Lieutenant Penner flew in the second wave of the great air assault upon the approaching GD armada. The first wave of fighters and V-10 drones engaged GD carrier UAVs, swarms of them.
“This is going to be tough,” Penner’s wingman said.
Penner silently agreed. Look at the number of enemy UAVs, a flock of them or a swarm of bees on the hunt. Missiles fired, four of them.
He released chaff.
US Command didn’t have many options now. To win, they had to destroy the armada. If they burned up the Air Force to kill the ships, it would be worth it. Penner didn’t want to sacrifice his life, but they had to kill the GD armada.
He had thoughts about aborting the mission. He didn’t want to ide. But he was a Canadian officer. He would go down fighting if that’s what it took.
Lieutenant Penner, in his helmet with its dark visor, looked around at the clouds. This was a beautiful day. Maybe, likely, it would be his last day. Under his dark visor, he smiled. It was beautiful today, and it hurt to think that in less than an hour he would be dead, fish food in the great Atlantic Ocean.
Trying to fortify his resolve, Lieutenant Penner and the airmen of the squadron continued to bore in toward the approaching armada and its swarms of UAVs.
“It’s truly working,” the admiral said, with awe in his voice. “We’re killing their air force just as General Mansfeld predicted we would do.” He turned to Kaltenbrunner. “Mansfeld predicted the Americans would become panicked at the sight of my fleet. He said the Americans would hurl the last of their air against us, thereby aiding our conquest. I tell you, sir, for a landlubber, the man is a genius.”
General Kaltenbrunner grunted a noncommittal response.
At his station near the big screen, Gunther Weise’s hands had finally stopped shaking. He had settled down from the nuclear attack. It had taken long enough.
The Americans no longer launched ICBMs from North Dakota. Whatever their reason had been for launching, it was gone. Maybe it was as the admiral said. The enemy had panicked. The armada’s CAP chewed apart the American air heading out here to fight. Even now, the main amphibious landing craft and helo-carriers gathered to make their initial approach to the New Jersey shore. The Americans would have been wiser to hold their air back for later.
Gunther looked up at the big screen. He frowned.
“Strange,” the admiral said.
With a twist of his head, Gunther saw that the admiral watched the same thing he had.
“What is that?” the admiral asked.
“Sir,” a major asked.
“That,” the admiral said, pointing. “What is that? Where did it come from?”
Gunther’s head swayed back. He noticed something new: a streak on the big screen. It was purple, not red. Purple meant the computer hadn’t registered the thing as dangerous, but as an unknown object, as possibly threating.
“Look,” the admiral said. “There’s another one.”
General Kaltenbrunner swore in a harsh voice.
Gunther sat back in his seat, startled and suddenly uneasy. A blizzard of purple objects appeared on the big screen. His mouth dried out, and he glanced around. Didn’t anyone have any idea what those streaks represented?
A twenty-pound tungsten THOR missile—one of fifty just like it—began its descent into the atmosphere. At the start of its rapid fall, the missile had an ablative nose tip.
As the rod plunged down through the atmosphere at meteor speeds, heating up by friction, the ablative nose tip wore away until finally it was gone. It had done its job as a mini-heat shield. Instead of a blunt nose or even a rounded one showing, the THOR missile had a sharp point and an arrow-like design. It sliced through the increasingly dense atmosphere, losing only a fraction of its terrific velocity.
Despite the intense heat, the internal guts of the tungsten rod began to work. At two miles above the Atlantic Ocean, the nose cap popped off. That exposed the sensors. They were high-grade and rugged, and this particular missile spotted the GDN
At twenty pounds, the tungsten rod was less than an inch in diameter and four feet long. A luminous trail appeared behind it, as straight as a line.
Traveling at the incredible velocity, the THOR missile neared its target.
Warrant Officer Gunther Weise’s hands had begun shaking again. Fear boiled in his stomach, and the approaching disaster angered him as terribly unfair.
Gunther had no idea how this wretched turn of events had occurred. By the startled and grim looks on their faces, the admiral and general didn’t know how or why this terrible thing was happening, either.
In some diabolical fashion, the Americans attacked them from space. It was a science fiction assault. The enemy shouldn’t have been able to deploy or use such a weapons system. The German Dominion was superior in every way to the has-been Americans. Once, the US had stridden across the globe, the strongest power on Earth. But that day had long passed. This was a new era. German might had been reborn through the Dominion.
“How…?” General Kaltenbrunner asked in a hoarse voice. “How was this even possible?”
The admiral shook his head.
Gunther Wiese sat at his station. His stomach knotted horribly with pain. He couldn’t take his eyes off the big screen.
Then the THOR missile struck the supercarrier, a molten, glowing-orange meteor that punched through metal as if it was paper. Incredibly, it smashed through the air control tower first, burning antennae. It sliced down through deck after deck of the great ocean-going vessel. Lastly, the missile tore a hole out of the bottom of the carrier. Meanwhile, fuel storage tanks blew. Friction caused munitions to explode with tremendous force, causing the entire vessel to shudder horribly.
Gunther was already dead, with a piece of hot shrapnel sticking out of his skull. The admiral no longer possessed a head as blood jetted out of his neck. His uniform was no longer white. General Kaltenbrunner bellowed in agony before blood loss rendered him unconscious, and his big frame slumped onto the burning floor.
As the great pride and joy of the German Dominion Armada began to sink below the surface, the rest of the THOR missiles likewise smashed through other carriers, into battleships, cruisers, infantry transports, hovers, against every major ship in the fleet.
Ships blew up. Ships sank. A few limped along with brutal damage. It happened so fast, too, as if Heaven had rained vengeance upon them. Then the attack from space ended, with nothing but hundreds of luminous trails in the sky.
“Are you seeing this?” Lieutenant Penner shouted.
On his screen, beamed from an American AWACS, Penner watched the greatest air reversal in history. He didn’t know yet that it was part of the greatest sea reversal in history, a bigger upset than the Battle of Midway.
One moment, US fighters died to swarming GD drones. The F-35s and V-10s battled gamely, but there were outmatched by numbers and by better technology.
Now, the GD drones simply stopped firing. The drones ceased launching missiles, shooting shells; they stopped doing anything as they flew straight. Some went down into the rough swells. Others traveled east. More flew to the west. If Penner didn’t know better, he would say that the drone operators had all at once ceased to exist. Yet how could that happen? It did not make any sense.
