ANTARES broke in with its warning: “Radar contact, directly below and climbing.”
ANTARES suggested a roll and a ten-G push-over to an emergency descent. But just as James ordered the maneuver he heard on the interplane channel, “Fox four, Zero-One, three-niner thousand. Underneath you, Ken.” Powell had already started shooting …
What was happening? Why didn’t he see Cheetah coming? The questions brought spikes of pain that shot through his head and reverberated through his body. For the first time that James could remember, DreamStar had no options. The pain intensified as he continued polling the database, hunting for answers—
Abruptly the confusion that had lasted only a few seconds ended as DreamStar’s sensors continued to track Cheetah. Suddenly the pain in James’ head disappeared and he found himself presented with a series of maneuvers.
DreamStar inverted and began a tight descending vertical roll. If Cheetah was in a high-speed climb underneath him, J.C. would be out of airspeed at the top of the climb and would have to go inverted and begin a descent to regain lost airspeed. Now DreamStar had the power advantage. All it had to do was complete the roll and Cheetah should be dead ahead and directly in his gun sights.
But as James hit the bottom of the roll the G-forces reached their peak. Air tubules in the legs of James’ flight suit inflated, which helped force blood back into the upper part of his body, but it wasn’t fast enough. James’ vision went to a gray-out as blood was forced out of his brain, then darkened completely as he lost consciousness.
ANTARES detected the elevated blood pressure and the interruption of theta-alpha. The computer immediately lowered the back of James’ ejection seat so that his head was below heart level to improve blood flow back to the brain. Oxygen shot into his face mask as he fought to regain theta-alpha. With his face mask flooded with oxygen, his breathing was slowed, making him feel light-headed.
It took a few seconds more for James to take control of ANTARES again. He countermanded the computer’s suggestion to raise the seat upright — he would need several more hard turns before he could get within firing range of his adversary and he’d be in less danger of blacking out if the seat-back stayed down. He began a hard seven-G turn back toward Cheetah, but by then he had lost his advantage. Cheetah was in a dive at nearly Mach one.
DreamStar pulled in six miles behind Cheetah, and James tried for a radar lock, but Cheetah executed a vertical scissors and darted away — even though Cheetah did not have DreamStar’s sophisticated high-maneuverabilities, her large foreplanes and temporary speed advantage allowed her to execute such a move. DreamStar easily performed the same inverted vertical scissors to pursue. Cheetah had moved out to nine miles by then, and James ordered the throttle into min-afterburner in the descent to catch up. With the throttles up in the steep descent, the lighter, aerodynamically cleaner DreamStar fighter quickly regained the speed advantage.
Closure rate five hundred knots, ANTARES reported. James “heard” the stream of computer-generated reports as if he was listening to the sound of his own breathing. Range seven miles. Action: High-maneuverability configuration, maintain speed advantage, ANTARES infrared pursuit, deactivate attack radar, laser lock, attack, close to gun range, attack, constant AOA wing mode, maintain gun range, attack. The messages began to repeat, informing him of altitude, closure rate, weapons status, external heating, stress factors, power demands, air-conditioning faults. James accepted ANTARES’ engagement suggestions — the computer had already decided how the battle would be fought several minutes in the future — why not let it go?
Using its infrared tracker and laser rangefinder, ANTARES had predicted the moves Cheetah could make in its present flight attitude and airspeed and had devised an attack for those maneuvers. There were also reversals Cheetah could make, and ANTARES had computed how to defeat them. The final moves of this aerial chess game were now being played. Cheetah was making a hard left turn, but DreamStar had the cutoff angle and the power advantage. DreamStar did not need to snap over in a hard bank to make the kill — her high-maneuverability canards and strake flaps pulled the laser rangefinder onto target and held it there. Cheetah tried another hard turn, this time to the right, but the XF-34’s guns were locked on solid now — Cheetah was just burning up airspeed in each high-G turn. DreamStar was flying “uncoordinated,” sideways and downward at the same time—
Suddenly James heard McLanahan over the interplane channeclass="underline" “Storm Flight, knock it off, knock it off! Storm Two, pull up!”
Ground-map radar, James immediately ordered. The phased-array radars snapped on … revealing a sheer rock cliff no more than a thousand feet away and straight ahead. Cheetah had flown directly at two tall buttes, diving and banking away just before reaching them. ANTARES faithfully computed the deadly news — DreamStar would impact in exactly eight-tenths of a second.
Which was like eight minutes to the ANTARES computer. James canceled high-maneuverability mode and threw Dream-Star into a hard left bank. DreamStar’s large canards and computer-controlled rudders kept her nose from pushing in the opposite direction in a hard turn, and she slipped between the twin towering buttes. ANTARES reported the data from the ground-mapping radars: DreamStar had missed the right butte by eight feet.
James cleared the left butte and rolled to the right, only to find Cheetah directly in his gunsights less than two miles away. He quickly lined up on him, switched to his twenty-millimeter cannon to activate the gun camera and called, “Fox four, Storm Two, your six-o’clock.”
“1 said knock it off!” McLanahan ordered. “Storm Flight, route formation, station check. Weapons on standby. Move.”
James raised his ejection seat back out of the reclined anti-G setting and activated the radars that would help keep DreamStar in formation with Cheetah. “Two has twelve minutes to joker, all systems nominal.”
“Lead’s in the green, nine minutes,” Powell reported.
“Storm Flight, right turn heading zero-four-three, direct beacon red five at ten thousand feet.” Powell executed the turn, and DreamStar stayed with him in route formation.
“What the hell happened, Ken?” McLanahan said as they rolled out on the new heading. “You passed out of theta-alpha for a few seconds but you pressed the attack anyway. We watched you side-slip behind us right into that butte. You almost got yourself killed and destroyed—”
“I had contact with the ground at all times,” James lied. “I was conscious during the entire attack, except at the bottom of my loop when ANTARES took over. I had clearance between the obstructions.” Another lie — James would not soon forget the rivulets of ice and the lichens he saw growing on the sides of the rock … he was that close to it. If Patrick hadn’t yelled out … “I had the last shot after passing between the buttes,” he insisted, “and I processed the shot. before you called—”
“Save it for the debriefing,” Patrick said, “and the data tapes. Storm Flight, fingertip formation. Prepare for penetration and approach.”
DreamStar and Cheetah were now to demonstrate their landing abilities. Powell redeemed himself for his poor takeoff. Keeping Cheetah in perfect balance, he guided the fighter to a pinpoint landing and stop within five hundred feet — he could have landed Cheetah on an aircraft carrier without the use of a tail hook or arresting cables. But DreamStar’s landing was even better — it was as if the one hundred-thousand-pound fighter was a bee alighting on a flower. The combination of the large canards, mission-adaptive wings in their long-chord, high-lift configuration and thrust-vectored nozzles, all controlled by the fastest “computer” extant — the human brain — and James had DreamStar stopped within four hundred feet of touchdown, a hundred feet better than Cheetah.