Slowly, slowly, Captain Sarah Hutcheson crept up on the rogue jet. She had shut down her radio systems, disabled her active radar, and even put her missile systems on standby, relying on passive radar and line of sight to bring herself up to Jean-Paul in his singular blind spot. She was waiting till the kill was guaranteed. Till the bastard that had slaughtered her friend and their French colleague was dead in her sights. She was only a quarter mile behind him now and she allowed herself a smile.

But her moment of satisfaction was cut short as she then also registered the big bomber off in the distance. She had a moment to contemplate what she was seeing before she saw Jean-Paul’s jet launch his missiles. Shit. She had waited too long. She had allowed the rogue fighter to launch on another hapless victim. Her rage boiled over in her and she went weapons hot in a flash. Engaging her systems at point-blank range and locking on in less than a second. As she fired her missiles, she went to guns and opened up her powerful Gatling gun, bringing her nose across the other plane’s tail and sending everything she had after him.

Jean-Paul heard the lock and missile alarm as one and started his bank before he even registered where it was coming from. But his silent pursuer had been too close and too complete in her attack. The four missiles came in a tight phalanx and followed his hard turn with ease. While the missiles sought the heat of his tail-fire, Sarah’s bullets flew into the space he had occupied only a moment before, followed quickly by Sarah’s plane itself, but the missiles stayed true.

Jean-Paul’s head span round in surprise and shock as the explosives closed in and was granted a moment’s regret at his complacency before the fire ripped through his plane and blasted him outward, charring and flaying his flight suit and synthetic skin as he began the long, hard fall to Earth. The plane’s carcass dropped past him like a metal meteor, a sad echo of the Agents’ arrival on Earth eighteen months beforehand. The fall was going to hurt, probably destroy even his robust body, for unlike Lord Mantil, there was nothing left of the eject mechanism and parachute that he would have had if he’d had the time to eject.

Without tactical options, he set his fate aside and turned in the air to watch as his missiles cruised toward their more distant target. At least he would get to watch these bastards go down, he thought.