Kevin Anderson - Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

With a deliberate scraping sound, something large and powerful tore a wider opening in the hangar wall. From outside, a smoky haze obscured details, but Dex could see the ominous shapes form as they strode closer. Unable to run, he propped himself up, staring.

The trim figure of a dark-robed woman wearing large opaque glasses stepped imperiously over the rubble. She looked around, her impenetrable lenses seeming to scan the hangar's smoky interior. Flanking her were two seven-foot-tall walking robots. Each had a bullet-shaped head, a wasp-thin waist, and a pair of steel tentacles for arms. The tentacle arms twitched and thrashed, throwing off sparks as they touched the fallen debris.

Though pinned under the collapsed wall, Dex searched the rubble for any way to defend himself. His eyes widened when he spied his new prototype ray gun lying only a few feet away. If the sonic atomizer could melt a hole through a thick plate of steel, he knew it would make short work of those mechanical men.

The mysterious woman saw him, then strode toward him.

Caught in the rubble, Dex strained to reach the ray gun, but his fingers only grazed it. Finally hooking a knuckle around one of the decorative fins, he drew the futuristic weapon closer. At last he scooped it into his hand, turned the emission nozzle toward the nearest of the two tentacled robots, and fired a volley of concentric shimmering energy rings.

The beam from the sonic atomizer slammed into the robot's midsection, and the metal armor of its torso glowed white-hot. Its tentacles flailed, throwing off wild sparks, and the walking robot slumped forward, dropping to the piles of rubble on the hangar floor, as dead as a machine could be.

"One down!" Dex turned to fire at the second walking robot, but it was too quick for him. Serpentine coils lashed out, wrapping around Dex's wrist, and a flash of pain made him drop the ray gun. Another steel-cable tentacle easily swept the heavy rubble aside, freeing Dex's leg. Then the robot wrapped a tentacle around his waist and lifted him into the air like a doll.

Dex struggled in vain, unable to wrest himself from the robot's grasp. The tentacles tightened. He looked at the torn map fragment in his hand, desperate. Wheels were turning in his head.

As he rocketed away from the city and out over the metal gray Atlantic, Sky Captain dodged another volley of machine gun fire. By now the flames from the damaged fuel line had gained strength, engulfing the plane's wing.

Swallowing hard, Polly looked out the back of the cockpit, then turned forward again. She scribbled furiously on her reporter's pad, mouthing the words out loud as she wrote them. "Six Flying Wings on… our… tail. Escape seemed… impossible. Outmanned. Outgunned. Hopeless…"

"Do you always have to write out loud?" Sky Captain yelled. "It's already hard enough to think around here!" The Warhawk took another hit and shuddered violently. Any other airplane would have been sky wreckage long before this; however, even with its specially installed systems, the P-40 could not endure such a pounding. "I can't outrun them much longer."

The Flying Wings continued to bombard their victim, and fire blanketed the entire left wing. Black smoke poured from the exhaust manifold, causing the plane to sputter, choke, and stall. Below, there was no way to escape, no place to land except the deep ocean.

"Hold on! They'll never expect this." Sky Captain unexpectedly shoved down on his flight stick, sending the Warhawk straight toward the choppy Atlantic. With one engine stalled, he had very little control left.

"Joe! What are you doing?" Polly peered through the windshield to see the ocean coming fast at them. "We're heading straight down. You'll kill us."

"I know what I'm doing. Try to relax, would you?"

"We're going too fast. We're not going to make it. You have to pull up." Polly grabbed the shoulder of his leather jacket, but he did not flinch. "Pull up, Joe! Pull up!"

Sky Captain struggled with the controls as the Flying Wings regrouped. The Warhawk continued to accelerate downward, assisted by gravity. They hurtled toward the ocean's murky surface… sure to die.

Dex has located the source of a mysterious radio transmission, but captured by Dr. Totenkopf's deadly machines, he is unable to warn Sky Captain.

Meanwhile, Sky Captain's Warhawk has been attacked by strange flying machines and is about to crash into the ocean's surface.

Only seconds from crashing into the water, the P-40's engine sputtered, then briefly roared back to life. Sensing the end of the chase, the Flying Wings zoomed after them.

Polly screamed. Sky Captain kept his stranglehold on the controls, never swerving. The ocean came at them like an endless expanse of blue pavement. Polly closed her eyes, bracing for the crash.

Moments before impact, Sky Captain shouted through his headset microphone, "Switching to amphibious mode!" His right hand slapped an emergency switch.

A series of servomechanisms clicked into place. Hull vents and exhaust manifolds sealed shut. Gaskets clamped around the cockpit canopy, and the engine droned at a lower octave. The Warhawk transformed into a sleeker bullet shape, like a flying torpedo.

Then Sky Captain's plane plunged into the choppy water.

The sounds became immediately muffled as the diving aircraft submerged in a froth of bubbles. The fire on the wing was instantly extinguished, and the propeller's growl became a more sonorous hum. The Warhawk jetted along underwater.

Above, the streaking enemy Wings collided with one another, some swerving, some slamming into the ocean. Broken chunks of hulls, wings, and engines splattered like a meteor storm into the Atlantic.

As the P-40 cruised along beneath the waves, going deeper, Polly kept her face pinned to the window, stunned. "We went… underwater!"

Sky Captain calmly piloted the plane along. "Yeah, Dex rigged it up. Got the idea from one of his comic books. Good old Dex."

Barely a month went by without Dex showing him some of his favorite literature, be it the colorful pages of a superhero comic or the black pen-and-ink drawings in Amazing or Astounding. The young man had invented sensors, supercharged engines, electrical armor (which shorted out more often than not), even new prototype weapons, like his "Buck Rogers" sonic atomizer.

Since the evil geniuses of the world continued to create innovative threats, Sky Captain and the Flying Legion had to develop new ways to counter them. Dex continued to read his science fiction voraciously, purely for research purposes.

Now, as Polly's terror melted away, angry realization crossed her face. "You knew this, and you let me think we were going to crash?" She shoved the back of his pilot's chair. "Damn it, Joe! I thought we were both going to die! You should have said something!"

"I was a little busy trying to save our lives. Besides, you wanted to come aboard, adding about a hundred and fifty pounds of extra weight and hampering my maneuverability."

"A hundred and fifty! Why you — "

"Just a guess."

"You still should have told me."

The currents streamed by, carrying a flow of white bubbles away from the churning propeller. Filtered sunlight provided barely enough illumination for Sky Captain to see by, though he didn't have a particular destination in mind. He sounded exasperated with her. "Look, Polly, if you can't take it, it's not my fault."

Though she seethed, Polly's natural toughness came through. "I can take it. I can take anything you dish out."

"Good because this was nothing. Just a practice run." He reengaged the main engines. Yanking on the stick, he guided the Warhawk up toward the bright sunlight.