This week with Arlene and Jeff:
...While Jeff was talking to Aiko, Arlene, Ann and the nine other teams were completing their final checks in their interceptors. (One interceptor team - the little squadron now totaling twelve interceptors - was in their scout craft spying on the alien ship as it lumbered toward Earth, while White and Martin were preparing to be married.)
Ship was already a couple of thousand miles up when Arlene, as Squadron Commander, told Ship, "Activate both launch doors." Then to the teams, "Prepare for combat-launch." A couple of seconds later, "Go for launch," she told Ship.
Inertialess drives activated, and her ship, along with four others, was guided toward the left launch bay door while the other five interceptors were directed to the right doors. In seconds, they were in space and away, which meant that they basically disappeared to the naked eye.
Ship had already programmed in their course for Ceres, which pleased all the pilots, even though the computers would have had the course on screen in seconds if they had to compute the course themselves. Selina may enjoy computing courses manually, but none of the pilots on the interceptor teams did.
They quickly formed into their combat formation, but were spaced far enough apart to prevent the whole squadron from being destroyed by a single nuclear blast. Ship had told them that their shields should hold up to that type of blast and would keep the radiation down to livable levels, but she never did tell them at what distance or how large the device. And… no one really wanted to know...
Have a goodun;
Roust