plane on a night flight, using full heat modelling and starlight vision enhancement. Black forest shot out of sight under the jet and suddenly the glowing grid of a city flared up below him. His equipment read temperature gradients rather than light and darkness, so residential areas registered as bright scarlet, office buildings as orange and bodies of water a dull rust brown. An urgent synthesized tone rang in his ears, stereo imaging making it sound as if the noise was directly behind his head. Behind and low, in that vulnerable area near the back of the neck. Sean resisted the urge to look over his shoulder. He tongued a control and instantly the image of the city below squeezed and flattened, forming a narrow band occupying the lower edge of his visual field. Directly before his eyes, front and centre, was an image from the sentry cameras situated behind the cockpit of the Loki. Sean grinned. Better than a rearview mirror. Not that he had much to grin about. Six Indonesian Hawkers were locked on behind him, coming in for the kill. Sean blinked his left eye once and his right eye twice. The fuselage of the Loki shimmered around him, orange mist coming off the metal. It was terrifyingly as if the plane had begun to smoke and burn. But the orange steam thickened and solidified, conforming to the shape of the Loki. The orange was rising steadily upwards, a second Loki jet, ethereal and glowing, lifting out of the metal of the plane. Now it was directly above him, a plane identical to his except insubstantial, a little ragged at the edges, like an afterimage on your retina. Sean checked the rear view. The Hawkers were closing fast. He blinked his right eye twice. The heat ghost of the Loki accelerated and streaked away. The real Loki dived. Sean watched as the six Indonesian fighters shot above, ignoring him, their primitive software deceived by the decoy. Sean was grinning again. He launched six Valkyrie air‐to‐airs. They hovered in front of his cockpit for a moment then shot away in pursuit of the Hawkers. One and a half seconds later six plumes of flame lit up the Indonesian sky in simulated night‐vision colours. Sean allowed himself a single moment of grim satisfaction then returned to the business at hand. A quick status check on the Loki, and then the final missile run. He read off all the instrument outputs. The energy used to create the heat ghost had been a major drain on the system, but all flight functions were still well in the green. He cancelled the head‐up analogue displays and proceeded to begin a visual inspection of the fighter’s fuselage.
The first things he noticed were the white monkeys.
Dozens of quick‐moving snow‐white shapes, writhing on his wings, scrambling up the sidewall of the jet, pressing their obscene, debased, subhuman pink faces to the cockpit. Writhing like a giant cluster of huge maggots, they closed in on him from all sides. The cockpit was covered with their degenerate idiot faces. Drooling, squamous genetic garbage –.
‘Warren!’ Sean tore the gaming set off his head. He knuckled at his eyes and screamed again. ‘Warren, you little suck!’ The set hit the canvas floor and rolled across the tent, bouncing against Calvin’s ankles. Calvin was beginning to remove his own gaming set, moving a little slowly, his fingers clumsy. Calvin had been piloting the Hawkers Warren had shot down and no doubt he was still recovering from the brilliant high‐resolution colour graphics and true stereo surround sound involved in a fiery death in the air. But it wasn’t Calvin he was after.
‘Warren!’ The fat little bastard was nowhere to be seen. Calvin had removed his headgear now and he was blinking, disoriented in the dimness of the tent after the garish colours of the virtual reality Indonesian airwar. He got up from his canvas folding chair, still a little shaky, and came over towards Sean. ‘What’s the matter? I –’
‘It’s Warren. He’s ruined the game.’ Sean got up and kicked his own canvas chair over. His leg muscles ached from hours accommodating themselves to an imaginary cockpit. Warren was nowhere