Archives for April 2019

Captain Aran, Azanian Land Force, watched another of his shell tracers fall short of the Persian tanks dug in at the top of the pass.  The big Karars were looking down a steep rocky slope at his light Mbwa tanks and blasting them with their big 100mm rifled guns.  The Azanian tanks could not approach close enough to reach the Karars with their smaller 75mm guns.  Even if they could Aran doubted the shells would penetrate the thick turret armor of the Karars, which is all they showed above ramparts of rock and gravel dug for them to hide in.

Worse, it was broad daylight, and there was virtually no cover in the mile of open desert leading to the Persian line.  There was nowhere to hide, and any Azanian vehicle coming within range was blown apart by 100mm shells.  Three of his few remaining Mbwas were smoking wrecks, victims of stupid orders which Aran was forced to carry out.

He was ordered to keep the Persians engaged and continue advancing, with all other considerations secondary.  He’d argued with his battalion commander in person this morning before the company of light tanks moved out. 

“This is stupid, Mayli,” he’d said, using the first name informality common in the Azanian Land Force.  Within two paygrades it was permissible, if not too public.  “You can’t expect us to push past the Persians in the Sheban passes without assistance.  Not with these—” Aran pointed to the Mbwas.  “It’s suicide.”

“Then find a way not to die carrying out the orders,” Mayli said.  “That’s what company commanders are for.”

“I don’t understand,” Aran said.  “This is stupid.  Why are we doing something this dumb?  Are things going so badly we are reduced to frontal assaults against defended passes?  Didn’t we learn about this last war?”  The Sheban passes had saved Persian honor from total defeat twenty years before.

“Aran, you have to do it.  Those are the orders, and all I can tell you is there is a reason for them.  I can get you some artillery assets, but only until 1200 hours.  They have other things to do this afternoon.”

Aran had kept trying for more assistance, more anything, but had failed.  His company, in line with two other light tank units, were to throw themselves against a Persian wall for some unknown reason.

He’d done his best, arranged an artillery fire plan which dropped smoke in front of suspected Persian positions and airbursts on top of them to keep any armored vehicles buttoned up and infantry in their holes. 

The first push had gotten much closer than Aran would have guessed.  An errant gust of wind unmasked one of the Karars when they had closed within 500 meters.  The Persian turret slewed toward his company and Aran felt like wetting himself.  There was nothing he could do, trapped driving forward in the open with the other Mbwas.  The Karar’s 100mm cannon cracked, and Aran saw the shell spark as it penetrated the side of his 2^nd Platoon leader’s tank.  The shell streaked through the Mbwa and shot out the other side of the lightly armored tank.  Immediately, fuel and ammunition began to burn.  Smoke poured through the shell holes and bubbled out the closed hatches as the air pressure inside shot up.  Aran saw the driver’s hatch open, and a man clambered out.  No one else escaped.

His own gunner, who couldn’t see what Aran was watching sitting up in his hatch, had already aimed the main gun at the Karar.  “TANK IDENTIFIED!” He cried. “PERMISSION TO—”

“FIRE!” Aran cut him off. 

The Mbwa’s cannon barked.  The shell struck a boulder in front of the Persian tank’s hull and sent a cloud of splinters and dust into the air.  Aran saw three other shells hit on or near the tank within a few seconds.  None could penetrate the rocks piled around the tank or its front turret armor.

The Mbwa’s gun was reloaded automatically by a revolving cylinder.  It meant follow-up shots were available quickly.  Aran, trying to maximize the chance of hitting the Persian tank, ordered his driver to halt.  The jerky movement of the Mbwa could throw off the gunner’s aim.  Standing still made their own tank an easy target, but Aran decided anything at 500 meters was an easy target, moving or not.

With a steady rest, the gunner fired again.  The shell cut a groove in the mantlet of the Karar’s gun and sent sparks flying.  The gunner lined up and aimed the next shot.  While he squinted through his sight, the Karar fired, blasting apart a Mbwa to their rear.  The gun fired again and again, but the shells bounced harmlessly off the tank’s armor. 

Aran, feeling the panic rising within him, looked around at the battlefield.  Everywhere seemed to be wrecked Azanian tanks.  A few were still firing ineffectively at the Persians, but some were starting to turn around and run. Not a single Persian tank was hit. 

He made an impossible decision.  Aran hated failure, but continuing was suicide, and would accomplish nothing.

“ALL UNITS, RETREAT UNDER COVER OF SMOKE, RETURN TO LINE ALPHA,” he yelled into his radio.  Another transmission to the artillery directed them to fire another batch of smoke. 

“Driver, turn around and make smoke!”

The driver needed no encouragement.  He reversed the tank in a circle and cranked the diesel when the Mbwa was pointing downhill.  He flipped a lever dumping diesel fuel onto the hot exhaust pipe, pouring smoke out the back of the tank. 

With the new artillery barrage arriving and the company’s own smoke generators, enough smoke covered the battlefield to allow most of the company to escape.  Once they reached their start line, Aran took stock.  Three tanks lost, and another had its gun tube blown off.  He had only three tanks left.  Only half the crews had survived the destruction of their tanks and made it back. The Persians had seemed uninterested in shooting fleeing men in the back. Aran told himself to remember that.

The units on either side were in similar shape.

In the late morning, he was reduced to calling in artillery missions to keep the enemy pinned and trying to get his own tanks close enough to get a one-in-a-thousand kill shot against the dug-in Persians.

He’d parked his Mbwa between two boulders with only the gun poking out between them.  He’d hoped to be able to drop shells in an arc on top of the enemy tanks, but it wasn’t working out. 

Like an elephant pestered by a fly, the Persian tank fired back.  Its heavy shell exploded the boulder next to the Mbwa, cracking it into three pieces.  Exposed, Aran ordered the Mbwa to retreat.

“Damnit!” he said to himself.  This was not only frustrating but pointless.  Why was he doing this?  The Land Force was supposed to be better than this.  It was the Persians who mindlessly attacked prepared positions, not Azanians.  Find the flank! Find another way around!  He remembered his training, and it was all being ignored.

In the distance, he heard something strange.  It sounded like aircraft, but not like any aircraft he had ever heard before.  The whine of turbines soon joined the sound of blades chopping through the air.  The air pulsed as if cut by a thousand threshers. Aran looked to the west to the source of the sound.

Over the hill behind him rose a plane with no wings.  A whirling propeller blade flickered in and out of existence above it.  To Aran’s amazement, the apparition halted in mid air and hung as if from a rope suspended in the sky.  He had no words to describe what he was seeing. 

Behind the first craft another appeared, then three more.  Soon the air behind the front line was full machines bouncing up and down and turning this way and that.  Aran could not understand why they did not fall from the sky. What little he knew of aircraft told him what he was seeing was impossible.  Awestruck, he was reduced to watching wide-eyed as the machines arranged themselves into rows and then began flying overhead. 

WHOP WHOP WHOP WHOP.

Aran wasn’t prepared for what happened next.  As the machines overflew his tank at low altitude the noise changed to a staccato CHOP CHOP CHOP. A great wind raised dust all around his vehicle and blew it in all directions.  One after another the flying craft buzzed over his tank.  The noise left him deaf and speechless, and the dust cloud covered his face with dirt and pelted him with sharp pebbles.  He felt an instinctive need to dive inside his turret and close the hatch behind him, but curiosity won out over fear. Fascinated, he kept his eyes fixed on the apparitions.  When the last one passed, he saw on the tail boom something he could hardly believe. 

Each of the machines was painted with the yellow triangle of the Azanian Air Force. The mystery craft were friendly. Aran could hardly believe it, but it was true. Through the open doors of the passing craft he had seen dark faces peering out into the sunlight.

The formation of fliers roared toward the pass.  They flew over the Persian positions and dropped over the hill behind them, out of sight.  The whine of the turbines disappated and the chopping noises faded.  Wherever they were going, they’d be behind the Persian lines.

In a flash, he understood the purpose of his attack which had seemed so senseless.  He was here to hold the attention of the Persians to the front line while the whatever-they-were flew over behind them and dropped off the soldiers they carried.  It was like an airdrop, but an airdrop into the maze of canyons and boulders in the Sheban passes would be madness.  These machines would be able to land and disgorge troops almost anywhere.

No wonder he had never heard about them. It was an incredible secret weapon.

Aran knew he was watching history being made, and he would have some part in making it.  He was reaching for the radio when the order came over the net.

“ALL UNITS, ADVANCE.”

This scene was written to be chapter 2 of New Persia: Before the Storm. It ended up being cut, but you can read it here.

Farad Hashemi flew his Qaher jet fighter in tight formation with his wingman.  Farad glanced to his right and saw Qabish in his cockpit, faceless under his helmet and oxygen mask.  They were flying high today on a patrol of the Azanian frontier.  Here the two nations met in a region of trackless desert adjacent to the Great Waste that spanned the interior of the continent.  Further south they were separated by the Arab states that both powers by treaty treated as sovereign.  In reality, each was a Persian or Azanian vassal.  The Treaty of Zanzibar had created a buffer zone between the two sides with the aim of preventing another war.  The Arab states were one buffer.  The diplomats created a second buffer zone by moving the northeast border between Azania and New Persia westward into the middle of a barren desert.  Those writing the treaty thought that moving the border to a wasteland would remove any reason for the two powers to fight. 

The diplomats were wrong, Farad thought.  It didn’t matter if the land was barren and fit only for the lowest forms of native life.  To the Azanians, it was their land, unjustly seized at a moment of national catastrophe by the hated Persians. 

Farad looked down to check his map and compass.  The exact border was unmarked.  Since the Treaty, disputes had arisen over what part of the worthless desert was on which side of the border.  The Treaty of Zanzibar had drawn a line in the sand but had failed to account for the water rights of the few hardy tribes living there.  The treaty had no provision for wandering herds of animals.  There was nothing about the citizenship status of tribesmen who had roamed the edge of the Waste since the founding, living amongst the native plants as if born to it.  It was impossible for either party to the treaty to efficiently police the thousand-kilometer span, so both made claims and tried to make them stick.  The stakes were very low regarding anything a rational person would consider valuable.  It mattered little to the survival of New Persia whether an oasis was in Azania or not.  Because the border mattered so little, both sides took any violation very seriously. 

Today, Farad and Qabish flew north along the border to express how serious New Persia was about enforcing the Treaty.  Azanian jets had been seen darting over the border and returning to the Azanian side before any New Persian planes could intercept them.  A camp of Army Scouts, local tribesmen trained, armed and paid to patrol the border, had been strafed and bombed.  The Azanians claimed that the camp had been west of the border.  The Scouts claimed, of course, that they had been to the east.  It didn’t matter.  Something had to be done.  Somewhere in the basement of the Palace in Persepolis, the decision had been made to send a wing of the most modern aircraft in the Persian inventory north.  They would patrol the border continuously, every day, and intercept any Azanians who crossed.

Farad’s Qaher jet fighter was the result of the Azanian war.  That desperate conflict had forced both sides into a deadly spiral of innovation.  New fighters appeared every few months.  Eventually, the fighter reached the limit of performance for propeller-driven aircraft.  The jet engine was the answer.  The first jet fighters had been primitive, breakdown-prone, dangerous to fly, and fast enough to outrun any propeller-driven aircraft.  All earlier fighters were made instantly obsolete.  As soon as the Treaty was signed, research and development had proceeded at reckless speed.  After many failed designs and many dead pilots, the second generation of jets rolled out of factories deep in the Persian interior.

The Qaher could fly at over a thousand kilometers an hour.  In a high-speed dive, the plane would shudder as the control surfaces ceased to function.  The speed of sound remained a barrier that no aircraft had yet broken.

At lower speeds, the Qaher was spry as a gazelle and could bring its heavy armament of four 30mm cannons to bear with a touch of the controls.

Farad looked at his watch.  He gave a hand signal to Qabish through his canopy glass.  It was time to turn.  The border here changed direction slightly from north-south to southwest-northeast. 

The plane responded to Farad’s touch.  Other pilots in the squadron thought of their aircrafts as extensions of themselves.  Farad treated his Qaher as a steed, a living being that would listen but could not be forced to do what was beyond its ability.  It was a distinction that had served him well.  Like a steed, a pilot cared for a jet fighter before himself.  Farad always did his preflight inspections, a chore some avoided to save time.  He spent more time with his ground crew than any other pilot in the squadron.  The crew resented this at first, but once it was clear that Farad cared more about the plane than his status as an officer the crew had adapted a comfortable familiarity. 

Farad’s mind wandered.  His eyes scanned the sky automatically.  His eyesight was outstanding.  As a boy, he had seen the stitching on footballs as they flew toward the goal.  Now he searched for the smallest speck in the sky that would be the first sign of an enemy aircraft.  

Haze made visibility lower than promised by the clear sky.  Blowing sand and native spores polluted the air up to high altitude.  Farad squinted through his goggles into the western sky.   The Azanians preferred to make their border violations in the afternoon, with the sun at their backs.  It made their Duma jet fighters hard to spot.

Patrols flown in a fighter aircraft were mentally and physically demanding.  Being trapped in a tiny coffin-sized cockpit for hours on end required endurance.  It was the reason most fighter pilots were short.  For a pilot, a muscle cramp had deadly consequences.  Farad’s stubby limbs and broad torso were made to fit in a pilot’s seat.  He kept himself fit to withstand the demands of flying better.  The constant attention required to operate a fighter and remain aware of the outside environment drained the mind as much as the body.  Farad still played chess with the concentration of a master.  It was good practice for the monotony of routine flying. 

Qabish waggled his wings.  Farad’s mind came back to the present in an instant.  Through his wingman’s canopy, Farad saw Qabish pointing with his finger.  Farad followed the hand signal with his eyes.  To the west near the afternoon sun were two white specks.  As he looked, his eyes resolved two more specks.  Farad turned his head to Qabish and flashed a thumb’s up in acknowledgment.  Neither pilot used the radio for fear of alerting the Azanians to their presence. 

Farad gently banked his Qaher jet upward to the left.  He pointed his nose ahead and above the approaching planes.  He angled the aircraft as close to head-on as he could to give the Azanian pilots as small a cross-section as possible to make his plane harder to spot.  The top half of his aircraft was painted the same shade of tan as the desert below, and the underside painted grey.  Farad hoped that the deceptive paint scheme would make his plane disappear against the desert below. 

Farad glanced down at his map and the desert below.  He had been flying on the east side of the border on a compass heading paralleling the imaginary line in the sand.  The Azanians, he guessed, were very close to the border.  They were flying an opposing course paralleling his own.  They could be on the Persian side, but it didn’t matter.  Major Tambor, the wing leader, had made it very clear in his morning briefings that no pilot was to wait to engage any Azanians, in the air or on the ground, that they came across.  The Azanians had violated the border already, and it was time for revenge.  Or, as Tambor had put it, “to restore credibility to the Treaty line.”  Going over the line to restore credibility was implicit in the look he gave each squadron commander.

The Azanians, Farad saw, were still flying planes in plain metal finish.  He could see a flight of four stub-nosed Dumas with swept wings.  Their yellow-painted tails were plainly visible at this difference.  The Azanians wanted everyone in the sky to know who they were.   

Farad increased his throttle to maintain his climb.  He could see Qabish matching his trajectory.  He automatically looked for more Azanian fighters.  He didn’t want to be caught by surprise.

The Qaher fighter sailed upward on its broad swept-back wings.  The Azanians were still above Farad’s flight and had the advantage of altitude.  Altitude was speed, and speed was life.  If one of the enemy pilots glanced down at the wrong time, Farad would be seen and enter a four-to-two dogfight at a disadvantage.  He needed every advantage he could get.

Farad and Qabish matched the Azanian’s altitude and passed behind them as they continued south.  Farad banked and turned.  He flicked his wings level and settled two kilometers behind the Azanian flight.  The Azanians still flew straight and level. 

Farad waved at Qabish.  His wingman nudged his fighter closer so that both pilots could see each other easily.  Farad signaled the numbers one and four with his left hand.  Qabish nodded.  The Azanians were flying in a wedge formation with the leftmost and rightmost plane in the rear.  With luck, shooting the trailing planes first would not alert the lead two pilots for a second or two. 

His fingers flipped open the cover over the cannon arming switch.  Farad flipped the switch upward and visually confirmed that the CANNON ARM light was on. 

Farad had considered a high-speed pass that would get his two-ship formation to the Azanians quickly before they could react.  He was confident he could shoot down his target and climb away.  The Qaher had the more powerful engine and could outrun the remaining two Dumas before they could acquire him.  That would leave the two Persian fighters with a height and speed advantage for the next part of the dogfight. 

The other option he entertained was riskier than a high-speed pass.  If they approached more slowly from the rear and behind, Farad and Qabish would have time to shift fire from the outer two planes to the two planes on the inside of the formation.  If the Azanians didn’t react immediately, Farad could shoot down two planes on the first pass.  Even if Qabish missed, that would leave an even fight. 

Farad made his decision.  He carefully increased his throttle until he was closing on the Azanians.  Farad could see the yellow triangles painted on the underside of the Dumas’ wings.  The Azanian’s smoke trails thickened above his canopy as he coaxed his fighter closer to cannon range. 

Sunlight flashed off the polished metal skin of the Azanian lead.  Farad blinked and lost sight of his target.  In a moment, he reacquired the outer left Duma fighter in the Azanian formation.  The swept-wing fighter grew in Farad’s windscreen as the two planes converged.

Farad could feel his desperate eagerness to engage but kept his feelings in check.  He waited an eternity for the Azanian jet to grow closer.  He could see the welded seams in the fuselage panels and could read the number painted on the horizontal stabilizer of the Duma.  The yellow triangles on the underside of the wings looked enormous. 

Finally, Farad pulled the control stick a few centimeters toward his chest and gently pressed the left rudder pedal to bring his gyro gunsight onto the fuselage of the Azanian.  In his tightly focused eyes, the plane filled the sky although he was two hundred meters distant.  He was closing at a relative speed of 30kph from behind. 

Farad waited until the Duma filled his sight at minimum magnification.  He squeezed the trigger on the control stick.

The four 30mm revolving cannon mounted in the gun pod below his seat fired for half a second.  The Qaher shuddered with the recoil as each cannon sent ten rounds streaming from the fighter’s nose.  At such close range, the first shells hit the Azanian plane before the last bullet fired. 

The Azanian Duma jet disintegrated under the impact of a dozen heavy shells.  Both wings broke off a fraction of a second before the jet’s fuel tank detonated and filled the air with an expanding ball of orange fire.  Metal fragments arced in all directions. 

Farad jerked the stick to the right to avoid a fuselage side-panel, still emblazoned with the Azanian yellow triangle.  Smaller fragments clattered off his canopy like hail. 

He had no time to celebrate his first victory.  The lead Azanian plane flashed across his gunsight.  Farad fired the guns, but the shells punched through the air around the target without hitting it. The sudden turn to avoid the debris had caused him to miss.

Farad leveled his wings and gave the Qaher left rudder until the nose pointed where the Azanian fighter had been.  It was gone.  Farad cast his eyes around in confusion.  He saw a silver plane streaming smoke and plummeting out of view below and behind him.  Qabish had hit his target.

The second enemy plane in the formation was in a banking climb to the right.  Thick exhaust poured from its engine nozzle as the Azanian pilot pushed his throttle to maximum power.  Farad made a note of his trajectory and rolled his plane to look down toward the desert.

He found the Azanian flight leader that he had missed in a dive streaking down toward the desert.  When attacked, the two planes had separated, the lead diving to the left and his wingman climbing to the right.  The break forced Farad and Qabish to split up to pursue the Azanian planes.  The enemy reacted so fast that it must have been a practiced maneuver. 

Farad considered leaving the lead Azanian and joining Qabish in chasing the second plane that was climbing away.  The two Qahers would quickly catch the Duma jet and could cooperate to shoot it down.  The lead enemy plane was diving away and would not be able to return to the fight anytime soon.  Sticking together would use teamwork and the Qaher’s superior climbing ability to the fullest.

Farad didn’t want to let the lead Azanian go.  The smart thing for the enemy to do after losing the three other planes in his flight would be to break contact and flee.  Trying to climb back into a dogfight against two alerted enemies with superior speed and altitude would be reckless.  He would run, Farad was sure.

With that thought, Farad put his fighter into a dive and firewalled his engine to pursue.  He could see the swept-wing silver jet streaking across the brown desert below.  In a dive, the Duma was almost as fast as a Qaher.  The less powerful engine inside the Duma did not hinder it when it was using gravity to accelerate instead of jet fuel. 

Farad grunted with the sudden g-force as he spun the fighter around.  His fingers felt like lead weights as he keyed his radio microphone.  “Firefox two, this is lead.  I am diving to pursue,” he said.  He could barely hear his voice over the roar of the turbojet engine and the screaming of the airstream outside his canopy.

The Qaher dived like a falcon.  The swept wings cut through the thickening air like knives.  The Azanian Duma was far below, close to the desert floor.  Farad twisted his head and rolled his plane to keep the enemy in sight.  He wanted to dive on the Azanian unseen and blast him before he knew Farad was following him.

Farad was disappointed.  The Azanian pulled out of the dive into a shallow climb.  The Azanian banked and looped his fighter around to scan the sky in all directions.  When he saw Farad diving toward him, he snapped his wings level and climbed vertically.  Farad cursed.  He knew that at the speed that he was falling he would be unable to aim his guns at the enemy plane.  Farad tightened his hand on the throttle and reached for the airbrake.  He stopped himself.  He could decelerate, but that would leave him vulnerable to the Azanian looping vertically and dropping behind him.  Farad opened the throttle instead and rolled the plane.  He would fly past the Azanian at a safe distance and turn his plane so he could keep sight of the enemy.  The turn would bleed speed and allow him to enter a maneuvering fight. 

The Azanian pilot rolled his plane and flew straight up.  As Farad flew past, the Azanian cut his throttle and nearly stalled his aircraft.  He inverted the Duma fighter and turned toward Farad.  Hanging in the air, in the second before his fighter stalled, the pilot sprayed a burst of shells into the path of Farad’s Qaher. 

The cockpit lit up with warning lights and blaring alarms.

Farad saw tracers streak across his nose.  Before he could react, two Azanian shells shook his fighter.   Shell fragments peppered the wings and fuselage with holes, and a flying piece of metal left a star-shaped crack in his canopy.  Farad’s armored steel seat back bent inward from a shell impact, kicking him in the kidneys.  He gasped in pain.

Farad rolled the plane away from the Azanian and banked.  His eyes scanned his gauges.  Engine power was down to a quarter of maximum thrust.  The oil gauge was dropping.  Fuel pressure was falling.  He tested the controls and found he could still maneuver, but he was losing airspeed fast.

Behind Farad black smoke poured out of his damaged engine.  He saw flickers of flame licking out the port side of the fuselage.  If the fire reached the fuel tanks, they would detonate, blasting him to pieces in a second.

Farad flicked the nose from side to side so he could see past the smoke trail he was leaving in the sky.  He saw the Azanian plane below and behind, climbing up to finish him. 

Farad pulled on the throttle, but it didn’t respond.  The engine was wrecking itself as the compressor fans disintegrated.  Behind Farad, there was a racket like a silverware drawer dropped on a steel floor.  Thrust was still falling.  Damaged, the Qaher would not be able to escape. 

If he turned, he would lose more speed than the engine could restore.  It would only delay the inevitable.  Climbing was impossible.  Farad checked the altimeter.  He would not be able to pull out of a dive before smashing into the ground.

Farad’s fists balled in rage.  He was defeated.  He saw the Azanian fighter lining up behind him for the final shot.  His crippled plane could only flop like a fish on a line, impotent to escape. 

He leveled off and reached for the ejector lever.  Shell tracers cracked a few meters away.  Farad tensed his arm and pulled up hard on the lever.

Nothing happened.  The shell hits had cut the wires leading to the ejection charge beneath his seat.  The explosive charge designed to blast him away from the stricken jet could not fire.

Farad pulled the lever again with no result.  The shell tracers drew closer to Farad’s plane.  He didn’t have time to open the canopy manually, unstrap himself, and jump out.  Even if the Azanian didn’t blow his Qaher to bits by then, he was flying too fast to jump.  He would be caught in the slipstream and dashed against the Qaher’s huge tail fin.

Reflexively, like an animal thrashing in its death throes, he spun the fighter in an evasive dance around the axis of the shells streaming from behind.  He felt the Qaher shudder from more impacts.  Holes appeared in the broad, swept wings on either side of the cockpit. 

He turned his head and saw the nose of the Azanian Duma close behind him.  The pilot rolled his plane up and around in a vertical scissor to stay behind the decelerating Qaher.  Farad could see the Azanian pilot through his canopy. Their eyes met.  The Duma’s gun barrels swept toward Farad, ready to fire the final burst.

Tracers streamed past the Azanian plane.  Bursts of exploding cannon shells marred the silver finish of the Duma fighter.  It shattered into pieces.  The wings cartwheeled away from the broken fuselage.  The cockpit burst open as the Azanian pilot fired his ejection seat.  Jet parts fell like falling leaves. 

“Scratch two,” Qabish said on the radio.

Farad felt a rush of emotion at his deliverance.  He felt a rush of life returning to his body like a wave running up the beach.  He was going to live!

His cockpit instruments told him otherwise.  Lights were flashing everywhere, and the fire alarm chimed in his ears.  His Qaher could explode apart at any moment, and he had no way to escape.

Farad didn’t notice as Qabish’s fighter shot past below him.  His eyes spotted the silver shape in pursuit.

“Two, you have an enemy at your six!” Farad said on the radio.

“Roger,” Qabish said.  “I know.”

Farad realized that Qabish must have let his target go to follow Farad in his dive.  The enemy had followed Qabish down.

Farad could only watch from his crippled fighter.  At low altitude and speed, the Duma had the advantage over the Qaher.  Qabish tried to avoid a turning fight by going vertical and burning off the Duma’s momentum in a climb.  The Azanian refused to follow and instead went into a turn toward Farad’s plane.  Farad cursed. 

“Two, break contact.  He’ll lose you if you climb,” Farad said on the radio.

“Negative, one,” Qabish replied.

“Damn you, that’s an order,” Farad said.  The Azanian fighter was closing from the left side.  Farad tried to ease his smoking machine to bring his nose around, but the Duma pilot easily kept out of his gun arc.

Qabish ignored him, rolled his plane and dove toward the Azanian.  The enemy pilot saw this and broke off his attack on Farad.  The Duma turned toward Qabish and caused him to overshoot.  The two planes broke in opposite directions and began to turn into each other. 

Over his Qaher’s nose, Farad could see both planes pulling toward each other.  Whichever pilot could bring his guns to bear would get the first shot.  Each pushed their machines as far as they would go, with their engines firewalled and their alerions pulled to maximum extension.  Farad’s eye could see the Duma pulling its nose closer and closer to Qabish’s track. 

Qabish realized that he was losing the fight.  He put the Qaher into an upward bank and rolled in a vertical scissor.  This maneuver brought the Azanian closer but pulled him momentarily out of his gunsight.  A burst of 30mm shells passed under Qabish. 

The Azanian pilot found himself closing quickly.  He was going to overshoot beneath Qabish’s fighter.  He rolled his wings vertical and used his rudder to push his nose upward.  For an instant, Qabish entered his gun envelope.  The Duma’s guns fired.

Farad watched as the two fighters crossed before him.  The Azanian’s gun burst blew off the nose of Qabish’s fighter.  The cockpit vaporized.  Headless, the Qaher spun in the air like a corpse. 

“Qabish!”  Farad called into his radio.  There was no response.  No parachute sprouted from the ruined cockpit of the Persian jet.  Farad gripped his stick in grief and rage.  His eyes glazed under his goggles and his vision blurred.  In a moment, his training took over, and he regained control of his emotions.  He had to survive.  Grief came later. 

In a moment, his mind started working again.  Through his shock, Farad saw Qabish’s plan.  Qabish’s maneuver had brought the Azanian into Farad’s guns.  Farad’s fighter could not maneuver, but Qabish had done the maneuvering for him.

The gyro gunsight in Farad’s cockpit still worked.  The Azanian Duma was crossing into his view.  Farad fired a long burst, ignoring his training to put all the shells he could into his one chance to kill the enemy. 

The four 30mm revolving cannons spat their rain of death into the path of the yellow-tailed Azanian jet.  Three shells penetrated the Duma’s half-empty fuel tanks and detonated the vapor inside.  The orange fireball filled the sky in front of Farad. 

Farad automatically scanned the air around his fighter.  There was nothing left flying but his plane.  Qabish’s fighter spun away until it pancaked into the desert below and exploded.  Pillars of smoke rose from the ground to mark the grave of each destroyed jet.

The empty desert passed beneath at three hundred kilometers an hour.  Farad thought quickly.  If he could get the canopy open and bail out of the plane, he would fall into the empty desert, full of native life, Azanian infiltrators, and tribesmen only nominally loyal to Persia.  Bailing out only made sense when the alternative was being blown apart by Azanian cannon. 

Farad was a flier.  The thought of being on the ground, helpless, with nothing but his legs to carry him, terrified him.  He understood the fighter he rode in the sky.  Even wounded and failing, it was what he knew.  He decided to stay with the crippled machine.  If he died, he would die in the sky, as a pilot.

He took a moment to look at his map and ran mental calculations based on his airspeed, altitude, and distance to the nearest airfield.  S-3 was close enough, he decided.  He would only need a little more time, a bit more engine thrust, to give him the height he needed to glide home. 

Would he have it?  Farad made a guess and looked at his watch.  If the engine could just hold on another minute, Farad thought.

Terrible grating sounds signaled the Qaher’s death-rattle.  Farad shut off the throttle.  He glanced behind, checking for flames.  Seeing none, he dumped the remaining fuel in the tanks. The fighter trailed a cloud of vapor.

When the fuel was gone, he looked at his watch again.  Seventy seconds had passed.  How long had he spent flipping switches?  He did not know. 

It was silent except for the air passing outside. 

He saw S-3, a ribbon of white concrete in the red desert.  Farad made his adjustments for his final approach.  The Qaher was falling too fast.   

Farad thought of Qabish.  If he made a mistake in his approach, he would not get another chance to pray.  He said a prayer for the soul of Qabish, then asked him, “Brother, I will miss you, but I do not wish to join you today!  Let your spirit guide me!”

Farad lowered the landing gear by pulling the emergency release at the last moment.  The Qaher dropped toward the desert short of the runway. 

A wind gust and the Qaher bounced upward.  A cloud of dust surrounded the canopy.  Farad lost sight of the runway, but his pilot’s intuition guided his hands.  He pulled the nose up as far as he dared.  The dust cloud paced him, borne by the wind.

Farad felt the shock of landing through his controls.  The Qaher bounced once before landing on the runway.  Farad pulled the emergency brake control, but the air accumulator was damaged, and it failed.  The Qaher rolled down the runway without any way to stop.  The dust cloud outside blocked all vision.

Blind, Farad steered the plane toward where he thought the centerline to be.  The Qaher drifted to the left, and the landing gear dragged in the sand.  The wheels locked and the gear collapsed.  The jet carved a furrow in the sand.  The plane slid to a stop. 

The dust cloud blew away until it dissipated at the end of the runway.

The ground crew outside ran toward him with fire extinguishers and medical kits.  Farad unstrapped himself and struggled to open the jammed canopy.  He waited for the men outside to open it.  As he climbed from the wrecked plane, he gazed at the end of the runway.  He said a prayer of thanks, quiet so no one else could hear.  

From time to time, I like to write about ideas and events, real and imagined, which influenced my writing.

Project Daedalus was a “thought experiment” put together by the British Interplanetary Society in the late 1970s. The idea was to envision a spacecraft which could reach a nearby star within a human lifetime using current or near-future technology.

The result was a squat robot probe powered by fusing pellets of deuterium and helium-3 with electron beams. The coin-sized pellets would detonate at a rate of 250 per second. The two-stage probe would consist mostly of fuel tanks.

The probe was designed to reach Barnard’s Star, 5.9 lightyears away, in about 50 years, traveling at 12% of the speed of light. The probe would not be able to stop and investigate once it arrived, but would blow through the star system in a matter of days. It could not carry enough fuel to reduce its velocity to orbit the star. The fly-by would have to be enough.

Daedalus, as big as it was, would carry a small payload. It would have to operate autonomously because radio lag from Earth would be measured in years. Some kind of AI computer would control its movements and decide what to investigate.

With the advancement of modern telescope technology, it’s not clear to me how much utility an interstellar probe would have, particularly if it could only approach a star system for a few days before flying off into space again. As ground- and space-based telescopes improve, we will probably be able to directly observe planets orbiting other stars before too long.

Even so, the idea of a practical interstellar spacecraft intrigues me. Nothing in the Daedalus design is too far-out. We can’t produce its fusion motor, yet, but there’s no reason to think it’s practically impossible in the next century or so. It’s possible to envision something like Daedalus making its way to the stars in the centuries ahead.

Such a probe would be enormously expensive, but as the world economy grows and technology advances it becomes more likely we’ll be able to launch one. Perhaps to a certain nearby star…

And if we can launch a probe, eventually we’ll want to launch people. More about that in a future post.

Here’s the original Daedalus study, if you are interested.

https://www.bis-space.com/what-we…/projects/project-daedalus