In dawn light, on the wet concrete beneath the courier's oval window, men with white gloves sign each other's slates while a truck with a flashing amber light goes past. When it happens, the scramjet is climbing high above the Pacific. The courier has settled into his calf-hide first class seat, is trying not to stare at the TV anchorwoman across the aisle. Stewards are taking back glasses in readiness for the interval of free fall at the top of the scramjet's sub-orbital arc. And in the hold, the device planted by one of the baggage inspectors fires a single microwave pulse that fries every processor in the scramjet's neural net.
All power goes out.
Cabin power, power to the fuel pumps of the air-breather motors, power to the control surfaces. The scramjet tumbles in an uncontrolled dive, the spine of its overstressed airframe shattering, the pressurised cabin exploding along welding seams, breaking up a kilometre above the Pacific. Over the next three days, US Navy ships gather from the ocean's heaving skin luggage and life-vests and seats and clothing, carbon fibre shards from the scramjet's wings and fragments of its titanium hull, and bodies and pieces of bodies. The tiny glass capillary tube, its seal broken, drifts more than twenty kilometres north before it finally sinks. All rights reserved.