It was getting very tight.

"Targets designated, Captain."

Halabi scanned the main display, looking for the main body of the British Home Fleet that was moving down from the north to engage Admiral Raeder.

"Launch," she ordered.

She heard the ignition of the missiles in their silos, but could feel nothing because of the ship's extreme speed and the violence of the maneuvers the CI was using to protect them.

Deck-cams showed the last of her combat maces lifting away on white exhaust plumes. As soon as they cleared the tubes, the CI threw the ship into a tight turn, the Metal Storm pods drumming away again. Halabi checked the threat boards: 163 German aircraft were attempting to sink her, although it looked like some of them had broken off in a hopeless attempt to intercept the sunburn missiles that were now accelerating away to the east.

Her second defensive sysop, Lieutenant Anne Davis, reported that the laser packs were now "nonfunctional."

"Thank you, Ms. Davis. Comms, how are Three-oh-three doing?"

"Down to sixty percent strength, ma'am. RCAF Four-oh-one and Two Squadrons are set to arrive in three minutes."

Metal Storm roared out again, reducing its stocks to 4.3 percent.

Halabi was beginning to feel decidedly uncomfortable. Her last offensive weapons were speeding away at Mach 6. Her ability to defend the ship and its crew was degrading with every minute that passed.

A sudden lurch to starboard nearly wrenched her shoulder out.

"Sorry, ma'am," said her countermeasures chief, Lieutenant David Loomes. "Posh detected a torpedo launch. Dolphins away."

Down beneath the waterline on the port-side hull, bay doors slid open and two black lozenges spat out into the foam skirt that surrounded the ship when the Super-Cavitating System was engaged. Seeker heads powered up, aqua-jets engaged, the Tenix-ADI Dolphin's own SCS came online, and the weapons shot away from the Trident at a speed of 280 knots.

Twenty-three seconds later, there came a dull thud from the speaker system at the subsurface threats station as the first Dolphin intercepted the U-boat that had fired on them. With a final burst of acceleration, the superhard, nonexplosive warhead simply punched through the thin skin of the submarine, exiting the hull on the other side, leaving two gaping holes.

The sound of the torpedo intercept didn't register against the incredible amount of background noise, but the Nemesis arrays recorded a kill and then reported that both Dolphins were seeking new targets.

"Thank you, Mr. Loomes," said Halabi.

Her six ship-killers, the last of her missiles, were tracking past Calais, ripping along forty meters off the deck, through the obstacle course of ships and even the occasional slow, low flying plane. Halabi's eye was drawn back to the main display for a moment, where the Cyclone gunships had begun their run.

SUFFOLK, ENGLAND

In the end, the rush to finish fitting out the Cyclones had become so frenzied that there'd been no chance to test them properly. McGregor had no idea whether the airframe would even hold together when they triggered the "miniguns." The whole fucking thing might just fall to pieces in midair. If they even made it to the target.

The skies were alive with thousands of aircraft, friendly and hostile, all of them seemingly twisting and turning and roaring in chaotic dogfights around his flight of slow, lumbering transporters.

His headphones crackled with the voice of his copilot. Tight, strangled words gave away how scared his copilot Barry Divola was. They were all frightened. Flight Lieutenant Philip McGregor felt like his balls had crawled up somewhere inside his rib cage.

"Pathfinders dropping smoke. Green smoke," said Divola.

"I see green smoke," McGregor confirmed.

He began to haul the C-47 around, pitting his strength against the machine. He'd heard that you just had to nudge the stick in one of those twenty-first planes and the thing would dance all over the sky. That must be why women could fly them. He had to move this flying pig the old-fashioned way, by wrestling it through every turn and dip.

He gripped the controls and felt the flaps bite into the slipstream as he brought them around for the payload run. The other three converted Dakotas followed his lead. There was no flak, thank God, but his jaws and teeth hurt anyway because he'd been grinding them together so hard. German fighters had attacked them three times since they'd taken off, and three times they been beaten back by their escorts, a squadron of the new Super Spitfires, sooled on the Messerschmitts by some talking box on the Trident.

Or at least, he vaguely assumed that's what had happened. He was too busy keeping them alive and on course to think about anything other than the immediate demands of the situation.

"Guns hot," came a voice in his phones.

"Guns hot," he acknowledged. "Commencing final approach."

The engines howled a little louder as the props bit into the air and the Dakota tilted along its axis. McGregor was glad he wasn't responsible for lining up the weapons, the crew chief who'd come aboard back at Debden was using some magic box to do that. The first he'd know about it would be when-

"Firing in three, two, one-"

"Shit!"

McGregor had been prepared for a surprise. After all, they'd told him the electronically powered guns could put a bullet into every square inch of a footy field in just a few seconds. Intellectually, he could appreciate that meant a lot of bullets leaving his plane very quickly, but the reality of it was still a shock. The whole aircraft seemed to lurch sideways through space as though it had been slapped. A terrible, head-splitting metallic ripping sound filled the world, and McGregor felt as though he was on the receiving end of the strafing run, so violently did the C-47 rattle and shake.

"Fuck me blind!" cried Divola. "Did you see that, Skipper?"

McGregor risked a quick glance down at the target area, a densely wooded copse of trees a few hundred yards from a smoking, shell-damaged church. All four Cyclones were pouring solid rivers of fire into the woods, which were literally disintegrating under the effects. A few small, dark black-clad figures emerged at a run from the disappearing cover. Most escaped, but two burst into pink mist.

"Sweet Jesus," breathed the pilot.

Three companies of SS Sonderaktiontruppe had been sheltering in the small forest, which was now just a smoking mound of shattered splinters, drifting leaves, and-he supposed-tiny bite-sized pieces of Aryan supermen.

HMS TRIDENT, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL

There was no audio track, of course, for which Halabi was quietly grateful. Five or six hundred men being turned to offal was unlikely to make for easy listening. The top-down view, from a virtual height of five hundred meters, was more than graphic enough. The Cyclones began to turn for home. As if in counterpoint to silent carnage, the ship's CIWS fired again, a couple of long, growling bursts.

"Metal Storm down to three-point-nine percent, Captain."

"Thank you, Ms. Morgan. Lieutenant Davis, how's our air cover?"

"Changing over now, Captain. But Squadron Leader Zumbach's men are refusing to withdraw. They're staying until they run out of fuel. One of them has just tried to ram a One-oh-nine."

Halabi rolled her eyes skyward, but could see only ducts, composite paneling, and fiber-optic cable. She could still wonder at what it must be like up there, in primitive planes that probably wouldn't even get a safety clearance in her day. If this were a movie or a cheap, particularly stupid novel, it was the point at which she would call up Jan Zumbach and order him to get his crazy-arse Poles back to base.