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that helped revolutionize aerial combat in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
    Though greatly improved over the years, the Flighthawks had a number of limitations, including range and speed. More importantly, their airframes were now well past their design age. Materials fatigue—both their metal skeleton and carbon-fiber skins—was starting to hamper their effectiveness. Internal fasteners had to be inspected before each flight on some of the high-hour aircraft—an onerous procedure that added several hours to the maintainers’ routine chores. It was time for a new generation of remote fighters to take over.
    The Sabres were that fighter.
    Nicknamed after the fighter that had dominated the skies over North Korea during the 1950s, the UM/F–9 was the first UAV capable of sustained Mach speeds. (Though technically the Flighthawks could fly faster than the speed of sound, they could not operate reliably in Mach-plus regimes for several reasons unrelated to their airfoil.) Long and sleek, the aircraft used a hybrid ramjet pulse engine to fly; an array of maneuvering nozzles and high-strength carbon-based alloys made twelve g-plus turns routine. Tests showed that it was more than a match for even the improved F–22C Block–150s that had recently joined the Air Force’s top interceptor squadrons.
    But high speeds and maneuverability meant nothing if the aircraft could not be controlled. And this control system—called Medusa—represented the real breakthrough.
    Like the Flighthawk, the Sabre was capable of “autonomous combat.” In other words, it could figure out on its own how to take down an enemy, then do so. Unlike Flighthawks, Sabres could work together against an enemy, employing section tactics without human intervention. Data from one aircraft was immediately shared with all of the aircraft in the same flight. Spotting a group of four enemy planes, for example, the flight could decide to break into two elements and attack from two different directions.
    While the Flighthawks had small onboard flight computers to handle many of the basic tasks of flight, they relied heavily on a centralized computer and a human controlling them, generally from an EB–52 or modified B–1.
    Medusa did not exist separately from the Sabres. It was, as the man who invented it liked to say with his droll puns, a true “cloud computer.” The interconnection of the units working together created the real intelligence.
    But there had to be a human in the process somewhere . And that was what today’s meeting was about.
    Actually, the man who invented Medusa didn’t agree that there should be any human anywhere in the process. It wasn’t that Ray Rubeo had no use for his fellow man or thought that human intelligence was an oxymoron, though charges along those lines had often been leveled at him. Rubeo simply saw no need for a human “to muck things up.”
    “You don’t steer a Sidewinder to its target,” he had told Breanna on several occasions. “It’s fire and forget. Same with this.”
    But the military was not ready to think about a squadron of aircraft as “fire and forget” weapons. And though Rubeo worked, as a contractor, for her, Breanna wasn’t ready to think that way either.
    So where did the Medusa “control” unit go?
    At a secure base far from harm, like those generally used for the Predator and Global Hawk? Or a plane, like the Flighthawk system?
    A satellite control system with a ground base could be used, but there were problems with bandwidth, and the cost was considerable—much more than Medusa, let alone the Sabres.
    Medusa’s range was roughly two hundred miles, a considerable improvement over the Flighthawks. Still, that was close enough that a savvy enemy could seek to locate and isolate the control aircraft. Simply making the plane run away would mean a cheap victory, as the Sabres would have to follow or lose their connection. That wasn’t much of an issue for a system like the Flighthawks,