I started to hurry into my own clothes. "What's happening?" I said, trying to match her calm.

"Our admirers in the Defense Department," she muttered, looking outside. "One of their pilots must've caught sight of our ship in Afghanistan. Looks like they've deployed their whole collection of toys: ekvs, leaps, eris—there's even an sbl out there."

"Larissa," I said, doing up my coveralls, "arcane acronyms really aren't going to reassure me right now."

Even in the midst of such an attack—or, perhaps, because of it—Larissa became playful and coy. "No, but you'll need to memorize these things, Doctor," she said, giving me a quick kiss. "Believe me, there will be a test." She began to point around the sky at the streaking objects. "Lightweight exoatmospheric projectiles, or leaps—they're the smaller ones. Then there are the extended range interceptors, or eris, and the exoatmospheric kill vehicles—"

"ekvs," I said, watching the wild display outside with her. "And the really troublesome bastard," she finished, pointing to some sort of satellite or platform in the distance. "An sbl‹space-based laser. All part of thaad, the Śtheater high altitude area defense' against ballistic missiles. You know—the Star Wars nonsense." She grabbed my hand and we rushed out into the corridor.

"How accurate are they?" I said.

"It's not their accuracy we have to worry about," Larissa answered, moving toward the ladder that led up to the ship's turret and big rail gun. "The thaad boys have never managed to hit anything intentionally. But that doesn't keep them from throwing all that firepower around the atmosphere like they're in some kind of high-tech spitball fight—and an accidental hit could do real damage."

We'd reached the ladder and started up. "It's a little like skeet shooting," Larissa laughed as we entered the turret to find Eli Kuperman waiting for us. "And don't worry, they're all unmanned vehicles, so you won't actually be killing anybody." She climbed into the seat of the rail gun and smiled at me in a devious way that hours earlier would have seemed very disconcerting. Now, however, I found myself smiling back.

As Larissa began to direct the rail cannon's fire in every direction, pounding away with glowing bursts at the midsized and larger interceptors that were being sent against us (the ship's magnetic fields deflected the smaller ones), the stratosphere was lit up by dozens of explosions, as well as by the indiscriminate but no less dangerous fire of the space-based laser. My job during the encounter was to help Eli try to determine just which long-range radar station was giving our position away to the American thaad command. Apparently there were only a few monitoring sites sophisticated enough to be able to thwart our ship's stealth technology by doggedly fixing on the confusing signature we were emitting (and which the Americans had, presumably, tagged as ours after they made visual contact in Afghanistan). Using the banks of equipment in the turret, Eli‹operating in that cool but no less energized and sometimes even jovial manner that I now accepted as normal for everyone on board the ship—finally determined that a remote English base was the most likely culprit. His hypothesis was confirmed by Leon Tarbell, who, working on a lower deck, managed to intercept and descramble a series of communications between the English and American air forces.

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