Gust Front

«Coming up on Fredericksburg, now,» she continued, pointing the camera forward again. «Got some tracers, they must still be fighting in there. I'm go

«They're solid on U.S. 1, too,» she continued as she recovered. «I guess they're pressing them back into town. Heading for the I-95 interchange and going active now.»

It was one of the few required tasks laid on the mission, and one she was certain was going to be her last. Once she crossed into the interchange of I-95 and VA 3 she would be in the open, radiating in multiple spectrums, and that was a deathtrap. She finally understood how the Japanese kamikazes felt. She made a series of adjustments to the weapons controls.

The F-22E Peregrine variant hosted a number of instruments the original F-22 designers would never expect would someday be standard equipment. The plane was originally conceived and designed, in the days of the Global Positioning System, as an air superiority fighter. If there was a ground autotargeting system to be installed, it would naturally be based on the GPS.

However, since the designers modifying the F-22 into a ground-attack variant recognized that there were not going to be any satellites, period, they had to come up with other measures. Eventually they fell back on three old but proven technologies.

First, the Peregrine could fix its position fairly well on the basis of inertial guidance. Given that it knew where it took off from, sensitive devices measured every direction vector on the craft and, on the basis of calculating all of those various vectors, could determine its current location with fair accuracy. It was '60s technology, but with more sophisticated computers, software and sensors, its degree of accuracy far exceeded any previous system. However, the farther the plane went from its starting point, called an IP, the larger the degree of inaccuracy. This was especially true when the plane was performing excessive maneuvers such as max thrusters on a hard terrain setting.

Second, the plane could «look» at the terrain and match it to a computerized map in its memory. A system originally developed for the much slower Tomahawk cruise missile, with modern computers, radar and software it was more than capable of taking terrain reads at twelve hundred knots. The terrain reads were primarily used to adjust the data from the inertial guidance system, correcting it as it got farther and farther off baseline. Thus, if the terrain was good the inertial guidance became much more accurate.

Last, the plane could fix its position in two dimensions quite well off LORAN radio direction finding.

So when Colonel Sherman programmed all of her cluster bombs to land just east of the 95/3 interchange, she could be fairly certain that that was where they were going to land. All she had to do was live long enough to give the drop command. She had to ensure that the CBU-58s would land on Posleen and not human defenders.

The plane made a hard jink to the left and dropped as a huge explosion occurred behind her and to the right. Slapped by the shockwave, she at first thought she had dropped her load early and looked in her rearview at the wrong moment. As she snapped her head back to the front she got tone just as the Peregrine cleared the woods west of Fredericksburg.

The area in and around the interchange was a seething mass of Posleen. Forces driving from the north and south had met at the interchange and tens of thousands of them were creating a sea of alien centaurs in their haste to enter the city before it could be fully sacked. But that same pileup made for thousands of God Kings and they all swiveled towards the target as Colonel Sherman's fighter rocketed fully into the open.

Before her thumb could complete the fractional movement to the firing button, hundreds of lasers and plasma ca

* * *

«That's a hard target for Showboat, sir,» said the technician, stabbing the monitor with her finger in eagerness.

«Concur,» said the ANGLICO captain, looking over her shoulder. «Call 'em up. Tell 'em to give it all they've got; there's no humans in that mass.»

* * *

«Fire mission, continuous!»

With the setting of the sun, the wind had died and the Potomac River was as still as a pond. The ship had already dropped its anchors to hold it in place against the slight current and the huge guns now swiveled westward in their turrets.

«Load M-One-Four-Four!»

Doors opened in the side of turrets and the long green rounds slid across the compartment, up the carriage and into the breeches.

«Elevation twelve-fifty, five bags.»

The tubes slowly elevated as teenage seamen and women hurled the heavy bags of powder onto the rammers, doing the same job their great-grandfathers had done over sixty years before. With a sussurant hush the fifty-pound bags were shoved up behind the antiperso

«Warning Light is ON!»

Throughout the ship sailors opened their mouths and clamped hands over ears already stuffed with earplugs.

«Fire!»

And the newly refurbished USS North Carolina, one of the seven remaining battleships in the world—pulled from her berth in Wilmington where she had spent nearly fifty years as a state monument—shivered as flame lanced from her sixteen-inch guns for the first time in over sixty years.

CHAPTER 36

Fredericksburg, VA, United States of America, Sol III

0456 EDT October 10th, 2004 ad

«Jesus Christ!» Lieutenant Young shouted, clamping his hands over his ears, «what the fuck was that?!»

«Had to be one of the new Peregrines to survive this far in,» Colonel Robertson surmised, shaking his head to clear the ringing. Just when his hearing was getting back to normal from the noise of landing, the human fighter had slammed it again. «It was definitely a jet.»

The mothers, intent on getting into shelter, paid little or no attention to the cries of their children as they carried them, with the help of the many defenders who had gathered in the area, up the ramp to safety. There were fewer than fifty to go, but the line had started to slow.

Lieutenant Young was peering past the Klieg lights in the direction the fighter went when there was a tremendous explosion to the west. Again the group was rocked by a pressure wave as a huge fireball climbed above the trees in the distance. For a moment the city was lit as if it were day, then the magenta and orange flash faded. A split second later there was a second, fairly anticlimactic, explosion to the northwest.

«Well, there goes the fighter,» said Lieutenant Young. «So much for support.»

«I think that first one was the armory,» Colonel Robertson corrected. «The second was probably the fighter. But if he was ru