time for the pilots to eject. Fish and Dragon plowed on through the fireballs where the two enemy fighters had been, passing the other three Gnats. They came into formation beside Stinky and TigerLady, who was still firing behind them at the remaining Gnats.
'Shit!' Fish banked and rolled while trying to swallow her stomach, then pitched one-hundred-eighty degrees and yawed forty-five. 'Guns, guns, guns.'
'Fox three!' TigerLady shouted. A missile screamed out from the bot-mode fighter's midsection and twisted its way right into the cockpit of one of the pursuing Gnats. 'Hot damn! That's one!' the young lieutenant shouted.
The two remaining Gnats continued to bank through the turn, trying to get a firing solution on any of the Ares. As the two Gomers pulled in tight behind them, their trajectories led them right across multiple firing solutions, and the four Navy aviators laid waste to the Seppies. But just before the last one crossed a firing solution, it did something that none of them had seen before. The Seppy Gnat transfigured into a bot mode and went into a Superman dive, going to guns with its forearm cannons.
'Guns, guns, guns!' Fish's railgun cannon tracers cut in across space in front of the transfigured Seppy Gnat and tracked its trajectory until it flew right through the forty-millimeter cannon rounds. The enemy fighter was ripped to shreds by a fusillade of baseball-sized, high-incendiary, armor-piercing tracer rounds, scattering debris and gas vapors from it.
'Guns, guns, guns!' Dragon followed up.
'Guns, guns, guns!' Stinky shouted.
'All wings, all wings! Be advised that the Gnats have a bot-mode! I repeat, the Seppy Gnats have a bot mode now!' Fish communicated wide, with full dispersion across all the flight-wing channels. She guessed that several others had to have seen the same by now and wondered why nobody had called it in.
'Fish, Fish,
'Go,
'We need air support dirtside! It's thick down there.'
'Roger that,
Chapter 21
July 1, 2394 AD
Sol System, White House
Friday, 3:26 PM, Earth Eastern Standard Time
'Yes, Mr. President, it would appear that the fleet ships in the Ross 128 system are severely outnumbered,' the young courier officer said over the holoview communication from onboard the QMT facility out in the Oort. 'The final information is encoded, and I was told by the admiral himself that you would understand this message. The message is, quote, Operation Bachelor Party is in play and has visual confirmation of missing package. Missing package is on enemy supercarrier that QMTed out that DeathRay pursued. DeathRay also confirmed via sensors that missing package was aboard said enemy supercarrier-class vessel just before he vanished with it.'
Alexander Moore and his wife stood in front of the long mahogany conference table in the White House Situation Room, watching the holoview communication intently. The Situation Room had basically the same decor that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had added back in the mid-twentieth century after the Bay of Pigs incident. President Moore stood grimacing with his arms folded at the head of the room where more than ninety-six other presidents had stood and pondered the heavy decisions of their time. As if the weight of the office bearing fully on his shoulders wasn't enough, now the fate of his teenage daughter was wrapped up in the decisions he would have to make. Was there some approach that his predecessors had used or some profound thought that had kept them on the right path that he could emulate? He wondered if other presidents thought the same things as they had stood there over the last couple of centuries.
How had President Alberts felt when he learned that the Separatists were attacking Mons City on Mars just twelve years earlier? How Nixon must have paced the room during
