A century of air combat had distilled numerous tricks into the corpus of Air Combat Maneuvering. Some of these were classics from the very first day of man killing man in the air: the Immelmann turn, the split-S... and perhaps the great-grandfather of them all, the dive out of the sun. It was a simple trick, using the glare of the sun to obscure your aircraft from the sight of the enemy, allowing you to close in undetected. In more modern times, it was used in reverse, flying [i]into [/i]the sun to fool the primitive seeker heads of early IR-guided missiles. In an era of AESA radar and sensor fusion, though, it had mostly fallen by the wayside.

But Aurélie was a scholar of ACM, among many other things, and the principle still applied. The portable floodlights were compact but powerful, strong enough to illuminate a runway for safe landing - and thus more than powerful enough to dazzle. If the enemy didn't have optics, the glare would make it impossible to see anything within something like a 15 degree arc of the light source; if they had optics, the lights might well burn them out if they were looking in that direction. 

Either way, it would give them something to think about. 

And shoot at, as the case may be. They could just blast the lights out. But at least that would take some time - time that Cobalt could use to approach and assault. 

Time, the essence of combat. Bought, more often than not, in blood. Of which Napoleon himself had said, "You can ask me for anything you like, except time."

Aurélie had little to contribute to the team in an assault, but she could buy them that time. Before anyone else had noticed, she was already at the cart, flipping open the lid to the control panel and angling the lights at the traitors' position.