Guaranteed delivery
One hour, one hour to cross most of the planet, and make it back. Crazy, impossible, ridiculous, necessary. Calel felt his mind sink into celeritas. It was in his opinion, the finest Huginn stealth plane built by human hands. Built from the ground up for use by a technopath with only the finest components, enhanced further by commissioned runes. It was the only reason that racing an incursion would be anything but suicide. His mind merges totally, and the world slows. The seconds the hangar doors take to open feeling like long minutes.
After a frozen eternity, the sky shows though, and Calel wills the engines to life, accelerating with such speed that celeritas outpaces the sound of its awakening. Calel races into a frozen sky, the wings of a passing dragonfruit beating sluggishly for an instant as he blazes past it. The runes on the frame blazing to life, holding together the frame. At such speeds, even the airborne predators of avernus can barely perceive him, yet the danger remains.
A warning blares and Cales makes a desperate pivot, the frozen wing flap of a sky dragon coming millimeters from shattering his canopy. A minute dip of the nose sends him hurtling down below a flock of some unknown bird, a desperate swerve takes him out of the path of a rearing conflux hydra. Something is coming, and the planet awakes, leaving the skies crowded. Each turn costs him precious speed, pushing back his arrival time by seconds he can ill afford. The mountains turn to dessert, and things become complicated, he's too low.
Speed is no defense against foresight, and he finds the sky awash in needles. Sensors strain as his cognitor quick mind plots a desperate path through the maze, he is not even half done when he enters. Desperate turns and spirals bleed precious speed as he roars through the maze of frozen needles. The machine mind is to slow, but intuition is instant. Faced with no time to think he acts on instinct, blending human reactions with machine logic, he almost makes it. The last needle gently brushes a wing sending him into a desperate spiral.
He pours his soul into the airframe, willing it together, willing thrusters to angel just that little bit more than they should be able to, stoking the reactor to unsafe heights , draining power from everything but controls and engines. He can feel his body tear as inertial dampening starts to fail. Meters above the ground he levels out, his engine wash blasting the ground to glass and scorching an unfortunate titan scorpion, but with a lurch he's climbing again.
Sand gives way to sea, and frozen leviathans move through a glass diorama beneath him. His auspex plotting out the maze of storms in his path, rainwater would be stone hard at his speed. He would dearly love to climb, but he won't make it. His congator mind plots a path through the pair of spatial anomaly so recently found. They will save him the desperately needed time, but the path to the first will keep him below the killing rain.
This maze, however, is far simpler, its walls still and charted in advance, the issue is the spray. Plumes of foam deadly obstacles. Yet they are distant and slow and easily avoided until he approaches the first distortion and his blood runs cold. Some vast behemoth has breached, kicking up a vast wall of water. He pours himself into the prow and the neutron laser fires. Burning a slightly to small gap the desperately needed meter wider. Warnings flare across his instruments as he flies through, his hull is cracked and integrity is critical, but he hits the distortion. Reality jerks and he's another quarter of the way there, he desperately climbs for the safety of the upper atmosphere, thanking the throne the second is above the cloud cover. The easy part is done.
Long minutes later, he hits the second anomaly, his speed perfectly matched to make use of He now has 20 miles To figure out how to go from mach, broken speedometer, to a landing safe speed. Made all the more existing by the landing near the lizardmen being to short at the best of times. Calel takes a deep breath and cuts the engine. He begins bleeding speed almost immediately, but it's not enough, he won't be going slow enough to extend his landing gear let alone land. Yet he continues, gliding in on a ballistic trajectory. 8 miles, 7 miles, 6 miles, he pulls the stick and his craft pulls an impossibly perfect 180-degree turn, and he thumbs the afterburner. The airframe groans under the strain as he burns away vast quantities of speed. He's less than a mile out when the landing gear slams down.
The plain jerks as it makes touchdown, rolling backwards down the too short runway, and once more Calel thumbs the afterburner, bursts of perfectly timed thrust slowing celeritas to a gentle stop, directly by the hulking figure of his passenger. The rear wheels coming to rest against the line of bricks marking the end of the runway.
Calel lets out a deep breath as the cockpit opens With a hiss, the chrono showing 31 minutes of flight time. With a soft thump the ancient one leaps into the empty co-pilot seat.
"What took you warmblood? I was told 30 minutes or less."
Calel swallows his reply as the cockpit closes.
@Durin another little omake. yes I did spend nearly a thousand words leading up to a pizza deliver joke, and I regret nothing. 
