She was sitting at the controls of one of the most advanced operational fighter aircraft in the world. A couple of the Big Hill’s original Raptors were still functional, but they were back in California, in the Zone, and probably in about a million pieces, being studied by a team of aeronautical engineers. One of them had been hers. Nicknamed Condi, after her daughter, whom she missed every single day. The marines were still flying Super Harriers off the Kandahar, but they were being held back as a strategic shield for the task force. So she and her fliers were the spear point of the free world today.
She checked her electronics systems: her heads-up display, the link to the AWACS bird that was already aloft, and the link to the Clinton’s Combat Intelligence, Little Bill. All good to go. Torres fed power into the turbojet, which cycled up into a screaming roar. She set herself.
The catapult fired and slammed her back into the padded ejector seat. The outside world blurred past as she shot down the runway and lifted off into clear space. For just a few seconds everything was clean and uncomplicated. She had a canopy of blue sky, dusted with fairy floss, the sort of day when once upon a time she would have taken her daughter down to the park, to just lie on the grass looking for shapes in the clouds. For that brief moment there was no war, no Transition, no madness and dislocation and the aching fucking loneliness of knowing that she was never going to see her child again.
And then she banked around to the northwest and the world rolled back into view. The Combined Task Force filled up the wide bowl of the sea beneath her wings, a vast armada carving white arrowheads across the Pacific. Her own ship, the Clinton, stood out because of her size. Fully twice as large as the next biggest flattop, she launched one plane after another into the sky. All of them A-4 Skyhawks like hers, the distinctive delta wings standing out as iron-gray triangles against the deep blue.
She formed up with her squadron, and in turn they fell in behind the E-2D Hawkeye that would control their mission.
After settling in for the flight, Torres called up the V3D map on her HUD, showing the target. The quality was abysmal compared with what she’d been accustomed to back in the twenty-first, but that was to be expected without satellites or full-spectrum drone coverage. Most of the image was computer-generated and didn’t come anywhere near photo-realistic, but it’d just have to do.
The principal terrain features should all be easily recognizable-she hoped-and her primary target was easy enough to spot, some sort of launch silo drilled into the side of a six-hundred-meter-tall hill that dominated the southern end of the island.
For eight months now she’d been training on the Skyhawk, getting ready for just this kind of mission. The novelty of flying a genuine museum piece had long since worn off, and she very much missed her old F-22. It was a hell of a lot more comfy, for one thing. The climate control in this plane sucked. If they’d just let her have her old baby, she could have nailed the job herself and been back in time for an afternoon nap. But it was going to be a long time before a working squadron got its hands on a Raptor again.
A text message from the Hawkeye came up on her HUD via laser link. The AWACS plane was about to roll into a holding pattern, allowing it to stay a safe distance from the objective. Six A-4s configured for air superiority broke off to take up watch over that rare and precious bird.
Torres checked the mission data in the bottom left-hand corner and saw that an in-flight refueler had just lifted off from the Clinton-it would be there to meet them on the way home. She keyed in a query and found that a mixed crew was driving the tanker. Originals and AF ’temps.
Not so long ago she’d have had uneasy feelings about that, but the ’temps were learning, and those who put their hands up to join the Auxiliary Forces tended to be especially motivated. It was as if they had something to prove-both to the uptimers and to their former colleagues. Besides, who the hell wanted to fly old Corsairs or Mustangs or even an F-86 when they could be driving something like this baby? Primitive as it was.
At least three-quarters of the pilots in her squadron were ’temps now, what with so many of the original Clinton air group being sent back stateside into the labs and lecture halls. Torres had been spared by the luck of the draw-somebody had to stay behind and teach these clueless newbies how to handle the fast movers.
It’d been a tentative business at first. The looks on some of her pilots’ faces the first time she’d stepped into the briefing room on the Clinton- Jesus, what a fucking nightmare. Nobody had been fool enough to diss her, or even look sideways at her. They’d had that particular brand of piss and vinegar whupped out of them back in the Zone, at Andersonville.
That’s where it became obvious pretty quickly who wasn’t going to be able to make the adjustment, answering to women or people of color. A surprising number of those assholes had turned up, thinking they still had the run of the joint, but none lasted very long.
So Torres only had to deal with the ’temps who made it through that winnowing-out process, for which she was endlessly grateful. Even then, there was a cultural brick wall that separated ’temp from uptimer, and she probably butted up against it at least a dozen times a day.
Sometimes it was meaningless things, like a joke they didn’t get, or some cultural reference she slipped into conversation without thought. Like referring to the squadron as the Scooby Gang, or responding to the news that the Clinton’s battle group would be fighting under ’temp control with the timeless Kent Brockman quote, “And I for one welcome our new overlords.”
Torres sighed. She really missed home.
The mood in the CIC was hushed, and even a little tense.
Or maybe that was putting it too strongly. Most of the men and women in here were Big Hill originals. Some had even fought with Kolhammer off Taiwan and North Korea. So they probably weren’t particularly anxious. More likely they were just stretched taut by returning to major combat for the first time in the retrofitted supercarrier.
In all of the sea trials and war games off San Diego they’d adjusted with alacrity to the new mix of technology and personnel on board. The old girl wasn’t half the ship she’d once been, but she was still the biggest, meanest piece of floating iron on the face of this particular world. And while a good deal of her electronic architecture had been stripped out and left back in the States, very little had changed in the CIC. Between her organic intelligence assets like the Advanced Hawkeyes and the Nemesis arrays of the Siranui, Kolhammer knew he was riding with the king.
Or maybe the queen, in this case.
The main battlespace display was almost entirely devoted to the A-4 raid on the island where Denny’s patrol had discovered Yamamoto’s nasty little secret. The fighter-bombers were beginning their payload run and would deliver in less than two minutes. So far no radar had painted them, and the Hawkeye was picking up nothing in the way of signals traffic. Kolhammer’s only real concern was how the new snap-on laser guidance kits would perform. They weren’t anywhere near as accurate as the precision-guided munitions he was used to, but then they were a quantum leap ahead of anything that had been deployed by the ’temps so far. As Mike Judge said, they were “probably good enough for government work.”
In the short time he had until the strike went in, Kolhammer had been watching a data package from Jane Willet’s sub, the Havoc. She was still lurking off the southern Kurils, with three drones at high altitude above the engagement between Yamamoto and their putative allies, the Soviets. And they were feeding her some scarifying footage.