The AN/AAQ-37 electro-optical distributed aperture system fed his helmet with data from visual and IR sensors located around the plane, allowing him to “see” through the plane below. And what he saw was chaos. He’d once flown through a forest fire during a training mission in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains; this was worse. All the smoke and debris in the air had created a swirl of darkness with patches of bright sun. Chinese drones darted in and out of the smoke at low levels, and on the deck, along with fragments of Marine Corps helicopters, his squadron’s fighters lay scattered about like puzzle pieces. He scanned up and around the sky and confirmed what he’d feared: his was the only U.S. jet in the air.

He started to check on the jet’s other systems. No sound came over his radios. The fighter’s GPS-coupled inertial navigation system was wrong, showing him as flying over Maui when he knew damn well this was Oahu. Electronically generated false targets flickered on the horizontal situation display and then disappeared. The plane, with its novel software systems and millions of lines of code, was designed to be its own copilot, capable of automation and interpretation never before possible in battle. But at this moment, Worm thought, the fifth-generation fighter was having trouble getting out of its own way, electronically speaking.

Marine aviators had flown for generations with just guns and guts, Worm told himself. He could do the same.

At the near corner of the airfield, he saw one of the tiny Chinese quadcopters firing, its autocannon peppering a parked Osprey tiltrotor aircraft. First, the starboard wing buckled, and then the MV-22’s massive engine dropped to the ground, tipping over the ungainly aircraft.

With one hand, Worm slowed the jet’s approach, and with the other, he targeted the quadcopter on the touchscreens before him. Then he saw her.

The defiance was unmistakable even at this distance. He magnified the image through his helmet optics, effectively creating a picture inside a picture on the screen superimposed in his cockpit. The marine fired her pistol at the drone that had rocketed the Osprey. She stood with her feet braced and leaned over the still-smoking engine to steady her aim. She fired a full magazine, then ducked down to reload.

As she drew the magazine from a pouch on her flight suit, the quadcopter dropped to within a few inches of the ground and circled back around her position. She spun around too; Worm saw her chambering the next round as she raised her weapon. He willed his jet’s cannon-arming protocol to speed up.

She fired and then darted to the other side of the wreckage, racing to keep it between her and the quadcopter, like a lethal game of musical chairs. Then she slipped in a pool of oil seeping out of the gutted Osprey, twisted her left leg, and fell down in a heap. The pistol skittered a few feet away.

“Shit!” shouted Worm.

The gun-pod light turned red. Active.

The jet shifted position slightly as Worm tried to line up the F-35’s cannon. But then the quadcopter drone rose abruptly. It had caught on to the game and was moving to gain an overhead shot on the fallen Marine.

Worm nudged the jet up using its thrust-vectoring nozzles, in effect dancing in the air. As he maneuvered to line up his gun pod, his helmet display showed the Marine crawling toward her pistol. It was lodged beneath a smoldering wing from a nearby wrecked F-35. Jesus, what balls she had, thought Worm.

His finger was already over the trigger, and he pressed down lightly, the jet buffeted as the rounds fired off. The drone opened fire at the same time as Worm’s jet loosed a line of training rounds that walked their way up the runway to the quadcopter. The image on the helmet display dissolved into an explosion of smoke and flame, and the drone spun down into the burning Osprey wreck.

Where was she?

His headset suddenly growled at him, and a flash of color danced across one of his displays. The warning from the jet’s radar-threat-detection system was unmistakable: an air-defense system was tracking him.

The readout showed that the radar that had washed over his jet wasn’t a U.S. system but an H-250 phased array, the updated Directorate mobile-SAM type.

“Oh, shit,” said Worm. “That can’t be.”

It wasn’t the threat of being shot down that chilled him despite the sweat in his flight suit. What this meant was much worse than that: they somehow already had major forces on the ground.

The Directorate armored column from the Golden Wave and Hildy Manor had bulldozed through the parked cars in the lot and left pier 29 behind; after that, the column had split, and the two lines headed off in different directions. One column of Type 99 tanks and their supporting vehicles raced off to link up with Directorate airborne troops disembarking from a trio of Harmony Airways Airbus A380s that had just landed at Honolulu International Airport. The other armored column went down the North Nimitz Highway out of town.

Worm knew where they were heading.

For all the historic value of taking Pearl Harbor, Camp H. M. Smith was the real prize. The headquarters of the U.S. military’s Pacific Command was designed to house the military’s peacetime bureaucracy, not fight off an invasion force. The Marines there would fight to the last round, Worm was certain. But there was no way they could stop a column of tanks. And then the command and control hub of the entire Pacific would be in… what? Was the right term enemy hands? It was incomprehensible.

Worm rechecked his weapons state: seventy-one rounds.

He took the plane back down for the deck and raced low across the runway. As he passed, he saw the Osprey’s wreckage, and then he saw a figure pop out from behind it. And she waved. What a warrior.

“That Marine needs to get the hell out of there,” said Worm, finding himself in conversation with his jet again, as happened when he needed to lock down his fear.

The jet’s horizontal situation display revealed a Chinese-made Z-10 attack helicopter moving in toward the runway. It wouldn’t take long for the Z-10 to discover the woman’s position, and she was clearly fool enough to start taking potshots at it. A fellow Marine needed him and he’d been taught since training that you never, ever left a Marine behind.

But there was the force headed for Camp Smith. He didn’t have enough rounds left to take the tanks out completely, but a few low passes might stall them. Maybe he could hit a command vehicle or disable the lead tank.

He eased the jet skyward and gained another five hundred feet, seeking an answer and more knots for the next strafing run.

His options were clear. His choice was not.

“Too much jamming, turn off the feed,” said Commander Bill “Sweetie” Darling. “Let’s focus on Foxglove Two, not the whole war.”

Darling couldn’t believe he’d just said war so casually. That’s what it was. America was at war in the Pacific, and he assumed elsewhere in the world. And a few minutes into the war, he could already tell that a major problem would be filtering out useful data from the flow that gushed over them as if from a fire hose.

“Understood,” said Hammer, the naval flight officer who handled the plane’s communications. “I’ll bring it back up if the jamming stops.”

Ninety miles from the formation of U.S. ships, Darling’s P-8 was on the hunt. A Type 93A submarine that had been tagged Foxglove 2 lurked somewhere nearby. The attack on Pearl Harbor was under way, but for Darling and his crew, the task was the same as it always was on patrol: find and prosecute. This particular submarine had been tailing the USS George H. W. Bush for a couple of days. Yesterday, it was just a nuisance and had added some edge to their flight ops. Today, it was an immediate threat that they had to shut down in the next few minutes or face a lifetime of knowing they had failed to protect a big-deck carrier with over four thousand sailors onboard.