"Time to break out solar-angle calculations?"

"And check them by hand in case somebody sabotaged the computer."

"Blue, we also want to borrow five randomly selected wristwatches so we can check the main computer's clock.  Group random number generation, not individual."

And then afterwards they should call in Green, to find out what Green thinks Blue said the cockpit said.  But this, of course, should not be said out loud right now.

"Tell the market we'll have an estimate on predicted land-sight conditional-on-everything-else-we-believe-being-true in 30.  Escort flight showing up conditional-on-everything-else-we-believe-being-true... very rough estimate, about an hour from when comms first went out.  Could be longer if they're not going supersonic to get a bead on us, but I predict they'll go supersonic.  If they're not here before we hit land then we're lost or Exception Handling is busy, so in non-mundane worlds that'll kill almost all the business-as-usual probability before we can sight land."

"Assuming we don't sight land early, of course."

"Uh huh.  Which side of the isekai bet did you bet on?"

"I bet on us having isekaied.  I need the resources more in worlds like that."

She flips the comm switch off.

"Not saying I buy the isekai theory yet, but I'm increasingly unhappy about all these clouds below us, blocking our vision of what could be below."

"Cost of deviating from our ground-predicted flight path seems very high."

"Yeah, I know, but--"

"Even if criminal masterminds shitted in our compasses and mind-controlled away our sense of where the Sun ought to be, I don't think there can be anything underneath us except a one hundred percent probability of water for at least an hour."

"If we've still got clouds below us in 90 minutes, after we're on the emergency path, and no Exception Handling flight escort, I think that's time to consider whether to look below them."

"If we've got no flight escort in 90 minutes and an endless, unchanging sea of mysterious clouds I start to feel nervous about trying to descend below them."

"Glad we don't live in that sort of universe."

"In three more minutes we're going to break out the backup shortwave radio and it'll just work fine.  Or we'll transmit on it and not get any reception on the primary radio and that'll confirm local equipment failure for sure."

"Leaving a line of retreat:  If our shortwave radios work fine with each other and there's still silence, not static, from land?  Then what?"

"Doesn't sound impossible for a supercriminal to arrange, if they set up a sideline transmitter and receiver between our emergency radios while sabotaging their ability to transmit on the intended band."

"It wouldn't mean something had happened to Civilization."

"It's never supercriminals."

"That's what supercriminals want you to think."

"The ass is their profit-motive?"

"Betting in the on-board prediction market on whether it was supercriminals."

"More seriously, but only after ten seconds' thought:  Buy our insurer after a flight with 175 passengers suddenly drops out of comms, sell after we land safely."

"Figuring out who bet more than they should've on that is Market Oversight's one job.  There'd be--some kind of market pause, some kind of standard extra oversight, you don't want to let people profit on arranging huge insurer payouts especially on true-deaths--"

"You know, never mind, this is a job for the on-board prediction market, I don't think the details interact with our job flying the plane, or even with our professional-paranoia about sabotage."

"I think we care about whether the criminal conspiracy ends with us dead at the end, or lost, or landing safely, in order for them to keep their profits."

"Yeah."

"It probably doesn't end with us dead.  Simpler ways to do that than cutting comms.  And--there's a difference between having Market Oversight after you and the entire superheated planet."

"Well let's hope it's an intelligently-planned criminal conspiracy, then, and not some grimdark natural phenomenon that's going to wreck all the components of this plane one after another."

"Time to tell the crew to unpack the backup shortwave radio," it's portable and even simpler than the built-in one and not inside the cockpit, "and see if the crew can talk to land, or failing that, can't talk to us in the cockpit on our own radio."

"Bets?"

"Bets?" Keltham says to his seatmate.