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TFT
    Lieutenant Donald Gregory eased back the acceleration of his SG-92 Starhawk as the seagirt dome of NAS Oceana dropped away behind him and was swiftly obscured by clouds. Sunlight exploded around him as he pierced the cloud deck and the sky almost immediately deepened from blue to ultramarine to black.
    In close formation with him, the eleven other Starhawks of VFA-96, the Black Demons, arrowed skyward, boosting in high-velocity mode. Nanosensors embedded within his fighter’s fluid outer coat fed data directly to his brain, allowing him to see with crystalline clarity in every direction, and to see the blacker-than-black long-tailed teardrops of the other fighters of the squadron formation, forms that would have been invisible to the unaugmented eye or brain.
    “Keep it tight, chicks,” urged the taclink voice of their squadron leader, Commander Luther Mackey. “Hold formation. Show the braid we’re as sharp as any hotshot Vee-crappers.”
    “Yeah, Boss, but how do you really feel about ’em?” Lieutenant Nathan Esperanza cut in. Several of the others in the squadron chuckled.
    “Hell, I think he just wants a crack at the Sh’daar,” Lieutenant Caryl Mason said, “assuming the scuttlebutt is true, of course.”
    “Oh, it’s true,” Esperanza said. “I got a buddy in Base Commo who saw the intercepts. One of our survey vessels got nailed out at Omegod Cent, and the Slan overran Arianrhod. That’s why the recall.”
    “It don’t rain but it pours,” Lieutenant Jason Del Rey observed.
    “Why bother with grapevine shit?” Lieutenant Joseph “Happy” Kemper said. “Just ask ol’ Nungie. Get the straight shit hot from the source.”
    “Fuck you, Kemper,” Gregory said with a quiet calm he didn’t quite feel. Nungie had not been his choice as a squadron handle, and he despised the implication.
    “Keep it down, people,” Mackey said. “Engage squadron taclink.”
    Gregory gave the mental command that synched his fighter’s AI to the rest of the squadron. The twelve Starhawks were now, in essence, a single organism hurtling up and out of Earth’s embrace.
    “On my mark, acceleration at two thousand gravities,” Mackey added. “And three . . . and two . . . and one . . . mark !”
    Gregory couldn’t feel the savage, gravitationally induced acceleration. His fighter fell toward the tightly projected artificial singularity pulsing at a billion times per second out beyond the blunt prow of his Starhawk, its gravity acting on every atom of his body simultaneously. He was in free fall, his vector matched perfectly with those of the other ships in his squadron. Earth, filling the sky aft with white swirls and mottled banks of white cloud, began dwindling rapidly into the distance astern. Starhawks were capable of boosting at fifty thousand Gs, which could accelerate them up to close to the speed of light in under ten minutes. Within the relatively close confines of Earth orbit, however, it was necessary to keep to a more sedate pace. It would take forty-two seconds to reach the midpoint of their journey, at which point they would flip end for end and decelerate the rest of the way in to their docking with the carrier.
    Ten more seconds.
    Seething, Gregory tried to put aside Kemper’s gibe. It wasn’t worth saying anything. Protests would just elicit more of the same; he knew that much from long experience.
    For years, Gregory had wanted to be a fighter pilot, wanted to be a member of that elite fraternity so bad he could taste it. Star carrier pilots were the aristocracy of the Earth Confederation’s military, but that wasn’t what had led him to volunteer . . . or to endure the years of training and heavy-duty AI downloads that had made him one. Born on the colony world of Osiris—70 Ophiuchi AII—he’d been eight when his world had been subjected to a savage bombardment by a Turusch battle fleet, followed by Nungiirtok assault forces landing in wave upon relentless wave. That had