickly stripped down and redressed - all the time making sure Ron had his back turned - before pulling the suit on over her mission clothes. Once they were both fully dressed; looking like a pair of highway cones in the reflective tangerine suits, a pair of technicians dressed in white walked in. They quickly attached the helmets and glove to the proper appendages and pulled the metal slides back to seal them closed.
Luckily, the faceplate of the helmet was raised so that they could breathe. The technicians told them that the gold tinted slide would only be closed in case of an emergency since the dark glass seriously impaired their vision, but that they would have to lower the Plexiglas section before launch. Ron tried to ask why but Kim cut him off; knowing the answer wouldn't be good. They were then led through a glass walled walkway to the launch-pad. Housed in the central-most building at the MSC, the MRBT sat on its tail pointing towards the ceiling.
A year earlier, Kim had been assigned a report on the Space Shuttle for her Computer Science class - why, she had no idea - and she found herself comparing this craft to the plans she had seen of the Orbiter. It, like the Shuttle; was attached to a large umber, metal fuel tank; whose contents would feed the engines during takeoff. The MRBT was built for high manverability and even higher speeds with its small, sleek design. The fuselage was about twenty-five meters long; narrow and smooth sided with two large rocket nozzles blossoming out the back. A band of thin, angular windows which encircled the upper section of the nose was all Kim could see of the cockpit. She could tell that the plane had been designed so - when in flight - the pilots looked at the instruments in front of them, not out at the landscape below them. The large delta wing, curving away gracefully from the body and a swept back, triangular tail-plane were completely moulded into the fuselage - all lines were smoothed out to virtually nothing. It gave the craft the ambience, the sense of speed. Even stationary, it looked fast.
The ship was painted a dark metallic grey, unlike the two tone Shuttle fuselage. Either it was a new type of heat shield, or the MRBT was designed to fly unseen. Ron noticed that the American flag and the words 'United States of America' had also been omitted from the body, which seemed unusual for such a craft. Usually the Space Centre like it when people knew they'd built the plane. Confronted with such a stealthy design, they wondered if the ship had been designed with a military use in mind.
The technicians ushered them across the pad to an elevator, which they rode up to the launch control centre where Kim had watched Monkeyfist's stolen rocket lift off with Ron aboard only months before. With the MRBT's rounded nose visible through the large glass windows, the two pilots were hastily explained their flight-path before being taken another prep room. A clump of technicians awaited them, and quickly attached various cords and tubes to their suits once they sat down on benches in the centre of the room. Radio, life support monitors and atmospheric pressure sensors were quickly snapped on without a word between the men, the oxygen purification system being the last to be connected.
This was a large, briefcase sized box covered in a thin layer of white cloth for shock protection. Two tubes ran from each box to the pressure suits, sliding into holes above the pectoral muscles. Any carbon dioxide exhaled would exit through one tube, be purified in the box, and re-enter the suit as oxygen through the other. This meant that neither of the pilots had to carry a large oxygen tank, and there was even a small store of oxygen in the tank in case of emergencies. They were warned that the system would hook into the MRBT's oxygen supply about three minutes after launch with a loud hiss.
"Thanks," Kim told them as she was led out with Ron onto the orange access walkway. She tried not to look through the metal mesh floor to the hard concrete twenty meters below her, but unfortunately she did. Kim had no idea why it made her dizzy, but the procession had to stop for a second while she regained her balance. She repeated her thanks to the technicians for their patience, and soon they were inside the MRBT. There both Kim and Ron needed a great deal of help climbing the ladder set into the floor up to their seats, and were eased into the large, padded chairs with the help of the now very limber and agile technicians. The plastic faceplate on the helmet was lowered when they were both seated, and a thumbs up was given as confirmation that there was oxygen flowing.
As soon as the men tightened the straps to a point just short of suffocation they wished Kim and Ron good luck and left the cabin - closing the heavy, pressure resistant door behind them. Sitting with gravity pressing her body back into her seat, Kim sat patiently and listened to the chatter on the radio as the ship finished it's preparations for launch. Looking at the controls in front of her, she was pleased to see that most of them were ones she had used before. Kim knew from experience that trying to control something using unfamiliar controls and instruments was hard enough; and going faster than the speed of sound made it even more difficult. And so a little slice of anxiety faded from her mind, only to be replaced by another worry or wonder.
Ron, on the other hand, was finding no solace in the cockpit, and instead was trying not to remember that he was about to fly in something little more than a big bottle-rocket. The words 'Remote Command Active' displayed on all the screens were especially worrying, since Ron was inherently distrusting of people controlling things from the ground. Especially after he'd seen a man fly a remote-controlled airplane straight into the ground on a clear, windless day - and he'd been an expert. So, he whiled away his time staring out the window in front of him at the large, burning white lights suspended from the hangar's ceiling and hoping they'd remember to open the launch doors soon.
Finally, after what seemed like hours but was barely seconds, they both heard Hutchins' voice requesting a go, no-go status on all the MRBT's systems. Once everything was reported to be in order, he began the sixty second countdown to launch. Kim checked her watch - clipped onto the wrist of her suit - and noticed it had been only twelve minutes since they'd walked in the building. She hoped that the MSC staff had been given enough time to prepare the craft, especially since she was about to be shot up to 100,000 feet above sea level in it. But, with the countdown reaching fifteen seconds, she put the thought out of her mind, placing her trust in the men and women at the Space Centre, and hoped like hell they had listened during training courses.
When Hutchins' reached ten, the call for engine start-up was made, and they heard a whirring somewhere behind their seats as the fuel pumps began to operate. At eight a deep rumble filled the cabin as the engines began their activation sequence. By five the force of the now-lit engines was shaking the cockpit like a soda can in the hands of a six year old. Kim and Ron were suddenly very glad for the foam padded ear flaps that kept their necks from being snapped off by the vibrations. The roar was deafening, and they could only tell when Hutchins had reached zero because the mission clock on the glare-shield switched on. They heard a series of groans as clamps and pipes were pulled away or blown off the side of the craft. The ship slowly began accelerating, and Ron looked forward to see snow falling through the now open launch doors; watching it pile up on their windscreen. He wondered if anyone had thought to deice the ship before it launched, but decided it was too late to worry anyway.
The ship was quickly out in the open night sky, its engines lighting up the empty fields around the Space Centre like twin suns. Monique, still at the party with friends, looked up from the patio to see an arrow of blinding white light shoot skywards. Everyone froze for a second - some thinking it was a missile, others that it was Santa Claus on steroids - and watched in silence as the rocket ascended into the grey storm clouds hanging over the city. Its fiery tail glowed orange as it travelled upwards, slowly rolling over to the east, and Monique whispered "Good luck Kim," as it slowly faded into the night.
The scene was not so peaceful in the cockpit, with the ship still shaking furiously as it travelled heavenwards at thousands of feet per second. Kim watched the altitude readings shoot up and though the numbers were going by so fast she could never read actual digits - she just knew they were really, really high up. Once the ship was through the clouds, the two passengers had an unprecedented clear view of the starry night above them since all the light pollution was filtered out by the clouds. They sat and watched the stars twinkle quietly above them, lost in the beauty of the moment, even while the cockpit shook and shuddered like a nudist with hypothermia. Just then a loud bang startled both of them, and Kim looked on the screen to see that the fuel tank had just been jettisoned. 'They could have told us that would happen,' Kim grumbled to herself as the nose dropped to an almost horizontal position at approximately 98,000 feet above sea level. The engines were still burning, and she wondered when they would cut out and the gliding portion of the flight would begin.
This was when the real roller coaster ride began, when the nose started to dip earthwards while the engines still burned at full power. Ron let out a frightened yelp, and Kim's eyes flared to the size of saucers as they plummeted ground-wards. The engines suddenly cut out, and they continued to fall noiselessly to the Earth; powerless to stop it since the controls were still on remote pilot. This was an unexpected reassurance, since Kim knew that unless any of the employees at MSC were feeling particularly murderous, they would do their best to keep them the pilots alive. Especially since the ship she was in command of probably cost something near to billion dollars to build.
"Ms. Possible, Ms. Possible," a male voice called out on the radio. "Do you read me?"
"Loud and clear, sir," Kim replied, recognizing the voice as Chuck Barrington, a radio operator back at MSC. "What's up Chuck?"
"Not much at the moment," Barrington admitted casually, having dropped the terse, controlled voice once he realized Kim knew him. Though his voice was still clear and his words well articulated to keep instructions as understandable as possible; the calm in his voice relieved some of the tension in the cockpit. "We're still controlling the plane from back here, and I'm supposed to tell you that you're now in the second stage of your flight."
"That would be the one where we fall really, really fast?" Ron butted in sarcastically.
"That's right Mr. Stoppable. You should being pulling out of it at sixty thousand feet, and the RCS will shut off pretty quick after that," Chuck told them.
"Until that happens we just sit still?" Kim asked as the plane passed through a patch of rough air, rocking the craft to the side a little and making Ron yelp again.
"That's right," the operator replied. "But it's only for another twenty seconds - you're already at seventy five and dropping fast. We'd like you to give us a shout when you have control of the ship; just so that we can make sure everything's okay and give you an update of the next portion of your trip. Roger that?"
"Roger that," said Kim. "Over and out."
"Over and out," Barrington replied, and a click signalled the disconnection of the radio for the time being.
He had been right - they had very little time to wait until the plane slowly began to rise out of its dive; its speed decreasing slightly as the nose rose to an angle descent of about five degrees.
"Remote command system shutoff in fifteen seconds, pilot control requested," a stern feminine voice called out. "Place hand on control yoke, place hand on control yoke."
Sensors on the control yoke were activated by touch, and once Kim gripped it with her left hand - placing her arm on the plastic rest provided for comfort - the computer spoke again:
"Pilot response positive, RCS shutdown in ten. nine. eight." Kim listened intently and hoped in her mind that she could actually fly this thing. But now was not the time for second thoughts, and she swallowed her fears as the joystick stiffened slightly in her hand.
"RCS shutdown complete, manual control now active," the voice informed them as the displays suddenly lit up; showing the artificial horizon, radar screen, engine monitoring system and everything else as Kim had remembered it from her last piloting experience.
"That was easy enough," she commented to Ron, and made a few slight adjustments to the craft's attitude before contacting Middleton control:
"MSC, this is Kim Possible. Do you read me?"
"We read you, Ms. Possible. How's it feel to be flying?" Chuck asked her cheerfully.
"Let's not jinx me, all right?" Kim replied jokingly.
"If you insist," he answered. "Now, you should have pulled out of the dive by now. You're on a slow, gliding descent, right?"
"Yep," Kim confirmed, checking her instruments as she spoke.
"From here it's a pretty smooth ride down to about ten thousand feet," Barrington told them. "So you'll have plenty of time to get used to the controls."
"What's past that?" Ron asked; taking over the radio conversation as Kim flew.
"One of the largest snowstorms the east coast has seen this century," was the operator's blunt reply.
"Wonderful," moaned Kim and Ron in unison.
"The computer should guide you through that pretty well though," Chuck assured them. "The final approach and landing are going to be the really hairy part though. New York has almost three feet of snow on the ground and JFK's snowploughs gave up hours ago."
"So how're we gonna land?" asked Ron.
"We're going to have you do a hard landing. It's where you land with your landing gear retracted. You'll have to land as slow as you can, and get on the ground really quickly," advised Chuck. "We've got it set up for you to land on runway 13 Right; their longest one. It's about 14,500 feet long, so you shouldn't have too much of a problem getting stopped in time."
"Sounds fine," Kim replied before Ron had a chance to express his displeasure. "Anything knew on the Drakken situation?"
"Not that I know of," Barrington replied. "We just got word that the deadline has been extended by fifteen minutes. You won't be so pressed for time now, but the storm's beginning to move out to sea."
"What does that mean?" inquired Ron.
"If it stops snowing, Dr. Drakken knows that the airport can have a runway cleared, and ready for a plane to depart on in ten minutes. With all the flights grounded because of the storm, he'll have no trouble finding a plane or pilot to get him out of the country within minutes either."
"So I take it we still need to get down there quick, fast and in a hurry," Kim observed grimly. "All right. Well, thanks for the help Mr. Barrington. We'll call you if we need anything else."
"Roger that. Over and out."
"Over and out," Kim said, ending the conversation.
The cockpit was silent with the pilot now concentrating on flying as the craft passed through some high altitude trade winds as they entered the jet stream over Cincinnati. Ron listened in on the radio as commercial flights below circled in to land, or at least tried to in the blizzard. His ears were continuously assaulted with calls for identification by air traffic controllers as the MRBT shot over their sectors. The small, fast moving blip with no more than NA-0000X (the locator number the computer automatically gave an unknown aircraft) next to it was probably causing a great deal of angst down below, and Ron hoped that the Space Centre had bothered to inform the government of its midnight mission. Otherwise Kim might have to start playing chicken with a couple of FA-18s when they neared New York. To his relief he heard a military aircraft inform one of the controllers that it was a reconnaissance aircraft working for the national weather service, and that the man should stop bothering the poor pilots up there. Those 'poor pilots' shared a smile at the thought of a harried controller wondering why in God's name would a reconnaissance aircraft become a multi-billion dollar weather balloon.
The calm was broken when the computer once again spoke; requesting 'airbrake setting two'. Without prompting from Kim, Ron reached over to the central pedestal and moved the small airbrake selector lever to the left of the throttle quadrant backwards two notches. In response they heard a mechanical whirr from the rear of the plane, and Kim pitched up the nose as per the flight director's orders to keep the plane from dropping too fast. They watched wordlessly as the airspeed began to drop rapidly, and Ron placed his hand over the engine start-up switches in case they needed extra power.
Fortunately the entire operation was being done to burn off some excess speed as they entered the lower atmosphere. Up until then they had been going at speeds exceeding the speed of sound as they raced the clock to New York. Now, with the custom built, damage resistant speed-brakes (which Ron saw were large slats rising up out of the trailing edge of the wing) their speed slowly ticked down to knots instead of Mach numbers. The nose was kept high to make sure the plane didn't begin dropping in altitude since the brake seriously affected how much lift the wings produced, and Ron watched in awe as they continued to descend with their nose raised at almost a twenty degree angle.
Nearing ten thousand feet - with the first dark silhouettes of storm clouds visible out the view ports - the computer ordered the retraction of the airbrakes. Ron pushed the lever forward, and Kim dropped the nose slowly as they continued their normal flight-path. Calm once again resumed in the cabin, as the wind softened for a moment during the transition period into rougher skies.
Soon though, the tension began to rise again, as they began to pass through the upper layers of the storm. Ron glanced down at the moving map to see the entire screen in front of them to be a massive yellow splotch. Even without reading the key he knew it wasn't a good sign, and he surreptitiously tightened his seatbelt a little more. Kim gritted her teeth as the turbulence rocked the ship back and forth, and kept her eyes glued to the artificial horizon. It was both too dark and too cloudy to see anything out the windows, so until they were within a few miles of the airport she wouldn't waste time looking at a matte black landscape. The winds grew stronger and stronger as they descended, and so did the snowfall. Ron reached up and switched on the de-icing system when ordered to by the computer, but did little else until they reached New York Approach airspace.
"NA-zero-zero-zero-zero-ex, do you copy," a controller asked.
"We copy," Ron replied, having been told to do so during their brief visit to the launch control centre in Middleton.
"You guys look like you wanna land," the controller observed wryly.
"Gee, ya think?" Ron asked sarcastically.
"All right - your people called me about ten minutes ago," the controller told them. "So I've go you vectored in on runway 13 Right at JFK. We've got nothing else in the sky - everyone's too smart to try and fly on a night like this - so you can fly straight in on bearing one-three-zero to the airport. Since visibility's about a quarter of a mile I wouldn't advise even lookin' out your window for the city - you won't see a thing."
"Thanks for the info," Ron said. "Anything else we need to know?"
"Yeah," the controller remembered. "I've got fifty bucks riding on you guys making it out alive, so you'd better fly right."
"Will do sir," Kim replied, the corner of her mouth upturned in a smile. "Over and out."
"Over and out."
They were now passing five thousand feet, and the weather was getting no better. The computer had automatically lit the landing lights when they passed the ten thousand mark, but it had made no difference. What used to be a dark grey wall of nothing in front of them was now a bright white wall of nothing, and the glow was beginning to give Ron a headache. He could barely see the edge of the wing out the rearmost view-port, and only because of the flashing strobe light on the forward tip did he know it was still there. To keep his mind occupied, and off thoughts of burning wreckage and mangled bodies, he began starting up the jet engines. Just in case they needed them, especially for the thrust reversers when they landed. The sequence was quick, and soon the twin turbofan engines in the rear of the craft were slowly spinning, set to idle.
"Ron, you all strapped in?" Kim asked, groaning slightly as another gust of wind slammed into the ship.
"Hell yeah!" he exclaimed, trying to lighten the mood a little. "You need any help?"
"Sure. Whatever the computer says - do it."
"Gotcha," he promised, and gripped the armrests firmly as they passed through another rough patch of air. By now they were being thrown all about the sky; one moment dropping, the next shooting up, followed by a hammering blast of air throwing them sideways. Ron had no time to worry about where they were going though, since he was soon engaged in extending flaps and trying to ignore the automatic; and annoying calls for the landing gear.
"Hey Middleton," he called over the radio. "How do we get computer to take five on the landing gear?"
"You can't, sorry," Chuck called back apologetically. "You're just going to have to live with it for a little while."
"Thanks," Ron mumbled, none too happy with the reply. He sat silently for a moment, and then turned to the pilot:
"Hey Kim, why do you always sign up for these jobs anyway?"
"You tell me," she managed to reply before returning to piloting. They were now only a mile from the runway, yet the clouds showed no sign of breaking. A hush fell on the cockpit - its occupants too worried about the landing to try and make conversation. Both knew that commercial airliners fitted with the most high-tech instrument landing systems and redundancy after redundancy would never even attempt a landing in such weather. Yet here they were doing just that without any prior training, in an experimental aircraft that had probably never been aloft before and with no landing gear to boot. Ron extended the flaps fully and watched the sky for the runway. Kim didn't even bother, knowing that it wouldn't matter if they could or couldn't see the runway - they'd still have to land.
At four hundred feet from the threshold the flashing approach lights finally came into view, followed seconds later by the runway itself. It was covered completely in snow - an avenue of white. All they could see were the border lights burning furiously through the drifts. Both pilot and co- pilot breathed a sigh of relief as the ship floated down through the sky to the hard, secure concrete below. Kim made a few final adjustments to keep the wings level, and raised the nose slightly as they shot over the airport perimeter fence. A scarce sixty feet from the ground and only a knot above the craft's stall speed; the crimson threshold lights flashed beneath them seconds before.
WHAM! The plane hit the ground with a jarring thud, and bounced into the air again before settling into the snow with a series of groans and crunches. Though they were now on solid ground, it wasn't over yet. Ron reached over and pulled the throttles as far back as they would go to activate the thrust reversers. Kim tugged the airbrake lever all the way back to one hundred percent, but it had little effect on their speed. Ron's last act before shutting his eyes in terror and compacting into a shivering ball of fear was to flick the braking parachute release button. They were jolted forward slightly as the 'chute opened up behind the aircraft, trapping air and creating drag to slow them. But it seemed to be doing almost nothing, and the craft continued to slide down the light-lined pathway with no sign of stopping. Its smooth underside found no traction with the slick snow, and they looked ahead to see a group of vehicles - with their lights flashing fluorescent orange - slowly begin to move out of the way. Kim tried in vain to use the rudder pedals and joystick to slew the craft sideways, hopefully slowing it. But the control surfaces were useless at low speeds. So Kim followed Ron's example and assumed the crash position.
As if by a miracle, and with only a few feet to spare, the MRBT finally slid to a halt in front of the convoy of snow-cats and emergency rescue vehicles. Kim reached over slowly, her hand shaking faintly from the adrenaline, and flipped the fuel cut-off switches - in effect shutting down the engines. She then scanned the cockpit for any warning lights, and seeing none; unbuckled her seatbelt. Ron heard the click of the metal clasp releasing, and opened his eyes to the wonderful sight of all his body parts still in the right places. He retracted the airbrakes and slowly shutdown all the systems before undoing his own restraints. Both then removed their helmets and breathed deeply - savouring the fresh air seeping in from outside. It was a welcome change from the stale, onboard air and they both removed the oxygen supply tubes from their suits before rising.
The hatch was surprisingly easy to open for something so bulky and complex. They slid down the yellow emergency slide to the awaiting airport officials where they were quickly covered in blankets (which were kind of useless, seeing as they were wearing suits resistant to minus sixty degree temperatures). Their ride to the terminal, they were told, would be there any minute.
"Well, that was fun," Kim commented as she looked over at the petrified expression on Ron's face.
"You'd better have a REALLY good present waiting for me at home," was all he growled in reply.
Author's note: Hope that was fun. If any of you need a little help envisioning an MRBT cockpit, look for a picture of the A340-600 cockpit. Once you have it, just place two orange suited teenagers in the seats, add a little snow outside the windows, make the cockpit a little smaller and you've got it. Oh, and there's two more throttle levers than there should be for an MRBT, along with a lot less switches and dials.
Oh, and I forgot to mention last time - I do not own Kim Possible or any other characters of the Disney Channel. Please don't sue me for whatever I write here.
Next update on December 17th. Happy holidays!
Though it was a holiday, the Space Centre was still open and fully staffed. Escorted to the mission control centre by an armed guard, they Kim and Ron were led to where Bob Hutchins - the centre's director - sat. He was seated in a large leather chair at the topmost of three computer banks, all facing a large concave wall covered by movie theatre style screens. One displayed an oval map of the world, with dashed blue lines to indicate where each of the Centre's satellites was above the Earth. But the other, usually devoted to a constant readout of each craft's telemetry and speed, displayed a huge map of the contiguous United States. A northward curving line from Middleton to New York City was superimposed on the map - what Kim guessed to be their route that night - along with a series of figures, and the word MRBT1.
"Ms. Possible, I appreciate you two getting here so fast," Hutchins them, rising from his seat to shake hands.
Kim was still wearing her party clothes - having not had the opportunity to change - and the middle-aged, unmarried man's eyes roved over her body. But she tried to ignore it while speaking:
"Not a problem. Now, Wade told me he'd arranged for a ride to New York from here. I hope we're not causing too much trouble in asking for one."
"Oh of course not!" he assured her jovially. "After helping us with that faulty space shuttle we're more than willing to lend a hand."
"That was so not a big thing," Kim said humbly. "It was just skydiving from ninety thousand feet onto something with a surface temperature of over one thousand degrees Fahrenheit. I'm just glad I packed oven mitts and a bottle of water."
"And for some reason I wasn't there for that one," Ron observed. "Wonder why?"
"So, how do you plan to get us to the Big Apple Mr. Hutchins?" Kim asked, trying to get him to stop staring at her chest, practically drooling onto his shirt. "I heard it was completely snowed in."
"It certainly is," he agreed, tapping a few keys to bring up a moving satellite image of the current weather. The entire east coast was a massive swath of white, and Kim could see another storm primed to pounce on Middleton. 'At least we're going to have a very white Christmas this year,' Kim thought to herself.
"Dr. Drakken's ultimatum means that there is no possibility of getting you there in time by either ground or conventional air travel," explained Hutchins. "So we've decided to let you try out a new toy of ours that's just begun its flight tests."
"What type of toy?" Ron asked doubtfully.
"It's called the Medium Range Ballistic Transporter, or the MRBT for short," Hutchins replied, tapping a few more keys to pull up a 3D model of the craft on the large screen. "It launches like any other rocket at the Centre, but its short burn-time means that it doesn't achieve normal orbital altitudes. Instead, once it reaches about 100,000 feet ASL the engines shut off and it slowly arcs back down to Earth. You can see from the imagery I've put up that it's designed to glide very easily, which is what it does on the descent leg. Like a normal aircraft it's equipped with a landing gear, flaps, airbrakes and small thrusters in the rear in caaassss. ewwww. nee." Hutchins voice trailed off, his speech slowing to nothing - his jaw even had dropped open half an inch as he spoke, all the while staring at the adolescent girl in front of him. Kim waited a few moments, watching in annoyance as he stared at her tits.
"Like my top, Mr. Hutchins?" she asked sweetly. "It's green, now get over it," she continued coldly, crossing her arms in front of her bust. This snapped the man out of his trance, and he continued to talk as though nothing had happened - completely unembarrassed.
"The craft is equipped with a GPS system so you'll be given a path to follow on the electronic map. Since we've also put in a flight director system all you have to do is follow the red markers on your artificial horizon and the moving map on the central pedestal. With both of those working you should be fine."
"All right," Kim said, unsure about Hutchins after his lack of embarrassment at being caught staring at an underage teenager. Either it was from a lack of sleep - it was almost midnight now - or simply that he was a dirty old man, but either way she was wary of him.
"I don't need to go over any of it again?" he asked.
"No, its okay," she assured him. "I got most of it, and we'll figure out the rest once we're up there."
"That doesn't sound very encouraging," Ron whined, causing the director to chuckle.
"You kids these days." he said, thinking Kim had been joking about figuring the controls out 'on the fly'. "I'll just let you go over and see Tom Weldon, our MRBT chief - he'll give you a quick run-through of the cockpit and get some flight-suits for the mission."
Hutchins pointed to a man of about Dr. Possible's general age and size, only with less hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses - a typical rocket scientist.
"Thanks again for the help," Kim said before walking over to where Weldon stood talking to a few colleagues.
"Did you see him?" she whispered to Ron once they were out of earshot. "What a perv."
"Hey, don't knock him," Ron replied. "Maybe his wife isn't giving him any. You know, withholding it until he paints the house or something."
Kim snickered quietly, imagining the tall, gangly man pleading on his knees with his naked wife. "Ron! That's really mean!"
"No it's not," he corrected. "It's really true. He's a dirty old man - admit it."
"Be quiet, people can hear you," Kim shushed him as they approached Weldon, and tried to keep a straight face. The MRBT chief was calling out orders to his subordinates while checking items off a clipboard - all the time glancing up at a large digital clock on the wall with a harried expression.
"Now, I need you to get the ship prepped, and fill the tanks immediately - we launch in twenty minutes," Weldon ordered as they approached. His voice was calm and composed, yet his face showed the strain the mission was placing on him. "And would someone find me Ms. Possible; I thought she was supposed to be here half an hour ago."
"Right here," Kim piped up from behind him. Weldon turned around and quickly shook her hand and led them into a side room. From the benches in the centre of the room, and the coat hangers set against the walls they could tell it was clearly a mission prep room.
"Good to see both of you," he said, closing the door once they were inside. "We don't have enough time to go through all the finer points of flying the MRBT, so hopefully the computer should be able to help you with everything. But you've both flown before, right?"
"Correct," answered Kim. "We had to land the experimental plane my dad had designed - it was during that whole Monkeyfist in space thing."
"Good, so you know where all the basic controls and instruments are?"
"Yup."
"What about airbrakes, flaps, thrust levers," Weldon asked.
"All on the central pedestal, right?" cut in when a puzzled look crossed Kim's face.
"Correct," Weldon confirmed before turning around to open a closet filled with orange flight-suits.
"How'd you know that," Kim asked Ron quietly, surprised at his answer.
"Hours and hours of playing Flight Simulator," he replied.
"So you think you can fly this thing?"
"Not a chance."
"Why?"
"I'm really good at remembering where everything is, just not at how to fly the plane," he told her sheepishly.
"Oh," Kim said, glad she was a little more experienced.
"Yeah."
"Ms. Possible, Mr. Stoppable," Weldon said, turning around with two of the suits in his hands. "I need you to get changed into these pressure suits for the ride."
"Pressure suits?" Ron asked suspiciously. "Why pressure suits."
"You may need them - in case of a bail-out," Weldon explained.
"No one ever said anything about a bail-out," Ron observed suspiciously.
"Ron," Kim hissed when Weldon left the room. "Don't worry. These people are just really careful - I swear it's not that dangerous."
"Yeah, kinda like you swore that Monkeyfist was 'a really nice guy'," he hissed back, imitating Kim's feminine voice by raising his a few octaves.
"Very funny," she replied dryly as they began to get dressed.
"Thanks," they said as he walked out. Kim opened the duffel bag she'd brought along from home and pulled out her mission clothes. Ron had already managed to struggle into his on the car ride over, but Kim opted to wait and not give herself a wedgie. Now she quickly stripped down and redressed - all the time making sure Ron had his back turned - before pulling the suit on over her mission clothes. Once they were both fully dressed; looking like a pair of highway cones in the reflective tangerine suits, a pair of technicians dressed in white walked in. They quickly attached the helmets and glove to the proper appendages and pulled the metal slides back to seal them closed.
Luckily, the faceplate of the helmet was raised so that they could breathe. The technicians told them that the gold tinted slide would only be closed in case of an emergency since the dark glass seriously impaired their vision, but that they would have to lower the Plexiglas section before launch. Ron tried to ask why but Kim cut him off; knowing the answer wouldn't be good. They were then led through a glass walled walkway to the launch-pad. Housed in the central-most building at the MSC, the MRBT sat on its tail pointing towards the ceiling.
A year earlier, Kim had been assigned a report on the Space Shuttle for her Computer Science class - why, she had no idea - and she found herself comparing this craft to the plans she had seen of the Orbiter. It, like the Shuttle; was attached to a large umber, metal fuel tank; whose contents would feed the engines during takeoff. The MRBT was built for high manverability and even higher speeds with its small, sleek design. The fuselage was about twenty-five meters long; narrow and smooth sided with two large rocket nozzles blossoming out the back. A band of thin, angular windows which encircled the upper section of the nose was all Kim could see of the cockpit. She could tell that the plane had been designed so - when in flight - the pilots looked at the instruments in front of them, not out at the landscape below them. The large delta wing, curving away gracefully from the body and a swept back, triangular tail-plane were completely moulded into the fuselage - all lines were smoothed out to virtually nothing. It gave the craft the ambience, the sense of speed. Even stationary, it looked fast.
The ship was painted a dark metallic grey, unlike the two tone Shuttle fuselage. Either it was a new type of heat shield, or the MRBT was designed to fly unseen. Ron noticed that the American flag and the words 'United States of America' had also been omitted from the body, which seemed unusual for such a craft. Usually the Space Centre like it when people knew they'd built the plane. Confronted with such a stealthy design, they wondered if the ship had been designed with a military use in mind.
The technicians ushered them across the pad to an elevator, which they rode up to the launch control centre where Kim had watched Monkeyfist's stolen rocket lift off with Ron aboard only months before. With the MRBT's rounded nose visible through the large glass windows, the two pilots were hastily explained their flight-path before being taken another prep room. A clump of technicians awaited them, and quickly attached various cords and tubes to their suits once they sat down on benches in the centre of the room. Radio, life support monitors and atmospheric pressure sensors were quickly snapped on without a word between the men, the oxygen purification system being the last to be connected.
This was a large, briefcase sized box covered in a thin layer of white cloth for shock protection. Two tubes ran from each box to the pressure suits, sliding into holes above the pectoral muscles. Any carbon dioxide exhaled would exit through one tube, be purified in the box, and re-enter the suit as oxygen through the other. This meant that neither of the pilots had to carry a large oxygen tank, and there was even a small store of oxygen in the tank in case of emergencies. They were warned that the system would hook into the MRBT's oxygen supply about three minutes after launch with a loud hiss.
"Thanks," Kim told them as she was led out with Ron onto the orange access walkway. She tried not to look through the metal mesh floor to the hard concrete twenty meters below her, but unfortunately she did. Kim had no idea why it made her dizzy, but the procession had to stop for a second while she regained her balance. She repeated her thanks to the technicians for their patience, and soon they were inside the MRBT. There both Kim and Ron needed a great deal of help climbing the ladder set into the floor up to their seats, and were eased into the large, padded chairs with the help of the now very limber and agile technicians. The plastic faceplate on the helmet was lowered when they were both seated, and a thumbs up was given as confirmation that there was oxygen flowing.
As soon as the men tightened the straps to a point just short of suffocation they wished Kim and Ron good luck and left the cabin - closing the heavy, pressure resistant door behind them. Sitting with gravity pressing her body back into her seat, Kim sat patiently and listened to the chatter on the radio as the ship finished it's preparations for launch. Looking at the controls in front of her, she was pleased to see that most of them were ones she had used before. Kim knew from experience that trying to control something using unfamiliar controls and instruments was hard enough; and going faster than the speed of sound made it even more difficult. And so a little slice of anxiety faded from her mind, only to be replaced by another worry or wonder.
Ron, on the other hand, was finding no solace in the cockpit, and instead was trying not to remember that he was about to fly in something little more than a big bottle-rocket. The words 'Remote Command Active' displayed on all the screens were especially worrying, since Ron was inherently distrusting of people controlling things from the ground. Especially after he'd seen a man fly a remote-controlled airplane straight into the ground on a clear, windless day - and he'd been an expert. So, he whiled away his time staring out the window in front of him at the large, burning white lights suspended from the hangar's ceiling and hoping they'd remember to open the launch doors soon.
Finally, after what seemed like hours but was barely seconds, they both heard Hutchins' voice requesting a go, no-go status on all the MRBT's systems. Once everything was reported to be in order, he began the sixty second countdown to launch. Kim checked her watch - clipped onto the wrist of her suit - and noticed it had been only twelve minutes since they'd walked in the building. She hoped that the MSC staff had been given enough time to prepare the craft, especially since she was about to be shot up to 100,000 feet above sea level in it. But, with the countdown reaching fifteen seconds, she put the thought out of her mind, placing her trust in the men and women at the Space Centre, and hoped like hell they had listened during training courses.
When Hutchins' reached ten, the call for engine start-up was made, and they heard a whirring somewhere behind their seats as the fuel pumps began to operate. At eight a deep rumble filled the cabin as the engines began their activation sequence. By five the force of the now-lit engines was shaking the cockpit like a soda can in the hands of a six year old. Kim and Ron were suddenly very glad for the foam padded ear flaps that kept their necks from being snapped off by the vibrations. The roar was deafening, and they could only tell when Hutchins had reached zero because the mission clock on the glare-shield switched on. They heard a series of groans as clamps and pipes were pulled away or blown off the side of the craft. The ship slowly began accelerating, and Ron looked forward to see snow falling through the now open launch doors; watching it pile up on their windscreen. He wondered if anyone had thought to deice the ship before it launched, but decided it was too late to worry anyway.
The ship was quickly out in the open night sky, its engines lighting up the empty fields around the Space Centre like twin suns. Monique, still at the party with friends, looked up from the patio to see an arrow of blinding white light shoot skywards. Everyone froze for a second - some thinking it was a missile, others that it was Santa Claus on steroids - and watched in silence as the rocket ascended into the grey storm clouds hanging over the city. Its fiery tail glowed orange as it travelled upwards, slowly rolling over to the east, and Monique whispered "Good luck Kim," as it slowly faded into the night.
The scene was not so peaceful in the cockpit, with the ship still shaking furiously as it travelled heavenwards at thousands of feet per second. Kim watched the altitude readings shoot up and though the numbers were going by so fast she could never read actual digits - she just knew they were really, really high up. Once the ship was through the clouds, the two passengers had an unprecedented clear view of the starry night above them since all the light pollution was filtered out by the clouds. They sat and watched the stars twinkle quietly above them, lost in the beauty of the moment, even while the cockpit shook and shuddered like a nudist with hypothermia. Just then a loud bang startled both of them, and Kim looked on the screen to see that the fuel tank had just been jettisoned. 'They could have told us that would happen,' Kim grumbled to herself as the nose dropped to an almost horizontal position at approximately 98,000 feet above sea level. The engines were still burning, and she wondered when they would cut out and the gliding portion of the flight would begin.
This was when the real roller coaster ride began, when the nose started to dip earthwards while the engines still burned at full power. Ron let out a frightened yelp, and Kim's eyes flared to the size of saucers as they plummeted ground-wards. The engines suddenly cut out, and they continued to fall noiselessly to the Earth; powerless to stop it since the controls were still on remote pilot. This was an unexpected reassurance, since Kim knew that unless any of the employees at MSC were feeling particularly murderous, they would do their best to keep them the pilots alive. Especially since the ship she was in command of probably cost something near to billion dollars to build.
"Ms. Possible, Ms. Possible," a male voice called out on the radio. "Do you read me?"
"Loud and clear, sir," Kim replied, recognizing the voice as Chuck Barrington, a radio operator back at MSC. "What's up Chuck?"
"Not much at the moment," Barrington admitted casually, having dropped the terse, controlled voice once he realized Kim knew him. Though his voice was still clear and his words well articulated to keep instructions as understandable as possible; the calm in his voice relieved some of the tension in the cockpit. "We're still controlling the plane from back here, and I'm supposed to tell you that you're now in the second stage of your flight."
"That would be the one where we fall really, really fast?" Ron butted in sarcastically.
"That's right Mr. Stoppable. You should being pulling out of it at sixty thousand feet, and the RCS will shut off pretty quick after that," Chuck told them.
"Until that happens we just sit still?" Kim asked as the plane passed through a patch of rough air, rocking the craft to the side a little and making Ron yelp again.
"That's right," the operator replied. "But it's only for another twenty seconds - you're already at seventy five and dropping fast. We'd like you to give us a shout when you have control of the ship; just so that we can make sure everything's okay and give you an update of the next portion of your trip. Roger that?"
"Roger that," said Kim. "Over and out."
"Over and out," Barrington replied, and a click signalled the disconnection of the radio for the time being.
He had been right - they had very little time to wait until the plane slowly began to rise out of its dive; its speed decreasing slightly as the nose rose to an angle descent of about five degrees.
"Remote command system shutoff in fifteen seconds, pilot control requested," a stern feminine voice called out. "Place hand on control yoke, place hand on control yoke."
Sensors on the control yoke were activated by touch, and once Kim gripped it with her left hand - placing her arm on the plastic rest provided for comfort - the computer spoke again:
"Pilot response positive, RCS shutdown in ten. nine. eight." Kim listened intently and hoped in her mind that she could actually fly this thing. But now was not the time for second thoughts, and she swallowed her fears as the joystick stiffened slightly in her hand.
"RCS shutdown complete, manual control now active," the voice informed them as the displays suddenly lit up; showing the artificial horizon, radar screen, engine monitoring system and everything else as Kim had remembered it from her last piloting experience.
"That was easy enough," she commented to Ron, and made a few slight adjustments to the craft's attitude before contacting Middleton control:
"MSC, this is Kim Possible. Do you read me?"
"We read you, Ms. Possible. How's it feel to be flying?" Chuck asked her cheerfully.
"Let's not jinx me, all right?" Kim replied jokingly.
"If you insist," he answered. "Now, you should have pulled out of the dive by now. You're on a slow, gliding descent, right?"
"Yep," Kim confirmed, checking her instruments as she spoke.
"From here it's a pretty smooth ride down to about ten thousand feet," Barrington told them. "So you'll have plenty of time to get used to the controls."
"What's past that?" Ron asked; taking over the radio conversation as Kim flew.
"One of the largest snowstorms the east coast has seen this century," was the operator's blunt reply.
"Wonderful," moaned Kim and Ron in unison.
"The computer should guide you through that pretty well though," Chuck assured them. "The final approach and landing are going to be the really hairy part though. New York has almost three feet of snow on the ground and JFK's snowploughs gave up hours ago."
"So how're we gonna land?" asked Ron.
"We're going to have you do a hard landing. It's where you land with your landing gear retracted. You'll have to land as slow as you can, and get on the ground really quickly," advised Chuck. "We've got it set up for you to land on runway 13 Right; their longest one. It's about 14,500 feet long, so you shouldn't have too much of a problem getting stopped in time."
"Sounds fine," Kim replied before Ron had a chance to express his displeasure. "Anything knew on the Drakken situation?"
"Not that I know of," Barrington replied. "We just got word that the deadline has been extended by fifteen minutes. You won't be so pressed for time now, but the storm's beginning to move out to sea."
"What does that mean?" inquired Ron.
"If it stops snowing, Dr. Drakken knows that the airport can have a runway cleared, and ready for a plane to depart on in ten minutes. With all the flights grounded because of the storm, he'll have no trouble finding a plane or pilot to get him out of the country within minutes either."
"So I take it we still need to get down there quick, fast and in a hurry," Kim observed grimly. "All right. Well, thanks for the help Mr. Barrington. We'll call you if we need anything else."
"Roger that. Over and out."
"Over and out," Kim said, ending the conversation.
The cockpit was silent with the pilot now concentrating on flying as the craft passed through some high altitude trade winds as they entered the jet stream over Cincinnati. Ron listened in on the radio as commercial flights below circled in to land, or at least tried to in the blizzard. His ears were continuously assaulted with calls for identification by air traffic controllers as the MRBT shot over their sectors. The small, fast moving blip with no more than NA-0000X (the locator number the computer automatically gave an unknown aircraft) next to it was probably causing a great deal of angst down below, and Ron hoped that the Space Centre had bothered to inform the government of its midnight mission. Otherwise Kim might have to start playing chicken with a couple of FA-18s when they neared New York. To his relief he heard a military aircraft inform one of the controllers that it was a reconnaissance aircraft working for the national weather service, and that the man should stop bothering the poor pilots up there. Those 'poor pilots' shared a smile at the thought of a harried controller wondering why in God's name would a reconnaissance aircraft become a multi-billion dollar weather balloon.
The calm was broken when the computer once again spoke; requesting 'airbrake setting two'. Without prompting from Kim, Ron reached over to the central pedestal and moved the small airbrake selector lever to the left of the throttle quadrant backwards two notches. In response they heard a mechanical whirr from the rear of the plane, and Kim pitched up the nose as per the flight director's orders to keep the plane from dropping too fast. They watched wordlessly as the airspeed began to drop rapidly, and Ron placed his hand over the engine start-up switches in case they needed extra power.
Fortunately the entire operation was being done to burn off some excess speed as they entered the lower atmosphere. Up until then they had been going at speeds exceeding the speed of sound as they raced the clock to New York. Now, with the custom built, damage resistant speed-brakes (which Ron saw were large slats rising up out of the trailing edge of the wing) their speed slowly ticked down to knots instead of Mach numbers. The nose was kept high to make sure the plane didn't begin dropping in altitude since the brake seriously affected how much lift the wings produced, and Ron watched in awe as they continued to descend with their nose raised at almost a twenty degree angle.
Nearing ten thousand feet - with the first dark silhouettes of storm clouds visible out the view ports - the computer ordered the retraction of the airbrakes. Ron pushed the lever forward, and Kim dropped the nose slowly as they continued their normal flight-path. Calm once again resumed in the cabin, as the wind softened for a moment during the transition period into rougher skies.
Soon though, the tension began to rise again, as they began to pass through the upper layers of the storm. Ron glanced down at the moving map to see the entire screen in front of them to be a massive yellow splotch. Even without reading the key he knew it wasn't a good sign, and he surreptitiously tightened his seatbelt a little more. Kim gritted her teeth as the turbulence rocked the ship back and forth, and kept her eyes glued to the artificial horizon. It was both too dark and too cloudy to see anything out the windows, so until they were within a few miles of the airport she wouldn't waste time looking at a matte black landscape. The winds grew stronger and stronger as they descended, and so did the snowfall. Ron reached up and switched on the de-icing system when ordered to by the computer, but did little else until they reached New York Approach airspace.
"NA-zero-zero-zero-zero-ex, do you copy," a controller asked.
"We copy," Ron replied, having been told to do so during their brief visit to the launch control centre in Middleton.
"You guys look like you wanna land," the controller observed wryly.
"Gee, ya think?" Ron asked sarcastically.
"All right - your people called me about ten minutes ago," the controller told them. "So I've go you vectored in on runway 13 Right at JFK. We've got nothing else in the sky - everyone's too smart to try and fly on a night like this - so you can fly straight in on bearing one-three-zero to the airport. Since visibility's about a quarter of a mile I wouldn't advise even lookin' out your window for the city - you won't see a thing."
"Thanks for the info," Ron said. "Anything else we need to know?"
"Yeah," the controller remembered. "I've got fifty bucks riding on you guys making it out alive, so you'd better fly right."
"Will do sir," Kim replied, the corner of her mouth upturned in a smile. "Over and out."
"Over and out."
They were now passing five thousand feet, and the weather was getting no better. The computer had automatically lit the landing lights when they passed the ten thousand mark, but it had made no difference. What used to be a dark grey wall of nothing in front of them was now a bright white wall of nothing, and the glow was beginning to give Ron a headache. He could barely see the edge of the wing out the rearmost view-port, and only because of the flashing strobe light on the forward tip did he know it was still there. To keep his mind occupied, and off thoughts of burning wreckage and mangled bodies, he began starting up the jet engines. Just in case they needed them, especially for the thrust reversers when they landed. The sequence was quick, and soon the twin turbofan engines in the rear of the craft were slowly spinning, set to idle.
"Ron, you all strapped in?" Kim asked, groaning slightly as another gust of wind slammed into the ship.
"Hell yeah!" he exclaimed, trying to lighten the mood a little. "You need any help?"
"Sure. Whatever the computer says - do it."
"Gotcha," he promised, and gripped the armrests firmly as they passed through another rough patch of air. By now they were being thrown all about the sky; one moment dropping, the next shooting up, followed by a hammering blast of air throwing them sideways. Ron had no time to worry about where they were going though, since he was soon engaged in extending flaps and trying to ignore the automatic; and annoying calls for the landing gear.
"Hey Middleton," he called over the radio. "How do we get computer to take five on the landing gear?"
"You can't, sorry," Chuck called back apologetically. "You're just going to have to live with it for a little while."
"Thanks," Ron mumbled, none too happy with the reply. He sat silently for a moment, and then turned to the pilot:
"Hey Kim, why do you always sign up for these jobs anyway?"
"You tell me," she managed to reply before returning to piloting. They were now only a mile from the runway, yet the clouds showed no sign of breaking. A hush fell on the cockpit - its occupants too worried about the landing to try and make conversation. Both knew that commercial airliners fitted with the most high-tech instrument landing systems and redundancy after redundancy would never even attempt a landing in such weather. Yet here they were doing just that without any prior training, in an experimental aircraft that had probably never been aloft before and with no landing gear to boot. Ron extended the flaps fully and watched the sky for the runway. Kim didn't even bother, knowing that it wouldn't matter if they could or couldn't see the runway - they'd still have to land.
At four hundred feet from the threshold the flashing approach lights finally came into view, followed seconds later by the runway itself. It was covered completely in snow - an avenue of white. All they could see were the border lights burning furiously through the drifts. Both pilot and co- pilot breathed a sigh of relief as the ship floated down through the sky to the hard, secure concrete below. Kim made a few final adjustments to keep the wings level, and raised the nose slightly as they shot over the airport perimeter fence. A scarce sixty feet from the ground and only a knot above the craft's stall speed; the crimson threshold lights flashed beneath them seconds before.
WHAM! The plane hit the ground with a jarring thud, and bounced into the air again before settling into the snow with a series of groans and crunches. Though they were now on solid ground, it wasn't over yet. Ron reached over and pulled the throttles as far back as they would go to activate the thrust reversers. Kim tugged the airbrake lever all the way back to one hundred percent, but it had little effect on their speed. Ron's last act before shutting his eyes in terror and compacting into a shivering ball of fear was to flick the braking parachute release button. They were jolted forward slightly as the 'chute opened up behind the aircraft, trapping air and creating drag to slow them. But it seemed to be doing almost nothing, and the craft continued to slide down the light-lined pathway with no sign of stopping. Its smooth underside found no traction with the slick snow, and they looked ahead to see a group of vehicles - with their lights flashing fluorescent orange - slowly begin to move out of the way. Kim tried in vain to use the rudder pedals and joystick to slew the craft sideways, hopefully slowing it. But the control surfaces were useless at low speeds. So Kim followed Ron's example and assumed the crash position.
As if by a miracle, and with only a few feet to spare, the MRBT finally slid to a halt in front of the convoy of snow-cats and emergency rescue vehicles. Kim reached over slowly, her hand shaking faintly from the adrenaline, and flipped the fuel cut-off switches - in effect shutting down the engines. She then scanned the cockpit for any warning lights, and seeing none; unbuckled her seatbelt. Ron heard the click of the metal clasp releasing, and opened his eyes to the wonderful sight of all his body parts still in the right places. He retracted the airbrakes and slowly shutdown all the systems before undoing his own restraints. Both then removed their helmets and breathed deeply - savouring the fresh air seeping in from outside. It was a welcome change from the stale, onboard air and they both removed the oxygen supply tubes from their suits before rising.
The hatch was surprisingly easy to open for something so bulky and complex. They slid down the yellow emergency slide to the awaiting airport officials where they were quickly covered in blankets (which were kind of useless, seeing as they were wearing suits resistant to minus sixty degree temperatures). Their ride to the terminal, they were told, would be there any minute.
"Well, that was fun," Kim commented as she looked over at the petrified expression on Ron's face.
"You'd better have a REALLY good present waiting for me at home," was all he growled in reply.
Author's note: Hope that was fun. If any of you need a little help envisioning an MRBT cockpit, look for a picture of the A340-600 cockpit. Once you have it, just place two orange suited teenagers in the seats, add a little snow outside the windows, make the cockpit a little smaller and you've got it. Oh, and there's two more throttle levers than there should be for an MRBT, along with a lot less switches and dials.
Oh, and I forgot to mention last time - I do not own Kim Possible or any other characters of the Disney Channel. Please don't sue me for whatever I write here.
Next update on December 17th. Happy holidays!