Eagle Station

With a very slight jolt, the Scion executive jet touched down. It rolled along the runway, braking smoothly as its turbofans spooled down. Outside the windows, the Sky Masters Aerospace complex slid past in a sprawling maze of huge aircraft hangars, office buildings, machine shops, labs, and warehouses.

Nadia reached across the aisle and touched Brad’s arm. “Welcome home,” she murmured.

“You, too,” he said, smiling now himself. “At least to one of them, anyway.” He nodded out the window at the snow-dusted brown heights towering a couple of thousand feet above the high desert plain. “It’s not exactly Kraków, though.”

“Not exactly, no,” she said with a quick, amused snort. “But we will be there soon enough.”

Brad nodded seriously. The date they’d picked out for their wedding was now just a few months away. What had once seemed like a far-off, fairy-tale dream took on more substance with every day that passed.

They’d first met almost five years before, at a time of grave crisis for Poland and its people. With the Russian Army massing on the border for a threatened invasion, the Poles had turned for help to Scion and its fledgling Iron Wolf Squadron. Nadia had been assigned as Polish president Piotr Wilk’s military liaison to the multinational unit. Later, she’d joined the squadron as a combat officer in her own right, serving at Brad’s side on several risky covert missions deep into Russian territory and later even into the United States itself. And what he’d thought might just be a short, fun fling — a “beautiful local girl takes pity on a lonely foreigner” kind of deal — had very quickly blossomed into a much deeper, lasting, and far more passionate romance.

The Scion jet taxied off the runway, swung through a wide turn, and came to a full stop not far from the airport operations center. Ground crewmen bundled up against the unseasonal chill were already rolling a mobile boarding ramp toward the Gulfstream’s forward cabin door.

Seeing it coming, Nadia unbuckled her seat belt and stood up — balancing gracefully on the twin tips of her black carbon-fiber running blades. Nearly two years before, she’d been severely wounded in a battle against Russian assassins sent to murder the man who was now America’s president. To save her life, trauma surgeons had been forced to amputate both legs below the knee. Months of painful rehabilitation and exhausting physical training had taught her to master these agile, incredibly flexible running blades, along with other, more conventional prosthetic limbs. But in the end, despite all her hard work, it had become clear that she would never be able to stay on active duty in Poland’s Special Forces. So, at Brad’s urging, she’d transferred to a joint Scion — Sky Masters private space enterprise based here in Nevada. Learning to fly the incredible S-series spaceplanes and work in outer space had been like a dream come true. In zero-G, her missing legs were no handicap at all… a fact she had proved beyond a doubt during Scion’s desperate assault on Russia’s Mars One orbital platform.

Brad offered her his arm as they waited for the aircraft’s lone steward to unlatch and open the door. Nadia took it gladly, not because she needed any physical support, but simply because she delighted in his touch and presence. Her first fears that a lingering sense of guilt about the injuries she’d suffered would drive him away had long since disappeared.

The door swung open in a blast of cold air, revealing Hunter “Boomer” Noble already ambling up the ramp to greet them. Wearing a huge, welcoming grin, he shook Brad’s hand and gave Nadia a quick hug. “Welcome back to the ass end of nowhere,” he declaimed. “Otherwise known as Battle Mountain — home of the sweetest flying machines known to mankind… and not much else.”

That was a typically Boomer-grade wild exaggeration, Brad thought with amusement. Since Sky Masters Aerospace moved its operations from Las Vegas, both the company and the surrounding area had blossomed — high-tech companies from all over the world moving here had turned the sleepy little mining town into a bustling, modern city.

When he wasn’t flying special missions for Scion, the tall, lanky Boomer Noble — so nicknamed because his early engine designs had a bad habit of unexpectedly and spectacularly exploding — was the chief of aerospace engineering for Sky Masters. He also ran the company’s advanced aircraft and spaceplane training programs. Not many other people could have managed what were essentially three-plus full-time jobs. But “work hard, play hard” had been Boomer’s motto for most of his life.

“Nice to see you, too,” Brad said, matching his friend’s grin.

“Say, where’s Vasey?” Boomer asked, peering inside the jet’s empty passenger cabin curiously. “You guys get tired of that hoity-toity British accent of his and dump him out somewhere over the Pacific?”