“Roger that.”

The fighter came down on them like an eagle, and as soon as it was in range, the 20mm erupted. The hardened shells hit the ship just above and at the waterline near the bow so that water frothed like she had been hit by a torpedo. None penetrated. The Oregon’s armor plate deflected all of the rounds. Had she been any other ship, this would have been a crippling attack, and at the speed she was running she’d be down by the head in minutes.

The old girl plowed on as if nothing had happened.

“Viper Seven, report,” Giddings asked a few moments later while the plane circled like a wolf around a wounded deer.

“Nothing,” Viper 7 finally said in dismay. “Nothing’s happened. I hit her good but she’s not sinking.”

“Alert One,” Giddings called out. This would be the lead plane of the two additional Hornets they’d put up. “You are go for Harpoon launch.”

Because of the time it took the Oregon’s supercomputer to decode the military encryption, the plane had already nosed around, and the ship-killing missile was off its rails.

“Wepps!” Taking a few rounds of 20mm was one thing. Nearly a quarter ton of high explosives was an entirely different challenge.

“On it.”

The Harpoon missile dropped down to surface-skimming mode as quickly as it could and accelerated up to five hundred miles per hour. Its radar immediately locked onto the one juicy target it saw and flew at it with robotic efficiency.

Mark Murphy dropped the doors hiding the Oregon’s primary defensive weapon and had the six-barreled Gatling, a clone of the one carried by their attacker, spun up to optimal speed. Its own radar was housed in a dome above the gun that gave it the nickname of R2-FU because it looked like the cute droid from the Star Wars movies but had a nasty attitude.

When the inbound Harpoon was still a mile away, the Gatling opened up, throwing out a barrier of tungsten that the missile would have to fly through to reach the target. It was the old problem of hitting a bullet with another bullet, but, in this case, the Gatling had unleashed more than a thousand, all aimed directly at the missile.

The Harpoon exploded well away from the ship, and Murph silenced the gun. Pieces of missile plowed into the ocean while its fireball bloomed and distorted as it lost the force of the Harpoon’s powerful rocket motor.

In the op center, they watched the battle unfold via a camera mounted near the gun emplacement. The resolution hadn’t been good enough to actually see the incoming missile, but they all cheered when the orange-and-yellow explosion suddenly appeared.

“Juan!”

“What?”

It was Linda. She was pointing to the bottom corner of the massive screen, the mast camera that had been slaved to tracking the first F-18. “It just vanished.”

“What?”