heard since takeoff.
It had become uneven.
Harsh.
Wrong.
Pauline had heard that sound before, decades ago, in the Mojave Desert, when a prototype aircraft had begun shaking violently during a test flight and the engineers on the ground had suddenly gone silent.
Back then, she had been thirty-two years old, wearing a flight suit, a helmet, and the call sign Widow 6.
Now she was seventy-one, traveling in a red jacket with silver hair tucked behind her ears, and the young first officer standing in front of her seemed
