アニメ4

he caught the 1. Above him the screens were still scrolling. Eight seconds.
Suddenly the cockpit seemed to sway, an air pocket that
even the Daedalus' advanced structural mode control sys¬tem couldn't damp out entirely. Now Androv was talking to Petra, going for a sliver more altitude. Seven seconds.
"Michael." Eva was watching, her face still drawn from the acceleration. "Is it—?"
"It's the gloves. The damned gloves. I'm . . ." Then he punched in the first 9.
In the back of his mind he noted that the cockpit was adjusting as Daedalus rotated, increasing attitude . . .
He got another 9. But his grip on the "calculator" was slipping, pressing toward the floor as the G-forces of accel¬eration weighed against him. He checked the screens again and saw that three seconds remained.
Now Androv was grappling to keep control of the throt¬tle, while issuing instructions to Petra.
Am I about to disable her? he wondered. If I do, can he manage this nightmare manually? What if Mino was only bluffing?
Two seconds.
A final, bright green 9 appeared on the liquid crystal readout.
“Alert. AI system malfunction.” It was the toneless voice of Petra. She sounded vaguely annoyed.
Something had happened. Two of the screens on the wall above had just gone blank, but Daedalus continued to climb.
"Dr. Vance, we are now going to recall the plane. We have ordered a wing of fighter-interceptors scrambled from the Dolinsk airbase on Sakhalin. They will escort you back."
Whoops. So that was what he was telling the Soviet brass to do. Get up some hardware fast. This could well be the shortest flight since the Wright brothers'.
Then he heard Androv's helmet mike click on.
"This is Daedalus I. Do you copy me?"
"Major, you—" Mino began.
"Copy this, you bastard. Fuck you. Repeat. Fuck you. I've disabled your fucking AI module."
"You disabled it?"
"That's a roger. Do you read me, you murdering son-of-a-bitch? FUCK YOU!" He clicked off his mike
Vance was moving slowly across the cockpit, headed back to his own G-seat. As he settled himself and reached for the straps, he glanced up at the screens to check their flight data—altitude, speed, vector, G-force, fuel consump¬tion. They were still on the deck, with an airspeed just under a thousand

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