Dreamland

“Flaps. Optimum takeoff configuration. Go,” Brea

“Seventy knots, eighty,” read the copilot.

The wings strained at the top of the plane, anxious to lift her into the sky. Brea

“Gear up,” Bree told the computer.

“Gear up and safe,” reported the computer as the giant wheel assemblies folded into the undercarriage.

Brea

Brea

“Why?”

“Come on. You can’t see anything from there.”

“You’re not afraid of flying, are you, Ray?” asked the copilot.

Rubeo narrowed his eyes into a glare; he hated to be called Ray.

“Any monkey can fly,” he said as Chris eased out from behind the copilot’s station. Still, Rubeo hesitated, and Brea

Not that he would admit it. He frowned deeply as he sat down next to her.

“You might want to hitch up the restraints,” she suggested.

“I intend on it,” said Rubeo.

She noticed a definite green tint around his gills. Brea

“Good morning, and thank you for choosing Dreamland Airlines,” she said. “I’m Captain Brea

“Yuk, yuk,” mouthed Rubeo.

“On a serious note,” Bree continued, “I would remind you that we are an experimental aircraft. Our systems are held together by bubble gum and duct tape. I do expect that you will remain strapped to your parachutes and snug your skull buckets. You too, Sergeant Parsons.”

“Don’t worry about me, Captain,” answered Greasy Hands.

“If you look out the port windows, you’ll see the Z27 test range, where our friends in the Army are testing their new pulse antimissile system.” Brea

“Very fu

Brea

“The B-52 is sometimes called the BUFF—for big, ugly, fat uh, fella, shall we say?” Brea

Rubeo ignored her, staring straight out the front windscreen.

“In June 1946,” continued Brea

“Damn straight,” said Greasy Hands.

Brea

“It was just about that time when the wizards at Pratt & Whitney came up with the J57 jet engine. It was a V-8 for airplanes, capable of delivering 7,500 pounds of thrust without popping a gasket. An Air Force officer looked at the Boeing turboprop proposal one cold Thursday in October 1948 and declared it obsolete. Then he showed the team the specs for the P&Ws and sent them away. They called the next morning from their hotel and promised he’d have a design on his desk Monday. The engineers worked like demons, even building a balsa-wood model. When Monday rolled around, they had invented history’s longest flying bomber, arguably the most versatile and successful military aircraft ever conceived. Through 774 iterations, encompassing eight major families and an almost unfathomable number of alterations and updates, the B-52 has served for nearly fifty years as America’s primary ma

“Jeez, it is older than Dr. Ray,” said the staff sergeant sitting with Parsons below.

“Hardy, har, har,” answered Rubeo.

His response got a better laugh than the original line.

Brea

“Now where was I?” she said. “Oh, yes. I should probably note that our new power plants are derived from the engines used by the Boeing 767. They feature considerably more thrust, so much so that Fort Two is currently fitted with one at each engine root instead of the original pair. If my math is correct, that’s four instead of eight. Even so, Fort Two has broken the sound barrier in level flight at 55,000 feet.”

That was an incredibly impressive statistic, since it was impossible for even a “clean” B-52 with minimal load and stock power plants.

“We are, as you may know, testing several engine configurations for the Megafortress,” she continued. “Fort Two is presently the only one with the Xs. And one of our planes—Raven, which we’ve used for ECM tests and Flighthawk drops—still has the original P&Ws. Needless to say, these power plants are better, increasing the plane’s already prodigious range to slightly over ten thousand miles—though most of that’s downhill.”

No one laughed. Tough crowd.

“The B-52 was at least theoretically obsolete by the 1960’s,” said Brea