The Fall

by R. J. Pineiro

Genres: Alternative History sci-fi; Urban Fantasy

Synopsis

In R. J. Pineiro's The Fall, a sci-fi thriller, a man jumps from the upper-most reaches of the atmosphere and vanishes, ending up on an alternate Earth where he died five years earlier.

Jack Taylor has always been an adrenaline junkie. As a federal contractor, he does dangerous jobs for the government that fall out of the realm of the SEALS and the Marines. And this next job is right up his alley. Jack has been assigned to test an orbital jump and if it works, the United States government will have a new strategy against enemy countries.

Despite Jack's soaring career, his personal life is in shambles. He and his wife Angela are both workaholics and are on the verge of getting a divorce. But the night before his jump, Jack and Angela begin to rekindle their romance and their relationship holds promise for repair. Then comes the day of Jack's big jump. He doesn't burn up like some predicted—instead, he hits the speed of sound and disappears.
Jack wakes up in an alternate universe. One where he died during a mission five years earlier and where Angela is still madly in love with him. But in this world, his boss, Pete, has turned to the dark side, is working against him, and the government is now on his tail. Jack must return to his own world but the only way for him to do that is to perform another orbital jump. This time is more difficult though—no one wants to see him go.

Jack's adrenaline is contagious—The Fall will keep readers on the edges of their seats, waiting to find out what crazy stunt Jack will perform next and to learn the fate of this charming, daredevil hero.

Release date: July 28, 2015

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 336

Sample

1

A WORTHY CAUSE



The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause.

-Theodore Roosevelt

What goes up must come down, thought Jack Taylor as his gloved hands gripped the handles framing the oval-shaped exit hatch of his windowless capsule.

He loved the adrenaline rush, riding atop the booster that had shot him off the Florida peninsula like a cannonball, giving him the gut-wrenching, suborbital ride of a lifetime for the past few minutes.

And that was the easy part.

The stereoscopic image painted on his helmet's polymer faceplate, slaved to the external cameras, displayed the rocket booster's fall to Earth as he rapidly decelerated while approaching the apogee of his programmed sixty-two-mile ballistic flight, skimming the Kármán Line, the official threshold where space began above sea level.

But Jack was far more engrossed in the splendor and magnificence projecting beyond the spinning booster as it vanished in the vast carpet of mountains and plains dotted with dozens of lakes and meandering rivers stained with vivid hues of orange, red, and yellow-gold by the looming sun's wan light.

He flew temporarily weightless now, as his ballistic flight reached its zenith high above glaring mirrors of infinite shapes and sizes surrounded by forests, agricultural crops, mountain ranges, cities, and grids of roads and highways-all framed by endless coastal plains, by the eastern seaboard projecting far north into the darkening curvature of Planet Earth and the stars beyond.

The soft whirr of his suit's environmental control and life support system broke the silence of space, the dead calm that Jack enjoyed as much as the cold and wonderfully refreshing pure air sprayed gently inside his helmet from the suit's liquid oxygen supply.

The familiar aromas of plastic and sweat filled his nostrils as Jack inhaled deeply, his gaze gravitating to the west. Tropical storm Claudette, which had moved up his launch schedule, gathered strength over the warm Gulf of Mexico, bright flashes of cloud-to-cloud lightning trembling across hundreds of miles as it twisted its way north.

"Stay the fuck away," he mumbled, glaring at Claudette's swirling clouds.

"Phoenix, KSC, we didn't quite copy that. Say again."

Shit. "Ah, nothing, KSC. Just enjoying the view," he replied to Pete Flaherty, his boss and longtime friend, who was acting as capsule communicator, or CapCom, for this mission down at Kennedy Space Center.

Jack heard a slight pause, probably Pete trying not to laugh, followed by a lively, "Copy that. Sixty seconds to Kármán."

"Roger," Jack replied, scanning the myriad displays projected all around the periphery of his helmet, marveling at his wife, Angela, the genius behind this amazing piece of hardware that he hoped would bring his ass down through sixty miles of hell in one piece to a smooth touchdown in a designated grassy field northeast of Orlando.

The Orbital Space Suit, nearly six years in the making, had his wife's ingenuity written all over it, from the amazing helmet displays, to the retina-controlled systems, integrated stability jets in the gloves and boots, a closed-loop oxygen system to eliminate the need for large tanks, and multiple of layers of titanium, Nomex, nylon, Mylar, and graphite to keep the intense heat from reaching the sensitive inner layers-all packaged in an incredibly light and flexible one-piece jumpsuit. The OSS just flowed. It was elegant, clean, and highly intuitive, minimizing the time it would take the wearer to grow familiar. Plus Angela had designed it with full modularization so it could be mass-produced for a new generation of American fighting forces.

And all courtesy of the slice of the DOD's extensive budget that Pete had managed to channel to this project.

"Thirty seconds to Kármán."

"Roger, KSC. All good up here," Jack said, glancing at the video projecting a vast void below him, feeling the reassuring mild stiffness of pressurized oxygen inside the suit.

Trapped inside this tiny pod hurtling at more than five thousand miles per hour to reach an altitude two and a half times as high as the well-advertised jump by "Fearless" Felix Baumgartner a few years earlier, Jack couldn't help but wonder if he had gone just a bit too far this time. This was not one of the relatively easier jumps from the Stratosphere that Baumgartner and USAF Colonel Joseph Kittinger before him had accomplished. Jack was at the official edge of space, deep in the unforgiving thermosphere, about to reach the exact height where Alan Shepard flew Freedom 7 back in 1961, marking America's entry into the space race with that historic fifteen-minute suborbital flight.

Yeah, but Shepard stayed inside the capsule, Jack.

He shook the thought away while tightening his grip on the handles, becoming hyperaware that everything sounded right. Inside his suit, sound was a primary sense, and Jack's trained ears listened to the whirring pumps not only feeding oxygen into the suit but also dumping exhaled carbon dioxide to keep his blood oxygenation at the proper level. Their constant-and reassuring-humming mixed with the occasional sound of nylon creaking as he inched closer to the exit hatch.

Just a walk in the park, he thought, remembering his prior job as a federal contractor for the U.S. government, testing gear and tactics before they became plans of record for SEAL teams, Army Rangers, and other elite fighting forces. The assignments had taken Jack from desert sands to icy mountain peaks, from the depths of the ocean to stormy heavens while pushing prototype equipment to the breaking point. From the latest skydiving rigs to leading-edge underwater gadgets, rappeling equipment, and every conceivable type of weapon, Jack was the Pentagon's leading test warrior, wringing out the kinks of prototype hardware and tactics for the benefit of America's fighting forces.

And this assignment was just another stepping stone in Jack's uniquely dangerous career. Pete had wasted no time signing him up for the elite Project Phoenix.

NASA hoped to breathe new life into its dying operations by proving to the Department of Defense the immense value of space jumps. If NASA perfected orbital jumps, the Department of Defense could have soldiers jumping from so high up that the enemies of the United States would never detect them in time. And this suborbital flight was the first step in the process. Angela was already finalizing the computer design of a suit that would allow a true orbital jump directly from the International Space Station-an assignment that Pete was already hard at work lobbying to fund.

But first, Jack had to succeed today.

Everything depends on it, he thought, activating the suit's BIST-Built-in Self Test-an algorithm developed by Angela to have the suit's master computer system test every module of the OSS, displaying the results in Jack's faceplate as well as in one of the large monitors in Mission Control. His primary concern was damage by the Gs he had endured during the ascent phase.

"All systems in the green, Phoenix," reported Pete from the Cape.

"Roger," Jack replied.

The press, which was under the impression that NASA was simply testing an early prototype suit designed to help astronauts abandon the International Space Station in case of emergency, was certainly having one hell of a field day with his latest stunt. From passing out and failing to open his chute to breaking up when hitting the speed of sound, or-Jack's favorite-his eyeballs and heart exploding while burning up in the atmosphere, the pundits were going crazy with their-

"Ten seconds to Kármán, Phoenix. OSS looking good."

"Roger that."

Focus, Jack, he thought, scanning the telemetry displayed on his visor, confirming that the OSS-the single-most compact and complex piece of equipment ever made by NASA-was fully functional, making this mission a go.

"Five seconds ... All systems nominal."

His tactile gloves clutching the handles flanking the exit hatch, his power boots pressed hard against the Velcro floor pads, Jack watched a single bead of sweat momentarily floating right in front of his eyes before the suit's recirculating system sucked it away.

"Three ... two ... one ... Kármán."

Point of no return. Jack took a deep breath as he watched, completely devoid of sound, the oval-shaped hatch blasting into space courtesy of a dozen explosive bolts in a pyrotechnic display of oranges and reds that ironically matched the myriad hues from the tunnel-like image of Earth beyond the pod's large opening.

Right up to Kármán, Jack had the ability to abort the mission and use the capsule's heat shields to return to Earth safely, just as Shepard had done decades before. NASA had built the pod as Plan B in case of a suit malfunction during the ascent phase. But just as Cortez burned the ships when conquering the New World to force his troops inland, NASA had also technically just burned Jack's ship. There was now no other way down but to jump.

"Well, good thing the suit's holding up," he said, before thinking, Thank you, Angie.

"Roger, Phoenix. All looks good down here as well ... hold on."

Jack dropped his gaze at Pete's last two words.

"Phoenix, this is General Hastings."

Really, dude? Right now?

The Pentagon had decided to place the entire operation-just twelve damned hours before the jump-under the direct command of General George Hastings, a senior member of the DOD overseeing committee who had never set foot at the Cape before. Jack had nearly lost it when he'd arrived at Kennedy Space Center last night to find an entourage of dark SUVs packed with a small army of soldiers and a couple of scientists from Los Alamos. Then an hour later, as NASA technicians were going through the process of getting him inside the multiple modules and layers of the OSS, Hastings made his appearance and had gone straight into a discussion about changing the descent profile, in direct conflict with Angela's instructions. A heated exchange followed between Hastings, Jack, and Angela.

No offense, General, but she's got the MIT Ph.D., not you, Jack had finally told him, prompting the general to storm out of the suit-up room to call the Pentagon. But in spite of clashing personalities, there was simply too much at stake, and there was no one else skilled enough-and perhaps crazy enough-to make this jump. So after a ten-minute conference call between the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House Chief of Staff, Hastings, and Pete, it was decided that the jump would go on as planned but with the reprogrammed descent profile requested by Hastings, and that Pete would find a way to keep Jack on a leash.

"General?" Jack finally said.

"Jack, you must accept the reprogrammed Alpha-B profile when you reenter the atmosphere. It is critical that..."

Jack tuned the general out while watching the Earth below him, leaning forward into the abyss, freeing his boots from the Velcro straps on the floor while still holding on to the exit handles, trying to listen to his suit rather than to Hastings. His mind focused on the job ahead, letting the general continue to rattle off the same garbage he had spewed back in the suit-up room.

This is the precise reason why so many well-planned military operations turn to shit, General.

But Jack held his tongue, trusting his wife, deciding to accept whatever descent profile appeared in his display.

Instead, he gazed at the nearly surreal view beyond the capsule as he waited for the timer to start the jump countdown sequence. It was one thing to view the world painted on his faceplate display by exterior cameras. It was an entirely different animal to actually see it from this altitude with his own eyes. No camera could capture the incredible depth and colors of planet Earth as he swung forward as much as he could while still holding on to the handles, projecting half of his body beyond the opening, milking the moment for as long as he could.

Even Claudette looked amazing from this altitude, its angered clouds alive with pulsating lightning resembling balls of light arcing across its twisting mass, trembling wildly in a rainbow of colors contrasting sharply with the bluish hues of the Gulf of Mexico as it slowly turned east towards the middle of the Florida peninsula.

Although seldom easily impressed, Jack took it all in, enjoying his very own fireworks show, filling his lungs, savoring the moment before his jump window opened, listening to his suit, to the droning pumps keeping the OSS's internal temperature at 70 degrees Fahrenheit, to the light beeps made by the master computer system as it ran yet another diagnostic, and even to the sound of his own breathing as he became nearly hypnotized by the view.

Somewhere in the background, Hastings was still talking, still dispensing orders.

Jack continued to ignore him, his eyes scanning his faceplate displays, confirming proper operation of all his systems, before returning to the cloud-to-cloud lightning, framed by the ocean and the Florida peninsula. Beyond it a sea of stars outlined Earth's delicate curvature, countless points glittering against the darkness of space.

A green numeral 20, projected in the middle of his faceplate, disrupted his cosmic sightseeing.

Lock and load time, he thought.

As the timer turned red and began the critical twenty-second countdown before the jump window closed, Jack remembered Alan Shepard in Freedom 7, recalled what later became known as Shepard's Prayer in the aviator's community thanks to the movie The Right Stuff.

"Dear God, please don't let me fuck up," he said, interrupting Hastings's monologue.

Then Jack lowered the heat shield over his visor and jumped into the abyss.

* * *

"He'd better know what in the fuck he's doing, Flaherty!" hissed George Hastings, the oversized Army general, while standing next to Pete at the CapCom station in the relatively modest Mission Control Room, occupying the second floor of an old space shuttle-era building recently refurbished for Project Phoenix in Launch Complex 39. In this windowless room, eighteen mission specialists sitting in three rows of six monitored every aspect of the launch. If successful, the next Pentagon grant would allow Pete to expand this Mission Control Room, add a second one at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and add an OSS Launch Module to the International Space Station, where America could house its first platoon of orbital jumpers ready to be deployed to any location on the globe.

"I thought you were going to keep him on a leash, dammit!" the general snarled before stepping back and crossing his massive arms while looking at the large displays monopolizing the entire front of the room.

Dr. Angela Taylor, sitting at the far end of the last row, shook her head while sipping her third energy drink in two hours, finishing it, and tossing it over her head and directly into a waste basket just five feet from the growling general with the blazing orange hair and freckles. The can banged loudly against the other two she had previously deposited in the same trash can.

That's another three-pointer, Grumpy.

Angela felt his stare on her as she loudly popped the lid of a fourth drink while glancing at her short fingernails, painted black to match her lipstick, before shifting her gaze between Jack's vitals, the descent profile display, and the suit's hundreds of internal monitors-telemetry that was broadcast through two passing satellites and one in geosynchronous orbit right above the jump as backup. In addition, the pod's final task was to shoot off in a parallel descent path to Jack's while providing them with high-resolution imagery for the first few minutes of the jump, before it burned up on reentry at around mile thirty. Then the cameras aboard a dozen high-altitude balloons parked along his planned route would pick up his epic fall right up to his final chute deployment, when ground cameras and several spotting helicopters would be waiting to record the final descent.

Everyone in that room-with the exception of Hastings and his annoying crew-had a specific task to handle, from managing the capsule's trajectory and tracking satellites, to the incoming weather system, the high-altitude balloons, distance to all other orbiting objects, and even working real-time with central Florida's air traffic controllers to create a twenty-mile-wide temporary flight restriction around Jack's planned descent path, also known as the "pipe."

On top of all that, the Air Force had a dozen fighter jets hauling high-frequency transmitters meant to keep all birds away from the pipe. The stakes were high, and the last thing NASA and the Pentagon needed was for Jack to hit a chunk of space debris or a damned seagull on his way down. But even the finest rocket-scientist minds couldn't anticipate every possible thing that could go wrong with a project of this complexity, and that very, very small-but still very, very real-probability of something going wrong kept Angela's heart rate high and her throat dry.

Come home to me, Jack, she thought, feeling immense pressure building up in her chest, just to realize she had stopped breathing.

Slowly inhaling through her nostrils and exhaling through her mouth, Angela took a sip of her drink and tried to control her growing heart rate, for a moment feeling ashamed that Jack's was actually lower than hers. But then again, Jack had always been in superb physical shape, which over the years meant that Angela also got in shape to keep up with him, from long runs, mountain climbing, and ocean kayaking to becoming his official self-defense training partner at home, an activity that typically ended in the bedroom. In return, Angela taught Jack to ride Triumph motorcycles and even got him to get a tattoo to match hers.

She grinned, glancing at the burning Triumph Bonneville T140 flanked by American and British flags on her right forearm, half covered by her lab coat.

The knowledge that Jack had one just like it up there somehow helped her steady her breathing.

You are some smooth operator, she thought, amazed that he could calm her down even from outer space.

But just as Jack could calm her down, he could also really push her buttons, bringing out the worst in her.

Their relationship hadn't been easy the past two years, with Jack signing up for every high-adrenaline military mission while she developed space suits for NASA.

What happened to us? she pondered as the countdown sequence ticked down in the upper left corner of her display. The glimmer in his brown eyes last night, as they shared homemade pasta while reviewing the various phases of his descent and last-minute adjustments to his space suit, had reawakened long-dormant feelings in Angela.

But you came along, you little fucker, she thought, glaring at Claudette in one of the large screens at the front of the room, remembering the cell phone vibrating on the dinner table, Pete informing them that an incoming weather system had moved up the jump. A car was already on the way to get them both to the Cape.

Angela sighed, recalling the feelings rekindled during their interrupted dinner-feelings long absent in their busy lives.

Two damn years, Jack, she thought, frowning. That's how long it had been since they'd really connected, since the fire of their initial years of marriage was quenched by the realities of their almost separate lives, driving a deep wedge between them, resulting in Jack sleeping more often on the couch than in their bedroom.

But there had been something there last night, a spark of years past, and a part of Angela was hoping to pick up where they had left off.

But first you need to do this jump, she thought, as Jack separated from the pod and instantly assumed the planned initial descent profile, opening his arms and legs as if he were flying, stretching the titanium alloy webbing from his waist to his elbows and in between his thighs. The idea, which had earned her another patent, came to Angela by watching sugar gliders jump from tree to tree.

"Phoenix, KSC. Jump plus five seconds. Looking good. All systems nominal. Pod ignition started. Ten seconds to drone deployment," Pete said while sitting back down at his station in the middle row as General Hastings stepped aside to confer with the pair of Los Alamos physicists he had brought down with him along with a dozen military personnel, which he called his "security detail."

"Roger that. Phoenix's good up here."

Hastings said something to his head of security, Captain Riggs, a steroids-enhanced brute who had come close to attacking Jack after last night's heated exchange with Hastings.

My money would have been on Jack, she thought with a grin, taking a sip while sizing up Riggs, who looked as if he ate rocks in his morning cereal. The man was certainly solid, with tight muscles visibly pressing against his dark uniform.

In fact, he looks too perfect, she thought, with his closely cropped blond hair, hard-edged features, and very fair skin-certainly a fine specimen of Aryan descent. And interestingly enough, all of Hastings's men had that look. Some had dark hair. One was Asian. Another black. But they all looked as if they were grown in the same place, like little toy soldiers, seldom making eye contact, and not one of them ever looked in her direction.

Maybe they're gay, she thought.

Or maybe the good general cuts off their balls like they used to do in the old days.

Riggs saluted the general, did a perfect about-face, and proceeded to direct his team of eunuchs to cover all entrances to Mission Control before approaching NASA's press coordinator in the back of the room.

She exhaled slowly, reminding herself that the brass was footing the bill. But if NASA could pull this off, perhaps Hastings, his pit bulls, and his pair of gurus would crawl back to whatever shithole they had come out of and let the real pros continue to drive this program.

She gave the Alamo scientists a furtive glance while biting her lower lip. The male one was in his sixties, bald, and a bit hunched over, with round glasses perched at the edge of his thin nose. The female was much younger, perhaps in her forties, rail thin, with ash-blond hair, light-colored eyes behind thick glasses, and a pasty complexion that suggested she probably didn't get outside much.

Maybe Hastings is doing her, she thought with another grin, finishing off her drink and executing another perfectly loud three-pointer.

She had never seen either one of them before last night, when she caught them in the suit-up room with their noses deep in the electronic guts of her baby, the product of nearly six years of painful design and redesign. Jack had to literally restrain her when Angela had instinctively reverted to her biker upbringing, turning into a junkyard dog about to mangle the visiting physicists, who scrambled out of the room.

She hoped she wouldn't see them ever again after today.

Angela had no clue yet, why there was a need for a pair of tablet-armed nerds sticking their noses in her project and scrubbing through the OSS computer network but she intended to find out. An alarm in the back of her head told her that the Pentagon brass didn't pull last-minute stunts like this one without a powerful motive.

But the cyber-sword cuts both ways, she thought with a slight grin. The same VIP accounts that allowed the Los Alamos scientists to connect their tablets into the OSS network had allowed Angela to load up a nice little virus into their portable devices, creating back doors that should give her access to their networks.

You get to see mine but I also get to see yours.

As soon as this jump was over, she would find out who they were and why they wanted to modify Jack's descent profile during the reentry phase from Alpha-G to Alpha-B.

She had gone over the data and it didn't make any sense. Alpha-B would increase the angle of descent by two degrees, keeping Jack supersonic for fifteen more seconds than planned, which could potentially set him off course by as much as three miles from his designated touchdown site northeast of Orlando. The Alpha adjustments, from A to K, were created to compensate for the winds aloft during reentry and keep the jumper on a mission-specified vertical track. Part of Project Phoenix's deliverables was touchdown accuracy to within ten feet of the intended target.

In the end, NASA had caved and agreed to program Hastings's Alpha-B descent profile. But just before the launch, Angela had used her secret back door into the OSS descent control algorithms to reprogram it back to Alpha-G while still keeping all systems reporting that they were set for Alpha-B.

It's my husband you're fucking with, General, not one of your eunuchs, she thought, glad that she had listened to the hacker in her and programmed multiple back doors into every system in the OSS network.

"Jump plus ten. Pod burn complete."

"Roger."

Pete looked over to Angela and gave her a reassuring thumbs-up. His soft features contrasted sharply with a pair of blue eyes gleaming with bold intelligence under a full head of dark hair.

He turned back toward his monitor. Pete's dark skin had the handsome damage of countless weekends sailing or skydiving with Jack. Those two went back to high school in New Jersey. Although Pete was captain of the chess team while Jack led the football team, they developed a deep friendship. Then Pete got an academic scholarship to Stanford's prestigious School of Engineering while Jack played football for Rutgers before joining the Navy, where he eventually screened for BUD/S, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training at Coronado. That led him straight to SEAL Team 3, followed by five years of missions in the Middle East's hottest spots and another two years with SEAL Team 4 in South America. When a mission in Colombia went south due to faulty combat gear, Jack signed up to test prototype military equipment for the Pentagon, feeling that he could best serve his country by working out the kinks in high-tech weaponry and gadgets before they became plans of record for America's fighting forces. Pete, on the other hand, accepted a contract with the Pentagon to develop America's next generation of weaponry, which led him to NASA and Project Phoenix, where he wasted no time in recruiting Jack.

Angela watched the ends of her lips curve up on her reflection on the flat-screen monitor, remembering the first time she laid eyes on the clean-cut Jack Taylor, rapidly deciding he was definitely not her type. Angela had grown up among the tough biker crowd that hung around her father's motorcycle shop in Cocoa Beach. The former SEAL, albeit ruggedly handsome and quite free-spirited, didn't trigger any feelings in her. And besides, she was too damn busy developing the OSS to give Jack's advances any serious thought. But somewhere along the way, he had turned her around, and before she knew it they were married.

Angela forced those thoughts aside while focusing on the data displayed on her monitor, confirming proper functionality of all systems. Everything was as it should be, including her secretly reprogrammed descent profile.

She pinched the bridge of her nose, seeking comfort by remembering Jack's final words just before he'd left the suit-up room. Beaming with confidence, he'd looked her in the eye and gave her the same damn line he'd always given her before going on a mission: Relax, honey. I'll be right back.

She took a deep breath, glancing around the room, trying very hard to keep it together while her husband dropped out of the sky like a fucking meteor.

Come home to me, Jack. Please come home.

* * *

Jack plummeted to Earth, at least according to the altimeter reading next to the mission timer. One mile down and sixty-one to go, but all he felt was a serene sense of floating in space as outside temperatures read 100 degrees Kelvin or about minus-280 degrees Fahrenheit.

Pretty damn cold, he thought, reaching almost five hundred miles per hour before the drone deployed. It wasn't really a parachute but more of a small winglike appendage to increase stability for a cleaner entry into the speed of sound.

Jack kept his profile steady now as he approached six hundred miles per hour, the mission timer shifting to red, which indicated he was almost supersonic.

"Seven hundred miles per hour and fifty-eight miles high, Phoenix. Looking good."

Jack was about to reply but felt a slight buffeting that couldn't be due to air molecules. He was way too far up for any of that.

"KSC, Phoenix, there's a slight-" Jack stopped. The buffeting vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

"Congratulations, Phoenix. You are Mach one point oh and climbing."

Well, I'll be damned. He had just punched through the sound barrier with little fanfare.

"Roger that. Phoenix is supersonic," Jack replied, limbs still stretched, keeping the tension in the stability webbing as he shot past eight hundred miles per hour at mile fifty-six.

The stars slowly dimmed as a violet halo-like glow extended radially around him.

Weird.

But he ignored it as Mach two came and went, as he dropped below the thermosphere and into the ionosphere while the suit kept him completely isolated from the harsh environment.

One minute and fifty-three miles to go, he thought, enjoying a deep breath of pure cold oxygen while reading the mission timer as his speed continued to climb due to a lack of an atmosphere. And that also meant no sound since there were no air mo