ZEN PUSHED HIS STICK TO LEVEL HIS WINGS, FEELING for the plane with his arms and legs. He’d faked Smith out, but the rush of gravity was nearly too much; he felt his head starting to implode. If he were flying only the Strike Eagle he’d be fine, but he had to guide the Flight-hawks as well. Even with the computer guidance system carrying most of the load, it was too much work; his brain started caving under the physical and mental stress.

That was the point of all this, right? To find the limits?

Okay, he told himself, I’m here, I’m doing this. The bar at the top of his visor screen flashed green. It meant one of his escorts was now within firing range.

Okay, he repeated to himself. I’m home. All I have to do is flick my thumb down and enable the Flighthawk forward cams.

If Zen could do that, the heavy visor in his helmet would project two three-dimensional holograms in front of his eyes, each view projected from the nose of one of the U/ MF-3’s. He’d say “Hawk One” or “Hawk Two,” look directly at his target, select cannon, fire. End of exercise.

But before he could do that, the center of his screen flashed red, indicating that the F-15C behind him was firing its simulated cannon. He jinked left, his consciousness narrowing to a pinprick of pure white light in a round black night.

Smith had all the stops out. He wasn’t flying the F-15C as if it were a Sukhoi, with its limited avionics and conservative flight regimes. He’d tossed aside the flight protocol and briefed plan and was flying like an American—balls-out, over the line.

Fair enough, thought Zen, pulling back left, swirling in a scissors. The green firing bar disappeared—the Flighthawks had lost the shot. The little planes were extremely agile, but the computers that helped control them were not yet as creative as human pilots in close-in furballs.

Zen yanked his nose down hard, barely escaping one more time.

His head started to float. He’d pushed too far.

Zen forced air into his lungs, forced his muscles to relax, forced the blackness away. The green bar appeared and this time he mashed his thumb downward right away, saw Smith’s butt hanging fat in Hawk One’s boresight.

“Hawk One,” he told the control computer. “Cannon.”

“Ready,” replied the computer.

“Fire.”

KNIFE CURSED AS THE SICS BUZZER ANNOUNCED THAT he had been fried. He eased off on his stick and checked his power, leveling off as he reoriented himself. The dogfight had taken them to the edge of the restricted airspace Dreamland had set aside for the Flighthawk test; he began a bank south.

“Dreamland Playboy One, this is Hawk Mother,” Zen radioed. “You’re dirt.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Smith snapped. The transmissions were monitored as well as recorded, but at the moment Knife didn’t care if anyone thought he was a sore loser. It was the first time he’d lost to Zen in three weeks’ worth of mock battles. The point of the exercises was to test and improve the Flighthawk U/MF-3’s, and it could be argued that his previous victories had greatly enhanced the unmanned escort program, helping to improve the combat computer programming so the miniature planes would be useful twenty-first-century weapons.

It could also be argued that three against one wasn’t a fair fight. Nor were the exercise’s rules of engagement, which called for him to approach the Strike Eagle as if he were an Su-27, slower and higher than optimum.

Somehow, none of those things made him feel any better.

“Let’s go again,” suggested Stockard. “Down for doubles.”

“Oh, you got it,” said Knife. He glanced at his fuel gauge to make sure he had gas, then ran his eyes over the rest of the Eagle’s instruments. He knew from feel that the plane was at dash-one spec—but he also knew that relying on feel could be a quick ticket to the boneyard.

“Point Zero in zero one,” added Stockard, meaning that he and his escorts would be back at his starting position in sixty seconds.

Knife gave a terse acknowledgment and headed toward the end of the range. What he wouldn’t give to be flying the Cheetah, the advanced-airframe F-15. Its forward canards and maneuverable thrust nozzles enabled the plane to cut nearly straight lines in the sky. He would have nailed Stockard on his first pass.

He would have nailed him if he hadn’t had to worry about the Flighthawks. Three against one.

All right, he told himself. Stop making excuses and get to work.

Knife pushed himself forward against his restraints as he reached his starting point at the edge of the restricted airspace. He was ready. He’d nail that SOB, Flighthawks or no Flighthawks. This time he wasn’t holding back.

ZEN REPLAYED THE FINAL THIRTY SECONDS OF THE dogfight in the lower left quadrant of his high-tech visor while he waited for Smith. The herky-jerky images made it clear the Flighthawk project had a long way to go. The U/MF-3 flight computers simply hadn’t been able to keep up with the two manned planes; luck as well as skill had saved Zen’s butt from being fried.

Admittedly, carrying a dedicated Flighthawk remote pilot in the Eagle’s backseat would have helped. But the point of this particular experiment, and indeed the entire program, was to see if the remote planes could operate with minimal human guidance—if, in fact, a single pilot on a combat mission could control them while trying to evade an enemy aircraft. Besides, the corn equipment and communications gear were so large there was no way to get anyone else into the plane.

Even though Zen had just nailed Smith, he felt that he had failed. He knew he was being incredibly hard on himself. But he’d had to go all out to do it. If he had been flying a strike mission, he would not have been able to complete the bombing run. Zen was the sort of pilot, the sort of man, who accepted nothing less than perfection. Settling for what was possible simply wasn’t good enough.

The U/MF-3’s were in a shadow orbit, slightly offset and trailing his wings at a half mile as he circled over the Nevada desert. It was a standard Flighthawk maneuver, one that he could tell the computer to execute and forget about, though he had the Flighthawks’ God’s-eye view selected on his helmet monitor just in case.

The U/MF’s were about the size of Miata sports cars, with delta-shaped knife wings and small canard wings. Their tail sections looked like miniature versions of the F-23’s, canted off in a squashed V. Powered by specially designed and downsized versions of the Pratt & Whitney F-1 19-PW-100 without an afterburner section, the planes were theoretically more maneuverable than the F-15 or even the F-22, but without the top-end speed of either plane. On the other hand, their size and wing configurations made them essentially invisible to radar beyond three miles. The Flighthawks were intended as multi-role escort craft for high-performance attack planes on difficult deep-strike missions. They could be configured for reconnaissance as well as close combat, and the engineers who had drawn up the plans foresaw the day when a high-megawatt oxygen-iodine laser would fill the robots’ weapons bays.

That day seemed far, far in the future. The smallest oxygen-iodine laser in the world—not coincidentally under development at the top-secret base below—wouldn’t fit inside a 747 without some serious alterations.

The Flighthawks themselves had a way to go. Routine flight patterns were preprogrammed, and the small planes had enough “native” intelligence to follow simple commands, like prepare a nose-intercept with an approaching bandit. But complex commands and maneuvers had to be broken down and explained to the planes. That took time and computing power. The scientists responsible for the project had promised faster and smaller computers based on near-room-temperature superconducting chips (NRTSC) similar to those in the XF-34A DreamStar, the next-generation interceptor seen as a potential successor to the F22 Raptor. DreamStar’s computer advances were numerous and so complicated that Zen had only a vague idea what they involved; still, he knew it was just a matter of time before they found their way from the XF-34A to the Flighthawks.