In those tenths of a second, however, the alien fighter had already fired its lasers and destroyed the three weapons, leaving nothing but a cone of rapidly dispersing fragments in their place.

“Damn!” Stephanos swore as his munitions blinked off the HUD, well short of their target. “This guy is no joke.”

He risked an instinctive glance over his shoulder, but there was nothing to see, of course. The black of space prevented him from seeing much of anything at any reasonable range, and the fighter he was tangling with wasn’t at what he would call a reasonable range.

Turning his focus back to the HUD, Steph checked the range and noted that the Drasin was once more closing the gap and coming up on his six—hard. Steph snarled, hitting his retro-rockets and flipping the Archangel end for end.

Two missiles left, he thought, checking the munitions stores from the corner of his eye as he armed the remaining Havoc missiles and haloed the incoming fighter.

Whatever else this guy was, Stephanos had to grant him a certain grudging respect. The enemy flyer was a real pilot, unlike most of the drones they were dealing with.

Stephanos blinked, a thought coming up to him from the past.

It clicked in, and the light came on.

“Drones,” he said suddenly into an open com-channel.

“Pardon me, boss?” Racer asked a moment later as the time lag kicked in.

“They’re drones! Just freaking drones!” he snapped. “There’s only one real pilot out here! He’s directing the rest!”

Another pause as the time lag filtered through. Steph didn’t wait; he armed his seeker countermeasures as the countdown clock ticked down on his meeting with the only Drasin flyer he’d yet seen that was worth his time as a pilot.

“Are you sure, boss man?” This time it was Brute, sounding genuinely disbelieving.

Steph didn’t blame him.

No one, no one, used drones for combat duty.

It was stupid, it was wasteful, and it gave the enemy a decided advantage.

The US Air Force, back when it still existed as a discrete military organization, had a plan, once upon a time. They used some old airframes from the venerable F16 platform, rebuilt them with the latest in technology, gave them combat programs, and placed a wing of them under the command of a single pilot.

The result was a clusterfuck of near epic proportions.

While marginally successful in simulations, the real-world effect of the birds was decidedly poor. In spite of having higher acceleration rates and tighter maneuvering than any manned vehicle, the drone birds were consistently shot out of the sky by vastly inferior planes.

Simply put, they were predictable in a way that humans never were.

Just like the fighters Stephanos was looking at now—all except one of them, that is.

“Yeah,” Steph said dryly as he keyed up all his countermeasures and programmed a macro with a few flicks of his eyelids and motions of his fingers. “I’m sure…”

“Angel Lead…” he almost whispered as the Drasin fighter closed to within extreme targeting range. “Fox two.”