control surfaces to send myself barreling straight at the point in space where the other fighter was supposed to be located.

More than a century and a half before I’d been born, air-to-air combat had already progressed to the point where most kills were made at many times the effective range any unpowered munition could hope to reach. In fact, my suspicion was that the large-caliber rotary cannon installed in the nose of my fighter had been included more as an afterthought, or to humor the more sadistic of the ant pilots who liked to close to within knife range in order to execute the grubbers they’d been tasked with destroying, but the reason that the cannon had been included was far less important at that moment than thetrack the other fighter—a task that was all but impossible given the lack of both our radar cross-section and any kind of significant heat trail once I was no longer directly behind the other aircraft—the predictive algorithms seemed to be allowing my fighter to focus its efforts on a much smaller volume of space, and that was paying unexpected dividends.

With my holographic display clueing me in to both the likely location of my opponent and his probable course, it was stunningly easy to turn the tables on him once again. I simply maneuvered hard to the left, and then as soon as he had started turning in an effort to follow, I reversed direction and climbed back into position while he was still trying to figure out where