Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [90]
Target resolution gave JERUSALEM a window of attack of two seconds in ten seconds' time. JERUSALEM judged this too fast for human response and since Jacksonville was a possible target, it overrode the failsafe and cut the humans from the loop.
At the optimal moment within the window of opportunity JERUSALEM launched one battery of Vulture Surface to Air missiles at the fast moving inbound target.
The three missiles were in their sustainer stage before anyone at Jacksonville could re-engage the failsafe.
Tharsis Bulge
Francine's reflexes cut in before her conscious mind had registered the launch warning from the jet's look down threat radar. Pilot reflexes turned the jet and snapped the head round for an eyeball confirmation of the launch before the brain could remember it was blind.
Francine shut down the transponder, the radar, even the laser altimeter. Modem missiles could home in on any kind of emitter. She would have to rely on her passive sensors.
Without active radar and without sight, Francine became truly dependent on the augmented spatial awareness of her mind, encoded into wafer-thin silicon that was interlaced with her neurones was a complex topographical map of Mars, accurate down to one hundred metres. Her own inner ear provided the data for inertial guidance, backed up by direct feeds from the jet's avionics.
But the system wasn't perfect, it was based on a virtual representation of the real world and in any conflict, the real world always won.
Prancine was truly flying blind this time.
Passive sensors picked up the incoming bogeys by their active radar emissions. They were out of the sustainment stage and levelling off at two thousand metres. They deployed into a co-ordinated attack pattern that indicated a high intelligence interaction between the missiles.
Vultures for sure, thought Francine.
Francine in pre-flight training, fifteen and hot to rock. A room full of teenaged cadets with drug-retarded, pre-pubescent bodies, child faces and shaven heads. Gymnasts' bodies, with optimum G tolerance and vat-grown eyes.
'Human thoughts are not pictures,' said the instructor. 'There is no central Cartesian Theatre where they are displayed before the conscious mind.'
The law said that they had to be told, but the cadets weren't listening. Instead their augmented eyes were filled with silver shapes leaving contrails in the high stratosphere. Up there where the sunlight is white and pure.
'Instead the mind operates like an old-fashioned transputer, making editing decisions in parallel. We will teach you to make use of this facility.'
The air force divided up their brains with lacy wafers of silicon and hypoallergenic crystal. Taught them to fly from the inside out and let them play with the most expensive toys in human history.
In one of the separated sections of Francine's mind the thoughts coalesced into what would be an image of the Vultures in flight, if thoughts were pictures.
Two stubby cylinders with recessed pods for manoeuvring thrusters. In the tenuous atmosphere over the Martian highlands, control surfaces are useless. Their noses studded with both active and passive sensors. In their ballistic stage, now at two kilometres a second, describing an arc while the smart silicon in the nose calculated an intercept.
Francine broke radio silence to warn her wingman. 'Flash, two hot ones, on ballistic and intercept.'
'Copy Angel,' answered Flash, 'I see them.'
Flash Harry in the second Honda Peacemaker, flying 'loose deuce', five hundred metres and thirty years behind her.
Francine must have taken hits because the Peacemaker was handling heavy and slow. More like a commercial jet than a fighter. Her weapon options showed zero ordinance, zero flares and chaff. Must have been a tough mission. Not remembering was frightening. You couldn't afford a lapse, not with the Greenies punching the air with pop-ups all down the canyon.
A curtain of darkness lifted and she could see the mountain, the big shield volcano rising sharply