Microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate for the weight of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a virus program called Mole IX, the First true virus in the history of cybernetics. The Russian pulse guns threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suffered systems crash, light circuitry wiped clean. Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out the fragile, radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky
