Destiny often works in quiet and mysterious ways,
But sometimes it takes you by the hand and drags you kicking and screaming.
"Captain!" Max called out as he bolted up the steps two at a time. Though panic nipped at his heels, he wasn't ready to give into it just yet. "Inboard port engine is burning…" he announced as he pushed open the cockpit door and made his way up to the pilots command chair. He half expected Cap'n Ron to say something along the lines of "No shit Sherlock," but instead Max was greeted by silence… and an empty seat.
"Dorothy, where is…" he began as he glanced over to the co-pilots station, only to find it vacant as well.
Slowly Max turned towards where, only minutes before, Torque had been working to reestablish power to the flight radar. Wires and cabling extruded from the open fuse panel and he could see the shunt Torque had used as a bypass… but the large black man was nowhere to be seen. 'What the hell is going on,' his mind questioned as he ducked out of the cockpit and slowly wandered down the connecting corridor looking for Rabbit and Q-Ball.
The only evidence of the bleeding Loadmaster and his cute assistant was found in the crew's galley. The folding table the crew had meals at should have been stored and locked while flying through such a nasty storm. Instead it was out and had the contents from one of the first aid boxes strewn over it. But as for Rabbit and Q-Ball, there was no sign. In an odd daze, Max checked the rest of the crew's flight cabins and though he found everything in order, he also found that he was alone on the C-5B.
At this point confusion far outweighed any form of fear as he slowly made his way back to the cockpit and slipped into the pilot's chair. "So now what," he posed the question to the empty room.
Due to the military's ideals that there should be fail safe contingencies for every situation that can or might arise, a crew member of any given vehicle, be it a tank, an assault transport, or in this case… a C-5 Galaxy, should be able to perform any and all jobs required of that vehicle should one or more of its personnel be unable or unfit to perform their assigned job. This meant that Max needed to not only know the proper way to load the plane, but fly it as well.
And Max could fly a plane; he had flow his grandfather's single engine, Piper Cub crop-duster hundreds of hours… But a C-5 Galaxy was not a crop-duster.
In the Cub, there were only 7 instruments you had to keep an eye on while in flight; airspeed indicator, altitude indicator (artificial horizon), vertical speed indicator (rate of climb), altimeter,magnetic compass, turn and bank indicator (aircraft attitude), and fuel.
Because a C-5 had four engines, it had four times the gizmos 'n' gadgets. The original instrument panel for the C-5 was a vast array of gauges, switches and toggles. However, most of the avionics were modernized in 2002 when the majority of the C-5B's got overhauled. Now, instead of starting at his left elbow, and running across the cockpit to the far right hand side of the co-pilots seat, the whole thing was run by computers and simplified into four display screens, a large computer and a hand full of switches.
This was all fine and dandy, when the power wasn't out.
So instead of a huge cluster of out-of-date instruments that worked, he instead had four blank screens and a giant electronic paperweight that took up a great deal of space between the two command chairs. On top of that, no power meant no hydraulics, so Max was stuck trying to fly the dying plane by wire.
Luckily not everything was dead. There were still a few things that didn't require power to work, or had their own back-up source. The back-up altitude and air speed indicators ran off outside air piped in, and passed over gyros. Direction was a floating compass with hash marks. Pitch of the wings worked off a ball of mercury in a glass, crescent shaped tube. And finally there was fuel. While there was an electronic gauge for fuel, there was also a gauge that used liquid presser to tell you how much of the go-go juice you had.
But trying to read the instruments by the red glow of the emergency lights was next to impossible. "Time to improvise," the memory of his grandfather, the man who had raised him after his parents died, came back in a rush. The old man had a vast farm in Kentucky where he bred horses, grew corn and did what he could to take care of Max by himself. One of the first things he taught Max was that if something broke, you fixed it. If you didn't have the right parts, you improvised or "You MacGyvered it," the old man told him.
Instantly he was up and digging though Torque's station until he found what he was after. A pen sized Maglight and duct-tape. Quickly he lowered the armrest of the co-pilot's seat and after aiming the small light just right, he taped it down… using a good bit of the roll to do so.
Now that he could see the fight instruments, he climbed back into the pilots chair and buckled himself in.
"Ok, now run though your checklist boy," his grandfather's voice echoed back to him, and for a moment in time, Max was 14 again. The sound of the Piper Cub's single engine droned on in a strange purr, as the weathered old man who sat behind, coached him on. "Come on, Boy, used that head of yours for something besides a hat-rack and think… what do you do first?"
"I check my horizon line first, making sure I'm flying level," he spoke the words as they came to him. "Then the altimeter. Air speed is next followed by direction and fuel."
"Then what are you waiting for boy?"
Blinking back the memory, Max went to work. The horizon line told him he was slightly nose heavy while in a gentle bank to port, and while the plane had been flying at twenty thousand feet above sea level, he was currently a twelve thousand and dropping. As for the compass, what had been an easterly flight, he now found, was the plane heading almost due north. While all of that should have alarmed him, it was the fuel gage that suddenly filled him with dread.
Reaching out, he gently tapped the gauge with a finger in hopes that the indicator was stuck and giving the wrong reading. Yet the needle didn't move from where it pointed… it hovered over zero.
Checking his watch, Max could only sit there in an odd state of shock. They had completed a mid-air refueling only three hours ago, so the wing tanks should still be half full. Sure they had flown headlong into a storm, but even that couldn't have eaten that much more gas. So where the hell had all the fuel gone?
And then he remembered the port inboard engine and his mind went to work. While a lightning strike on a jet turbine shouldn't make it explode into flames, it could have hit any number of things and knocked them loose. If a fan blade came off just right, and he had seen videos where it had, it would cause the high tech machine to disintegrate into a ball of flaming debris. And unless one shut off the fuel to said engine, the pumps would continue to feed gas to the flames.
"Ok, first things first," he said, though no one was listening. "Let's get that fire out!"
Grasping the throttle for inboard engine number 3, he tried to yank it back as fast as possible so that the fire couldn't follow the dwindling fuel up the gas line and into the wing tanks. But the throttle wouldn't move. Arching a questioning eyebrow, he tried to figure out what would have locked the handle in place. It came to him while he stared blankly at the instrument panel.
There it was, probably running on back-up power, but there it was. One of the few indicator lights that slowly flashed before him, was the auto-pilot. Without thinking he calmly reached out and flipped the toggle to off… and regretted everything that came after.
With nothing holding the large plane on its dwindling course, the C-5 nosed over hard to port and rolled onto her back.
With the world upside down, the 400,000 plus pounds of cargo was now placing a lot of strain on the Galaxy in a way the designers at Lockheed had never intended. And yet, no matter what he tried, the plane refused to right herself. All around him, Max could hear the sounds of groaning metal as the stress on the plane made it flex and pop. If he didn't act quickly, the gigantic aircraft's wings would be ripped off by the stress.
Thanking the powers that be for the insight of buckling his ass in earlier, he now said a quiet prayer that what he was about to do, would work. With the plane already inverted, he set his feet and pulled back on yoke with all his might… and oh so slowly, the C-5B began to respond.
The fighter jocks called it an Inverted Immelmann turn. While upside-down, one kicked the elevators over and pointed the nose of the plane straight down, once done, you just kept the half loop going until the plane pulled itself out and was once again in normal level flight. That was all well and good if you were in an F-22 Raptor. They were made for aerial combat and offensive maneuvering. Max was in a jumbo cargo plane…
Now that the C-5 was in a nose dive, Max became aware of a few things. One was that he was losing precious altitude at an alarming rate. The other was that there was a city directly in his path of descent. Why he wasn't over a vast unfriendly ocean, he hadn't a clue… but it was a good size city judging by the vast expanse of lights. 'Jeez, I wonder how many buildings will be destroyed when I plow into the ground?' the morbid thought crossed his mind.
"No, Not Yet," Max cried as every heart beat brought him closer to death. "Come On Hannah, You Fucking Bitch, Pull Up!" The mixed scream of defiance and rage helped to push the negative thoughts out of his head, while at the same time, had an interesting affect on the plane. Little by little, as the city grew ahead of him, Hannah's nose began to lift.
The problem was that for every second the plane fell out of the sky, she also picked up speed. So as the altimeter ticked past four thousand feet, the airspeed indicator climbed past 620 miles an hour. The strain of trying to pull her 769,000 lb bulk out of the dive was beginning to take its affect. Somewhere in the plane, metal buckled, rivets popped and welds ripped.
And yet, defying all odds, the C-5B held together.
As the Galaxy gradually settled back into level flight, Max was finally able to let out a sigh and wiped away the sweat that now trickled down his forehead. With the landscape now less than a thousand feet below the C-5's belly, and flashing past at a rocketing 650 mph, the junior flight mechanic allowed himself a moment to relax. Sure she was exceeding her rated cruising speed, and probably had irreparable damage done to her flight frame. But they were both alive and still flying.
The only problem Max failed to take into account was that the altimeter showed an aircraft's height above sea-level, not its height above the ground. So as he piloted the C-5B on a now straight south cores, following a twisting river, the trees and ground were slowly getting closer. Several more small towns would pass by before Max took note of the world outside the cockpit and began to make adjustments accordingly.
If Max was going to find a place to land… or crash, it would have to be soon.
Unfortunately it would have to be crash, for while he was rechecking his instruments, the sickening sound of one of the turbines flaming out reverberated though the plane. One look told him everything. Engine one on the starboard wing had just run out of fuel. Max quickly glanced out the cockpit, hoping to find a large flat place to ditch, only to discovered he had unconsciously followed the river into a wide basin flanked on either side by high mountains.
What was worse was the rather high peek and, though slightly cartoony looking, a brightly lit castle that loomed ahead of the C-5B.
"Come along Nightwing, I don't want Princess Luna to know we were absent from our post."
"And whose fault is that, I wonder," the Nightguard trainee asked.
"To place blame would be unproductive at this time, Nightwing," the older pony gave a snort.
"Only because you're the one it would be placed upon," she snapped back as she raced along the outer battlement. "We should have left 10 minutes ago, but you just had to roll toughs stupid dice one more time!"
"Now listen here you…" Dante halted in his headlong rush and spun around to chastise his partner, only he suddenly lost the ability to speak. If he hadn't turned around, he never would have noticed it. The "It" was traveling remarkably fast and looked to be on a collision course with the lower half of Canterlot Castle. "What in the name of Celestia?"
"Hey now, don't change the subject," Nightwing stood her ground.
"Wing, look…"
"No, you were about to say something and…" she was interrupted when Sergeant Dante reached up and turned her head. Even she couldn't miss what was approaching.
Pony gliders, hot-air balloons and Sky-Ships were nothing new to the ponies of Equestria, and were used all the time, so both Night Soldiers knew instantly that what flew towards them was a machine built for flight and that it was in trouble. "Whatever it is, they won't last long with that wing on fire." Nightwing calmly noted.
The sergeant wholly understood his comrades' comment, yet as he watched, he could see the air craft fighting for altitude. However it was where the craft was heading that froze his hooves to the battlement. "Hey Sarg…" Night began as the machine sped ever closer, her armor beginning to rattle. "Is it just me, or is that thing heading straight for us?!"
Just as it looked like the craft was done for, and that tomorrow, thousands of rescue ponies would be sent to search the rubble that had once been Canterlot for survivors… the craft banked hard to the right. Together Nightwing and Dante cheered when, with a roar that shook the castle's very foundation, the machine finally rocketed past… its huge left wing barely missing the gigantic tower that housed Celestia's bedroom. "Oh thank the Sisters…" the two hooped for joy while they watched the craft disappear past the walls and continue on its journey.
What they didn't know was that the flying machine only had seconds left to live.