Sortie

Iryx

25 Feb 2025 • 23 min read

0300L, November 18th, 1765.
Kaltukatjara AFB, Australia.
Two hours before the Battle of the Celebes Sea.

MSgt Bouddi looked up from the console as she walked into the hangar. "Ready to go, Major?"

"Come on Master Sergeant, don't hit me with the 'major', I work for my paycheck." It still felt strange to her; she'd only been an officer for three months.

"Yeah? You call what you do work?"

She grinned. "Not at all. Am I good to go?"

He turned to shout to the ground crew, "WE GREEN?!," getting a quartet of thumbs-ups in response: weapons, avionics, engines, and last but not least, interface.

"We're green. Waiting on you."

"Fantastic." She took the thirty-three steps from the yellow "work zone" line to the ladder, then another seven up to the cockpit. Senior Aviator Djalu was on the other side to greet her.

"Ready?"

He nodded.

"Meshing in three, two, one–" She took the final step into the sensory harness and touched the surface in the back of her mind that was made of titanium-silver alloy, ceramics, and synthetic diamond. Everything went black, then white.

There was a hiss, then a click as Djalu slotted a simple but very important piece of medical tubing into her circulatory port. The light dimmed, and she could feel pins and needles as the sensory harness pressed in around her. Her sight came online within seconds, electro-optics across her body blasting a deluge of information into her eyeballs.

"Feeling good in there?"

"Feeling like me," IRIS replied. Her voice was buzzy and synthetic, as if she was a killer robot from some schlocky movie. Just how she liked it.

"Good. Sealing you in." She could feel the clicks and thumps as Djalu maneuvered her sensory harness into the the guts of the plane, where the armature could rotate her biological component to withstand omnidirectional g-forces.

"Preflight checks, please." She ran through the list as the ground crew disconnected various coolant and fuel hoses. Move all her control surfaces, actuate all her servos, make sure her senses were all working. As usual, it all worked perfectly. MSgt Bouddi gave a thumbs up from his console.

Djalu patted her like she was a particularly satisfactory racehorse and gave her a thumbs up before scrambling down the ladder and wheeling it out of her way. She resisted the urge to "tap" him back with her laser system while MSgt Bouddi's voice crackled in over the radio, "Green across the board. Ready for engine start." She transmitted a seeker growl in response as her ground crew cleared the hangar.

"And IRIS? Good hunting."

Seventeen jet-black darts tore through the atmosphere over the Australian desert, trailing a stream of white-hot plasma behind them. This would not be the reactive scrambling of the last few months. Odie's Indonesian Offensive had been blunted in the northwest by the sacrifices of the Sixth Fleet and a fortune in orbital ordnance, but the other half of it was lurking underwater in the Celebes Sea. Seventh Fleet was poised to deliver the death blow, but only if they could get past the shore batteries on Mindanao, and Odie knew that too. Their task, as the 77th Combined Interception Squadron, was to break Odie's back in the Celebes, clear the skies for allied fighters, and kill every Essie with a jet engine between here and the Visayas.

They were entering an already-busy battlespace, not as first-line combatants. The cold calculations of war demanded that less valuable aircraft be used to determine the location and disposition of enemy forces. Or rather, the cold calculations of war demanded that orbital assets be used for that, but the fucking Essies had been tossing up surface-to-orbit missiles from Mindanao for the last two hours, and low orbit was currently full of shrapnel. The PDT orbital grid was halfway competent, but not against that many missiles. So it was back to planes again, dropping sonobuoys, taking photos, and squinting with the good old Mk.1 Eyeball. Or rather, Mk.2 or Mk.3 Eyeballs, because they weren't exactly working with plain old human eyes.

A nearby AWACS keyed up on their squadron channel. "Lucky Sevens! Welcome to the thunderdome. I'll be your AWACS today, callsign EXALT GRID–"

A series of confirmation beeps filled the channel, a squadron of aerial predators eager to do what they were made for. She'd worked with EXALT GRID before, but only for scramble calls, not a full squadron sortie. He'd immediately distinguished himself after his first time handling Blacklights by learning how to speak to them in their own language. He might have been slower at it than they were, but the effort meant a lot.

"–thanks for the vote of confidence. Alright. IRIS, PYRITE, AMETHYST, RADIANT, loop back for a few minutes, I've got a tasking for you. FORGELIGHT, ECHELON, PHALANX, CRIMSON, you're on the eastern side on [COURSE:0xb019...201c], you're top cover for the Valk strike that's about to hit at [LOC:6.11x125.16]. The rest of you are on QRF. Provide long-range support however you like, but stay behind our jamming. We want Odie to bring out his toys first."

The 77th responded with an array of confirmations, climbing and accelerating past the triple formation of CN-2000 flying wings. IRIS hung back with the rest of her flight and vibrated with frustration at being denied combat, but understood why. There was a plan at work.

But that didn't mean she had to sit around and wait. "EXALT GRID, directions?" Text-based communication was designed to be easier for their senses when they were like this, but that didn't mean they weren't capable of human speech. Regardless, many preferred to stick to text, to immerse themselves in the machine. Unlike a lot of her fellow Blacklights, using her voice wasn't something that bothered her. IRIS had cranked up the mechanical and digitized nature of the synthesizer to the max– reminding other aviators that she was a machine was something she loved. It was also why she was notionally the flight lead, because PYRITE and AMETHYST emphatically did not like to use their words. RADIANT didn't mind, but this was only its second sortie.

"Wait one, IRIS." He was only human, and guiding seventeen living war machines, each with a nine-figure price tag, was not a trivial task. IRIS idly wondered if it was possible to make an AWACS controller the same way they had made her a Blacklight. A few of them would have to like it, right?

"Okay, you four: tagging ally formation for escort. Your friends are clearing a path, you're making sure it stays clear and your charges stay alive. Save your missiles, we're expecting more company any moment now."

IRIS's vision lit up with the tagged allies: five BN-54 Auroras and a pair of the BI-54 Shimmer air-to-air conversions, cruising up from the south at a leisurely Mach 6.2 and a brisk 25,000m. They were, to some degree, birds of a feather, the only other true hypersonics in PDT service. But they were bombers, not interceptors, even if they filled their holds with a naval laser system and air-to-air missiles. They capped out at Mach 6.5, a third less than a Blacklight's top speed, and they weren't like them. Auroras had people inside; they weren't people themselves, not like she was.

That said, they were fun friends to have, and every one she'd tried out had been fun in bed, too. The four of them pulled around and dropped speed to nestle in besides their newfound friends, sending telemetry mesh requests.

The lead Aurora spoke up with a thick Scottish accent as they merged with the bomber formation, "Well, hello there, wee beasties." IRIS waggled her wingtips in response. Blacklights might have been huge by the standards of fighters, but Auroras were twice their size.

"Tasking?"

"World's fastest ASW, we've got holds full of mines and sonobuouys. Keep us from getting any extra holes, and Odie's navy dies here."

"Confirmed." IRIS imagined that for a bombardier, watching a three-hundred-meter submarine detonate was probably as good as the sensation she got from seeing a Garuda evaporate into fragments after a railgun hit. They certainly sounded eager.

She gave the equivalent of a nod to the other three Blacklights. They had practiced bomber escort before with this in mind, though those practice runs had been for nuclear delivery, not sensors. But there were hundreds of enemy fighters in the air, and they wouldn't be able to localize the subsurface fleet until sonobuouys were dropped. She might have been nigh-invulnerable to the majority of air-to-air ordnance, but naval fire support was a more serious matter.

The four of them banked slightly and accelerated forward from the flight of AWACS, ECM platforms, and blended-wing tankers.

Commander (Junior Grade) Nantaal looked over his shoulder at his squadron. Twenty-five BH241 Gammas piloted by the best young men his nation had to offer. He was damn proud of them– even though they might have been green, they weren't unblooded. But nobody would be calling them green after today.

Orbital systems had picked up on the fact that the snakes were swarming. They had figured out that the South Sea Combined Fleet, the other half of the Indonesian Offensive, was still in the Celebes, and they were gunning for it with a massive concentration of naval power from the east. Nantaal was confident. They knew the enemy was coming, they knew where they were, and they were going to be fighting during daylight. It would at least minimize all the inhuman bullshit. And if the snakes' fighter force here was decimated, there'd be little to stand in ODI's way to properly burn out their hives around the Banda and Java seas.

The radio beeped. "Cobalt squadron, Emperor. Engage on bearing one-eight-zero, FL one-niner-zero. Lots of friendlies, so watch your fire."

"Roger. Cobalt squadron engaging." He banked his Gamma in a snappy, parade-perfect turn into the new vector, followed quickly by the rest of the squadron. They'd practiced.

"Silver squadron, Emperor. Engage on bearing..."

Nantaal tuned out the AWACS and fiddled with his HUD controls. Talk about a target rich environment. The whole center of the Celebes had vanished into a hash of radar jamming before he'd even gotten off the ground, and it hadn't improved much since.

"Cobalt squadron, belay that. New priority target. One-one Auroras, bearing two-three-zero, FL two-five-zero."

"Roger, Emperor. Cobalt engaging on two-three-zero, altitude two-five-zero." That was a little higher than their Gammas could reach, but not higher than their missiles could. They didn't carry the titanic missiles that were purpose-built to kill hypersonics at long range, but they each had a pair of converted naval ABMs in their weapons bay that could still catch a hypersonic. Nantaal and the rest of his squadron banked to the new vector and climbed at a comfortable Mach 3.3.

"Cobalt, prep for coordinated release."

The bombing run was going well, at least from the perspective of the bombers. The Auroras had dropped most of their sonobuoys without incident, and the formation was angling around to drop their mines across the northern strip of the Celebes. Fortunately, the jamming and fighter strikes had wrecked Odie's long-range IADS, and nobody had lobbed any hypersonics at them yet. But from an interceptor's perspective, it had been awfully dull.

IRIS saw the encroaching Gamma flight from the northeast at the same time they saw her. Or, not saw so much as detected, but radio waves were just another visual sense for her, overlaid and meshed together with the rest of her electro-optical system. And it was a sense that was barely working at the moment, because the air was so full of microwaves you probably could have warmed up a frozen dinner with it.

<[TID:BH241x25|QUERY:ENGAGE].> That was AMETHYST, eager as always.

<[NEGATIVE|HOLD]. Maintain formation.>

<Why?> If IRIS had lungs, she would have sighed. AMETHYST was perfectly happy to follow orders that conflicted with their own hyperaggressive instincts... as long as they were told why, often in excruciating detail.

RADIANT replied before she could. <If we engage now, we leave [FID:BN-54x5|BI-54x2] behind, and [TID:BH241x25] will have time to scatter. We can intercept their missiles, just wait until they're closer and we can kill them all.>

<Understood.>

"Sir? I'm not sure those are all Auroras." They were a thirty or so seconds out from their launch point, and it was a little late in the game to be noticing things now. But Commander (Junior Grade) Nantaal's XO had been around the block a few times, so he earned a listen.

"Explain."

"The ones on the sides, they're a lot darker in color. Auroras are white, not black. They could be... you know."

He rolled his eyes. His fellow airmen had taken to refusing to name the beasts, in the hopes that it would somehow protect them from the massive drone fighters that had been tearing through their airpower in Cascadia like tissue paper. It was wrong to sit a thousand kilometers away and fly a fighter. Air-to-ground, sure, but air-to-air combat should have been face-to-face. Not like the snakes gave a shit about what was right and wrong, of course.

"Parekh, they can't use Blacklights without sat links. And they're a hundred kilometers away, you're not seeing anything more than single pixels at this range." They also didn't have more than four or so of the planes in this hemisphere, but that was classified beyond his ability to share. Nantaal didn't wait for his XO to respond before flipping over to the squadron channel.

"Cobalt, release."

Fifty HPL-90 Air-Launched Anti-Ballistic (Multipurpose) missiles dropped out of his squadron's weapon bays. The Gammas themselves could only pull Mach 3.5, and the Auroras were nearly twice as fast, but they only had to get in range once. The HPL-90s could hit Mach 11 or so against air targets, especially ones at that altitude, and while Auroras had lasers, they didn't have enough to deal with fifty missiles. It was going to be messy. Nantaal grinned in anticipation.

The sweet, sweet siren of the launch warning filled IRIS's senses. Fifty missiles was well within their intercept capabilities with the Shimmers, who were carrying literal tons of interceptor missiles. It only took a few seconds for her to pick out the likely squadron commander and flight leads and tag them.

<[AMETHYST,RADIANT].>

They responded with a combination of warbling radar pings and growling seeker tones. It was time.

<[TID:BH241x25]. Kill them. And make it messy.>

They wordlessly pivoted, accelerating towards their prey as the Aurora formation spewed counter-missiles and decoys.

Nantaal's stomach dropped out from under him as two of the Auroras pulled high-g turns towards his squadron and accelerated. Parekh had been right, but he didn't see how. There couldn't be a Blacklight here, much less two of them. There were only supposed to be four, and they were already tracking them over Mindanao. And they shouldn't have been able to run autonomously like this!

"I fucking told you–!"

"Shut up! Cobalt, on me! Max forward jamming! Wait for them to close, then put missiles out in front of them! Switch seekers to datalink!" Unsaid was the fact that none of the remaining missiles they carried had much chance of acquiring a maneuvering hypersonic aircraft, much less hitting one. The HPL-90s probably could have, but only at close range, and they'd launched all of theirs to overcome the bombers' lasers...

He suddenly realized that he'd been tricked and squeezed his joystick with anger.

"Cobalt, Emperor. Break off immediately, return due north."

What– they couldn't possibly outrun hypersonics, especially when they were a hundred and fifty– no, a hundred now –kilometers out.

"Negative, Emperor. We know the score. We're taking some down with us."

"Cobalt! Break off immedi—" Nantaal switched his radio off.

Odie was courageous, RADIANT could give them that much. The squadron didn't turn tail and run, though it wasn't like it would have helped. It picked out the squadron leader, switching its railgun to ARM and feeling charge trickle into its weapon capacitors.

<Idea. [MANEUVER:0xa011...ff9e],> AMETHYST sent.

RADIANT liked that idea. <[CONFIRM].> It loosed the railgun shot, feeling its airframe shudder as electrical current flung a chunk of metal and electronics at something close to Mach 20.

It took the pair of Blacklights under sixty seconds to close the 150-kilometer gap between where they'd been and the formation of Gammas. RADIANT's railgun shot took half that, clipping its target's wing with a rain of hypersonic needles. The initial shot was quickly followed by another two, though neither connected: the hash of radar noise coming from the Gammas was intense enough that it was throwing off its targeting.

The incoming Gammas attempted to lob some missiles their way, with little success. The sole heater that that got even remotely close to them, RADIANT detonated with a pulse of laser light.

The pair of them held their fire as they closed the last few kilometers into gun range– not their own railguns, but the Gammas' cannons. They had something more efficient in mind than wasting their shots.

Commander (Junior Grade) Nantaal had approximately three seconds to react after making visual contact with the pair of IS-64 Blacklights. The interceptors dodged the squadron's volley of heaters like they were simply stepping out of the way. He was not a particularly curious man, and didn't wonder about how many g's that maneuver had involved, but he was a halfway competent pilot. Nantaal pointed his plane's nose in the vague direction of the two black specks and held down the trigger until his cannon ran dry.

The last thing he saw was a black arrow wreathed in white looming over his cockpit bubble.

RADIANT watched with predatory elation as the Gamma's airframe broke like it was tempered glass. Planes were generally not designed to withstand the overpressure of a hypersonic shockwave from a meter or two away, and its own had rendered the lead Gamma into nothing more than spiraling fragments and burning fuel.

It flicked on its laser interception system, picking out the nearest fighter and blasting it with 200kW of coherent light and another 800kW of microwave radar. RADIANT wasn't sure what broke, but the plane spiraled out of control a half-second later, and it didn't bother looking for a chute.

<This is pathetic,> AMETHYST sent, <can they even hit us?> They focused their laser onto another Gamma's cockpit. That's probably a grisly way to die, RADIANT thought. Oh well, should have stayed home.

<It's an appetizer. And, [NEGATIVE], they cannot.> RADIANT flung out its dorsal airbrakes, shedding velocity in exchange for a viciously small turning circle, and fired its railgun again. The release was bliss, feeling the recoil shudder through its alloy frame, shortly followed by the annihilation of a Gamma that had been brave enough to try to turn around for another missile launch.

IRIS interrupted their little killing spree with a message. <[AMETHYST,RADIANT:DISENGAGE].>

<What? Why?> The point of waiting had been to kill all of them, not–

IRIS forwarded a bit of intelligence from EXALT GRID: two full squadrons of Garudas in flight, taking fuel on from a flight of tankers south of Hainan. The timestamp was five minutes ago.

<Oh. Disengaging.> The Lancer squadrons could clean up the shattered Gamma formation later. That was a lot of Garudas.

"Payload away." The last set of active mines dropped free from the Aurora. It felt strange to IRIS, seeing a high-altitude hypersonic bomber dropping gravity weapons, but it wasn't like they could bring the ASW helos out here without them getting chewed up.

As the formation and their escorts curved back south, the lead Aurora's pilot keyed up the radio. At this distance, she could see the painted decal under the cockpit window: Agony Wagon, with a stylized pioneer wagon covered in spikes. "Thanks for the escort, Lucky Sevens. We'll take it from—"

A priority transmission from EXALT GRID sliced through the pea soup of jamming, "ALCON, ALCON, ALCON. Disengage immediately along vector one-two-zero. Repeat, disengage immediately along vector one-two-zero."

<What, [TID:H-1000x48]? We can take those,> sent RADIANT as the formation turned into the new heading. Blacklights could take Garudas three-to-one, and there were seventeen Blacklights within a minute's flight.

<Look at the sonar data.> PYRITE, typically the silent one, was like a sponge when it came to sensor data. All the Blacklights were superhumanly good at parsing sensor information, of course, but its hobby was reading over interface specification documents and coding up the relevant sensory plugins. Sometimes it had to be reminded to share said sensory plugins, but IRIS would never turn down another sense if one was available.

<[DISENGAGE],> AMETHYST sent, more firmly. They were correct. The water was boiling in a half dozen spots as Odie finally surfaced from the depths.

IRIS spoke over the radio, "Agony Wagon, max your throttles. Enemy fleet group surfacing."

"We're going as fast as we can, IRIS."

"Understood." They would be a hundred and thirty kilometers southeast in sixty seconds, but they didn't have any longer than it took for an ODI submarine to bring its search radar online. The sonobuoys and mines must have forced their hand, making them choose between fighting on the surface or blind-firing missiles from underwater while getting showered with ballistic torpedoes. It had been close, though. IRIS could see the makings of a brutal ambush: overconfident Blacklights suddenly caught with an entire fleet group surfacing underneath them while they attempted to engage a numerically-superior force of Garudas.

An ambush that could still kill her, even if it hadn't gone off as planned. A naval radar flicked on behind her, and she saw the wavering image of an ETC turret unfolding from a submarine's deck through the sea mist.

IRIS's skin lit up like it was on fire, and not the pleasant warmth of hypersonic friction heating.

Admiral Wu Gao surveyed the battlespace plots as the CIC lit up with activity. The air force's inability to stop the minelaying run meant that naval combat was now inevitable, and with the full weight of the Seventh Fleet bearing down on him, the outcome was far from certain.

"Sir, formation of fast movers, bearing zero-four-five, range four-zero. Eleven contacts, heading one-two-zero, speed two-two-zero-zero."

The captain looked to the admiral. "Sir?"

"Fight your ship, Captain."

"Aye, sir." He turned to the weapons officer, "Weapons, engage, hypersonic package."

"Weapons, hypersonic package, one-one targets, aye." The officer tapped a series of keys, and six megawatts of radar focused into a thin beam, lighting up the formation of enemy aircraft. A single last tap began the firing sequence. The Nanling-class submarine cruiser vibrated as two dozen missiles left its VLS cells, and the ETC barked out just as many rocket-assisted shells in quick succession. The radar picture went hazy as the snakes focused their defensive jamming, but the missiles were already in the air.

IRIS resisted the instinctual urge to twist and wriggle her way out of the target designation beam. Doing so would reveal what she was, and if the weapons officer who'd fired those missiles knew what he was doing, he'd redirect everything to her.

The pair of Shimmers started spitting out decoys and counter-missiles again. IRIS watched the counter tick down with concern. They were getting close to running dry; the salvo of HPL-90's had been more expensive to intercept than anticipated. Odie must have improved his anti-laser coating.

<[QUERY:EVADE],> PYRITE sent.

<No. The faster we get out of range, the better. There's a whole fleet group down there.>

<[QUERY:STATUS:ENGINE:THROTTLE:100].>

A pause. <[NEGATIVE|DISREGARD].> PYRITE was often uncomfortably eager to leave friendlies behind, but leaving the interception envelope of the Auroras wasn't any safer.

<So what, wait?> That was RADIANT.

<[CONFIRM.] Sync lasers with [FID:BI-54x2]. We're flying through it.>

"We're fully synced in, sir."

"Good," replied the captain. "Anything I don't know?"

"No sat coverage for either of us. Snake navy just entered the Celebes and they're launching like there's no tomorrow. And... and there's a pair of IS-64's in that group of hypersonics, according to the datalink."

"Oh? Thought they could hide? Weapons, retarget those shots." Nobody had killed one of the snakes' strategic interceptors so far, and there was a million-yuan bounty on each of them.

"Weapons, retasking, aye." A few key taps later and the ordnance in the air was converging on two targets instead of eleven.

<[WARN:SHELL|TID:SHELL]!> Nearly four megawatts of infrared light lanced the incoming ETC round from eleven different aircraft. It exploded in a fraction of a second, and their lasers pivoted to the next one just as quickly. They were getting uncomfortably close before detection– if one managed to get within separation range, someone was going to go down.

<[WARN:MISSILEx24|TID:MISSILEx24]!> Missiles screaming in at nearly Mach 20, far too heat-resistant to kill with lasers, the plasma sheath around them finally visible on radar even through the haze of jamming. The Shimmers dispensed another fifty counter-missiles, each looping around before attempting to engage their target. At these speeds, intercept of a small target from a narrow aspect needed direct impacts, and with this much jamming counter-missiles weren't perfect.

Nearly half of the counter-missiles found their targets. MHCM-1A's were good missiles; some of the best in the business. They had dud rates below one percent, pK's in the high nineties, and sometimes the crates even came with a six-pack of beer in them. But they weren't perfect, especially under jamming. Of the twenty-four targets engaged, twenty-three were successfully struck by at least one missile. The automated interception systems in the BI-54s reacted instantly to the sole missed target, launching a final pair of interceptors. The first missed by less than three meters. The second was a fraction of a second too slow, missing by a hundred.

IRIS saw the emissions of the terminal homing radar, felt the sidelobes bouncing off her skin. It wasn't heading for her.

<[AMETHYST:EVADE|EVADE|EVADE|EVADE|EV–>

AMETHYST flung out their right dorsal airbrake, the hydraulic piston slamming it into the hypersonic airstream at nearly ninety degrees. They spiraled hard, up to their airframe's limit. IRIS tasked the missile with the rest of the formation's lasers, hoping the ablative thrust would push it enough to make it miss and—

The warhead separated, a fine rain of metallic needles clouding the radar screen for a split second before they flashed past AMETHYST. One connected.

A piece of the leading edge on the tip of their right wing broke off, the chunk of synthetic diamond spiraling back into the airstream. Blacklights were incapable of making the noises of pain that humans or dragons were– no shouts or yelps, only words translated to text or a calm synthesized voice.

<Damaged,> AMETHYST sent, <decelerating.> Their wing was shredding from the airflow, sheets of wafer-thin ceramic tearing off from the wind the wind and exposing the titanium-silver lattice underneath. Their airbrakes splayed out in maximum extension, a white-hot X forming around their silhouette as they dropped from Mach 6.5 to subsonic in under five seconds.

<[QUERY:AMETHYST:STATUS].>

<Bad.> It was impossible for a Blacklight to pass out or become incapacitated by pain; it wasn't even really possible for them to feel significant amounts of pain. Being damaged was emotional pain.

"EXALT GRID. AMETHYST is injured and limited to subsonic. We require assistance."

There was a brief hesitation where EXALT GRID keyed up their radio but didn't say anything.

"...Understood. Standby."

The beast was wounded. The BI-54s had expended nearly all their ordnance to keep it alive, but something had connected. It had dropped an insane amount of velocity in seconds, but the residual speed had just barely carried it out of the range of their hypersonics. But it wasn't hypersonic anymore.

"Sir?"

"Just thinking of that million yuan, lieutenant. Subsonic package, and double it."

"Aye, double subsonic. Weapons away."

A salvo of eight missiles leapt out of the submarine's VLS. Overkill for any normal fighter, but Blacklights obviously weren't normal.

"Gold squadron, Silver squadron, Emperor. You are cleared to engage, heading one-eight-zero. One wounded bird trying to fly home. Ruin that snake's day for me."

"Will do, Emperor. Gold engaging."

"Not if we get it first. Silver engaging."

"ALCON, EXALT GRID. [TID:H-1000x48] entering the AO from heading zero-one-zero. I'm setting you up in a pinwheel around AMETHYST, get them back over the islands."

A series of cold-edged confirmations answered him. Blacklights were not designed to express emotion outside of high-velocity violence. There was no worried tone that they could use, no halting speech. But their emotional state was clear: there were no joyous acknowledgement beeps or predatory seeker tones. The enemy had dared to touch them; they would pay.

The bridge was staring at the plot in confusion. Rather than scuttle the damaged Blacklight, another dozen or so had crawled out of the jamming fog to protect it, whipping around it in a layered pinwheel.

Why go to the effort of protecting a damaged drone, the admiral wondered. The huge interceptors were automated, the only way something that big could maneuver and react like that. So there wasn't a pilot in there to protect, and even if there was, it wasn't like the snakes would have any trouble flying back to their airbase after an ejection.

It must have been the difficulty of making them, he concluded. The snakes had spared no expense, and somehow managed to make that an efficient use of resources, but that meant that any single loss might be unrecoverable.

"Sir, we just got satlink back. Enemy fleet positions coming in now. And tracking on inbounds."

The air force would have to deal with this one. He had a fleet to fight.

IRIS felt the thud of her railgun reverberating through her body, her first shot of the day soaring out into the distance to intercept one of the eighty-something missiles the Garudas had flung their way. It joined another three shots from FORGELIGHT, ECHELON, and VAPOR, each of them firing as fast as their capacitors could charge.

It wasn't going to be pretty. The Garudas were closing fast, and there were a lot of them, more than any of them had seen at once. Nearly fifty of them was probably a significant portion of the RIAF's entire hypersonic force. And the seventeen Blacklights here were also half of the PDT's entire inventory.

"EVENTIDE, EXALT GRID. I have likely flight and squadron commanders for you. Tagging now."

"Thank you." That was EVENTIDE, the squadron commander. Its voice was sultry, almost erotically so. It broadcasted engagement instructions almost immediately: <[TID:H-1000x6:JAM|LAS|LAUNCH:MAIHx4].>

Lasers, microwaves, and sixty-four telephone-pole-sized missiles ripped forth from the orbiting formation of Blacklights. It wasn't the every-plane-for-themselves orgy of violence they were built to love, but clinical, calculated violence, the domain of trained officers and war colleges, not instincts.

Curiously, Odie was still dividing up his missiles, presumably hoping they could pick up more than one kill. That might have doomed them, because while AMETHYST was too injured to dodge, the rest of them weren't. Of the five missiles that had targeted IRIS, she killed two with her railgun, two with counter-missiles, and slid past the last one as it desperately tried to reorient from chasing a sensor ghost.

The last of the Garudas' first volley exploded twenty kilometers to her left, struck by one of CRIMSON's countermissiles. Their own volley was getting picked apart, but their combined laser output appeared to be causing some problems. It was burning through cryogen like nothing else, but it was worth it when one of the Garudas lost control and tumbled, the airframe shredding itself as it spun.

<[IRIS,PYRITE,RADIANT,ECHELON,FORGELIGHT:ENGAGE],> EVENTIDE sent.

<That many,> IRIS asked as she turned towards the oncoming swarm, <are you sure?>

<Yes. We'll defend and snipe.>

<Understood.>

As she accelerated, four Garudas exploded into supersonic gouts of flame, struck dead-on by their missile barrage. For all their reliance on counter-missiles, Odie had never managed to get his interceptors to deconflict targets in close proximity. IRIS imagined shaking her nonexistent head in disapproval of the waste of ordnance, barely wasting a second on savoring the sensations of exploding targets before she was firing her railgun again. The enemy formation didn't instantly shatter like they used to– Odie had learned to put backups in place once they'd figured out how good their ELINT systems were at picking out officers –but the Garuda she had fired on sure did.

She broadcast a staticky sigh of pleasure over the unencrypted channel as her victim disintegrated into a mass of shredded metal. Psychological warfare was not something that Blacklights were trained in, but by their nature they were terrifying to the Essies, even if they still hadn't figured out what they truly were.

A dozen missiles came her way as she closed. She burned another railgun shot and most of her remaining counter-missiles to evade them. At close range, Odie's missiles would struggle to acquire her, their ultra-high-update-rate seekers designed for an extremely narrow sight cone, and at long range, jamming could make a difference until the last few kilometers of terminal guidance. But mid-range required bullying through it.

Fortunately, Odie was not clever or organized enough to volley her with forty missiles as she closed. She picked out a Garuda, blasting it with target designation radar as a friendly railgun round came soaring in– FORGELIGHT's. The guided round angled itself just barely enough to get a hit, a dozen tungsten fragments shredding her prey's ceramic skin like a shotgun through a screen door.

She didn't have time to celebrate. There were still forty-one fascists breathing her air, and her entire body sang with violence.

1231L, December 5th, 1765.
Kaltukatjara AFB, Australia.
Seventeen days after the Battle of the Celebes Sea.

Ammy turned off the polisher and inspected their work. There was no lasting damage– they were a machine, able to be built and rebuilt –but they had wanted a scar. A woman from a Japanese training squadron, rotating through Kaltukatjara to train their own prospective Blacklights, had suggested the idea of kintsugi to them.

They might not have been able to actually join the repairs with gold, but paint could do the aesthetics just as well. It was, theoretically, rated for temperatures almost as high as the ceramic itself, and they'd had to order it specifically at no small cost. The manufacturer had almost refused to let Ammy pay once he'd figured out who, and what, was ordering ultra-high-temperature gold paint, but they'd insisted. They didn't need the handout.

It would probably reduce their performance slightly. Not in any noticeable way to an outside observer, but they'd be able to tell. That was okay.

Thirty seconds of walking later and they were striding into the squadron office with confidence. "AMETHYST, reporting for duty."

IRIS looked up from her paperwork and grinned. "Good to have you back."