Drone (+audio)

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Flight 630 at 37,000 feet
12 nautical miles north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

The flight attendant stepped up to her seat—4E—which had never been her favorite on a 767-300. At least the cabin setup was in the familiar 261-seat, 2-class configuration, currently running at a seventy-three percent load capacity with a standard crew of ten and one ride-along FAA inspector in the cockpit jump seat.
“Excuse me, are you Miranda Chase?”
She nodded.
The attendant made a face that she couldn’t interpret.
A frown? Did that indicate anger?
He turned away before she could consider the possibilities and, without another word, returned to his station at the front of the cabin.
Miranda once again straightened the emergency exit plan that the flight’s vibrations kept shifting askew in its pocket.
This flight from yesterday’s meeting at LAX to today’s DC lunch meeting at the National Transportation Safety Board’s headquarters departed so early that she’d decided to spend the night in the airline’s executive lounge working on various aviation accident reports. She never slept on a flight and would have to catch up on her sleep tonight.
Miranda felt the shift as the plane turned into a modest five-degree bank to the left. The bright rays of dawn over the New Mexico desert shifted from the left-hand windows to the right side.
At due north, she heard the Rolls-Royce RB211 engines (quite a pleasant high tone compared to the Pratt & Whitney PW4000 that she always found unnerving) ease off ever so slightly, signaling a slow descent. The pilot was transitioning from an eastbound course that would be flown at an odd number of thousands of feet to a westbound one that must be flown at an even number.
The flight attendant then picked up the intercom phone and a loud squawk sounded through the cabin. Most people would be asleep and there were soft complaints and rustling down the length of the aircraft.
“We regret to inform you that there is an emergency on the ground. I repeat, there is nothing wrong with the plane. We are being routed back to Las Vegas, where we will disembark one passenger, refuel, and then continue our flight to DC. Our apologies for the inconvenience.”
There were now shouts of complaint all up and down the aisle.
The flight attendant was staring straight at her as he slammed the intercom back into its cradle with significantly greater force than was required to seat it properly.
Oh. It was her they would be disembarking. That meant there was a crash in need of an NTSB investigator—a major one if they were flying back an hour in the wrong direction.
Thankfully, she always had her site kit with her.
For some reason, her seatmate was muttering something foul. Miranda ignored it and began to prepare herself.
Only the crash mattered.
She straightened the exit plan once more. It had shifted the other way with the changing harmonic from the RB211 engines.

***
Chengdu, Central China
Air Force Major Wang Fan eased back on the joystick of the final prototype Shenyang J-31 jet—designed exclusively for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force. In response, China’s newest fighter jet leapt upward like a catapult’s missile from the PLAAF base in the flatlands surrounding the towering city of Chengdu.
It felt as he’d just been grasped by Chen Mei-Li.
Never had a woman made him feel like such a man. Fan hadn’t known that he could be taken past the ultimate peak so many times in a single night. More than once he’d half feared that his given name would come true and he would die collapsed upon her—his fellow test pilots often teased him about his first name, Fan, meaning “mortal.”