“Who do you have on station?” Bruning asked.
Racine checked his screen, looking for patrolling fighters. “Filial 3 and Filial 4, about twenty minutes from an intercept. Sooner if they light their asses.”
Bruning looked up from his work, “No rush son, sounds like a civilian flight, probably hunters or trappers that didn’t file a plan.”
Another chime sounded in his ears and Racine looked down at his screen. The unidentified aircraft was descending now, moving through nine thousand nine to nine thousand eight. “It seems to be descending slowly now sir, moving through nine eight zero to nine seven.”
Bruning was tempted to give the guy an earful, but it was only his second week and he needed him sharp and motivated in about an hour when that C130 was coming in. He put on a patient tone, “Do the math Airman. On that heading, at that airspeed and rate of descent, where might it be landing?”
Racine frowned. It was still a hundred miles out, so it could be making for FAI, Fairbanks’ civilian airfield. Racine zoomed his screen out and started looking for commercial airfields on the bearing of the UI aircraft. FAI was the logical destination for sure, but it was too far to the north-east. So on a hunch, he called up national park cabins that had dirt airstrips alongside them. Bam. He put his finger on the screen. “I got the Harding Birch River Cabin strip right about where that glide slope would bottom out Sir,” Racine announced.
“Poachers,” Bruning spat. Bruning was a hunter too, but he was one of the dumb ones who paid his license. “Cheeky sons of bitches, think they can just sneak in at dawn, bag a moose or bear, get out again at dusk and no one will know. Make me sick.” A thought suddenly crossed his mind. “Those fighters doing anything critical?”
Racine called up the mission orders for Filial 3 and 4. “Night flight instrument checks sir,” he said.
“Good, let’s give them something more interesting to do. Tell them there is an unauthorized civilian flight approaching Eielson and give them an intercept. Once they get eyeballs on it, I want them to scare the shit out of whoever is in that plane.”
“Sir?”
“Tell them to turn it around Racine,” Bruning explained. “Back to wherever it came from. With prejudice.”
Rodriguez checked her watch. It was go time. There wasn’t anything more she could do to get her people ready to recover the drone when it splashed down, so she walked over to the trailer and opened the door, stepping into a tight atmosphere of sweat and adrenaline.
Listening, she soon heard why.
O’Hare wasn’t the one sweating, even though she was flying both as pilot and systems operator. What made US drone tactics possible were the huge advances in data compression of the last few years, which had reduced satellite comms lag from seconds to milliseconds, while also increasing a hundredfold the volume of data that could be flung through the ether. But even a lag time of milliseconds meant leaving most of the actual flying to the drone AI once it was out of ‘line of sight’, and Bunny still had a half-dozen screens to watch as they fed her tracking and targeting data, plus a hundred combat software routines at her fingertips ready to feed down the line. It troubled her not at all. As a child of the ‘continuous partial attention generation’ she had mental bandwidth she hadn’t even tapped yet.
“Being painted by long-distance ground-based radar again sir,” Bunny said.
“Those fighters still closing?” Halifax asked.
“Yes sir. Can’t be precise with passive array sir but I’d say 110 to 120 miles out. Still only at cruising speed, they’re not in any hurry. They’ll be in weapons range in five minutes.”
“Damn,” Halifax said. “They’re onto you.”
Rodriguez smiled. Halifax was worried he was about to get 80 million dollars’ worth of drone shot out of the sky but to Rodriguez it sounded like Bunny’s mission was going exactly to plan.
“Light your IFF as soon as those F-35s get into weapons range,” Halifax told Bunny, referring to the Identify Friend or Foe system that told the US and NATO aircraft and ground defense systems they were looking at an ally, not an enemy.
“But then we lose, Eielson wins sir,” O’Hare said. “With respect, I got this.”
Halifax ignored her. He was leaning over O’Hare’s shoulder, looking intently at a screen, “One minute ten to missile launch point,” he said.
“Yes sir,” O’Hare replied.
“Those F-35s are three minutes from weapons range,” Halifax said.
“Said I got it sir,” O’Hare said calmly.
“The window is too tight, Lieutenant,” Halifax said through gritted teeth. “Pull up your wheels, light your tail and start squawking, this mission is a bust.”
“Still seeing daylight sir,” Bunny said, not at all phased by having her senior CO riding shotgun on her. “I’m entering max range. It will be so much more convincing inside the 90 percent certainty zone.”
“Best leave the pilot to do her work sir,” Rodriguez interjected gently.
Rodriguez could see Halifax wanted to say more, but he bit his lip and turned to Rodriguez, looking worried, “I really wanted this scalp Air Boss.”
Rodriguez winked at him. “Fat lady hasn’t sung yet sir.”
“Who you calling fat, ma’am?” Right on cue, Bunny started a running commentary. “GPS and inertial targeting locked. Twenty seconds to air-ground standoff missile release,” Bunny’s fingers danced across her keyboard like a pianist playing an arpeggio as she cued up a simulated hypersonic High Speed Strike Weapon, or HSSW. “Cudas in passive mode, also locked on targets. Ten seconds.” Her hands lifted from her flight keyboard to her weapons system console. “Get ready on the comms sir,” she said over her shoulder to Halifax. “Opening bay doors.”
Rodriguez noticed for the first time that Halifax had a hand-held comms unit in his hand and he held it up to his mouth. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see it shaking a little, with the amount of tension there was in the room.
“Three-two-one… HSSW away,” Bunny said coolly, punching some keys. “Initiating egress. Wheels and flaps up, going to Mach speed. Engaging red fighters!” The screen in front of her, her simulated cockpit, was completely dark, no horizon, not even a star showing to help her orient herself. But the ghostly green circle of her heads-up instruments display spun giddily as she ordered the drone to come around and pointed it at the incoming fighter patrol.
Bunny’s virtual-reality heads-up display was made possible by a combination of quantum computation and AI imputation. The advances in data compression technology in the last ten years had enabled drones like the F-47 to squirt an almost real-time video and data feed from their onboard cameras and instruments up to a lurking satellite or airborne control aircraft and down to their ground station. This technological leap had been coupled with advances in data processing and imaging which meant that the F-47 could take what its cameras were seeing and then based on the inputs sent to it by the pilot on the ground, project the effect of those inputs onto the cockpit virtual reality simulation the pilot was working with and show them what the F-47 would be seeing and doing when their control inputs were acted on. It was a little like low tech time travel but it meant that for all intents and purposes the control system lag introduced by pilot and drone being hundreds of miles apart was ‘virtually’ eliminated. Not enough for real-time air combat, but more than enough for recon or ground attack work. It also meant that for observers not sitting with their heads inside a virtual-reality helmet, seeing what the pilot was seeing, a 2D tactical view of any engagement could be projected onto a screen showing low-rez simulated recon imagery, targeting video, battlefield events and friendly and enemy dispositions in near real time.