The Fool's Run

increments of advantage.”
    He laced his hands behind his head. “In any case, the big defense aviation companies were focusing on the hypersonic aerospace fighter. To a few of us, it seemed that a gap might open, and we could slip into it with a privately built plane. So we started working on one. Just concepts at first, springing some engineers here and there to do studies and try out new ideas.
    “We weren’t the only ones doing that. Whitemark Aerospace had its own project going, and the bugs were out of it. They tried building private fighters and got burned. They got burned even though they did a hell of a job. But they weren’t working with the same kind of gap that we are now.”
    He paused and looked at his hands, as though he would find words in them.
    “Anyway, it was us and Whitemark. These things get complicated, almost philosophical, but we took different routes to the new fighters. They went with a heavy bird, called it Hellwolf. Big weapons platform, lots of armor, lots of computer assist. It’s a brute. We went with a light bird, the Sunfire. Not much armor, limited amounts of weaponry, although it could take a good variety—cannon, rockets, smart bombs, air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles, area-denial canisters, the full spectrum. It has an exceptional stealth configuration and selectively malleable wings that make it into a hell of a lifting body, with great idle time. It can go out and hang there, waiting. It’s as fast as the Whitemark entry, Mach 3.4 at thirty-five thousand feet, 1.3 at treetops. But it has half again the combat radius, better than twenty-three hundred miles.”
    “Sounds unbeatable,” I said, uncertainly. “Though I don’t know much about fighter specs.”
    “It looked good,” Anshiser said. There was a bitter note in his voice. “For a while, at least.”
    He turned and looked at me. “There are reasons to build light birds, and reasons to build them heavy. Pure speed is good, but it’s not everything. Dogfighting speeds are a lot lower than full-burn running. If you’re trying to maintain air superiority over a ground fight, you’ve got to stay over the killing ground. Whitemark figured that for practical purposes, in dogfights, Hellwolf would be as maneuverable as our Sunfire, with the advantage of the armor and the extra weaponry. They also knew that the American defense establishment has always gone for the heavy fighter when it had a choice. So Whitemark thought they had an advantage. But we had something they didn’t.”
    “And that was?”
    He hesitated. “I haven’t told you anything secret yet. I’m aware of your old military security clearance, but you’ve got to know that some of this is classified.”
    “I don’t talk.”
    He nodded. “What we had was a genius. Walter Markess. He was a synthesizer. They’re pretty rare among engineers. He took some stuff from Navy submarine design and some stuff from the Corps of Engineers, God help him. He did some research of his own, and he had access to all the work on air target acquisition. He came up with a thing that he called ‘String,’ for Selective Targeting.
    “You see, the maneuverability of a fighter is not limited so much by its design as by what the pilot can endure. Above certain turn rates, you get pilot failure. They’re crushed by the high-g turns, they black out, they red out, their reactions go to hell, they get confused and disoriented. String targeting was a system that used laser tags, radar imaging, and even acoustics to get a target and hold it. It didn’t make any difference what altitude the enemy plane was in, or your plane, what speeds or directions they were going. Once the target was acquired, String would hold it, and relate it to your plane, until it was so far out that it was no longer a factor. Just like you had a string tied to it.
    “Then Markess took the whole thing a step further. He designed a control system using limited artificial intelligence software that could game-play the opposing fighters, given selections made by the pilot. In other words, the plane could fly by itself. It could make intelligent choices by considering a whole array of data: type of armaments and remaining supply, remaining fuel, number of opponents and their armament, actions of allied and enemy aircraft, prospects of success, the importance of success, and so on. And the thing is, you see, a pilot could opt to let the plane go beyond his own control. Even beyond his blackout