“All right, Angels, form up and kick in the burners. Time for a little hit-’n-run!”

Snorts and chuckles echoed over the tac-net as the Angels checked in and joined up with Stephanos on an intercept course with their target’s fighter wing.

“Just like the old days, Steph!” Racer said with a grin.

Stephanos groaned. “Don’t remind me, Racer. The Yangtana wasn’t exactly a bright point in my career. And this monster packs a slightly bigger wallop.”

Snorts, catcalls, and cries of “not likely” echoed through the net as Stephanos thought back to the last time they tried this maneuver. The Yangtana was the Eastern Block’s penultimate warship, a combat carrier capable of laying waste to a thousand-square-kilometer area from up to five thousand kilometers away. The Archangels had volunteered to prevent the Yangtana from reaching its launch zone, a point over a thousand kilometers off the west coast of California from which it would launch a crippling attack on the New York and Delaware regions of the North American Confederacy.

The Angels had lived in their planes, literally, for three and a half weeks, all the while running harassing attacks on the Yangtana and its fighter cohort. The Yangtana was the prototype for its class, the latest in a long line of ships deemed unsinkable. Surprisingly enough, Stephanos mused, in the Yangtana’s case, that turned out to be a truth. A hundred and twenty kilometers from the launch point, the Archangels had reformed for one last attack, their numbers having been depleted by over 60 percent during the last three weeks.

The massive Chinese warship had taken everything they could throw at her and a good deal more from the surface ships that had joined the attack. In the end, the NAC forces had won the day, but the Yangtana herself survived the attack. In fact, she was still sitting there, where the Angels’ attack had driven her, beached on a shallow reef that had become her final resting place.

That last battle had weighed heavily on Stephanos for months afterward. Of fourteen planes that went in, only eight had come out. A rate of attrition that Stephanos hadn’t believed possible a month earlier. That was the first time he had realized that the Archangels weren’t, in fact, angels, but only human, after all.

Stephanos shook his head clear, noting that he was less than a minute away from intercept range. And this monster does, indeed, pack a more lethal punch than even the Yangtana’s big-gun batteries. Not to mention that this bugger isn’t limited to one plane of motion.

The tight formation of fighters blazed in on their alien counterparts, taking continuous fire from the moment they entered within range. Every cockpit filled with warning alarms as the onboard computers struggled to adapt the cam-plates to deflect the incoming laser fire. From the outside, the sleek fighters shimmered with iridescent colors as the modifications occasionally altered the visible color of the fighters’ armor.

The Archangels ignored their alien counterparts, trusting their over-beleaguered combat computers to defend them from the other fighters’ laser fire. Stephanos and his team instead focused their weapons on the Drasin carrier ship, directing Havoc missiles, eighty-millimeter cannon rounds, and thirty-gigawatt laser fire at the big ship as they skirted along the very edge of their firing range. Due to the speed they were traveling and the shallow angle of their attack, Stephanos and his team had only engaged the enemy carrier for a few seconds before they were peeling off from the battle group and soaring back into open space.