Final impact

If he expected a fight from Spruance, he didn’t get one. The ’temps really had hardened up in the last two years. In some ways they seemed even more inured to suffering than folks had been in his own time. Less of a victim culture, he supposed. Last he’d heard, at least eighty thousand Frenchmen and women had died in the preparatory air strike over Calais. You couldn’t pull shit like that back up in the twenty-first without most of the media and half of Congress demanding that you be indicted as a war criminal. Or a Nazi, he thought with yet another spasm of twisted irony. That was always a fave, whenever people at home were exposed to the actual brutality of warfare. Out would come the tar and the feathers and the hand-painted NAZI sign to hang around somebody’s neck.

Somebody like him.

But Spruance remained focused on the big picture, no matter how grim-faced he was at having to listen to the destruction of Sergeant Denny’s patrol. They had to assume that the other Force Recon units inserted on two nearby islands had been compromised, as well. Yet they couldn’t allow that to distract them.

“I agree, Admiral Kolhammer,” Spruance said. “Launch your planes.”

In the short walk out to her Skyhawk, Flight Lieutenant Anna Torres began to leak sweat. The air temperature was hovering over forty degrees Celsius, but down on the Clinton’s flight deck it seemed to be about half again as much. The roar of jet engines, the heavy traffic in personnel and equipment, the reflected heat scorching off the composite decking-it all created a very uncomfortable environment. She didn’t envy her chief as he readied the stepladder just beneath the cockpit. He must have been broiling inside his coveralls and powered helmet.

Torres gave him a thumbs-up as she strapped in and the bubble canopy slid down into place. She could have sworn there were about twice as many people watching from whatever vantage points they could grab as she ran through preflight. That was only to be expected. Although the A-4s had been flying off the Clinton for a few months now, this was their true baptism of fire. Slung beneath her fuselage on the centerline hard point she had a laser-guided sixteen-hundred-kilo GBU-20. A bunker buster that could chew through five meters of reinforced concrete before detonating. She was also carrying a couple of thermobaric glide bombs, two under each wing, and four hundred rounds of 20mm cannon ammo.

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.