She sighed to herself. "What would I do without you, Gabe?"

  "Beats me," buzzed the voice from the empty seat behind her. "There'd be no one here to look out for your cute blue ass, so I guess you'd really be deep in the tox-sludge without a chem-suit."

  Gabe - or the Wachowski-Linder Industries GABRIEL-302 auto-drone flight unit, as his manufacturers called him - was a prototype sentient copilot/navigator programme specifically designed for use with the Seraphim fighter. He and Combat Flight Pilot Second Rank Rafaela Blue made a perfect combo, everyone agreed. None of the other pilots in the squadron could be persuaded to fly with some box of chips and wires sitting there as their copilot and, equally, none of the navigators wanted to share a cockpit with a blue-skinned genetic freak like Rafe.

  Correction, she reminded herself: a blue-skinned female genetic freak.

  "GI Dolls." That's what they had called her and the others, and probably still did, behind her back. "Milli-com bed warmers." "Command staff stress release units." "R&R Commandos." Those were favourites too, homing in on the generally-held suspicions about why exactly the Milli-com top brass had wanted female as well as male Genetic Infantryman beings created, and what exactly the female version's non-combat duties at Milli-com had entailed.

  Rafe had heard them all, all the sniggering jokes and comments, and tended not to react too well to them.

  Which was why she was flying solo now, and dumped with every shitcan mission that came across her squadron commander's desk. That was what happened, she reminded herself, when you put three of your supposed comrades into the base infirmary - one of them a flight commander nursing a broken arm and fractured jaw - after a forthright exchange of views one night in the pilots' mess.

  She half-smiled at the memory. One thing was for sure after that little incident, she remembered. It was the last time anyone ever called her any of those names. At least to her face. The fact that it had happened the day after she had been officially confirmed as the highest-scoring Souther ace pilot in this whole campaign sector had only made things all the sweeter.

  It was also the reason, she had to ruefully remind herself, why her enraged squadron commander simply hadn't been able to have her recycled all the way back to Milli-com.

  After the destruction of the entire genetic infantryman regiment at what had infamously come to be known as the Quartz Zone Massacre, the GI program had been deemed an official failure; the plug had been pulled on any future attempts to use genetic science to create armies of super-soldiers purpose-designed to wage war in the unique combat conditions on the surface of Nu Earth. That left just the so-called GI Dolls - and one last remaining and particularly resilient example of the male of the species, she reminded herself - and no one seemed quite sure what to do with the contingent of female GIs that had been created in the gene genies' bio labs at Milli-com. The near-critical level of mounting losses to the war had finally forced the military planners' hand, however, and the female GIs had been individually assessed and reassigned to regular duties throughout every branch of the Souther armed forces.

  Like many of her gene-sisters, Rafe's assessment scores showed an almost preternatural level of intuitive ability and aptitude for machine interface and information categorisation. However, while most of the others found useful roles serving in the vast pools of data assimilators and battle strategy assessors that made up a great part of the million-strong command staff of Milli-com, further testing had revealed Rafe to be almost uniquely qualified for one particular job...

  "Yessir," she breathed to herself. "Flying the friendly skies of Nu Earth. Working nine-to-five in the most hazardous combat environment on the most dangerous war world in an entire galaxy full of people busy shooting at each other! Why, it's just about everything a gal grown in a test-tube ever dreamed of!"

  There was a querying bleep on her helmet comm.

  "Nothing, Gabe," she replied. "Just thinking aloud."

  Her copilot's designers might have equipped their creation with a personality matrix that seemed to have stuck on a default setting marked "love-struck lecher", but an understanding of good old-fashioned human irony seemed to be have been beyond even their programming abilities.

  Another comms alert lit up on her visor display, calling for her attention. "What you got for me, Gabe?"

  "Radio intercept," chimed the reply. "An aerial distress call, coming from right in our neighbourhood."

  She checked the radar display, unsurprised to see nothing there. The high-level chem-clouds were so dense in some parts of Nu Earth, and contained so much radiation, sensor-scrambling or radar-blocking trace elements, that on occasion the first warning you had that you might not be alone in the skies was when you came cruising out of a cloud bank and suddenly had to take emergency evasive action to avoid a midair collision with a patrol of enemy fighters. Or alternatively, a flight of your own side's troop landers that someone forgot to tell you would be flying in your vacinity on the same day.

  Just another extra little thrill that added to the general excitement of flying the friendly skies above Nu Earth, she reminded herself.

  "One of ours, Gabe?"

  There was a brief pause in response to her question. The airwaves of Nu Earth were awash with coded signal traffic from both sides, much of it designed to jam out the communications frequencies of the other side. It could take a highly-trained human operator years to get to grips with the complexities of the invisible landscape of Nu Earth's radio-wave environment.

  Gabe - his powerful processors scanning through thousands of frequencies on a bewildering number of wavebandss, and comparing the collected data to the information held in his daily-updated memory files - accomplished the required task in a few brief seconds.

  "Affirmative, hon. It's a command rank frequency, Pershing-level priority. It's kinda strange, one of the older code variants that no one's really used much in the last few years, but it's still registered as valid and non-compromised by the Nort crypto-breakers. Give me a few more moments, babe, and maybe I can-"

  "Gabe..." There was something more than a distinct note of impatience in Rafe's voice.

  The navigator unit couldn't properly imitate the uniquely human sound of a sigh of resignation, but Gabe's vox-programmes did the best they could. "Got a signal-lock on the source. Intercept course plotted. Feeding it through to you now."

  The data flickered across her visor display but even before her mind had properly assimilated it, her GI intuitive senses had already kicked in and she was bringing her craft's main thrusters online and swinging the fighter around to the required new heading.

  "Sounds like some useless piece of Milli-com brass maybe got closer to the action than he wanted to. C'mon, Gabe, time to go earn our daily hazard pay."

  "They've started paying us now? When did that happen? Did I miss a squadron memo or something?"

  Rafe's reply, couched in terms that breached several directives from Milli-com on the use of inappropriate terminology over official Souther military communications channels, was lost amidst the crescendo roar of the fighter's thrusters blasting into full, fiery life.

  THREE

  They found the source of the distress call without much trouble, and a little extra something else. Three Nort fighters, Grendel-class patrol interceptors, who were either the cause of the distress call, or, like Rafe and Gabe, had picked up the signal and zeroed in on its source, no doubt eagerly anticipating the promise of easy prey.

  Gabe had picked up their radio chatter - voices barking excitedly at each other in the harsh, guttural tones of the language of the Norts - while he and Rafe were still some distance away. Forewarned of the presence of the enemy craft, Rafe had climbed another thousand metres into the cover of a dense layer of rust cloud and then cut power and throttled back, coming in on the Norts in a manoeuvre that was half gliding, half controlled fall. Cutting the flow of power to the Seraphim fighter's engines would reduce the telltale energy signature that might betray its presence to the Nort craft, while the rust cloud - a swirling vortex composed of millions of tiny fragments of battlefield debris swept up into the upper atmosphere by cyclonic strength winds - would shield her approach from the Norts' radar senses.

  It was a dangerous manoeuvre and other, more cautious pilots would have actively sought to keep out of a rust cloud, but Rafe knew her craft and her own abilities, and was confident that both would see them safely through.

  The Seraphim bucked wildly, buffeted by the wind forces lurking inside the rust cloud. There was a frantic drumming sound, so loud and intense it quickly merged into one big hammering rumble, as rusting flecks of debris bounced off the fighter's armoured skin.

  "Probably going to need a new paint job when we get back to base," Gabe observed. Rafe said nothing, but suspected that Gabe's personality matrix processors had probably been chewing over the concept of irony a little more during the ride in.

  "Warning light on the starboard intake," he noted. "Probably debris sucked into the engine cowling." By the time Rafe had looked to check, the warning status had changed to two small flashing amber lights.

  "I see it," she confirmed. "So when do we start worrying?"

  "Probably at four," came the reply, just as the third warning light came on and something inside the cockpit started beeping urgently.

  "What about five?" asked Rafe.

  "There is no five," Gabe informed her. "About ten seconds after warning number four, the engine explodes, taking most of the wing with it, and we take the short, fast route to finding out whether the grunts at ground level have it any worse than we do up here."

  "I know my crate. It'll hold," said Rafe, wondering if Gabe's personality matrix had advanced enough yet to know a bluff when it heard one.

  It was at that moment they broke out of the rust cloud and saw the targets ahead of them. Nort Grendels, four of them, which was one more than she and Gabe had been expecting, going by the three separate voice patterns Gabe had positively identified from their radio chatter.

  "Guess the fourth one must not be such a big talker," said Rafe, as she hit the boosters again and sent her Seraphim diving down into an all-out attack manoeuvre. Gabe's comms receptors broadcast the Norts' shouted exclamations and squawks of horrified surprise, which were instantly drowned out a moment later by the roar of explosions.

  One of the Nort fighters vaporised in midair, struck by one of the missiles launched from the rocket pods on the wings of Rafe's fighter. The destroyed craft fell away, reduced to little more than burning fragments, fragments that might ironically one day be swept up from the ground during a cyclone storm to become part of another rust cloud.

  The other Nort fighters frantically peeled away, evading the same fate as their comrade. Another of Rafe's missiles got a semi-lock on one of them, and exploded as near to its target as possible, peppering the Grendel's hull, engine and wings with shrapnel. The Nort dived towards the cloud layer below, his tail fin partially shredded and one engine trailing black smoke. Gabe tracked him with the Seraphim's targeting systems and opened up with the rear turret quad-lasers, blowing away the remainder of the Nort fighter's tail section. The Grendel - an ugly, blunt-nosed thing, typical of the Norts' pragmatic approach to military design - corkscrewed crazily through the air and then dropped like a stone, disappearing into the cloud layer below. Like every other Nu Earth airman, the Nort pilot would be equipped with a grav-chute and a chem-resistant flight suit, but even if he managed to bail out of the stricken craft, he must have known his chances of surviving the journey through the dense and highly toxic chem-clouds would be minimal.

  In the Nu Earth air war, there were very few lucky escapes and no prizes at all for merely being second-best.

  The remaining two Nort fighters were running ahead of the faster, more agile Souther aircraft, pushing hard with their afterburners, chasing after the target that had drawn them here in the first place. Rafe could see it now, a lightly armed command transport. Its hull shape showed the familiar lines of Souther design, although Rafe couldn't quite recognise what type and model it was. On cue, Gabe chimed in with the results of his vessel ID scan. "It's a junker, hon. Mostly composed of the airframe of an old Buffalo Class Type IV atmo-shuttle, but with a few other pieces added in."

  Rafe frowned. "Junkers" were common enough on various parts of Nu Earth. Craft built from the salvaged remains of battle-destroyed wrecks. They were mostly used by off-world mercenary units and the so-called scavenger packs, small bandit armies composed of deserters and renegades from both sides of the war.

  But what the hell was a senior Souther command staff officer doing flying about in something as undignified as a junker?

  "Coded transmission hidden inside their craft ID beacon checks out, hon. They're definitely carrying someone with VIP status," reported Gabe, almost as if he could read her mind.

  "Not for much longer," said Rafe, watching as the two remaining Grendels streaked towards the vulnerable shuttle craft.

  It was a miracle that the shuttle had survived this long. Rafe suspected that the Grendel pilots' plan had probably been to capture the Souther craft and its human cargo intact, sending out radio warnings that they would blow it out of the sky unless it landed now in Nort-controlled territory.

  Now, however, with Rafe arriving on the scene, the Norts had apparently abandoned this plan and now wanted to destroy the shuttle and whatever VIP passengers it might be carrying.

  She pushed her Seraphim hard to gain on the Norts and their quarry, locking onto the nearest of the Grendels. Missile lock-on tone pinged loudly in her helmet speakers, but she didn't fire, knowing if a missile missed its initial target then it could easily mistakenly lock onto the shuttle craft as its secondary alternative target. Instead, her finger went to the firing stud of her fighter's main guns. The finger hovered there, waiting patiently for the right moment to unleash the power of the four forward-firing lascannons slung beneath the Seraphim's nose cone.

  The Seraphim jolted violently as it rode the turbulence from the engine wash of the two Nort fighters. Close enough to feel the heat from your target's engine thrusters meant close enough to fire and Rafe's finger stabbed down on the trigger stud just as, a moment too late to save itself, the Nort fighter directly in front of her deployed its rear defensive measures.

  A hail of small objects fell away from the tail of the Grendel, just as Rafe's lascannon bolts ripped into it. Anyone watching might have thought the hail of objects were part of the Nort fighter, fragments blown off by the lascannon hammer-blows which smashed apart the Grendel's entire rear section in one furious burst of fire, but Rafe knew better.

  "Scatter mines!" she called in warning to Gabe, wrenching at the flight controls in an effort to evade the hail of explosive devices coming flying towards them.

  Their fuses were proximity-sensitive and they exploded all around the Seraphim, filling the air with fragments of flying shrapnel as the Souther craft tried to weave a course through them.

  Rafe heard warning alarms sound. Shards of metal tore through the cockpit floor and she felt something punch into her lower leg. Wetness spread there, inside her flight suit, to be cut off a moment later as her enhanced GI body detected the damage to it. The coagulants in her better-than-human bloodstream stopped the bleeding almost instantly. Any other pilot would also be terrified by the fact that their cockpit had been holed and that its interior was now possibly contaminated by the deadly toxins that were ever-present in the Nu Earth atmosphere, but Rafe's GI immunity system made her invulnerable to the worst of just about anything the planet's super-polluted environment had to throw at her.

  Despite the agony from her leg wound - it would be a few more seconds before the chemically-boosted contents of her bloodstream would manufacture enough stimulants to kill the pain. As the damage alerts lit up her instrumentation panel and filled the comms channels of her helmet speakers, Rafe kept her attention locked on the task of saving her craft. Only GI reactions allowed her to jink her fighter out of the path of the flaming, expanding mass of wreckage that was all that now remained of the enemy Grendel.

  Her Seraphim wasn't out of danger yet, however. Something - Rafe caught a brief glimpse of a tattered, burning ragdoll thing still strapped into its pilot's chair - struck the cockpit canopy with enough force to leave a spider's web of deep cracks in the thick layer of armoured glassteel. Shocked, Rafe lost control of her craft for a split-second. By the time she had regained control and piloted the Seraphim safely through the last of the wreckage cloud, the last remaining Grendel had successfully acquired its target.

  It swept in from beneath the slower-moving shuttle craft, raking its underbelly with a devastating close-range volley of fire from its twin banks of wing-mounted quad-cannons. One of the shuttle's engines stalled and exploded. Rafe could clearly see the bright streaks of armour-piercing tracer shells passing through the shuttle's underside and then exiting out through its topside, causing untold damage to the ship's vulnerable internal systems and even more vulnerable human components.

  The shuttle dipped abruptly, then fell away. Only one of its landing thrusters was left functioning amidst the fiery scrap yard wreck of its destroyed underbelly. Rafe could see it firing wildly and could well imagine the panic in the shuttle pilot's mind as he fought to bring his crippled craft down on a controlled descent into the midst of whatever further dangers awaited it at ground level.

  The victorious Grendel peeled up and away, going into a textbook banking turn that would bring it back on course for a return pass over the shuttle. Whatever ideas the Nort pilot had about returning to finish the shuttle's destruction ended in a blazing fireball as Rafe locked onto the Nort plane and despatched a seeker missile after it.

  She followed the shuttle down, listening in to the pain-wracked voice of the pilot or copilot in its bullet-riddled cockpit.

  "Mayday, mayday, this is Buzzard Three-One... We are going down. Repeat... Going down. We are going down..."