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four-hour training mission, and he was more than ready to put his sting ship back on the ground and hand it over to the ground crew. Not only had it been boring as hell, but he had a hot date waiting, and Pelagia wasn’t the sort who cared to be kept waiting by a mere lieutenant in the planetary armed forces. He didn’t think she’d be impressed when he said “I tried, Honey!”
    He checked his display, and his ill temper eased just a bit as he realized the pileup was even worse than he’d thought it was. There were over a dozen vehicles involved, they’d landed all over the ground traffic lanes, some of them in bits and pieces, and at least three of them—not to mention what looked like a couple of ground lorries—were on fire. No wonder ATC was tearing its hair while it tried to sort out the mess. And they weren’t going to get that done anytime soon, either. It looked like Pelagia was just going to have to—
    His train of thought hiccuped as he noticed the icon swooping down from the north-northeast at a dangerous rate of speed. It was the sort of maneuver a trained military pilot noticed, and he punched a command into his sensor suite, then frowned. The transponder said it was a civilian air car, all right, but its emission signature matched that of a Skrzydło Jastrząb forward reconnaissance vehicle, which mounted a pair of thirty-millimeter pulse cannon and provision for up to six underwing missiles. What the hell was it doing screaming down like a bat out of hell that way?!
    “Lądowisko Spaceport Control, Stingship Alpha-Five-Charlie requests priority direct link to civilian air car Oscar-Mike-Sierra-Echo-Seven-One!”
    * * *
    Kazimierz Łukaszewski’s lips drew back in an anticipatory smile as the icon swelled rapidly in the center of his display. It still wasn’t flashing a transponder, and he checked his approach angle carefully. Perfect. He was coming in from the land side of the Szeroka Rzeka estuary. His little demonstration would have plenty of deep, empty water in which to land.
    * * *
    “Alpha-Five-Charlie, Lądowisko Spaceport Control.” The voice in Lieutenant Kezczyński’s earbug sounded more than a little harried. “Trying to get you that link, but things are a little confused just now.”
    “Lądowisko Control, Alpha-Five-Charlie copies, but you’d better expedite. I don’t know what this idiot thinks he’s doing, but—”
    * * *
    Łukaszewski was old-school. Or he liked to think of himself that way, anyhow. What he really wished was that he’d been born on Old Earth back when aircraft were made of canvas and wire and the only fire control they had was the human eye. It had taken men to fly those contraptions!
    Under the circumstances, he decided, he could allow himself a small treat, and he disengaged the fire control computer and activated the manual trigger button on his flight column.
    * * *
    A proximity alarm screamed, and Andrzej Bicukowski stared in horror at the projected flight paths on his short-scan radar. There was no time to ask ATC what was happening. There wasn’t even time to hit the seatbelt warning sign.
    He slammed the throttle wide open and heaved the huge airbus around to port, circling across the estuary in a frantic effort to avoid the midair collision.
    * * *
    “Oh, Christ—no!”
    Lieutenant Kezczyński’s face went white as the airbus in the Marianna Tours livery turned sharply left, away from the oncoming “civilian” air car. He understood instantly what the bus driver was doing, and why. And under normal circumstances, it would have been the right thing to do.
    Today, it was exactly the wrong thing.
    * * *
    “Oh, shit!” Kazimierz Łukaszewski screamed. He tried—he really tried—to get his finger off the trigger, but it was a lifetime—a hundred lifetimes—too late.
    The airbus swerving to avoid a midair collision with his air car flew straight into the “warning burst” of pulser fire and disintegrated in a blinding ball of