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Chapter 314 Nowhere to Call Home Anymore

Pilots were urgently putting on their gear according to a strict checklist procedure. And within five minutes, they were headed to the duty hangar, where they would receive their mission briefing and launch. As they crossed the hangar on their way to the briefing room, they passed a virtual hive of technicians scrambling over the parked jets and giving them last-minute checks and fueling them.

The pilots reached the briefing room and received their briefing, then boarded their jets and taxied out of the hangar.

Soon, with the screaming sound of jet engines spinning up, four planes were lined up on the runway access lane, ready for takeoff as soon as they received final clearance from the tower.

"Tower, this is SU-37, call sign Alpha One. Requesting immediate clearance for emergency intercept take-off. Please advise."

"Alpha One, this is Tower Control. Roger that. Emergency intercept take-off is approved. Proceed to Runway 27 Hotel for immediate departure. We\'ll alert civilian air traffic control and provide you with updated vectors to intercept. Keep us informed of the situation.

"Tower, Alpha One. Copy that. Taxiing to Runway 27 Hotel. Will update you on the situation once in the air. Alpha One out."

The squadron leader taxied onto the runway and brought his jet to a complete halt. Then he pushed his throttle to the stops, kicked on his afterburners, and released the brakes on his landing gear. His jet screamed through a short takeoff and into the sky at a 60 degree angle. Short takeoffs like those were designed for aircraft carrier runways and active combat scenarios, where pilots needed to be in the sky and mobile in the least time possible in order to avoid being intercepted by the enemy.

After the four planes had completed their takeoffs and assembled in formation, they moved to the heading they were supposed to head out on, afterburners still flaring and leaving a trail of exhaust plumes behind them. Once they were over open water, they went supersonic and the exhaust trails ended where the jets broke the sound barrier.

Minutes after the interceptor launch a fully fuelled and highly advanced version of a KC-135 Stratotanker also launched on the same heading as the intercept squadron. The interceptors would be flying their entire mission with their afterburners active, so no matter how awe-inspiring their fuel efficiency was, they would reach bingo fuel just a few minutes after they hit the halfway point toward their destination.

A few minutes before the interceptors were scrambled, Aeolus, the Air Force AI Command, and Freyja, the ARES Military Intelligence Command, had tasked the overwatch satellite following the oil convoy with tracking the pirate speedboats back to their base. While the trailing naval escort was absolutely more than enough to handle the attack, the standard operating procedure (SOP) for unprovoked attacks on any of Aron\'s military or civilian shipping was ensuring that the attackers had nowhere to retreat to.

A few That Direction Removers launched with great prejudice was the most effective method of achieving that goal.

As the four jets screamed on their way to remove a certain direction, a hundred and eighty nautical miles (333 kilometers) away from the oil convoy and well behind the horizon, six Heracles\' Bow batteries, fondly referred to as "Hello, Beautiful" by the sailors assigned to man the vessels they were on, simultaneously swiveled around as the frigates and destroyers of the Merchant Marine Escort Task Group Oscar Seven tracked invisible targets from beyond the horizon with the aid of the Panopticon satellite array high in the sky above them. Soon, the massive, eighteen-inch-diameter coilguns roared to life in sequence, the battery itself rapidly adjusting between shots and cycling through the three barrels in each battery.

The overpressure wave caused by projectiles going from a dead standstill to more than ten times the speed of sound kicked up waves around each firing vessel, and the ships themselves heeled over with the recoil. But where a normal vessel would take a hit to their accuracy for those reasons, the VIs (Virtual Intelligences) in the tracking computer were more than capable of using the zero-latency satellite connection to ensure that the designated, locked targets were hit with a hundred percent accuracy.

Even though using what was basically battleship weaponry to destroy small two- to four-person speedboats was like using a nuclear missile to swat a gnat, Athena had drilled her motto into her subordinate AIs: there is no such thing as "overkill". There is only "open fire" and "reload".

(Ed note: Have to give a shoutout here to Howard Taylor, the author and artist of Schlock Mercenary for his excellent list of Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. If you enjoy military humor, you\'ll like his writing, and the 70 maxims are all comedic gems. This one is Maxim #37)

...

"They really want to use our failure to deliver as leverage to get us to compromise on the tech sharing, don\'t they."

Rachael Richardson, the president of Hermes, was sitting next to Elizabeth Oppliger, the president of Helios Energy & Utility, in a virtual mission command center. They had been informed as soon as the pirates were confirmed by the Panopticon satellite, even before the convoy ships themselves had received visual confirmation. They were being kept in the loop during the small skirmish, as they were the titular heads of the companies responsible for the convoy—Elizabeth for the contents of the ships and Rachael for the ships themselves.

What Rachael said was prompted by an image displayed on one of the sections of the main screen in mission control. It was a zoomed-in satellite image of a submarine with an occlusion outline to highlight it against the dark seawater. The radio jamming signal was coming from an antenna raised above the sub\'s conning tower, meaning they were the ones responsible for ensuring that the convoy\'s distress call would go unheard.

"Yep, since the contract had no force majeure clause or piracy exclusion, it was pretty blatantly obvious what they wanted to do by sending a pirate \'fleet\' after our convoy. They don\'t care about our oil, I suppose. We\'ll have to hammer them in our next negotiation—after all, they need us, not the other way around. There are plenty of countries we could sell our oil to, China was just one of the better options," Elizabeth replied. She wasn\'t worried about the pathetic attack on their convoy at all, as she had an inkling of the capability of the Poseidon branch of ARES.

Rachael sighed in disappointment as she said, "They really chose the wrong country to fuck with, didn\'t they."