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big hammering rumble, as rusting flecks of debris bounced off the fighter's armoured skin.
    "Probably going to need a new paint job when we get back to base," Gabe observed. Rafe said nothing, but suspected that Gabe's personality matrix processors had probably been chewing over the concept of irony a little more during the ride in.
    "Warning light on the starboard intake," he noted. "Probably debris sucked into the engine cowling." By the time Rafe had looked to check, the warning status had changed to two small flashing amber lights.
    "I see it," she confirmed. "So when do we start worrying?"
    "Probably at four," came the reply, just as the third warning light came on and something inside the cockpit started beeping urgently.
    "What about five?" asked Rafe.
    "There is no five," Gabe informed her. "About ten seconds after warning number four, the engine explodes, taking most of the wing with it, and we take the short, fast route to finding out whether the grunts at ground level have it any worse than we do up here."
    "I know my crate. It'll hold," said Rafe, wondering if Gabe's personality matrix had advanced enough yet to know a bluff when it heard one.
    It was at that moment they broke out of the rust cloud and saw the targets ahead of them. Nort Grendels, four of them, which was one more than she and Gabe had been expecting, going by the three separate voice patterns Gabe had positively identified from their radio chatter.
    "Guess the fourth one must not be such a big talker," said Rafe, as she hit the boosters again and sent her Seraphim diving down into an all-out attack manoeuvre. Gabe's comms receptors broadcast the Norts' shouted exclamations and squawks of horrified surprise, which were instantly drowned out a moment later by the roar of explosions.
    One of the Nort fighters vaporised in midair, struck by one of the missiles launched from the rocket pods on the wings of Rafe's fighter. The destroyed craft fell away, reduced to little more than burning fragments, fragments that might ironically one day be swept up from the ground during a cyclone storm to become part of another rust cloud.
    The other Nort fighters frantically peeled away, evading the same fate as their comrade. Another of Rafe's missiles got a semi-lock on one of them, and exploded as near to its target as possible, peppering the Grendel's hull, engine and wings with shrapnel. The Nort dived towards the cloud layer below, his tail fin partially shredded and one engine trailing black smoke. Gabe tracked him with the Seraphim's targeting systems and opened up with the rear turret quad-lasers, blowing away the remainder of the Nort fighter's tail section. The Grendel - an ugly, blunt-nosed thing, typical of the Norts' pragmatic approach to military design - corkscrewed crazily through the air and then dropped like a stone, disappearing into the cloud layer below. Like every other Nu Earth airman, the Nort pilot would be equipped with a grav-chute and a chem-resistant flight suit, but even if he managed to bail out of the stricken craft, he must have known his chances of surviving the journey through the dense and highly toxic chem-clouds would be minimal.
    In the Nu Earth air war, there were very few lucky escapes and no prizes at all for merely being second-best.
    The remaining two Nort fighters were running ahead of the faster, more agile Souther aircraft, pushing hard with their afterburners, chasing after the target that had drawn them here in the first place. Rafe could see it now, a lightly armed command transport. Its hull shape showed the familiar lines of Souther design, although Rafe couldn't quite recognise what type and model it was. On cue, Gabe chimed in with the results of his vessel ID scan. "It's a junker, hon. Mostly composed of the airframe of an old Buffalo Class Type IV atmo-shuttle, but with a few other pieces added in."
    Rafe frowned. "Junkers" were common enough on various parts of Nu Earth. Craft built from the salvaged remains