>>6106651“Not once,” you confirm. “We don’t even test live warheads anymore. If it helps to know, Operation Crossroads actually helped make that the case. It turns out it’s really hard to put a whole dispersed fleet out of action at once, even with nuclear bombs.” That was a terribly generous interpretation of the truth, but not quite so technically incorrect as to be a lie.
“The way your sailors talked about it, I had always assumed that the atomic bomb would be the weapon of the future, for better or worse,” Nagato says pensively.
“Cooler heads prevailed. Barely. The real weapons of the future are standoff range, speed, and concealment. First look, first shot, first kill.”
“That sounds like something a submarine would say.”
“That’s from the Air Force, but same idea. Ah, speaking of first look, Gamma Flight may have something for us. Another aerial contact.”
This one is travelling rather faster than a floatplane, though, making 480 knots at 35,000 feet, with a heading of roughly 280°. That was an intercept course, more or less - it would cross your path in about 4 minutes. The picture from FLIR doesn’t show much other detail.
You’re just seconds from ordering Gamma 1 to intercept it first when it decides to instead turn hard away and head back the way it came, due eastward.
>[1] Attempt to hail the contact. >[2] Follow it. (Gamma 1 and 2 have about 200 extra miles of fuel budget before they’ll need a tanking sortie to get them safely landed.) >[3] Both. 