You're On Your Own Spacecowboy

Station Bent. I say again Alley-Oop is Station Bent.

May 14, 2024

Over the Philippine Sea, Approx. 100 mi West of Guam

Major Cameron “Change” Nicholls, United States Aerospace Force

Executive Officer, 23rd Fighter Squadron, 320th Fighter Wing

2231 Local Time, APR 10, 2037

The word HIEROPHANT would haunt his dreams.

Cameron was still processing what was happening. It was a blur. He had rushed to his aircraft and gotten it airborne before the first missile arrived. He had not even said goodbye to anyone. Half of the 23rd FS was still on the ground. They would not—could not—get airborne. There had been no cyberattack or zero-day exploit, only entropy. They had red-lined their aircraft during TIGER SHIELD ‘37. They had just been through the most intense exercises in the history of the Osaka Treaty Organization, which had been extended by two weeks.

Their maintenance schedules had come home to roost all at once and at the worst possible time.

If only the fuckers went a week earlier…

The plan had been set for years, but it had already changed. They were supposed to cover a force of B-21s to smack down on any PLAN surface assets in the Philippine Sea, but they had been rolled into a composite combined Allied strike package. There was a ‘squadron’ of Australian and Japanese B-1—an amalgamation of the working birds of Republican Australian Air Force’s No. 445 Squadron and Japanese Air and Space Defense Force’s 101st Squadron—and the F-35As of RAAF’s No. 75 Squadron. The unexpected fellow travelers had all been present for TIGER SHIELD but had not quite made it home.

The State of the Marianas would defend itself with its vast batteries of interceptor missiles and mountains of concrete as three heavily armed TRIDENT-class advanced forward missile defense platforms held the gates of the Second Island Chain until the PACFLT and PACAF could arrive en mass. There was a colossal migration of war birds moving across the Pacific, rushing to aid their sister squadrons scrambling out of Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan. America was readying the greatest display of airpower since the Second Gulf War of 1991. It would include everything from brand-new F-26A Voodoo IIs and upgraded B-21B Raiders to ancient B-52J Stratofortresses and budget F-25A Warhawks. But above all else, the Major counted his lucky stars that he was not with the 23rd Fighter Wing running out of the bunker complexes at Chiashan.

Poor bastards.

Everything that could fly on the Marianas was getting into the air. The motley and bleary-eyed lot was still sharp enough to cut God—and they had to go save the Navy’s ass. Mainland Japan was getting pummeled. The Sorks were untouched. Okinawa was fighting for its very life. Reagan and Kaga were on the wrong side of the First Island Chain. Someone had to punch a hole big enough so the ships of Exercise LIBERTY BANDIT could reach the cover of the Midway and Akagi carrier groups sortieing from Yokosuka.

This half-hour-old game plan was already falling apart. Nicholls was not surprised. This was not his first rodeo. He had flown his first combat sortie on the last day of First Sino. He had been in the air over Iraq when MBS carved his name into history with nuclear fire. He had three kills—but he was not eager for more.

He took some solace in the fact that—despite the small matter of being stuck in a waking nightmare—he was sitting inside an information singularity with a whisper in his ear like Kassandra. King Raptor was a monster. Only two aircraft could even claim to match her—the spooky sisters: Voodoo and Blackcat.

The F-22C was the Aerospace Force’s Ship of Theseus—or, well, Plane of Theseus. It all began after the formation of the Strategic Deterrence Fund in 2028. The budgetary partitioning of nuclear systems procurement from the core service budgets had freed up even more money for conventional procurement. The Defense Production Board wasn’t happy with the NGAD timelines, so they decided to authorize the “refit and re-procurement” of the existing F-22A fleet and the recommissioning of the Block 20 boneyard princesses.

DAF had the King of the Sky skinned, gutted, and rebuilt from the studs up, using the techniques and tooling for the HAVE CAT F-35 upgrade program (The D, E, and F models) and the so-called “F-18H,” which was actually a halfway house between the Son of Vark and Daughter of Vigi assembled from F-35 parts.

The program, known as TERMINAL ADDRESS, had given the Raptors ultra-high efficiency and extremely powerful A103 engines, increasing total thrust at full burner by 35,000 pounds. At the same time, the airframe shed 9% percent of its empty weight, thanks to advances in material science and the replacement of almost all conventional fasteners. The program went so far as to literally reskin the aircraft with the latest radar-absorbing material. All of this doesn’t even include the avionics upgrades. The multi-band APG-90 radar was shared with the “Hotel Hornet” and blew the APG-85 out of the water. The aircraft also gained the same alphabet soup of sensors as the HAVE CATs, EODAS, EOTS, MADL—the works. He saw the world behind a golden canopy and through a full-color Gen V Helmet Mounted Display. He was King—or at least he was King until the NGADs from Hickam showed up.

The 23rd FS was armed with a pretty standard mix: four AIM-260B Blackeye Joint Advanced Tactical Missiles and four AIM-196A Peregrine Poly-Seeker Interceptors in the main bay, four more Peregrines in the side bays. They had two low-observability fuel tanks and two weapons pods. That gave them an extra pair of AIM-260s and an AIM-300A Phoenix II Long Range Engagement Weapon per pod. But in the rush, not everyone was able to get their weapon pods, and at least one of his pilots had loaded the wrong pod.

His wingwoman, Captain Samantha “Loose Duke” Florencia, had a weapon pod with two AIM-9X Sidewinders and an AIM-401C—an air-launched THAAD-ER anti-ballistic missile—meant for a Marianas Aerospace Guard Reserve F-15X Super Eagle.

It looked like any other evening over the Pacific: scattered banks of clouds stretched across the horizon, an endless sea of stars overhead, and a glassy wine dark mirror of Pacific waters underneath. It was beautiful. It was peaceful. There were no external signs that his eleven Raptors had already entered a Thunderdome of Nations. A two-thousand-mile-wide lethal game of flashlight tag had started before the first fighter and gone wheels up.

Hundreds of AESA radars—from budget knock-offs to the very bleeding edge of the blackest budgets—had started a rave of radiation. Pencils of invisible energy crossed hundreds of miles in fractions of a moment, piercing the night in search of the enemy. Radar-warning receivers struggled to sort low-probability detection searches from the noise. Computers sought to parse the ebb of the tide from ripples of wakes. Hundreds of aircraft were in the fight; hundreds more were rushing to join. They sought each other in the dark, hoping not to reveal themselves in the process.

But that darkness was not absolute.

They were in the shadow of a maelstrom of fire and light—the Battle of the East China Sea had begun this war and was in full swing. Jamming poured from support aircraft in an endless font of power, moving like electromagnetic squalls across the sky. Decoys and spoofing hoped to mask tankers, fighters, and drones. Incredibly powerful fire control and search radars shone in the dark like spotlights. Missiles of every sort streaked through the night. On both sides, information flowed freely between sensor and shooter, transmitted a thousand miles in a blink of an eye.

USNS Sentinel (AFBM-3) was dead-center in the Philippine Sea, just off the “island” of Okinotorishima. SM-3 anti-ballistic missiles raced up into the heavens, scoring kill after kill as the entire Dong Feng ballistic missile family arced race across the sky. Her SPY-10C(LDVHP) multi-band radar array was powerful enough that Nicholls could pick it up at 600 miles with his onboard sensors—no need for battle management software there. It was a lighthouse amidst a storm and the eye that revealed swarms of steel and silicon soaring across the Philippine Sea.

The platform was continually handling a dozen engagements across two hundred fifty miles simultaneously. As soon as they intercepted a track, another appeared. Sentinel was in a death match it had been rigged to lose. Once they reached Okinotorishima, the heavies would climb and unleash three hundred AGM-158 cruise missiles at a host of pre-determined targets, with a reserve allotted for any targets of opportunity. That reserve was going to help break out LIBERTY BANDIT.

Nicholls watched as VLO tracks were picked up by the SDA’s PANOPTICON Space Architecture—a constellation of air and ground moving target indicator surveillance sats—and the FICKLE SICKLE long-range phased array on Luzon were classified in real-time. It was not good. The PLAAF had already rushed a not insignificant portion of its advanced aircraft into the Philippine Sea, a multi-air division force of J-20 Fagin fighters, JH-20 Fizzle attackers, and H-20 Brigand bombers.

It made Nicholls uncomfortable. Why the hell are they here and not over Big T?

Drones and decoys filled the battle space. UCAVs were already probing Sentinel and had started an attack on FICKLE SICKLE. The AN/FPS-147 array was covered in tick marks of incoming missiles and outgoing interceptors. The tracks turned grey as a missile track merged with the symbol for the radar. That radar had allowed them to see beyond the veil of the Chinese coastline. It was expected to be a goner—but not this fast.

In good news, Nicholls did not see any of the PLAAF’s potentially mythical Sixth Gen Fighter, the J-60 Fusebox. He, however, did see packets of unstealthy aircraft further west, behind the cutting-edge. They were a mix of YY-29 Merchant and YY-20 Muntjak tankers with J-16 Flanker November and J-10 Firebird fighters. He reckoned they were a follow-on force to continue the attack on the Phillippine Air Force and their National Air Defense System.

He raised an eyebrow as he watched thirty contacts be classified as CJ-30 Shiver long-range cruise missiles; those were nasty fuckers, and heading right for Guam, but they were about an hour and a half away. There were dozens of other shorter-range air-launched super and subsonic cruise missiles coming from the direction tracks flagged as bombers heading for Sentinel, queued up by SDA search and track constellations.

“Apollo, Battlestar. Tack northwest.” The voice of their attendant Aerospace Force ground controller spoke. There was feedback, and Nicholls could pick up voices in the background. “We’re tracking terminal Scimitars that are too close for comfort on your current vector. Apologies for the delay; most of the staff only just got here.” Here meant Andersen’s Hardened Battle Management Center. Nicholls had been inside it a couple of times. It had seats equal to a dozen E-7 Wedgetail AWACS with a genuine supercomputer stitching together the battlespace, all secure under forty feet of earth, concrete, and metal—with triple redundant communications infrastructure sufficient to send a message to Pluto even after the planet imploded.

The squadron lazily turned out of the way as the DF-26s fell from the heavens like shooting stars, fifteen miles off their wing. One missile was swatted from their air by a bolt of light rushing up from the Earth. It turned into a tiny shotgun blast of red-orange debris. More THAAD-ER missiles rose from Guam, racing into the heavens, proof that the 53rd State would not go quietly into that good night. Nicholls knew someone in the HBMC or the Nimitz Hill Annex Command Center was making some very unpleasant decisions about which missiles they would engage and which they would let through to preserve their ammunition for the oncoming waves.

He was still parsing through the reams of data from his squadron’s sensors when he nearly shit himself. “Battlestar, Apollo One. My EODAS has 1-7 extremely larger Screamers: Bullseye 0-3-0-5, 7-3 miles, Angels 1-0 and dropping, hot. They’re over Mach Three. Can we smoke these fuckers?” He tapped his MFD and warmed up his King Raptor’s 75 kW TALISMAN laser, “Torch is primed…” The missiles were bright enough that it was almost hard to look at them—a line of sunrises skipping across the Philippine Sea.

“Negative, Apollo. You will proceed to HANG FIVE with your strike package. Keep your noses clean and your pistols packed. We don’t have the playtime to spare. Leave the leakers to Thumper, Hot Dog, and Breakspear,” their handler sternly replied—referring to the state’s two Aerospace Force Guard-Reserve fighter squadrons and Guam’s missile defense system.

“Wilco, Battlestar,” Nicholls muttered, the spite barely hidden in his voice. He rocked his aircraft to one side and checked out the fast movers with his Mark I Eyeball. That jamboree was moving at a mile every nine and a half seconds. They were two minutes from Guam.

He saw ruin in the hieroglyphics glowing on his display. They were heading into Hell, and he could see everything. He had the eyes of OLYMPUS, America’s joint-combined battle management architecture.

He could see the ballistic missiles screaming above the Earth. Though he did not need OLYMPUS ZEUS to show him that, he could see the exo-atmospheric kills above his head. He could see F-15JXs screaming down out of Kyushu. He could see individual MANPADS flitting into the night from the fighting on the Sakishimas if he so wished. He could see that there was no longer a JS Kaga (DDH-184). There was only a faded tag at her last reported position, marking the grave of a thousand sailors. He could see the hundreds of red air contacts over the East China Sea—PLAAF bomber brigades, seemingly without end, thrown against beleaguered ships and a bastion of blue in a sea of red—Okinawa. He could see the cataclysmic air battle raging over Taiwan; ROCAF and 23rd FW would die fighting in the air. Unlike so many American and Japanese aviators who could do naught but look up at the sky as angels shorn of their wings as Uncle Xi marshaled his hosts.

He could see it all—but yet could do nothing. They were outnumbered. It would be at least a few hours until airborne reinforcements could reach them. The Percs were sure to make the best use of this moment. So, the strike package would stay quiet and cover the bombers toward the release point. Frustrated Aeros said nothing as the last of the Bones and Raiders formed up—and they all plunged into the night. The heavies would break the dragon’s jaw, and their escorts would kill anything that hoped to stop them.

They would do their part.

Seconds crawled by and rolled into excruciating minutes. All the while, all he could do was watch people—people he might know—die. He watched as the nearest PLAAF tracks moved across his display, creeping closer and closer—remaining just out of the maximum range of SM-6s from Sentinel, forming up for an attack. He looked at his fuel state and bitterly watched as Andersen and Tinian’s tankers sprinted east, away from the fighting. Only three KC-48 Replenishers, the USAF’s blended-wing body low-observability tankers, were moving west toward their own rally points.

The radio crackled awake with a hiss, and Nicholls winced at the noise of blaring sirens. A monotone voice dispassionately repeated the same phrase that Nicholls could not believe: “Active Shooter Lockdown is now in effect. Security Troops to positions. Sappers in the wire. Base personnel shelter in place and alert BDOC to any unidentified persons or movements. Sappers in the wire. Active Shooter Lockdown is now i—” There was shouting in the background, and the mic went cold.

“Jesus Christ, what the fuck was that, Change?” One of his pilots asked over their local channel.

“Not a fuckin’ clue, but it ain’t good. Did the god’amn Chi-Coms get fuckers onto…” Nicholls's voice trailed off. There goes the plan. A whole lot of plans.

“Apollo, Battlestar.” Their operator was on the air again; there were a dozen hushed voices in the background and the rustling of movement. Nicholls could immediately pick up that the Aero was trying to hide his shaking voice. “You are to detach and prosecute multiple inbound Screamers designated Raid 3-5, say again, Raid Three-Five.” There were a couple of muffled pops in the background. He had never heard an air controller so rattled, not even when there were nukes in the air in ‘34. “Speed 3-7-5-0 knots, Bullseye 300, Angels 40, hot. I don’t know how much longer I have on the mic—we’re trying to work things out on our en—” The mic went cold.

“Battlestar, Apollo—say again your last? What the Hell is going on!?” Before he could say anything, his radar warning receiver started shrieking. “SPIKE! SPIKE! SPIKE!” Nicholls cried. He could scarcely believe the information on his display.

About 700 miles away, someone fired up an 8-megawatt X-Band AESA radar at 35,000 feet. What the fuck is a cruiser radar doing in the sky? The track had been classified as a YY-29 Merchant—a tankerized Comac C929—with six sisters and a gaggle of mixed UCAVs. Clearly, that was no mere Merchant and was several times more powerful than their standard KJ-3000 Mainlock AEW&C aircraft. He should have realized that there was something wrong with that; it was a lot of very precious aircraft in one place.

The bombers deployed their defensive Longshot drones, each equipped with a wide-spectrum, high-power jammers. Hide and seek was over.

“Battlestar, Apollo. We’ve spiked by an extremely high-power airborne radar—3-0-1, 6-8-5, Angels 35, flanking—marked Alert Six. Please advise,” Nicholls barked into his mic.

There was no answer.

“REZKENSKY, GET YOUR PEOPLE FUCKING MOVING,” the feedback from the mic made Nicholls flinch and almost made his eyes water. He looked down at their MFD, which showed it was Andersen’s HBMC on the horn with equal parts confusion and apoplexy. The horrifyingly distinctive muffled sounds of automatic weapons fire rattled in the background. “L-T! WE! ARE! LEAV—” the mic cut out.

“Uh… Battlestar stay again your last…” He asked tepidly as rage boiled up inside him. He repeated his request three more times with no response. “Fuck it!” He switched to the local channel. “Fights on! Guam is out of it. We’ll deal with this ourselves.” They were supposed to be fighting as one finely tuned cog of a greater digital machine, but now they were just a lone group amid a night of chaos. “Slag, you and your Panthers’ll screen the heavies and cover us. Lets sucker punch these fuckers.” He growled, calling out to the Aussie F-35 commander. “Shinji and Soju, punch into burner and get to HANG FIVE A-S-A-P. Kill anything we have on track, then get the fuck out. Diaper, take your Raiders low, and clean up for the Bones. Sentinel can cover you better than we can. If you can, get on the horn to the Oki or Kasuga CAOC and tell ‘em that Anderson has sappers in the wire, and we’re in the blind. Any objections?”

“So, improvise?” The Aussie squadron commander replied with unwelcome glibness.

“It’s all Jazz now, baby.” He looked out of his canopy toward his wingman. “Duke, ya mind smoking that fuckin’ Turbo-AWACS with that pointy rock of yours?” The track was at 35,000 feet, not even a third of THAAD-ER’s official minimum engagement altitude. But, not all that glitters is gold—and not everything that is official is true. Hitting a converted airliner with a kinetic kill vehicle designed to intercept an intermediate-range ballistic missile above the atmosphere was overkill, and he wasn’t really sure what would happen. Still, it should at least elicit some kind of reaction.

The aviatrix nodded and replied contentedly, “Wilco.” A moment later, the 21-inch-diameter ABM dropped free from its oversized weapons pod and ignited its solid motor with a flash of white and yellow. It hurtled upwards. It would be one hell of a lofted shot. He still did not know how she managed it. The weapons pods were triple-marked and looked completely different, and the small fact that Super Eagles were based on Tinian—a separate island. Whether it was a case of tactical acquisition or fuck-up was a conversation for another day.

A significant number of PLAAF officers experienced a significant emotional event as they saw a theatre-grade hit-to-kill missile appear at 40,000 feet off a probable F-22 contact. The Turbo AWACS directed its full attention towards Loose Duke and Change. It took about thirty seconds to burn through their stand-in jamming drones.

Well, that ain’t good.

The Chi-Com bomber raid forming up at the edge of Sentinel’s missile envelope turned toward them. His aircraft’s EODAS picked up the thermal bloom of two brigades of J-20s ascending sharply at full burner.

Please don’t have the resolution to be a fire control radar.

The Raptors wheeled west, kicked up into afterburner, and started to climb. They were going to put as much distance between them and the heavies as possible and climb to give their air-to-air missiles as much potential energy as they could muster. The F-35s would clean up anyone who got through and help the bomber’s direct energy defenses intercept any incoming missiles.

Now this is a goddamn fight. The adrenaline rush finally hit. The match was set.

It would take just seven minutes for the J-20s and F-22s to collide—and about half that time for the Percs to enter their maximum weapon range.

With a few clicks of his display, he put together an engagement plan with Sentinel’s CIC and started queuing targets for his squadron. OLYMPUS POSEIDON, backed by the super-computer on Sentinel, crunched numbers in a minute and developed an optimal firing solution, accounting for everything down to the pressure differential along the missiles’ flightpaths.

The 300-mile gap between the two forces started closing at a combined airspeed that was ticking close to Mach 4—almost a mile every second. They were tracking 67 J-20s, 16 JH-20s, and 3 H-20s. They were outnumbered nearly eight to one.

Four things happened in quick succession.

First: Duke shouted over the radio, “SMITE! SMITE! Something high power is lasin’ me!” Nicholls looked over and through his HMD and saw a blinding hash-grid of infrared energy blasting his wingwoman. His aircraft’s laser warning receiver had also been tripped by the sheer power of whatever it was. It was no direct energy weapon he had ever seen. It was a LIDAR grid. The major dreaded to think how much juice and how big an emitter was needed to paint a target from a couple of hundred miles away.

Second: Someone on Andersen finally spoke up, with nothing but dreadful words to say, “All callsigns, this is Battlestar Actual. Authenticate Alpha Six Hotel. STATION BENT. I say again, ALLEY-OOP IS STATION BENT.” That was the air control wing’s commander telling everyone in the air that Andersen was compromised and incapable of landing aircraft or providing ground control. “Kilimanjaro will take what they can handle… Hickory is working on a solution…” He sounded tired, his voice rasped with one last awful word that he dread to speak. “Godspeed.”

Third: The three Perc bombers showed their cards—two dozen air-launch HQ-9D Gingseng Delta surface-to-air missiles appeared at 38,000 feet, screaming upwards on lofted trajectories. The bastards had just used a mix of extremely high-powered radar and LIDAR to negate their very low observability. Looking at his RWR and LWR, he was confident that the Mega AWACS did not have a fire-control lock.

Fourth: The PANOPTICON tracks froze. At first, he didn’t notice it as he warned Duke that she wasn’t being lit up by a laser weapon—or at least not an obvious one. One update tick passed, then another. His stomach dropped. He looked up into the night sky. At first, he thought it was just a shooting star, but then he realized the sky was on fire.

“Oh, Jesus.”

The Heavens fell as the Raptors raced upwards. They were running out of options.

The Ginsengs didn’t worry Nicholls too much, but they probably meant those were electronic warfare Brigands. That complicated things, or at the very least, could complicate things. The X Band pencil beams and LIDAR grids dancing between his squadron’s aircraft did worry him. No—they terrified him. They were outnumbered. The wrong move would see his entire command killed and the bombers in his care intercepted. They were on the razor’s edge—with two hundred and seventy-five miles of blade ahead of them.

“Okay, Apollo, let’s force these bastards closer to Sentinel. Set ‘em up for hammer and anvil. Ready up on Phoenixes, release on my call.” The Phoenix was a massive weapon, and officially, the Raptor wasn’t even spec’d for it—it was supposed to be the domain of the Wasp, Super Eagle, and Raider. Nineteen of them streaked into the air in three seconds.

The Raptors jinked away from the merge and toward Sentinel, entering a shallow dive to pick up speed. Their side-aspect radar signature was worse than head-on, but every mile closer to Sentinel made the Americans more dangerous and the Percs more vulnerable and helped ensure that the American, Australian, and Japanese bombers would slink into the night unharmed

The PLA went loud and activated their jammers and radars. The EW kit aboard three of the Brigands and four of the Fizzles was extremely sophisticated, with much better performance than what was in the DIA estimates. Someone in the Central Military Commission had gambled with a lot of very expensive assets. The Americans’ displays were turned to hash. For a moment, the PLAAF officers were very pleased by their electronic warfare capes.

But only for a moment.

It took USNS Sentinel’s Large Diameter Very High Power array just five seconds to burn through the cloud of defensive emissions equivalent to about nine TREE SHARK jamming pods at full power. Even as the sky fell, the multi-band radar aboard Sentinel was enough to burn through clouds of Heaven and get a lock on the face of God.

However, the PLAAF Senior Colonel running this multi-brigade operation from the backseat of an EW variant of the JH-20 fighter bomber was not interested in bombers. They were, at best, a mere bonus. His objective was something altogether different. Something of much greater value and import than a squadron-and-a-half of strike aircraft. He was to watch over those who Dared to Die.

Nicholls tensed the muscles in his hand as he held the stick; he was sweating, but not about the PLA missiles. He was working out the math. He watched as tracks ticked closer to Sentinel. He pinged the battle station, who put his ticket on hold.

How helpful. Nicholls stared at a little swooshing circle on his display with abiding annoyance. They put me on hold. “Looks like I need to talk to the mana—”

His display showed a deluge of nanocomposite metals and graphene-laced silicon rising from Sentinel. Nine SM-8 Hypersonic Interceptor-Tactical and sixteen SM-6 Block IIIA Extended Range Active Missiles accelerated into the night, hurtling at both the oncoming fighters and the strike package they had abandoned. The Chi-Com pilots had a minute to choose whether to face the incoming Phoenixes or the Standards. They could only present their best aspect to one incoming threat. They chose to present their noses toward Sentinel—even if that meant they had to keep closing the distance.

“Execute.” Nicholls’s voice was cold as ice. “Torch it.”

Eleven Raptors turned about on command, wheeling onto a closing vector with the Percs. The hunted had become the hunters. They cut afterburners and rolled into supercruise, but they kept slowing to reduce their thermal signature as they entered the fight.

Now, they had to deal with the first wave of incoming.

Eleven gunports snapped open, unmasking prismatic emitters for the eleven AN/AEQ-6 TALISMAN high-energy lasers. The 75-kilowatt laser system was designed to be a drop-in/drop-out replacement for the M61 rotary cannon. You were lucky if you could squeeze out six shots before the capacitor bank fried itself; if not for that little foible, it would recharge one shot out of three after about two or so minutes.

His HMD and EODAS had tagged the incoming rain of supersonic telephone poles, even if it took an extra second to parse through the burning debris re-entering the atmosphere. Apollo Flight started blasting. The lasers appeared only on his HMD, relaying the information gathered by the aircraft’s EOTS and EODAS. It took about two seconds to achieve a hard kill. Most of the missiles did not explode; they merely veered off course and fell toward the ocean.

It was anticlimactic. There was no pomp or circumstance. Distant darts tumbled like failed sounding rockets. Some missiles tore themselves apart, while some just twirled and twirled, down and down.

It was down to ‘just’ 200 miles.

And it was their turn.

Eleven APG-90 multi-band AESA radars rose to full power in a snap. The Raptors did not fire, but they did bring death. Twenty-two exceptionally dangerous surface-to-air missiles streaked across the sky and were provided with almost ideal fire control data as they entered their terminal phase.

The Fagin and Fizzles began to volley PL-21 Asmodeus ramjet-powered long-range AAMs at their maximum range. The count started at sixteen and rose to 44 missiles in mere moments. Four per Raptor.

How judicious.

“Think these guys wanna kill us, Change,” one of his pilots astutely assessed their situation with the acumen one would expect of the Aerospace Force’s best.

Thirteen seconds after they unleashed their first volley, the Standards Eight HITs made their presence felt. They killed six Brigands—including two of the three EW birds—and two Fizzles.

Their APG-90s proved their worth, using exceptionally high-power and pin-head diameter X-band pencils to permanently damage the multi-mode seekers of the incoming missiles even as they were in the ascent phase of their ballistic trajectories. The process took far too long for them to kill many this way, but every missile defeat was a victory.

They kept closing.

190 miles.

185.

They had a few minutes before the PL-21s came bearing down on them.

180 miles.

175 miles.

Bingo.

“RIPPLE! FOUR TIMES FOX THREE!” Nicholls shouted.

His Aeros joined him in a chorus of “Fox Three.”

Both his weapons pods opened up once more, each releasing a pair of two-stage AIM-260B Blackeye JATMs. 38 missiles were in the air in a few seconds. Three failed—one had a busted motor and just fell like an iron bomb, and the other two refused to accept guidance and just screamed ahead instead of racing upward in a lofted arc.

The Raptors cut their external weapons pods and fuel tanks as the SM-6s killed two H-20, six JH-20, and two J-20. His display had a dedicated button just to drop his stores. The explosive bolts ejected the pods from their pylons, and as they fell, switchblade wings snapped out from their dorsal mounting joints.

This was the work of an SAP which started as GENTLE STEWARD—a way to recover ejected stores by having them glide back to the earth—but evolved into CLAVICUS VILE—a self-contained, lost-cost decoy and spoofing system attached to the GENTLE STEWARD glide kit. The Raptors immediately turned their active electronic warfare systems to full, turning Chinese radar readouts into crystal blizzards. CLAVICUS VILE was not a smart system; it was primarily a reflector that allowed a jammer to “imprint” onto it, paired with the internals of a lower spec diminutive of the MALD-J decoy/jammer. It was not particularly powerful, and it had only a few minutes of endurance, but it was also cheap. As the Raptors spat electromagnetic noise at their handicapable faux-wingmen, they ejected the pylons. Like doing The Wave, the bits of metal rippled down from the formation like a zipper falling apart.

They were now eleven clean King Raptors against a world of hurt.

They fired their next volley of JATMs at 150 miles and began to break out of formation as they diverted away. It was erratic, novel, and—above all else—a little bit deranged. Nicholls moved his ship below and in front of his wingwoman—the fourth man in a four-ship flight of decoys. As the Percs started to burn through the outer layers of jamming, they were greeted with returns suggesting that their enemy had quadrupled.

The LIDAR grid started smacking their aircraft like a limp relativistic spaghetti-wrist slap. He watched as the incoming PL-21s distributed themselves against the new targets for a moment, but they reapportioned themselves again—against real Raptors. Another three dozen ramjet missiles came screaming into the night, appearing on Nicholls's display.

They had volleyed. They had thundered. Now, they charged into death.

It was the longest minute of his life.

He was certain it was going to be his last.

Five hundred seventy miles away, a THAAD-ER Block III kinetic kill vehicle used its liquid-fueled Direction and Attitude Control System to make an impact with the KJ-5000F Mastermind airborne computing control aircraft just forward of its starboard wing root. The aircraft was little more than fuel cells and computers—there to provide low-latency, high-volume computing power for her two LIDAR or AESA-equipped sisters and her mother with the control center for this four-ship airborne warning and control system. Several hundred pounds of metal impacted at Mach 6, enough to punch a Honda Civic-diameter hole. The entire right wing came free. The missile had broken the aircraft’s spine, so the fuselage forward of the impact tore free as the wreckage tumbled down into the cloud bank two thousand feet below. There was a muted burst of red and orange light as the fuel cells detonated.

It was now a cage match, and the lights had just gone out.

Not even the radar and electronic sniffers on the sole remaining EW H-20 could get a solid lock Raptors. The Americans were just too far away. The PL-21s started going in the wrong direction. The entire second salvo went wide as the Americans positioned themselves well outside the field of view of their seekers—the ramjet missiles would find nothing but empty air. The Percs, however, remained lit by the thirty-five-foot-diameter radar on Sentinel—the same as on the Yellowstone-class ballistic missile defense cruisers. The LREWs were fed with only the finest fire control data that Uncle Sam could provide, homing in on the aircraft most likely to be brigade and flight group commanders based on PLA standard formations.

Their TALISMAN once again started burning missiles out of the sky. However, they were not killing them fast enough. Twenty. Fifteen. Ten. Eight. Six. The F-22s began to maneuver violently as the ramjets sprinted toward the finish, jinking to avoid the field of view of the Raptors’ defensive lasers.

Two hit home—just as eleven Phoenixes found targets. The first Raptor lost in aerial combat fell toward the ocean. There was no chute. Another Raptor limped away with one engine. Nicholls ordered the pilot to retreat, divert to a KC-48, and then onto Iwo Jima or Wake Island if he could reach ‘em. The Phoenixes made eight kills—the last Brigand, one Fizzle, and six Fagin—plus two more damaged Fizzles.

One hundred miles.

The Chi-Coms volleyed off thirty, no—forty-six—more missiles, a mix of PL-15 and PL-20, after Apollo Two-Two was hit and began to limp away. The radars on the J-20s were still out of range; the JH-20s were another matter. They were getting close.

Sentinel once more began unleashing the fury of the tides in the form of thirty-two RIM-198 SM-7 Block IB, the solid rocket booster-equipped evolution of the RIM-162 Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile and replacement for the venerable Standard Missile Two. They were not targeted at the Chi-Com fighters. The battle station fired all thirty-two missiles at the Screamers howling toward Guam. An entire brigade of J-20s broke from the fight and began to fire their missiles at the ESSM-MRs.

Nicholls realized that he had made a mistake as he saw three dozen stealth fighters turn away from him. He was not at the top of their list. He had missed the game they had been playing. But it was too late.

The first JATMs started to kill—seven more Fagin and two more Fizzle. Most, however, were targeted at the diverting J-20s and did not have the energy to reach their target.

The ordered action began to devolve into a game of back-alley shivings at 700 knots. Both sides had lost their air controllers. They had lost comrades. They were out for blood. They would get it and more. There was fire and smoke and death on the air as the remaining JATMs struck home.

They were in a death match conducted over the horizon—well, at the very least, out of visual range.

Death came by missiles barely half a foot or so diameter of metal hurtling at multiples of the speed of sound. Nicholls directed his pilots as best he could, directing fire toward the remaining trio of Fizzles—whose more powerful radars, more advanced ECM, and larger weapons complement made them more dangerous than their distinguished predecessors.

Another Raptor fell—then another. They killed three more Fagin. Nicholls watched as those he had trained with for years died in seconds. He knew their kids. He had been at their weddings and been there for their divorces.

Memories were drowned in a blur of death and callouts as the human form struggled under the force of several gravities. It was a battle to survive as much as it was to kill.

Two more Raptors were overwhelmed by a flight-group-sized volley of PL-15s.

Eleven Fagin paid the price for that wound.

It looked like the Americans could win the fight. Then, the other J-20 brigade double-backed. They came at the Raptors with both barrels. Nicholls wrung every ounce of maneuverability from his aircraft. He lost count of how many he had dodged. The Raptor would probably be a write-off even if he landed it one piece; he was just about flying its wings off. But Nicholls did not care about the airframe; he just wanted to keep in the air. The longer he was alive meant that the PLAAF could shoot at him and not his aeros. However every missile they dodged would see two more flung at them. It was a numbers game, and it had been stacked from the start.

Nicholls’s fuel state was critical. His TALISMAN was fried. His complement of AIM-197 Common Airborne Self-Defense Hit-to-Kill—small diameter kinetic self-defense missiles had been depleted. He had two more Peregrines left. He touched off one at the last Fizzle. He pitched his aircraft over to dodge a PL-21, dumping his last Air Nulka (High Speed) decoys. He dodged yet another PL-15 coming from the other direction, touching off his last Peregrine in a counter-shot. His warning receivers were going crazy. His body was straying to keep out, and he just didn’t have enough energy to avoid the next missile.

The PL-21 sliced through his left wing and detonated beside the horizontal stabilizer. His left engine was shattered and the F-22C entered into a flat spin. He had no chance of recovery. He looked at where his wing used to be as he pulled the ejector handle. He was struck by cold winds going several hundred knots. His chute deployed without issue. He saw his aircraft disappear into a cloud bank. He followed suit. It was thick enough that he could barely see his hand in front of his face. By the time by the time he saw the Stygian waters of the Sea, his aircraft had been swallowed whole, as if it had never existed. A quarter of his squadron was dead.

He thought it was the sunrise just on the horizon, but it did not fade. It was a stream of meteors, glowing red hot from friction with the air. The Screamers tore across the sky like a hateful Phaeton, dragging darkness in its wake. He activated his rescue beacon and hoped that an HV-28 Kingfisher from Sentinel would come to retrieve him and what other pilots had managed to eject.

This fight was over, but his fight was not.