He grabbed the yoke and pulled.
Nothing happened.
The synthetic voice kept chanting, “Pull up. Pull up,” like a taunt.
“The controls are fighting me,” he growled. “Autopilots still on. Even though it says it’s off.”
Which meant whatever was commanding the plane wasn’t coming from inside the cockpit.
“We’ve been hacked,” I said. “Remotely.”
His jaw clenched. “Revenant wouldn’t risk losing us.”
“Unless they are done with us.”
“Or ARCHEON thinks we’re expendable,” he added.
Great. Two sets of psychopaths who might want us dead. Wonderful odds.
He fought the yoke again. “It’s not responding.”
I scanned the panel. The autopilot toggle read OFF, just like he’d said, but then the jet pushed into a steeper descent.
Okay.
If the brain is compromised, you yank the nerves.
I unlatched the breaker panel and yanked it open.
“What are you doing?” Andrei barked.
“Cutting power to the autopilot and avionics control,” I said. “If we pull the right breakers, we sever their leash.”
“‘Right breakers’ implies you know which ones those are.”
“I’m an analyst, not an idiot,” I shot back. “Revenant trained me for this. In theory.”
His eyes flicked to me. “In theory.”
“If you have a better idea, now would be a fantastic time.”
He didn’t.
Inside the little panel beside the cockpit controls, a mess of switches and labels stared back at me, half in Russian, half in English. I didn’t understand everything written there, but I did understand the important parts: some of these switches were keeping the plane under someone else’s control. And they needed to stop.
“Andrei, I think I can cut whatever the hell is flying this thing for us,” I said, running my fingers down the rows of breakers until I found the ones tied to the autopilot system. Luckily, those were in English.
“Do it!” he yelled, struggling against the yoke like he was wrestling a wild animal.
I pulled the first switch. The control stick in his hands jerked hard. The plane bucked as if something invisible let go of us for half a second.
“Again!” he shouted.
I yanked another.
This time the cabin lights flickered, the loud electronic warning went silent, and two of the screens in front of us stopped flashing like they were possessed. The whole jet shuddered, but it suddenly felt a lot less like a runaway roller coaster and more like a very large, very stubborn machine.
“How’s it feeling?” I asked.
