Shooting Script

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They came at me from high on the right, out of the afternoon sun. From just where they should have been. So perhaps I should have seen them coming.

Once, I would have done. But this time I was sitting half-asleep in the driving seat of a Dove trudging at 150 knots down Route Delta to Puerto Rico and not worrying about anything more than whether my cargo of seedlings would leave the cabin with a smell that I'd have to pay to get cleaned out.

The first I knew was when they flicked across less than a hundred yards ahead; two bright silver H-shapes in the sky, suddenly there, suddenly gone.

I came awake with a thump and a terrible sick feeling of being defeated. Beaten. Then it turned quickly to anger, and I swung the nose of the Dove around the sky, searching. But there are no guns in the nose of a Dove.

I'd recognised the shapes, of course: Vampire jets. And I knew where they must have come from – the República Libra. I was just south of the coastline, just past Santo Bartolomeo. But I hadn't known the Repúblicaowned any jet fighters, not even seventeen-year-old ones.

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