A Journey Across

Book 3 - Burning Hope

Chapter 4 - Turning Point

T-28:02:11:09

Jeb giggled. The plan was perfect. He looked back to make sure Applejack was still asleep. The loud snores she produced, as he looked to the copilot seat in the back, reassured him. He took a deep breath and screamed, "AJ wake up!" while pulling a yellow handle.

The pressure in the cabin sank quickly, leaving a weird feeling in his ears. At the same time the electric sound mufflers disabled and the cabin was filled with the screaming of the engines. Jeb pushed the control stick forward, letting the craft drop fast. The gauge indicated -1,2 Gees.

Applejack screeched as she woke up. Her face couldn't decide if it wanted to go pale or red, as the blood rushed out and got pushed back from the negative gee-forces.

Jeb laughed hard as he pushed the handle back in and pulled the craft back up, "Oh god, this was so totally worth it. Your face was hilarious." He continued giggling.

The farmer gave him a quick death stare of doom. As the adrenaline levels dropped she started giggling on her own. "If you do that again, I'll start pranking back," she laughed, "You shouldn't do things like this if you don't want to put me together afterwards."

Jeb calmed down, "Yeah, yeah. We'll arrive in 5 minutes. I thought, I should wake you up so I could prevent your poor friends from hearing your snoring. And I had to drop altitude anyways and I thought, 'Why not make it funny?'"

Applejack gave him a deadpanned look, "You know, I have a hole in me. I could literally spill my guts." They cabin went completely silent, aside the normal noise, for 2 minutes before they were interrupted by a slow, high pitched beeping. Jeb looked at the panel to figure out what happened. A yellow lamped labelled "Unknown Radar Contact" lit up once a second accompanied by the beep.

He pressed the transmit button on the radio, "Jeb to TARDIS."

After a few second the Doctor's voice came out of the speaker, "Doctor here, anything wrong up there?"

"First, I wanted to tell you that we will arrive in 3 minutes. Second, did you activate any sort of radar in your TARDIS?" Jeb asked.

A short silence before the timelord answered, "Actually, I'm about ten percent sure no. Why?"

Jeb looked confused, "I'm getting a radar contact and they clearly don't have radars here so I figured..." He was interrupted as the slow beeping was replaced by a faster, lower pitched one. Another lamp, this one red, lit up. It was labelled "Radar Homing Alarm".

A deafening silence laid over the cockpit before Jeb screamed in the radio, "WE'RE BEING TARGETED!" He pressed a button and three flashes blinded Applejack before he pushed the joystick rotating the aircraft vertical and pulling it up sideways. The beeping transformed into a steady tone. Jeb panicked and dropped more flares.

Outside the vessel, two short white missiles darted towards the Titan, not irritated by the flares, homing in on their target. The Titan was hit by one of the missiles while the other on missed, quickly running out of fuel and dropping out of the sky before it could turn around.

The Titan was hit on its right broadside, the explosion covering the whole craft for a brief second.

"WE'VE BEEN HIT!" screamed Jeb into the radio. He tried to pull up the craft while the Doctor's voice came out of the radio, drowned in the now screeching and groaning plane. The panel in front of him lit up in mostly red and yellow colors. Some blinking or accompanied by beeping.

The seven big indicators on the top remained unlit, which calmed Jeb a second before also some of those lit up. They were imprinted with "ATTITUDE CONTROL FAILURE" and "MASTER ALARM". Jeb quit the master alarm before further inspecting the panel. It took him multiple seconds before noticing the pattern.

"Hydraulics Failure!" screamed Jeb in the radio. The same second the craft dropped pointing it's nose towards the distant ground. He pulled with all force he had but the craft didn't change course. He looked up at the main panel again, inspecting the light patterns.

After he changed a few settings, Jeb noticed that Applejack was screaming in the back. "Hey, calm down. I'm the best pilot ever and I won't let anything happen to you," he reassured her. She calmed down and he turned back to the panel. The altimeter showed a height of 1,5 kilometers. "AJ, I need you too grab the Joystick and pull up as hard as you can while I try to reenable our controls." The farmer obeyed, pulling the stick as far as she could with her hooves while Jeb tried multiple settings.

Suddenly the craft jerked up again. "I got it, you can let go AJ," yelled Jeb, "The electrics still work," said Jeb as he took control of the craft again.

"What happened?" came the Doctor's voice out of the radio, now finally able to overtone the noise in the cockpit.

"We've been hit! We lost control on the left back wing!" reported Jebediah, "The hydraulics have failed and we are on backup electrics for the other wings." - he briefly looked at the indicators again - "And we just lost our right engine. It's spinning down but luckily not on fire. We will land in roughly a minute and it's gonna be a hard one."

The craft was still flying, although heavily damaged on it's right side. The left side didn't receive the full blast but still the left back wing caught a good part of it. The right engine had breathed in the gases and dusts of the explosion causing it to clog up.

The first contact with the runway was hard, almost breaking off the front wheels. When they finally touched down completely, Jeb ignited the breaking rockets in the muzzle of the craft. 16 seperate solid fuel boosters lit up, decelerating the vessel with 89 m/s^2. Applejack was pushed in the seat belts making her sick, almost wanting throwing up but she kept it down.

The craft had finally slithered to a halt when Jeb saw the Doctor and Rose running towards him. He opened the cockpit and helped a very confused Applejack out, trying to keep her coat over her. The astronaut stepped out of his cockpit and inspected the now damaged and smoking Titan.

"Are you okay?" asked Rose when she finally reached them.

"What the hell was that?" yelled Jeb in response.