Unknown Rider

She ignored the flurry of activity around her as the rest of her four-hundred-sailor crew moved to their battle stations. Her eyes drifted from one glowing orb to the next, trying to discern a pattern in their positioning but seeing only randomness.

Her confusion only multiplied when a speaker set to Net 15 squawked with a report from Combat: “Aside from the strike group’s other ships, the surface picture is clear.”

“Well, these things had to come from somewhere,” she said to herself, knowing full well she was losing her battle to keep emotion from her voice. She turned to the Gunnery Liaison Officer standing near the Mk 20 Electro-Optical Sensor System. “Get me an ID on these targets, Chief.”

“Aye, ma’am,” he replied.

Though designed to provide accurate targeting information for the ship’s five-inch gun, the EOSS was a capable system that might allow them to gain a visual on the unidentified flying objects through the fog and track them to their place of origin. Her first thought had been that they were commercial drones operated from a civilian ship in the area, but the speeds they could maintain and the absence of unidentified surface vessels in the area ruled that suspicion out. Maybe the EOSS would offer another clue.

“Range to Abe?” Beth asked.

“Eighteen miles,” the radarman replied.

Not enough, she thought. She needed to put more distance between them and the carrier and draw the orbs away, maybe close enough to shore where other Navy ships could aid in identifying them.

“Ma’am!” the Officer of the Deck shouted, pointing through the window.

The lump in her throat returned.

Bolt 41

Marine F-35C

Colt saw the glowing orbs right away. Once Banger control had vectored him in the right direction, he spotted them circling the dark Navy ship without the aid of his advanced sensors, but he directed his targeting system onto the ship anyway. Without weapons of any kind, the only thing he could do was be a high-speed cheerleader and record the event for posterity.

Between the EOTS’s Infrared Search and Track capability and his visor-projected night vision, he only had to look through the canopy into the night sky to see nearly a dozen tiny squares surrounding the lights. As he neared the Mobile Bay’s location, the sight of the swarming orbs left him speechless.

“Bolt Four One, Banger, status?”

“I…uh…”

He couldn’t find the words. His jet’s core processor had designated the targets, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of what he was witnessing. They looked like bright orbs of light encircling the ship and keeping pace as it raced through the water.

“Bolt Four One, Banger, take angels twenty and reset.”

He shook his head, his eyes bouncing from one square to the next. For whatever reason, the Hawkeye controller wanted him to climb to twenty thousand feet and return to his CAP location twenty miles to the west.

Well, that’s not gonna happen.

“Negative, Banger. I’ve got a visual on multiple bogies,” he said.

From his vantage point, he could see a green-hued guided-missile cruiser steaming at maximum speed to the east, her massive props churning the water to create a bioluminescent wake visible through the dense fog. Instead of climbing to twenty thousand feet, Colt banked the Joint Strike Fighter and entered into an orbit over the ship.

“Bolt Four One, Banger, Shogun actual directs reset,” the controller said in a firm tone.

He knew what that meant. The Commander of the Air Wing, CAG himself, had directed him to depart station and return to CAP.

“Stand by, Banger,” he replied.

He might as well have said “Fuck off, Banger,” since that’s what he really meant. He didn’t become a fighter pilot to tuck his tail and run, but he was a guest pilot and didn’t want to rock the boat either. If he pissed off CAG, his commanding officer back at the US Navy Fighter Weapons School in Fallon would get an earful. And that meant he would get an earful. That combination usually didn’t bode well for future career aspirations.

Dammit.

He keyed the microphone to acknowledge the order but stopped himself when the eight-by-twenty-inch PCD flickered in front of him. It lasted less than half a second before returning to normal, but he felt his face flush. He had more hours in the F-35C than almost any other pilot in the Navy, and nothing that unnerving had ever happened to him before. His skin prickling with anxiety, he wondered if it was the first indication of an impending electrical failure — the absolute last thing he wanted to deal with at night over the water.

“Banger,” the controller replied.

Colt again keyed the microphone to let the controller know he intended to comply when the portal on the right side of the PCD shuffled through multiple pages on its own. He reached up to navigate back to the air-to-surface radar page just as the adjacent sub-portal maximized and replaced his flight controls display with an air-to-surface weapons page.

“What the hell is going on?”