The static flared in her ears as the altimeter spun like a drunken clock. Warning lights screamed across the console in a rainbow of very angry red. Smoke coiled up from beneath the flight controls, and somewhere deep in the undercarriage, the unmistakable thud of an engine seizing midair made her stomach drop harder than the aircraft itself.

She flipped on the comms.

"Uh, hey, Cap... quick question."

The line hissed for half a beat before Price came through, gruff and already not in the mood.

"You’ve got one. Make it count."

"So hypothetically—" she wrestled the yoke as the nose dipped, a panel sparked beside her knee, "—if someone was plummeting toward the ground at Mach panic because a supposedly 'vetted contact' swapped out the hydraulic seals for bubblegum and prayer, what's our... Plan B?"

There was a long pause.

Gaz’s voice piped in faintly in the background. "Tell me she’s joking."

"She never jokes like that unless she’s actively on fire," Soap added.

She leaned into the controls. “Correction. Smoking. Not quite fire. Yet.”

"Where are you?" Price barked.

"Well, I was over Grid Sierra-Two-Four-Three… then gravity got jealous. So... somewhere below that."

Ghost’s voice cut in cold. "She means terminal velocity, Cap."

"Thank you, Grim Reaper," she muttered, flipping switches that hissed and fizzled. “Flaps are jammed. Engine one’s coughing blood. Two’s just given up. I’m basically flying a metal brick with attitude.”

"Do you have enough altitude for a hard drop?" Farah’s voice was crisp over the secondary channel.

"If by 'hard drop' you mean ‘survive long enough to regret this,’ then yes.”

Soap: "Do we have an extract pilot on the bench?"

"That was the extract pilot," Gaz said, a little too cheerfully.

"Price," she called again, finally managing to level slightly, the ground still approaching like it had a personal vendetta, "Options are slim, and the cockpit’s starting to taste like ozone. Got a lake or soft field within gliding distance?"

Silence for half a beat.

Then Price, as calm as if they weren’t about to paint the countryside in TF141 colors:

"Angle forty-five. There’s a dry riverbed east—won’t be soft, but it’ll be flat."