Mars Cook held his breath and steadily worked the controls, keeping the Tiger-Leopard fighter he was piloting in formation. Of course, he knew that even if he stopped breathing entirely, it wouldn't make the warship invisible. Still, since they were on a stealth cruise, they needed at least a little bit of ceremony.
Exactly, ceremony! Mars Cook thought. I'm not nervous at all.
Sixteen new warships, painted entirely in black optical camouflage—or perhaps they were better described as fighters—crossed the dark sky like geese migrating south.
By then, they had completed a long-range maneuver, avoiding the battlefield where the towering warships were clashing. Then they had begun closing in on their massive prey from the flank.
However, it was clear that although those giant warships were huge, they were by no means slow. Once the two sides began chasing each other, the distance between them was actually growing.
"Are we ready to enter attack mode and activate the spatial bubbles?" asked Lieutenant Colonel Snate, the formation's deputy commander, over the shared channel.
Cook's heart gave another jolt. The curious thing was that although he felt increasingly cold inside, his hands grew steadier. He even had enough composure to glance at the gunner crew seated behind the co-pilot's seat.
His co-pilot also had to double as the bombardier and forward main-gun operator. The gunner crew had seven members in all. Besides manning the three turreted laser batteries at the bow and on the flanks, they also had to serve as the engineering crew. Their most important task, of course, was maintaining and preparing the ship's most dangerous weapons—the four antimatter spatial-bubble torpedoes—before battle.
"They're fully charged. The torpedoes are ready to deploy at any time." The gunner crew's leader, a somewhat elderly master sergeant, gave Cook a thumbs-up.
"The ship's optical