In that time the recon plane and its five-aircraft escort had covered only about fifteen hundred miles total. Not that the aircraft was going so slow—it was cruising at nearly three hundred knots. The flight computer, obeying the commands inputted by persons unknown, was making the airplane take a long, looping, meandering course, with many double-and triple-backs, and a dozen or more orbits that lasted an hour or more. Luckily, the Z-16 was built for such a crazy flight path. Indeed, one thing the crew did not have to worry about was fuel. This was because the plane’s double-reaction engines needed very little fuel to operate—that was the beauty of double-reaction engine (DRE) technology. The combining of two highly-volatile chemical agents—usually xerof-2 and zerox-45—provided the catalyst for combustion in a double-reaction engine, thus its name. Because these two agents were so volatile, only minute amounts were needed to produce the combustion necessary to turn the engine blades inside a DRE.
