"Home Plate, this is Hawk One. Hawk Flight going to burner."

Commander Staunton watched two more F-14s thunder off the catapults and climb away as he absorbed the report from his two airborne fighters. The big, swing-wing aircraft were long overdue for replacement, and he didn't like to think about the flight hours and fatigue their airframes had accumulated, but the general slowdown in military funding over the last twenty years had played havoc with next-generation systems development and acquisition. And for all their age, the F-14 and its equally venerable Phoenix missiles remained the most capable long-range interceptor in the world. Which was the reason the Navy (whose airfields had an unfortunate tendency to sink when sufficiently damaged) continued to labor so heroically to keep them flying. The standby F-18s were already being towed to the cats, but he doubted they'd get the younger design aloft in time to make much difference. Whatever was coming towards them had still been pulling almost seven thousand miles per hour when it dropped below SPASUR's coverage.

"Hawk Two, Hawk One," he heard his senior pilot say. "Light off your radar."

"Rog, Hawk One."

Two hundred miles ahead of the carrier battle group, both F-14Ds switched on their AWG-9 radars, searching for whatever had killed Spyglass.

"Hostiles incoming! I have incoming hostiles!" Hawk One announced. "Jesus! The bastards are pulling close to twelve thousand knots!"

Staunton looked at his flight officer in disbelief.

"Skipper, the tender's launched another pair of ARADs!"

"Those poor bastards," Colonel Leonovna said softly.

"Fox One!" Hawk One snapped. "Fox One-four away!"

Four late-mark AIM-54 missiles dropped from the lead Tomcat's pallets, followed moments later by two more as Hawk Two's novice aircrew launched as well. The Mach-five Phoenix, the longest ranged air-to-air missile in the world, was totally outclassed by the incoming missiles. But Phoenix missiles were designed to knock down small cruise missiles in the most difficult targeting solution of all: head-on at extreme range. The Kanga missiles were larger than the Tomcats which had fired, and for all their massive speed, they were utterly incapable of evasion. They mounted advanced ECM systems, but those systems were designed for outer space, and no ECM in the galaxy could have hidden the fantastic heat source their atmospheric passage generated.

The Troll commander would have blinked in astonishment if he'd possessed eyelids. It was impossible!

"Skipper! They killed both ARADs!"

Colonel Leonovna had eyelids, and she did blink at the news. She widened the focus of her attention, and bits of information clicked. Her mental weariness was forgotten as her thoughts flashed at blinding speed. Her electronic senses probed ahead, and a vicious smile curved her lips as she "saw" the formation of ancient ships.

"Splash two!" Hawk One announced exultantly. Then his voice sharpened even further. "Home Plate, I have multiple bandits on my scope. Big bandits. I count five-no, six targets. Range three-nine-eight. Speed five-four-six-oh knots, closing the task force."

"Admiral," Captain James Moulder's voice was hurried but astonishingly calm in Admiral Carson's ear as he spoke from his own combat information center aboard Antietam, "we have confirmed use of nukes against our Hummer, and they've fired on our fighters. Request weapons release."

The admiral's knuckles whitened on the phone set. The bandits were closing at over a mile and a half per second; they would arrive over his ships in just over four minutes, and, given the reach and speed of the weapons they'd already employed, they were probably already in strike range.

"Granted!" he snapped.

"All ships. Air Warning Red. Axis of threat three-five-two. Weapons free," his tactical commander announced in an almost mechanical voice, and surface to air tracking and targeting systems sprang to life on every ship in the task force.

Colonel Leonovna felt the radar sources come alive ahead of her, and mingled horror and exultation filled her. She was a military historian; unlike the Kangas and their Troll guardians, she knew what they were about to overfly. Yet for all that, she had little clearer notion of what the naval force's missiles could do against modern technology than she had of the performance of smoothbore cannon. Could they knock down the tender? It might be the worst thing they could do, assuming they continued to use chemical warheads, but even to her it seemed unlikely that the primitive weapons below her could do it. Still, they'd nailed those ARADs... .

Sputnik Too arced up and away, breaking off the pursuit.

The Troll commander noted the maneuver instantly, and his brain whirled with the new data, trying to understand. Why should the cralkhi break away now? After coming so far? Something was wrong.

"Here they come," someone murmured aboard Antietam. None of them could quite believe what they were seeing on their displays, but no one wasted time denying the obvious.

The Kanga tender had only two more ARADs, and they both dropped free, guiding on the nearest radar sources.

"Vampire! Vampire!" The warning cry went out as the missiles hurtled towards the destroyers Arleigh Burke and Kidd at over twelve thousand miles per hour. The tender itself was still far out of range, but RIM-66 and RIM-67 surface-to-air missiles raced to meet the ARADs, and both ships were already skidding in maximum rate turns to open fields of fire for their Mark Fifteen Phalanx cannon.

The Troll commander winced mentally as the rising tracks of defensive missiles and what had happened to the last two ARADs came together with the cralkhi's maneuver. Primitive they undoubtedly were, but with his units' every erg of drive power diverted to the bow fields for maximum speed, they didn't even have to be nuclear-armed to be lethal-not if they could score at all. He tried frantically to warn his Shirmaksu masters, and even as he did, a portion of his brain noted that the cralkhi was already swinging onto a new course, racing around the flank of his own formation.

The ARAD bound for the Burke met three different missiles, and their combined warheads were sufficient to smash it out of the heavens. The one guiding on Kidd was luckier; it ran right past the interceptors, hurtling at impossible speed through a sheet of fire from the twenty-millimeter Gatling guns of the destroyer's Phalanx mounts. The close-in defensive system did its best, but it had never been intended to deal with targets moving at such speed. The mounts' paired radars had too little time to track, and USS Kidd vanished in a heart of nuclear flame as the missile struck home.

But the incoming bogeys had held their course long enough, and the Aegis cruisers Antietam and Champlain exploded with light an instant before Kidd as their vertical launch systems spat fire. Again, the defense systems hadn't been designed to cope with targets moving at six thousand miles an hour, but all the advanced ECM of the tender and its Troll escorts was directed against targeting systems the United States Navy had never even heard of. Its targets were glaring beacons of reflected radar pulses and heat, and it was all or nothing for Task Force Twenty-Three.

Three hundred-plus missiles screamed into the night.

Colonel Leonovna watched the hurricane of ancient missiles whiplash upward. They were pathetically slow, but the range was short and their targets were running straight down their throats-and larger than some of the ships floating below her. She caught her breath as the missiles slammed into her enemies.

The Troll commander's synapses quivered with fury as the primitive weapons hammered his formation. His units were climbing desperately, but they'd come in too low and begun their evasion too late. Even at their speed, they couldn't climb out of range in time.