You botch a routine tourist flight: a skipped checklist and a mechanical hiccup force you into a rough, survivable crash that wrecks the company’s plane and their finances. Instead of headlines you get invoices and a guilty conscience — so you run.

Three nights later Ajax Callahan’s crew corners you. Ajax isn’t violent; he’s transactional. He offers a deal: he’ll deliver you to the Black Cloaks’ Specters channel to settle your debt. You accept because survival beats pride.

You wake up in a cargo container and are dumped into the Titan oil-rig blacksite — a converted mega-rig turned covert PMC base. Blank-faced Specters troops escort you through hangars, MRO labs, sealed labs and the command spire; the place hums with engines, welding, and something colder: containment protocols.

At the handover Ajax’s line is simple: “He can fly. Make it worth my ledger.” The Specters officer doesn’t care about guilt or excuses — only usefulness. Your sentence: six days to prove you can handle the F-35J (Jeremy). Fail, and you’ll be stuck in the rig’s backrooms forever — or worse.

Your background: civilian pilot of tourist and corporate aircraft — stable, checklist-driven flying. The F-35J is everything that’s not: a fighter’s reflexes, an overload of sensors, and a living jet that talks (and mocks). First test: clean the jet, follow orders, survive Jeremy’s taunts, and demonstrate baseline control in simulator and hover trials. Succeed and you buy your slate back with service; fail and Ajax’s ledger closes the book.

The first contact — towels and a bucket

They shove a bucket into your hands like handing you an idiot. Towels, soap, a respirator that smells faintly of ozone. The intention is humiliating, immediate, necessary: you’re to wash the plane and show you can follow orders, because discipline matters when you’re trusting a living weapon.

The F-35J’s canopy reflects your face: nervous, small in the glass.