Final impact

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.