Eagle Station

Ozawa whistled softly. “Pretty long odds against scoring a hit that way, Colonel. Not at anything over a few hundred miles, anyway.”

“Maybe so,” Reynolds agreed. “But long odds are better than no odds.”

“Yes, sir,” Ozawa said.

Reynolds closed out that circuit and opened a new one, this time to the laser weapons officer in Eagle Station’s forward module. “This may get to close quarters, Bill. If it does, I’m counting on you to nail that S-29 fast. Once they’re within range of your lasers, you’re only going to have a minute to finish this fight. Right?”

“Yes, sir,” Captain William Carranza acknowledged. “One thing to consider, Colonel. If we can’t hit them, they may have trouble holding their own laser on target long enough to inflict serious damage on us.”

Reynolds nodded. “Yeah, which could make this a mutually assured destruction scenario. If possible, that’s not a game I want to play. This station is worth a lot more than one spaceplane.”

“Understood,” Carranza said.

Reynolds frowned deeply. Was there anything else he could do? There were just minutes before Eagle Station and Dusty Miller’s spaceplane passed each other within two hundred miles. Weird as it seemed, that was practically knife-fighting range for weapons that hit at light speed and considerable fractions of light speed. Then he shrugged. When all was said and done, this simulated space battle was going to come down to a completely unpredictable interaction between the laws of physics, probability, and Lady Luck.

Shadow Bravo One, over the North Atlantic Ocean

Ten Minutes Later

“Eagle Station is below our visual horizon. No other immediate threat detected,” a calm, female voice announced.

“Copy that. Discontinue evasion program,” Colonel Scott “Dusty” Miller ordered through gritted teeth as another sharp jolt, this time from the spaceplane’s aft thrusters, shoved him hard against his seat straps.

“Order confirmed. Evasive flight program discontinued,” the S-29’s flight control computer said.

The difference was immediately apparent. Instead of bucking around like a wild-eyed bronco on LSD, their winged spacecraft glided smoothly along its prescribed orbital track. They were still pitched nose down, which offered a spectacular view of the cloud-laced Atlantic through the forward cockpit canopy.

“Well, that was one hell of a ride,” Miller muttered, fighting down a wave of nausea. Short and stocky, and built like a wrestler, the command pilot had years of experience flying B-2 Spirit stealth bombers before transitioning to the U.S. Space Force. But not even the worst air turbulence really compared to what he’d just endured — ten solid minutes of wholly unpredictable motion, where his body and, more important, his inner ear hadn’t known from one fraction of a second to the next in which direction their spacecraft was going to pitch, veer, roll, or yaw.

Breathing out slowly, he glanced across the cockpit at his copilot. “You okay, Major?”

Major Hannah “Rocky” Craig had been a test pilot for the F-35 fighter program before qualifying as a NASA astronaut and then transferring to the newly formed Space Force. Despite her years of intensive acrobatic flight training, even she still looked faintly green around the gills. She forced a sickly grin. “I’m fine, Dusty.” She winced. “Jeez. That was like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride dialed up to eleven.”

He nodded carefully and then keyed the intercom to the S-29’s aft cabin. “Everyone still breathing back there?”

There was a long pause and then a pinched, oddly nasal voice answered. “Mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“Well, Jensen puked about halfway through… so we’re kind of being careful about the whole breathing thing,” the voice, which he now recognized as belonging to the spaceplane’s data-link specialist, replied.

Miller winced. Part of their Sky Masters training for space operations had involved multiple flights in an aircraft aptly nicknamed the Vomit Comet. Repeated high-angle parabolic maneuvers created short periods of weightlessness… and all too often induced air-sickness. So he didn’t need an overly active imagination to visualize what it was like being trapped in a tight compartment with globules of vomit floating everywhere.

Beside him, he heard Hannah Craig stifle a laugh. He shook his head. “Show a little sympathy, Major.”

His dark-haired copilot donned an appropriately contrite look. “Sorry, Dusty.” Then her natural mirth bubbled up again. “It’s just that I’m really glad we’re riding at the front of this bus… and not in back with Jensen and his miraculously reincarnated breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

Miller snorted, fighting hard against his own urge to burst out laughing. “Amen to that, I guess.” His gaze sharpened. “So, how does the all-seeing, all-knowing computer say we did?”