Arestes Black sat down at a console of the library's holographic viewing system. He swiped his ID card, opened the holo archives, and instructed it to play the Second Battle of Midway.
He was, he supposed, lucky that they had one. When the Fleet of Fog's embargo hit, the United States had gotten off relatively lightly. However, a few things, such as strategic rare earth metals, we in very short supply. Combined with the loss of offshore labor markets, the price of electronics had gone through the roof.
Abruptly, a large hologram of the Earth appeared, and quickly zoomed in on the North Pacific. A series of icons appeared, representing the remnants of the reinforced USS Ronald Reagan task group. With a Fleet Carrier, two Assault Carriers, four Battleships, more than a dozen heavy cruiser, and the various escorts, screening elements, and support vessels that went along with it, it would pose a considerable threat to the navy of any nation on Earth.
The in time lapse, the fleet began to sail from from the US Navy Pearl Harbor station. Following behind it at a 'safe' distance was a massive refugee flee, carrying literally hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Hawaii.
That was when we thought the Fog could be fought.
The ships sailed north-west for several hours, the warships considerably outpacing the refuge fleet, which contained most of the Task Force's detachable ASW capability.
The fleet's objective was to sail north to refuge in Alaska. At that time, there was a Fog fleet in the North Pacific to the east of Hawaii. From what Ars could figure out, his father had been planning to sail north-west until his ships were under the coverage of the Aleutian missile batteries, then break for Anchorage.
However, to do that, he had to break through the Fog elements along that path.
Just over a day passed before anything noticeable happened. Then, abruptly, dozens of Fog ships began to converge point along the projected path of the American Task Force, including four Battleship-sized vessels.
As they converged, with the odd grace that was just one of the many advantages they held over humanity, the Fog ships fell into formation. It was an antiquated pattern, one that bore a strong resemblance to a Napoleonic Line of Battle.
A short time later, arrows representing aircraft squadrons sprang from the icons representing the Reagan and her two Assault Carrier consorts.
Ars watched as the squadrons moved toward their contacts, minutes ticking past on the time-lapse readout. He knew that the aircraft, numbering more than two hundred in total, would be focused on a relatively small number of Fog Capital Ships. Given their lack of escorts and the power arrayed against each of them, the fights should have been practically one sided.
Each of the pilots was aware of this, and had presumably come to accept the probable outcome of this mission, as well as its necessity.
One by one, the fighter squadrons engaged their targets and were destroyed.
Considering its cost, the results of the strike were depressing. While each of the targets had been hit, one battleship by ten missiles and a supercavitating torpedo, the armor of the ships was able to practically shrug off the hits.
Moments after the last fighter element was destroyed, the Fleet of Fog ships launched their counterattack, an alpha strike of more than twenty-five hundred missiles.
When the Russians hard revealed their supercavitating torpedo, it had sunk nearly every weapons treaty on earth, along with several million tons worth of warships.
As the Fleet of Fog launched its missiles, a trio of Argus-pattern orbital anti-missile platforms revealed themselves and opened fire on the Fog missiles. Swarms of counter-missiles rained down among a hail of precision laserfire, in some cases shooting right past the lasers fired from the Fog ships targeting the orbital platforms.
The Argus orbitals were annihilated, but not before they practically wiped out the enemy missile barrage.
As the American ships continued to close, they began to fire their own ship-based supercavitating torpedoes. They were emptying their magazines much faster than would be considered practical at the time, but you learned fast that when dealing with the Fleet of Fog, you went in hard and fast, guns blazing, and hoped the ship you were facing would die to your bullets.
The Fog ships would have launched their own torpedoes, but the satellites tracking the battle had no real way to see them. Now, however, the enemy supercavitating weapons arrived. Ars watched as red hit indicators appeared across the human fleet, and ships were reported as damaged or lost outright.
The Reagan took three quick hits amidships in rapid succession. An icon appeared, indicating that Admiral Black was transferring his flag from the floundering supercarrier to the as-yet undamaged battleship Virginia.
The fleets continued to close. As their torpedoes were nearing their targets, the American ships finally launched their own missile strike. As they flew, the missiles spread out into an odd, evenly spaced grid lattice in the air, moving, excepting evasive maneuvering, in essentially straight lines.
Then, one of the Fog battleships fire its particle beam cannon, and the others quickly followed suit. The first energy weapon struck the destroyer USS Sherman square on the prow and gutted the ship. As the beam cut out, the ship just... collapsed around the massive cavity gouged in its hull.
The American ships returned fire with their heavy rail guns, but once again, the result was practically predetermined. The massive particle beams the Fog ships used could destroy anything smaller than a heavy cruiser in a single hit, but the armor the fog ships had could diffuse most of the energy from a railgun strike, preventing the human weapons from dealing much more than superficial damage.
The flagship Virginia was hit several times by the enemy particle beam, but her experimental ablative armor provided a measure of defense against the weapon. She was listing heavily and had lost a large chunk of her superstructure, but all of her heavy rail guns that hadn't been blown clear away were still firing.
Finally, the human missiles arrived.
As the missiles crested the horizon, the Fog ship went into active defense mode. However, it would have seemed largely unnecessary; nearly all of the human missiles were on trajectories that put them far away from threatening the enemy ships.
The engaged the missiles that appeared threatening. However, as their rays of coherent light split the first few weapons, some of their sensors noticed something... off about the debris scattered from the destroyed missiles. Beryllium, helium, and other exotic compounds.
At the same time, the torpedoes the humans had launched arrived under the enemy fleet.
One of the human missiles, one that had strayed away from the enemy fleet due to a mechanical error or a flaw in its tracking, came to life, sent out a single massive signal.
The Hydrogen Bombs in the human weapons detonated.
And there was light.
Ars ended the display. He knew what happened next. The first test use of an atomic weapon against warships had shown a soft kill radius of more than a mile. The ghost ships that made up the Fleet of Fog were much tougher than the targets in that test, though, and they had no crews that could be poisoned by radiation.
But these bombs were much more powerful.
And there were far, far more of them.
Even so, most of the missiles should have been intercepted before they reached a point where they could have inflicted meaningful damage. However, Admiral Black had presented a force where no sane man would, the Fog ships, concerned that he had some special tactic up his sleeve, rushed in to stop him, and paid no extra mind to what looked like simply a sloppy missile strike.
Kansas City Shuffle.
Like so many previous times during Second Midway, the result was predetermined.
Marcus West shook his head as he watched a Gravitic Disintegration Warhead struck the base of megascraper. The odd spatial anomaly appeared, vaporizing the bottom twenty or so floors of the building. As the anomaly collapsed on itself, the building, weakened by the shock, crumbled as it fell into the resultant crater.
Fifteen Thousand lives extinguished he thought, watching as two more missiles arc toward the city just like that. He turned away.
Around an hour ago, the Fleet of Fog had begun bombarding the City of Los Angeles. From what he understood, there had been a breach in the seawall a few hours previously, and, as the city began to flood, the Fog interpreted that as a violation of their embargo.
"These, secretary, are the monsters we face." He said, turning toward the man standing next to him, the Secretary of the United States Navy. Marcus was a young man, perhaps in his early twenties, rather tall, with dark hair and eyes. He adjusted his glasses before continuing. "For months now, we have existed practically at their sufferance."
Another missile detonated, this one forming a much larger anomaly, shaped like a flattened oblong rather than a sphere, and consuming everything within hundreds of yards of its impact point before dissipating.
A bank of fog that had been hanging over the water began to clear, and a strange, almost antiquated, but all too familiar, looking ship swiftly sailed out of it.
"Their defenses are impervious." A shore battery opened up against it, sending a blistering hail of utterly ineffectual missiles at it.
"And their weapons are devastating." A white ray shot from one of the large turrets mounted on the ship, annihilating the battery.
"And they are utterly without mercy."
A series of energy attacks struck across the city. Straining his ears, Marcus could just barely make out the screams rising from the city below.
"So, secretary, would you like to hear my proposition?"
Melissa set her VTOL down in the parking lot outside the public library. She pulled up an image the young man the Phoenix commander had sent her to retrieve. She checked her lipstick, then brushed a stray strand of her bright red hair out of her face. First impressions were important, after all.
She opened the armored door of the aircraft. It was several inches thick, made of armor nanoalloys. The aircraft had been by the U.S. Military, with considerable clandestine assistance from Phoenix, as a dropship for usage in boarding actions against the Fog.
She made her way through the parking lot, into the library, and to the front desk. She held up a picture of Arestes to the librarian at the desk. Wordlessly, she pointed to one of the holo terminals.
Melissa walked toward the indicated terminal. The boy, Ars, she had been told he preferred to be called, seemed deeply engrossed in whatever it was he was watching.
She walked up behind him and put her hand on his shoulder. He turned toward her.
"Excuse me, ma'am?" Ars muttered, his eyebrows creased. Even though he was seated, Melissa could see that he was a fairly tall boy. He had short, dark hair, contrasting his bright green eyes. His face, rather handsome, Melissa noted, bore a detectable veil of sadness.
"I represent an organization known as Phoenix." She said, not entirely sure of what the best way to say this type of thing.
"Phoenix?" Ars said, "What's that?"
"We're an... organization," Melissa said carefully, "we fight the Fog." She paused for a moment. "We continue your father's work."
Ars stood up. "What do you need me to do?"
One week previously
"This is the new pilot, huh?" Phoenix Chief Medical Officer Kalar Holt said, looking over the images of Ars displayed on the array of screens in the Medical Station. He was a wiry man, with brownish hair and a rather nondescript face, currently set into a contemplative frown.
"Yea." Melissa said. She shrugged. "Could be a lot worse, all things considered."
"Still, hill need a lot of prep before we can use him in actual combat." Kalar frowned. "I understand why we have to have sixteen-year-olds pilot these things, hell, I wrote that rule. But why can't we have started training him sooner?"
"Politics." Melissa said. "Specifically, that whole thing about child soldiers. The Commander said that if we started any sooner, some self-righteous idiot would get it into their head to dump the whole thing to the media." She snorted. "I'm inclined to agree with him."
Kalar shrugged. "I'll start preparing his meds. When do we need him ready to fly?"
"Month, month and a half at most."
"And when are you bringing him here?"
"Next week."
"Fortunately, I happen to have the neural antirejection mix on standby. The other stuff shouldn't be much of a problem."
"Allright," Ars said as Melissa took her hands off the controls of the aircraft, presumably having put it on autopilot. "I would like some explanation."
"About what?" She said.
"First of all, you said you fight the Fleet of Fog, and nukes are just about the only things that work against them." He pointed at the logo engraved above readouts at the pilot's station. "That's not the symbol of a U.S. Government Agency, and I've never heard of you before today. I doubt that the government would give nuclear release powers to a civilian organization, but if they did, and you started using nukes, you wouldn't stay secret very long. Therefore, you must have some method of fighting without thermonuclear weapons."
"Nice." Melisa said, shrugging. "Guess it wouldn't hurt to tell you more, in any case."
She coughed and took a deep breath. "After your father's pyrrhic victory over the Fog seventeen years ago, we were able to acquire a significant quantity of remnants from the destroyed Fog fleet. We've been dissecting for the past seventeen years. We can't replicate they're tech, exactly, but we've learned from it, build weapons using recovered materials and human ingenuity that might, might, have a chance of facing them.
Neither of them said anything for a while. The cockpit of the aircraft was completely silent, save for the low drone of the engines. "And we need you to operate them."
They both spent a while looking at the scenery after that. After a while, Ars spotted mountains rising in the distance.
"Hey, Mellissa," Ars muttered, cocking his head, "where are we going?"
"We're going to the Phoenix Primary Operations Center." She said, as if that should explain everything.
"You do remember that I heard of your organization about four hours ago, right?"
"Of course. I'm sorry. The Prime Ops center is in the Rockies." Melissa said, "Somewhere in Idaho, I think.
That made sense. If one wanted to build a major base for a secret organization, that was an excellent place to do it. Between the massive earthquakes and volcanic activity that had followed the Fog bombardment, the population west of the Rocky Mountains had dropped significantly. There were plenty of places that offered ample opportunities to build even a massive base dozens of miles from any human habitation.
Ars felt the plane tip upward noticeably. Several lights began blinking on the pilot's display in front of Melissa.
"Sorry." She said, taking a deep breath and sitting up straight, "the autopilot wants me to take over now. We can finish our conversation later. I need to focus."
Less than an hour later, Phoenix Central Operations came into sight. It was built into the side of a mountain on a massive plateau.
In the fading twilight, Ars could see numerous large, low buildings scattered across the area, probably extending underground. In addition, somewhat more conspicuously, there was a large armored aircraft hangar, a long runway, and several landing pads.
"We build up here for a reason," Melissa said. "We have next to nothing in the way of armor that can stand against a Corrosive Warhead, but thankfully they're designed for anti-ship work; their disintegration radius isn't that big compared to, say, Enhanced Conventional Munitions weapons. Therefore, the best defense is to spread out and put as much rock between you and them as possible."
Ars nodded as Melissa brought the dropship into a hover over one of the landing pads, then set it down. As the lurch from the impact passed, Ars felt the aircraft continue to drop. He looked around, noting that the landing pad seemed to be sinking into the ground. As Ars watched, the rim of the pad occluded the ground around it as the platform quickly descended into a well-lit square shaft.
As the elevator continued to drop, the shaft gave way to an open cavern. Ars' eyes widened as he looked around. Unsurprisingly, the cavern was poorly lit, but Ars could make out several groups of sleet, predatory shapes gleaming faintly in the overhead lights. Hundreds dark shapes lay spread out throughout the cavern, ranging from pallet crate to shipping container size.
With a thud, the platform stopped. Melissa reach forward and pressed a button on her control panel, and the doors on either side of the dropship's cockpit began to open.
"So." She said, smiling, "welcome to central operations. The commander is waiting."
Ars quickly undid the web of straps holding him into the seat and climbed out of the aircraft, mind whirling.
The commander of Phoenix was right there. My boss Ars realized, walking down the steps leading from the cockpit. Or he thought my commanding officer.
Ars walked toward the Commander, stepping over the slight lip of the platform where it had settled flush with a matching one on the ground. The moment his foot touched the hangar floor, the lights in the ceiling abruptly flared to full brightness, bathing the cavern in light.
Squinting against the abrupt brilliance, Ars looked around the cavern, confirming his suspensions. Dozens of Pre-Fog fighter aircraft of various types were stored through the space, which he now realized was a hanger.
Several of the lights seemed to be focused on a massive banner overlooking the hanger, hanging high on the wall of the far end of vault and bearing a single symbol in plain red lines on a black field.
There was a large circle in the center of the symbol, depicting an upward-looking bird with wings spread, apparently rising up from a stylized fire. Extending from either side of the circle were mirrored patterns of lines and geometric shapes reminiscent of stylized wings.
As his eyes adjusted to the light, Ars continued to walk toward the commander. He was a tall man, his short dark hair and black longcoat contrasting the pale skin of his exposed face. The commander took a step forward, extending his hand toward Ars.
"Hello, Mr. Black," he said, shaking Ars' hand. "I'm Commander Marcus. Welcome to Phoenix." He released Ars' hand and turned. "I believe it's time we showed you why we've brought you here."
The commander began to walk away. Ars hesitated for a moment, then, seeing Melissa walking in the same direction, followed.
It took several minutes to reach the edge of the room. The group ascended a few steps to a raised platform that appeared to wrap the entire hanger. The commander keyed a code into a pad by a door set into the wall.
The heavy blast door silently slid open.
Ars followed the pair through the door.
What have I gotten myself into?
"This whole base is essentially cut into the mountain." Commander Marcus said as the group walked onto what looked oddly like the platform of a train station. "This is B Shaft. We don't use it much for anything except storage and landing the odd aircraft."
"So where are we going?" Ars said.
"J Shaft." Melissa said. "Also-"
Abruptly, a streamlined train devoid of any lights rushed into the station, stopping with a door just in front of the group.
"The base is split into several different shafts." Marcus explained, boarding the train. "After our missile interception systems, that's the best defense we can find against corrosive warheads."
"I see." Ars said, following the Commander. "And this train connects them?"
"Right." Melissa said. "The monorail network is the fastest way to move between shafts.
Ars looked around the inside of the train. It looked like the interior of a subway car from any of the major Pre-Fog cities, with rows of seats down either side of the car and a variety of poles and handrails. Ars nearly fell as the train began to accelerate, much faster than any of admittedly small number of trains Ars had ridden. Grabbing a handrail to stabilize himself, he faced the commander.
"So, what am I here for?"
Marcus said nothing for a moment. "It's best just to show you."
The group disembarked at the station in J Shaft. A few people, most of them in uniform, boarded the train, which accelerated into the tunnel as Marcus led the group out of the station.
They made their way through several different identical hallways and down three flights of stairs. They encountered several more uniformed people along the way, who snapped to attention as the commander passed.
"We brought you in just after the transition to night watch. We wanted to try to get you in without anyone seeing you." Melissa said. "Naturally, that means it may actually take until lunch tomorrow for everyone on base to know you're here."
Eventually, the commander stopped them in front of what looked a set of armored elevator doors. A complex set of what were presumably security devices were set into the wall next to the door.
The commander walked toward the terminal and pressed his hand down on a softly glowing screen while typing a passcode consisting of at least twenty characters into a keypad with the other hand. The machine beeped, and the commander bowed his head down, placing his eye over a lenses. There was another beep, and the commander straightened, reaching into a pocket on his coat.
A moment later, he withdrew a long sheath knife. He pressed the pommel against the terminal, and a small hatch opened, and a pair of small metal rods bearing a small glossy black concave dish.
Slowly the commander drew the knife out from the sheath, paused for a moment, then cut one of the fingers on his left hand and held it out over the disk, allowing his blood to drip into it.
The security terminal let out a satisfied ping and the elevator doors slowly slid open. As the trio walked onto the elevator, Melissa procured a bandage and a few strips of gauze from her pocket and offered them to the commander. Wordlessly, he accepted.
What was that? Ars thought as the elevator began to drop. Blood wouldn't be necessary for a DNA test, especially given the rest of the technology I've seen here.
The elevator descended, its interior devoid of any indication of how far it was progressing. Eventually, it came to a stop, the doors once again silently sliding open.
Ars followed Melissa and the commander out of the elevator. The space beyond was lit incredibly dimly. Ars could make out a simple metal railing twenty or so feet in front of him, and nothing but emptiness beyond that.
"Welcome," Commander Marcus said, walking forward, "to the Eladrin Program."
An array of lights snapped on, illuminating an object sitting in the center of a massive circular depression in the floor. It was shaped like a fighter jet, but looked nothing like any fighter Ars had ever seem. It was more than a hundred feet long, with a massive pair of swept-back wings mounted around the midpoint of the fuselage, and a second set of four delta wings mounted in an 'X' around the rear engine tube.
The strangest part, however, was what it was resting on. Rather than conventional landing gear, the aircraft rested on five pairs of legs, two pairs forward of the wings, a pair on the tips of the main wings, and a pair spaced evenly between the main wings and the roots of those surrounding the engine.
Each of the legs consisted of a short section leading up and away from the body of the aircraft, and a second, much longer section extending upwards a short distance from its connection with the first, and down a much longer distance to the ground. Each of the legs extended at a diagonal away from the body of the aircraft, giving the impression of some massive, crouching predatory spider about to pounce its prey.
"This." Commander Marcus said, "Is Eladrin Sigma 12, the fifth operational combat unit." He paused for a moment. "Ragnarok."
"Everything this organization is, everything this organization has done, has been centered around this." Melissa said, turning to look Ars in the eye. "Developing this system would have broken any other nation on the planet. This unit cost more than a carrier battle group to build, and is practically irreplaceable."
"However," Marcus said, still looking at the Eladrin in the pit. "We did this because we believed that this nation and species needed something built by human hands, something we can understand, which can fight the Fleet of Fog on equal terms."
He turned toward Ars.
"I hope you understand what we are asking of you."
"And this," Melissa said, pressing a button on the wall next to a door, "is your room."
"Huh," Ars said, looking around as he walked through the door. "It's nicer than I expected."
"We took certain liberties with the standard accommodations." Melissa said, smiling. "You Eladrin pilots are pretty important, after all."
"Pilots?" Ars said, tilting his head. "As in plural?"
"Yea, they're at other locations. Ragnarok was the only unit we have combat ready, though"
"But the commander said Ragnarok was combat unit five."
"It's the fifth hull approved for actual combat." Melissa said, holding up a finger. "The others were all being rebuilt and refitted when we were working on it, so even though it's the most recent one we've build, it's the first one operational."
"I see."
"In any case," Melissa said, turning toward the door, "you have uniforms in the dresser, and directions to the mess hall on the table. There should also be a few pills on the table, take those with dinner."
Ars raised an eyebrow. "What for?"
"Connection boosters for the Eladrin control system and a couple of other thing." She waved a hand. "The FDA would approve everything there, if they knew about them."
"Get something to eat. Your training starts tomorrow, and I'm in charge. So sleep well, Ars. I'll likely kill you in the morning."
Despite having been built near the middle of the twentieth century, the office of the President of the United State of America looked like it had never left the nineteen forties. The most notable feature of the room was the lack of any sort of computing device on the massive hardwood desk at the head of the room.
A closer inspection would reveal a complete lack of any form of power outlets, along with no jack for a hardwired network connection. The room contained a faraday cage built into the walls and floor, strongly dissuading a wireless connection.
The man sitting at the desk had, for the past seventeen years, a serious distrust of electronic devices, particularly when critical data was concerned. He didn't anything against them; he simply had no trust in their security against the Fleet of Fog. Given that he was probably the second or third most powerful man in the world, any information that crossed his desk was extremely important.
There was a knock at the door.
President Alexander Constantine looked up from his work. "Come in."
The heavy hardwood door of the office swung open, admitting Phoenix Commander Marcus, wearing his black longcoat.
"Hello, Commander," President Alexander said, standing up, "it's been too long. What brings you to our humble seat of governance?"
"I'd love to say it's the same old thing," Marcus said, walking toward the desk, "but it really isn't. I've come to tell you we've collected our first Eladrin pilot."
"Excellent," the President said, "Take a seat. Would you like a drink?"
Marcus nodded.
"Domestic or import?"
"You're hilarious. In any case, I need to know-"
"Stop." The president held up a hand. "Are you carrying any electronics?"
"No."
"Good." The president reach under his desk and pressed a button. A massively powerful electromagnetic pulse radiated out from several emitters concealed in the desk, frying the circuitry of any devices within the confines' of the room's faraday cage. More importantly, any nanomaterial constructs concealed in the room would be instantly vaporized or liquefied as the tiny machines they consisted of were fused into uselessness. "Now we can talk business."
"As I was saying," Marcus said, resisting the urge to roll his eyes as he pulled a chair out from the side of the room and sat down in front of the Resolute Desk. "I need to know our present situation with regard to the war."
"Which we aren't currently involved in." The president muttered "Same as always, somewhere between twenty and thirty percent opposition."
Marcus growled. "Why can't those idiots see that-"
"Now now, Commander," Alexander said, shaking his pen at Marcus. "We're just the military and political leaders of the final bastion of human freedom. What right do we have to question cloistered and tenured academics on matters of war?"
"Excellent point. And our status?"
"Well, at risk of stating the obvious-"
"As it happens, I do in fact live under a rock, so don't worry about that."
"Well," the President rolled his eyes, "we have four carriers on active duty. Three Nimitz-class, and one of the new Midway-class boats, plus another of each in construction, and we've got nine of the Virginia-class battleships ready."
"Good, good. Also, have you been briefed on the use of Mental Models by the Fog?"
"Yes," the president said, "but I don't believe we have anything concrete."
"Well, as it happens," Marcus said, reaching into one of his coat pockets, "that's the real reason I'm here." He put a picture on the desk.
"That," the president said, picking up the photo, "is not a natural hair color."
"Thank God for semi-competent analysts, then." Marcus pointed at the picture. "That's the Mental Model of the I-401, the Fog Submarine the Japanese got their hands on. Somehow."
"So what do we know?"
Marcus sighed. "Less than we would like. Naturally, we're assuming they're holding at least some of what they know back, but given that I-401 isn't actually under their control, they probably don't know that much more."
"So what have they told us, then?"
Marcus took a deep breath. "First of all, the Mental Model can control its ship perfectly from considerable distance, and through considerable barriers. The maximum range is unknown, but if our suspicions about the Fleet of Fog communicating using quantum entanglement are correct, then the range may well be functionally infinite."
The President said nothing.
"In addition, a Mental Model, beyond possessing superhuman physical capabilities and durability, is also capable of projecting a Klein Field. Not only is the Model capable of using it to gain functional immunity to conventional small arms fire, but also as a form of powerful, if crude, telekinesis."
President Alexander sighed. "So, do we have anything in the way of a counter?"
"I have some R&D people working on one," Alexander said, "but honestly, the Mental Models, whatever the full extent of their capabilities are, simply aren't a primary concern in combat."
"Infiltration." The president murmured. "They look like us now."
"Fortunately, there are still a few ways we can distinguish them from a real person, Mr. President," Marcus said, reaching for his knife.
At 0400 hours on the dot, a klaxon blared through Ars' quarters. He pulled himself upwards, rubbing his eyes.
"What is this, maggot?" A vaguely feminine voice shouted in his ear. "If this was a Fog attack, we could all be DEAD because of you!"
The moment she was finished, the speaker hefted a large bucket and dumped it onto Ars.
He was instantly awake. He looked around, shivering as he frantically blinked and tried to wipe the frigid water, which felt and tasted extremely salty, out of his eyes.
"M-Melissa?" He muttered, recognizing the bright red hair of his tormentor, who appeared to wearing a full Battle Dress Uniform, "what are you doing?"
"SCILENCE!" Melissa slowly lowered her head to look Ars in the eye. "I believe you misspoke. Please repeat that."
"W-what are you doing, sir?"
"No questions. Start running, and try to keep up."
Melissa waited for a few seconds for Ars to climb out of his bed, opened the door, and began running down the hallway.
Ars followed.
The pace Melissa set was, for Ars, punishing. Though he had spent considerable time studying the strategy and tactics of Naval Warfare, he had never really put much thought into how exactly he would carry out his desire for vengeance. To be perfectly honest, he probably hadn't wanted to think about it. Most of his life, he had simply drifted; one more orphan of the Final Battle.
Now, that had changed.
After running for several minutes, Melissa had led Ars to a long, straight hallway that seemed to be sloping steadily upward. Ars lungs were starting to burn, typical for him after running. His entire body felt faintly sore, which was rather unusual, even for Ars, who had never really been particularly physically fit.
He kept running.
Several more minutes of running later, Ars was able to take a rest. There was a fair-sized room at the end of the hallway, large enough for more than a hundred people to stand comfortably. Six large elevator doors on the far wall were all that broke the monotony of the bare white walls.
Melissa approached one of the elevator doors and poked the call button. The doors immediately slid open, without any sort of elaborate security procedure. Melissa bowed elaborately, gesturing Ars forward.
"While I'm sure you won't be able to make any productive use of this information," Melissa said, rolling her eyes, "I suppose I should tell you that this is an emergency evacuation station. These elevator shafts are angled sharply, and lead to evacuation stations more than a mile away from the base."
"Yes ma'am," Ars responded, carefully.
The interior of the elevator was rather large, no surprising if it was intended to quickly evacuate large numbers of people. Ars was pacing constantly, trying to stay warm and to prevent the cold brine still slowly dripping off his sodden clothing from pooling around his feet.
However much time it took the elevator to reach the surface, Ars felt that it wasn't even remotely enough. The doors slid open a short time later, admitting a draft of cold air, chilling an already shivering Ars.
As they disembarked the elevator, walking, thankfully, Melissa bent down to pick up a large red sports bag lying against the wall next to the elevator and hefted it over her shoulder. The evacuation elevator lend into a room much like its twin underground, albeit with four exit hallways, two opposite the elevators and one on each adjacent wall.
Melissa led Ars out of one of the hallways and down a short flight of steps. There was another short corridor at the bottom, leading to a massive blast door at least twelve feet tall made of bare steel with a large wheel mounted at its center.
Melissa sighed and pointed at the door.
Ars complied.
The wheel was somewhat difficult to turn, but the door was incredibly well balanced and opened easily once unlatched. Ars pushed the door aside and stepped over the lip on metal on the ground and set foot on bare stone. He took a few steps forward, then froze.
He was standing on a large, more or less flat ledge cut into the side of the mountain. Stepping lightly, he walked forward until he was a few feet from the edge and lowered his gaze.
He was looking down a slope that had to be thousands of feet down. Somewhere below him, the rough stone of the mountainside gave way to forests of pine, which grew denser as the slope descended. Far below him was a vast sea of trees, broken occasionally by ruined settlements.
Slowly, Ars turned around and walked forward. The mountain continued upward for thousands of feet, its slopes slowly breaking away from those surrounding it to from a jagged, majestic, crown, silhouetted by the dawn.
Suddenly, Ars felt very small.
Ars was broken out of his trance by the sound of a zipper. He snapped his head back towards Melissa, who had set down her bag and drawn a long, black-bladed sword from it.
She smiled and tossed it at him.
Reflectively, Ars moved to catch it, before remembering a moment later that sword are sometimes sharp, and that he was more likely to catch this one with his face or his gut than his hand.
The sword hit the ground next to him, making a sound that wasn't exactly a clatter as landed, certainly not what Ars expected from steel hitting stone.
Ars picked up the sword and examined it. It was a plain weapon, perhaps a bit more than fifty inches from hilt to pommel, one that, exempting the color of the blade, he might have expected to see on a Medieval European battlefield. He looked back at Melissa, who had procured a blade of her own from the bag, which she had moved aside, and was now performing what appeared to be a series of warm-ups. She stopped and pointed her sword at him.
"Allright, as expected, your physical shape needs..." Melissa paused, "work. Lots of work. So, because I'm stuck with the task to somehow turn that," he pointed at him, "into a battle-ready and elite Eladrin pilot, I've been given a fair degree of latitude on how to do it. So you'll be learning the sword. I've trained with this weapon for the past seventeen years, and it's helped me with... a lot of things." She coughed. "Now, guard position."
The lesson began.
It was not pleasant.
Ars stumbled into the meeting room, closing the door behind him. It had been two weeks since he had started his training. Apparently, the 0400 hours wakeup call was a courtesy given on account of possible jet lag from his trip; his usual wakeup call came an hour earlier.
Over the past two weeks, he had spent more than, two hundred hours in the Eladrin flight simulator, most of them being spent being blow into tiny pieces or vaporized by two hundred year old warships.
He had also been taking a regime of drugs to enable safe neural interface with the Eladrin control system, which Chief Medical Officer Kalar assured him was not at all like drinking lead paint. He had gotten violently sick twice already from the connection meds, through the Kalar said he was probably mostly past that.
They also contained a physical booster, which in hindsight explained how he had survived the physical aspects of his training. Kalar had been very quick to explain that no, these were not steroids, and they were certainly not harmful. He had also requested that Ars not play any major league sports for the next few years. Ars couldn't tell of the man was kidding.
Naturally, they quickly became friends.
His physical training, though occupying less of his eighteen hour day than the simulator training, was brutal. Melissa had beaten him black and blue with the practice blades during their first session, and she had never failed to find at least two or three hours a day, sometimes much more, for further practice. Beyond that, he had engaged in other, more mundane physical training. Running, pushups, lifting heavy objects, and various other things.
He sat down in one of swivel chairs in the meeting room and sighed. He had just had a fairly short session in the simulator, but even that had left him lightheaded.
The door opened again, and brown-haired woman wearing a Phoenix uniform walked in.
"Hello, pilot Ars." She said, walking toward the podium at the front of the room. "I'm Ellan Karolus, Phoenix Xenopsychology specialist. Call me Ellen."
"Yes, ma'am." Ars said, unsure of the best approach to take.
"There's no need to be so formal," Ellen said, smiling. "Anyway, I'm here to brief you on Mental Models that the Fleet of Fog has started using."
"I've heard that term thrown around," Ars said, "but I'm not really sure what exactly they are."
"Okay, then," Ellen said, pressing a button on the table. "This is a Mental Model."
The projector came to life, casting an image on the far wall of the room composed of several smaller pictures. The majority of them were of a short, blue-grey haired girl with a blank gaze, wearing an extremely stylized naval uniform. She was depicted in a variety of poses, including several of her standing or sitting on various parts of a blue submarine, on docks, playing with starfish, and a pair of pictures that appeared to be mug shots.
All of the other images were of much lower quality, with no repetitions. A red haired woman in full plate mail, a blue-haired girl standing on what appeared to be the turret of a warship, a blonde with nearly all of her body obscured by a massive trenchcoat, and others that were harder to see.
"In essence," Ellen said, "a Mental Model is an artificial humanoid body created by a Fog ship. There are a few commonalities. For example, so far they appear to be universally female, and, as far as we can tell, all possess superhuman physical capabilities. Beyond that, however, almost anything is possible, as you can see."
Ellen pressed a button, advancing to a slide to display an image of the blue-grey haired girl standing spread-eagle.
Ars raised a hand. "Stupid Question," he said slowly, "but do we have any idea why they're doing this?"
"That's actually a pretty good question." Ellen said, "But honestly? I couldn't really tell you for sure. We have theories, of course, but we just don't know enough about the Fog to confirm or deny any of them. However, since the first reported sighting of a Mental Model just a little bit over two years ago, the patrol matters of the Fog seem to have been changing."
Ars thought back to all of the reports of battles with the Fleet of Fog he had read about. Almost invariably, the Fog did little more than sail in a straight line toward their targets, Klein Fields up and weapons blazing.
He had also read reports of Fog patrol patterns while he had never seen one less than six months old, and most were much older, something had always felt odd about the Fog's patrol patterns. In a way, they reminded him of ants, following the same paths over and over again, increasing strength where they found large numbers of humans or repeated attempts to run the blockade took place.
But if that was changing, then...
"They're for strategy." Ars said, excited, "Non-linear thought, inductive reasoning, that sort of thing. The one area where we completely dominated the in the final battle. The way my..." he trained of as he followed the train of thought to its logical conclusion.
"The way my father did." He muttered, voice soft.
"Wow!" Ellan said, completely oblivious. "You figured that out really fast. It took us days to come to that conclusion."
"Wonderful." Ars said, looking at the desk. "So, you were saying about the Mental Models?"
"Oh, right." Ellen pressed a button, and a 3D rendering of the girl appeared on the display. The rendering was still for a moment, they showed the girl's clothing and skin dissolve into silvery nanomaterial dust, revealing what looked like a blue female manikin.
"So, we know that the Mental Models are made out of nanomaterials." Ellen said, pressing a button as she finished speaking. On the display, the blue figure split vertically down the middle. The two halves move a short distance, then rotated, displaying more blank blue surface.
"We don't know what the Mental Models look like on the inside though, so we just assume they're walking blobs of nanomaterials. The Fog are computers, and we don't think there would be any logical reason to make the models more complex than necessary."
Six Weeks Later
The Avalon Spaceflight Facility was the crowning achievement of the LFD Corporation. It was a unique human accomplishment, the, as so far as anyone in North America was able to determine, the first and only Laser Boosted Single Stage To Orbit launch site in the world.
Currently, a massive SSTO vehicle was in the final stages of preparation for launch. The massive craft was undergoing the final steps of launch preparation. Technicians, many of them suspended in midair via a variety of platforms and harness, inspected the craft beyond the already painstaking requirements for spaceflight; absolutely nothing could be allowed to go wrong with this launch.
The vehicle on the launch pad consisted of a Jupiter V SSTO craft, with eight comparatively small, but still massive, detachable boosters attached, technically rendering it not an SSTO. All told, the vehicle weighed several million pounds, most of it in ablative propulsion material, as well as more conventional rocket fuel.
For three days, the spacecraft had been ready for launch, and, given their penetration of human information systems, the Fleet of Fog knew it. However, they didn't know when it would launch, by virtue of the fact that none of the humans present knew either.
So they waited.
"Allright, Ars," Melissa said, pointing at the board behind her, "this is it. Your first real combat mission."
Ars sat in his chair in the briefing room, eyes fixed on the blank wall display behind her.
"We are trying to launch an SSTO vehicle from the Avalon facility in Texas. Our objective is Japan. The SSTO is loaded with a variety of materials, all of which are now extremely scarce in Japan. Highlights of the load include several tons of Strategic Rare Earth Metals, in addition to a large quantity of highly enriched uranium."
"So, where do I come in?"
Melissa tapped the screen, and a man of the West Coast of the United States appeared. It was heavily annotated with various icons and symbols representing terrain, weather patterns, and, most notably, Fog warship presence.
"As you can see, the Fog has committed a much stronger force here than they usually use to enforce the blockade." She gestured at the display. "Given the requirements to do this, we are fairly sure that they have had to draw on their forces in other areas. What satellite data we can get confirms this."
"So," Ars said, "That means they must know this is important."
They had indeed made a considerable commitment to the blockade. Cruisers, normally used to anchor the formations of smaller ships that covered the coastline, had been deployed into the rank and file, many of their positions taken by Heavy Cruisers. In several locations, the blockade lines were anchored by Battlecruisers or Battleships, full-blown Capital Ships.
Melissa ran her finger in an arc across the display, drawing a red line behind it. "This," she said, "is the projected course of the SSTO on its way to Japan, before taking whatever evasive maneuvers will inevitably become necessary into account. Your mission is to deploy with your Eladrin and engage the Fog ships here," she made a circling motion around where the SSTO flight path crossed the line of the blockade, "disrupting their efforts to intercept the SSTO and, if possible, damage or sink them."
Well Ars thought, looking at the map, studying the fog forces around his target area if Ragnarok really is as capable as it was in the simulations, if the Fog are as dumb as they were at second midway, and if I don't make some incredibly stupid mistake because I've never actually touched the controls of this machine, this just might be possible.
He sighed. Or maybe I'll just die horribly.
"Allright," he said, stand up. "I'm ready."
Ars stood on the catwalk leading to the cockpit of the Eladrin. The aircraft had been brought up from the deep vault he had previously seen it in only a few hours before, and the technical teams had been working frantically to ensure that it was combat ready.
He looked down at the cockpit. Unlike most fighter aircraft, the Eladrin lacked any sort of canopy. Instead, the cockpit was set down into the body of the aircraft were the fuselage was thickest, between the main wings and the engine. Once he was settled inside, several layers of armor would close over him, and the integrated sensor readouts and the neural links would connect him to the outside world.
Though once I think about it Ars thought, looking over the rest of the body of the Eladrin, this is a pretty sound design decision. The Eladrin was, after all, better protected than any historical warship. Putting on a canopy, even one made of something like optical sapphire, could potentially compromise all of that armor without taking into account that in order to function it would obviously have to be transparent, and thus allow the laser weapons of the Fog to pass through it.
Ars took a step forward, then turned around and began to climb down the ladder leading to the cockpit of Eladrin Unit Sigma 12.
The communicator built into his Flight Suit came to life. Ars paused his descent.
The complex garment, if it could be called that, which he had spent the last fifteen minutes putting on, possessed myriad capabilities above and beyond its essential purpose of assisting the control interface of the Eladrin connect to his central nervous system.
"Ars?" The voice of Commander Marcus issued from the speakers built into the collar of his suit. "Once you get out there, we may not be able to contact you. The Fog have been jamming all our communications for years, so if they want to cut our channels, or listen in, they almost certainly could. So, before you go out there," The commander paused for a moment. "Happy hunting."
"Roger that." Ars said, then nodded. He resumed his climb.
The mood in the Phoenix Central Combat Operations Combat Information Center was tense. Dozens of men and women sat at their stations, completely silent. They were about to do something that no one, for seventeen years, had been insane enough too attempted.
They were going to sink ships of the Fog.
Commander Marcus sat at his station in the CIC. Naturally, silence lay thick, almost choking, over the entire room. They watched the launch clock at the front of the massive space count away the final seconds until the launch time that had been arranged in secret between the upper echelons of Phoenix, Avalon, and the Central Government.
Am I about to send him to die?
The clock hit T-minus zero.
All across the Central United States, lights flickered as unimaginable energies were rerouted toward the Avalon Spaceflight Facility. The dedicated fusion reactors onsite, built with technology derived from the Fog and provided by Phoenix, know to only a select few to be anything other than the 'mere' fission reactors the public was told they were, reached maximum output.
The energies were redirected into massive banks of capacitors, ones which Phoenix had also assisted in the development of. They were fractal capacitors, with a capacity more than an order of magnitude beyond that of most others used in the post-Fog world, which themselves were vast improvements over the conductive plates used in the early twenty-first century.
As the capacitor banks filled, yet more energy was drawn in, this time from across the entirely of continent. Eight beams of unimaginably intense coherent light lanced up from the launch pad and struck the cores of ablative metallic reaction mass in the booster engines surrounding the SSTO.
In a fraction of an instant, the beams heated the propellant to insane temperatures. The in an instant, the metal flashed into plasma, and was then channeled outward, and away from the laser emitters, by a series of carefully shaped electromagnetic fields, exerting a tremendous force on the body of the vehicle.
Then the central beam fired.
The SSTO vehicle began to rise, slowly at first, but rapidly gaining speed as the reaction mass ablated away. The beams flickered around the retreating surface of their respective targets with tiny, infinitely precise motions, ensuring the optimal use of reaction mass.
As the craft rose and accelerated, it began to tip westward. As it did so, the beams emitted from the launch pad cut out and, and instant later, began firing again from another emitter, positioned for a much better angle on the receding vehicle.
Ars sat down in the cockpit and put on the helmet that had been waiting in the aircraft. As soon as he did so, his seat slid back, retracting slightly into the aircraft. With a slight whirring sound, a pair of armored shutters smoothly slid into place over the cockpit, sealing it shut. For a moment, Ars was plunged into complete darkness, then his vision began to slowly return as, one by one, various controls and readouts lit up, arrayed just as they had been in the simulation.
Ars felt something shifting in his Flight Suit, starting at the back of his head and following his spine down to the small of his back. He felt a slight pricking sensation on the back of his head, which swiftly vanished and was replaced by a bizarre tingling coldness. The sensation stayed in the back of his head for a moment, then spread to his entire body in a wave of alien sensation, causing Ars to shiver as it did so.
What the hell was that? Ars thought. The neural interface? The Simulator used the same system, and the connection was nothing like that.
The communicator came to life.
"Don't worry about that, Ars," Melissa said. "The interface for the Eladrin proper is much more intense and, um, invasive than the one on the simulator." She said nothing. Given that the activation indicator was still lit, Ars assumed she was talking to someone else.
"You aren't having a seizure, are you?" Melissa asked, as if there was nothing even remotely abnormal about that. "Most of the failed Eladrin pilot candidates had started seizing up about now."
"No, I'm fine. It's great to know you care so much."
"Avalon Prime is in the air and reporting no anomalies." The Phoenix CIC technician who had spoken looked back at his screen. "No trouble on our scopes either."
The tactical officer cocked his head as someone in his back room said something into his headset. "The Fleet of Fog has not yet made any response to the launch."
The Phoenix CIC used a system much like that employed by the Mission Control for the Apollo Missions. The Sheer number of things occurring at one time made the concept of putting everyone with a necessary specialty in one space daunting. Instead, they were grouped by specialty and stationed in adjacent rooms, and each room provided information and support to the CIC officer for their task area.
Commander Marcus looked at the displays projected at his station. He watched as the arrow representing the SSTO crept north and east across the continent, watching as the time till it hit the coast ticked down toward the estimates of the time the Eladrin would need to reach the same point.
He coughed.
"Commence Launch."
"All, people!" Melissa shouted from her station, what would perhaps be the equivalent of an Executive Officer's station. "Commence Launch Status Checklist."
"This is power systems, we are go for launch."
"Life support is a go."
"Weapons systems are go."
"Engineering is go for launch."
"Flight Dynamics is a go."
"CAPCOM is go."
"Guidance is go."
"Medical is go."
"Propulsion systems are go."
Ars sat in the cockpit, listening as the pre-launch checklist continued. The Space he was occupying inside the Eladrin was surprisingly large, more so than any other fighter jet cockpits he had seen.
The pain from the activation of the neural link and faded almost immediately, and the strange sensation it had generated had passed soon after. The feeling of the neural link, still in standby mode, was unlike what he had experienced in any of the simulators. He felt some form of presence, just behind his head, and had an odd sensation of being watched. It made sense, he supposed. Intellectually, he knew that the CIC crew had access to just about any cockpit data feed and all of his biometric data, but this was something else, something different. Something originating in his animal hindbrain, the sense of being in the presence of an overwhelmingly superior predator.
The launch checklist reached him. He closed his eyes.
"Pilot Ready."
"Commander, all systems are go."
"Commence launch sequence."
"Commencing launch sequence," the Propulsion Systems Engineer said. "T minus thirty seconds."
"Switching all control to pilot."
"Commencing internal reactor ignition."
"Reactor ignition successful."
Marcus took a deep breath.
"Launch."
The launch timer hit zero. An instant later, Ars was slammed into his seat as a massive version of the catapults mounted on aircraft carriers flung the Eladrin forward, down a long tunnel cut just for the purpose, and into the sky.
Ars marveled as his sensor feeds and displays came to life. The sheer volume and clarity of data available to him was enough to set his head spinning. The simulator had been clean, sanitized, everything striped down simply the variables relevant to the situation at hand.
This was nothing like that. Six different RADARs, a pair of LIDARs, FLIR systems on all of his major weapons, and a plethora of other fairly conventional military sensor systems. There was, however, more. Beyond that, there were suites of systems designed for the express purpose of fighting the Fleet of Fog. A network of accelerometers was built across the entire ship, which, along with the arrays of gravitation traps was intended to allow the Eladrin to pinpoint the source of any sort of gravity anomaly. There were other, weirder sensor systems, too, things that Ars hadn't been briefed on. To be honest, most of them sounded more like things that belonged in a high-energy physics lab or a particle accelerator than on a combat aircraft.
Best of all, however, was the canopy. There was really no other way to describe it. The outermost wall of the cockpit had transformed into an image of the sky surround the Eladrin in flight. The display was sharper and clearer than any monitor of hologram he had ever seen, and gave him a three hundred and sixty degree horizontal view, and more than one eighty vertically.
Ars continued to fly, revealing in the data at his fingertips. At the very least, the method of data transmission was the same as the simulator. Receiving data from the Eladrin was a strange experience, one that would be rather difficult for Ars to put into words. It was a bit like remembering thing he'd never known. He would look at a vastly simplified display, and he would simply know all the relevant data.
He had more than five hundred miles to go until he hit the coast. At the standard cruising speed of the Eladrin, it would take him less than half an hour.
He looked at the data feeds. The SSTO had switched to internal power and was still on course, and the Fog was maneuvering as expected to intercept it. If they had spotted him, then they were trying to bait him into a trap by acting like they hadn't.
Ars considered for a moment. Even with the Mental Models, tactical complexity of that degree was still completely unexpected from the Fog.
He stayed on course.