“All instruments in the green,” Ferris reported, running through the indicator screens.

“Go for it.”

“Dreamland EB-52 BX-5 Galatica to Dream Tower,” he said immediately, clicking on the radio. “We’re on station and preparing to dance. Cue the band.”

Breanna rolled her eyes as her copilot and the tower controller exchanged a series of excruciatingly poor puns. When the controller reported that the weather was “sans polka bands, with trombones blowing from the west at two notes an hour,” she decided she had had enough.

“Chris, we don’t have all day.”

“Just trying to keep everybody loose,” said Ferris.

His poorly concealed smirk indicated that he had probably been waiting for her to reach her breaking point for some time. It was not out of the realm of possibility that he and the controller had some sort of bet riding on her reaction.

“Hawk Leader to Gal,” snapped Jeff over the interphone. “Yo, are we dancing today or what?”

“Not you too,” said Breanna.

“Hey, if the waltz fits, dance it.” He’d laughed, saying the words so quickly it was obvious he’d rehearsed them.

“Oye.”

“Let’s rumba.”

“I hope you’re all enjoying yourself,” said Rap, pushing the Megafortress into the long slope that would launch the U/ MFs.

At least Jeff seemed in a good mood today.

“Flighthawk launch in zero-five,” she told her husband. “Prepare for alpha maneuver.”

“Rosin the bow, maestro.”

THE AIR LAUNCH OF THE FLIGHTHAWKS WENT OFF without a hitch, as did the first refuel, despite the increased turbulence generated behind Gal by the new engine configuration. When Dreamland Control asked them to shift ranges to accommodate another flight, Jeff was happy for the break.

“Trail One,” he told C3 as Breanna brought the EB-52 southwestward. The computer informed him it was complying, and Jeff slid his flight-control helmet up over his head. He glanced at the console to make sure it duped the controls—it did—then eased back in the seat.

With both Jennifer and Ong tied up on other projects, they were flying without a techie aboard today. While Zen thought the minders had long ago become superfluous, he did miss having someone on the deck to joke with—or hand him a Gatorade during downtime.

He fumbled for his small thermos cooler stowed between the two stations, barely within reach from his seat in the widened Flighthawk control bay. The original B-52’s had three different crew areas. The pilot and copilot sat on the flight deck at the top front of the plane. The electronics warfare officer and gunner had a cabin on the same level behind them, where their side-by-side seats faced the rear of the plane. Below and roughly between these two areas was a bay for the navigator and radar operator.

In the Megafortress, the pilot and copilot—along with the extensive array of flight computers and advanced avionics—could handle all of the offensive and defensive duties as well as fly the plane. This allowed the other compartments to be modified and adapted according to the plane’s specific mission. Raven, for example, had been intended as a test bed for advanced ECM warfare and Elint-gathering craft, and her upper rear bay included extensive gear for that mission.

Gal, intended from the start as a dedicated Flighthawk “mother” with AWACS-like tracking capabilities, had duplicate U/MF control consoles in the upper compartment as well as the lower, where Jeff sat now. Lengthening and reshaping of the plane’s nose area during the remodel added two more seats on the flight deck, which would be used for the operators of the plane’s long-range surveillance radars. The changes had also made the lower Flighthawk bay somewhat more spacious than the offensive weapons station of a B-52G, though most of the extra space was taken up by test equipment and recorders.

Gal’s T/APY-9 surveillance radar had been installed, but its programming was not yet complete. For now, only the system’s most rudimentary capabilities were available, though even these were impressive for a fighter jock used to the traditional limits of small-area pulse-Doppler units. Operating in F band like the AN/APY-2 in the AWACS/E-3, Gal’s next-generation slotted, phased-array antenna was twelve feet wide, rotating in a slight bulge at the bottom of the fuselage roughly where the strike camera and ECM aerials would be located on a standard B-52. While only a third of the diameter of the APY-2, the radar had nearly the same range and capability as the earlier AWACS, with Pulse Repetition Frequency and environmental modes helping it pick up fighters “in the bushes” at fairly long range. At present there was no way to slave its inputs into C; Jeff had to manually send the feed to one of the multi-use display areas, read the plot, and take appropriate action. While most combat pilots would kill to have what amounted to their own personal AWACS unit, the procedure felt somewhat clunky in the Flighthawks’ otherwise seamless overlay of information and control.

Jeff popped the top on his soda and sipped slowly, watching the control panel. The U/MFs sat in their trail positions as precisely as a pair of Blue Angels preparing for a flight show.

The T/APY-9 required a few minutes to “warm up”—the revolving radar unit slowly accelerated from idle (one turn every four minutes) to operational mode, which was four revolutions per minute. The spinning disk changed the plane’s flight characteristics, and the pilots had to adjust their control surfaces and in some regimes their engine settings to compensate for it.

Jeff checked the unit’s status on panel two of the starboard station, then told Bree that he was about to gear up.

“Hang tight a second, Zen. We need to run through a systems check up here,” she replied.

“Roger that.”

Zen listened in as the two pilots worked through a short checklist; the procedure mostly consisted of his wife saying something and her copilot replying “in the green” or simply “green,” indicating that the item was at spec. But the snap in her voice fascinated Jeff, giving him a window into part of her that he hadn’t seen before the Megafortress and Flight-hawk projects were wed. He loved his wife for reasons that had nothing to do with the fact that she was an excellent pilot and a fine officer; in fact, while he’d known that those things were true when they dated and married, he hadn’t paid much if any attention—they’d worked in what were then completely different areas. But over the past few months he had come to admire her on a professional level as well. There was a certain satisfaction listening to or watching her work, as if her efforts justified some judgment he had made: My wife is not only beautiful and a great lover and companion, but she can kick ass too. Zen knew it was probably just a selfish ego stroke, but he couldn’t help smiling to himself as she and her copilot cleared him to start the radar.

“We’ll be at the next mark in, oh, call it three minutes,” Bree told him.

“Looking good,” said Jeff, sliding on his Flighthawk control helmet.

“Sitting that close to the radar,” joked Chris, “you won’t need birth control tonight.”

“Ha-ha,” said Jeff.

“Fuel burn?” said Bree in her most businesslike voice.

Jeff jumped into the cockpit of Hawk Three and began descending, watching the radar plot on the left side of the screen supplied by T/APY-9. The feeds were being recorded and the diagnostics were all automated, but Zen didn’t see the point of having the damn thing on and not using it. Smaller and stealthier than a normal fighter, the Flighthawk had a radar cross-section about the size of a sparrow’s, but the T/APY-9 followed it easily as it slid downward. Jeff’s rudimentary controls allowed him two views—full and close-in—as well as query and non-query mode, which attempted to identify targets through ticklers or ident gear. The finished product would be able to fall back on a profile library for planes that didn’t respond, a feature C3 already had.