Broken Sky

by L. A. Weatherly

  I switched on the ignition and the small plane roared into life, trembling with power: a MK9 Merlin Firedove, one of the finest machines ever built. It was just like the Dove I’d learned to fight in. We understood each other, this plane and I.

  I gave the primer pump another stroke. Anyone watching would’ve said I was scowling: I could feel deep furrows ridging my forehead, like always when I’m fully absorbed. Underneath my concentration was a rock-hard resolve.

  Today, of all days, I had to win.

  I signalled to the fitter and he ran to pull the chocks from my wheels. “You’re good to go, Miss Vancour!” he shouted.

  With a distracted wave I eased open the throttle and started taxiing, facing into the wind. The plane was trembling, eager, picking up speed by the second. The undercarriage bumped against the ground as fields rushed past in a blur…and then I was airborne.

  Usually I loved the moment when I lifted into the sky, so light and free. This time my jaw felt tight. I headed south-west at four thousand feet. Once I’d left the complex of airbases behind, I could see faint, ancient lines sketching the earth where streets had once been, and fragments of ruins up in the hills.

  No cloud cover. Good. Some Peacefighters hate that, but I know how to use the sun.

  The European Alliance pilot was already over New Bay when I reached it. His MK9 had stripes instead of camo swirls; that was the only difference. Our battle would be skill against skill.

  The ocean glinted silver. On its beach stood a commentator with a bulky field phone, describing the scene for millions clustered around their telios. Few Peacefights were broadcast live. That this one was, just cemented my resolve.

  My opponent and I faced off, circling each other as we waited. The vibrating drone of my engine filled my senses. Far below, seagulls wheeled over the water.

  The instant the clock showed 15.00, I banked and headed for the sun.

  I used it mercilessly, hiding in it, darting out at him from its glare. My thumb worked the firing button. A muffled staccato sound shuddered from my wings. Tracer shot through the sky, raining damage down on him.

  He whipped away and came at me from above. Gunfire rattled across my windscreen’s bulletproof glass. I swore and rolled; sky and ocean spun. I got him back in my sights, shot again. The way my opponent flew was familiar – I’d fought him before. Today he didn’t stand a chance.

  “You will not stay up,” I told him softly as I jammed down on the firing button.

  The other pilot twisted away unscathed and went into a screaming turn that held his plane a knife-edge from stalling. Tricky, but two could play. I stayed right on his tail, making the turn tight – tighter – feeling the G’s as my plane juddered, rattling my bones.

  Hold it. There.

  I fired, spraying his fuselage. Smoke started streaming from his tail. He broke the turn, tried to climb, but I was right there ahead of him. Fire. Bullet holes peppered his hood. The horizon tipped on its side as I peeled away.

  Suddenly the only engine I could hear was my own. The other Dove had gone silent, flames leaping up from its hood. The pilot bailed. I watched as his plane twirled down to the bay, black smoke spiralling, while the white circle of a parachute floated languidly, the pilot a dangling stick-figure clutching its cords.

  Base already knew, just like the rest of the world – but I reached for my mic and completed my job: “Victorious. Opposing pilot bailed and needs assistance.”

  When I released the button, I could breathe again.

  The airfield looked tiny as I brought the Dove back in. And now, despite what day this was, I was so light inside that I couldn’t help humming – some stupid song that was playing a lot on the telio, from one of those band leaders, Van Wheeler or someone, whose smile is more of a smirk but no one seems to mind; everyone flocks to the clubs where his band plays and dances the night away.

  Love me in May,

  Oh, please say you’ll stay…

  I could see the crew below. On impulse I did a victory roll right past them, laughing out loud as the world spun. Grinning, I soared high and came in again from an angle. When I got below a thousand feet, I shoved open the hood for the landing.

  Wind whistled through the cockpit. I throttled back and lowered the undercarriage and flaps. The Dove slowed obediently, nose lifting; forward visibility vanished.

  Love me in June,

  Oh, darling I’ll swoon…

  I peered out the port side, wind snapping at me. Right on track for the runway. I gave it a touch more throttle, still humming. A bump, then a pause – another jolt, and I was down, taxiing.

  I was singing aloud by then. I eased on the brakes and finished the song just as the plane stopped. I killed the engine. From the propeller’s blur, four flashing blades emerged and slowly stilled.

  In the sudden silence I peeled off my leather helmet and gloves, then gently touched the ID tags that hung around my neck.

  “I did it,” I whispered. A smile burst across my face. “I did it!”

  The fitters came running up as I climbed from the cockpit. “Good job, Miss Vancour!” Edwards stretched up a hand to help me. I’d given up telling them to call me “Amity”. The Western Seaboard base was full of traditions and that was one of them.

  “Thanks.” My smile threatened to split my face. I jumped down from the wing. I always felt more alive after a fight. Colours were brighter, the air cleaner.

  “Heard it on the telio,” Edwards said, his eyes shining. “Man, what a great day for a rumble!”

  My Dove sat behind us on the runway: a small grey and tan plane that looked sleek, muscular. Its nose jutted upwards as if eager to leap back into the sky. The other fitter had just put the chocks under my wheels; he bobbed up with a grin.

  “The other guy didn’t have a chance, the way you held that turn! I bet he’s still wondering what went wrong.”

  “He’ll get me next time, probably,” I said. The pilot I’d forced to bail was excellent. I didn’t know his name, but knew the way he flew. He beat me as often as I beat him.

  An open-top truck with the Western Seaboard sunburst emblem on its side came hurtling across the airstrip. The driver was half-standing, whooping, leaning on the horn.

  Russ, my team leader. He screeched to a stop and jogged over, a big black guy with a face like a boxer. “How’s my favourite wildcat?” he boomed, scooping me into a hug that lifted me off my feet. “Vancour, that was perfect! Just what I like to see: insane flying with no regard for personal safety.”

  “What was the dispute?” I gasped eagerly. We weren’t allowed to know before a fight.

  With slow ceremony, Russ drew two cigars from his breast pocket and held one out to me. My eyebrows shot up. This was a first.

  “That good?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes.” He waggled the cigar seductively back and forth, its cellophane wrapping gleaming in the sun. “And it was a clean win. Go on, kiddo, you deserve it.”

  I started to say no, then laughed and took the cigar. Why not? Russ was right; the clean win made it even better. The other pilot hadn’t been able to get his plane down – if he had, then whatever dispute I’d just won could be challenged sooner. Now the European Alliance would have to wait the whole five years to appeal.

  Five years of a clean win felt mighty sweet.

  Copying Russ, I bit off the cigar’s tip, then let him light it for me with a quick scratch of flame from his metal lighter. I took a deep, considering draw and managed not to cough.

  The fitters were grinning. “Wish I had a camera,” said Edwards.

  “Nothing to see here, gentlemen,” said Russ. “Just a pilot enjoying a well-earned stogie after a fight, that’s all.”

  With a wink at me, he looped an arm around my shoulders and we headed to his truck. The airstrip stretched out around us, shimmering into heatwaves and lined with palm trees. It was warm here in Angeles County, even now in November. In my home town further north, a chill would be huddling up against the bases of
the mountains.

  Home. Even now, I kept forgetting that Ma and Hal didn’t live there any more. I pushed the thought away, refusing to let it dampen this moment, and opened the truck door.

  “You still haven’t told me,” I said as Russ started the engine. His own cigar was clamped between his teeth. He twisted around to glance behind him, squinting against the sun.

  “What do you think of your celebratory cigar?”

  “It’s foul.”

  “Ah, but it’s the principle of the thing, isn’t it?”

  “Russ. Tell me.”

  He faced forward and gunned the accelerator; we careered across the airstrip, the warm breeze stroking our faces. Russ drove the way he flew – the way he pushed all of us to fly. Harder, faster, trust the plane, he was constantly shouting. Have I got pilots or a bunch of pantywaists?

  “You know I’m not really supposed to tell you,” he said, lifting his voice over the engine.

  “And you know I’ll just comb through the paper until I figure it out.”

  He raised a scarred eyebrow. “What is this, insubordination?”

  “Just telling it like it is. Sir.” I took the cigar out of my mouth and licked my lips, trying to get the taste of it off them. “This is terrible. How can you stand the way the tip goes so soggy? It looks like something you’d scrape off the bottom of your shoe.”

  Russ chuckled. “Give it back if you don’t appreciate it.” He wasn’t much older than me, maybe twenty-one. Most Peacefighters were still pretty young.

  I stubbed out the cigar in the overflowing ashtray. “Are you going to tell me, or not?”

  “All right, here it is, Vancour.” Russ intoned the words like a quiz-show host on the telio. “In your fight today…against a representative pilot of the European Alliance…you successfully rejected their claim…”

  “What?”

  “That twenty-seven per cent of our oil rights should be ceded to them.”

  I gaped as the magnitude of this sunk in. “That actually passed the Conflict Council?”

  Russ shifted gears. “Yep. They got it through on an ancient dispute claim. It was on the table, but you took it off.”

  At first I couldn’t respond. This was why we weren’t allowed to know what we were fighting for beforehand. “Why…why was that a Tier Two fight and not a Tier One?” I said finally.

  Tier One fights didn’t happen often – they were for the gravest, most monumental disputes. Russ might have fought it instead of me in that case; he was a T1 pilot as well as my team leader.

  He grinned at me. “Just missed being T1 by a hair. Heard they debated it for days. Aren’t you glad?”

  “Now I am. If I’d lost…” I swallowed, thinking of raised prices – hardship – millions affected.

  We reached the office, a worn building with sky-blue paint and our sunburst emblem over the door. Russ pulled up with a lurch. “But you didn’t,” he said, his voice firm. “Now go make your report and then celebrate. A few hours to rest on your laurels before you’re nothing again.”

  I smiled. I knew the drill. “‘You’re only as good as your next fight’,” I quoted.

  Russ let out an expansive stream of smoke. “‘So don’t cock that one up and you’ll be fine’,” he finished.

  Chapter Two

  In the locker room later I took a quick shower and then stepped out of the cubicle, wrapping a towel around me. Some of the guys were getting dressed; I had a glimpse of bare backsides and damp chests. Above, ceiling fans whirred lazily.

  I swung open my locker and grabbed a pair of denims and a clean shirt. As always, my eyes flicked to the sepia photo tucked behind my mirror: a laughing man with flight goggles pushed on top of his head. A younger me stood pressed against him, smiling widely.

  We had the same sleek dark hair and tilting brown eyes, the same olive skin like a perpetual tan. There was a biplane on the grass behind us; the man wore a leather jacket. The smell of it came back to me, rich and primal.

  I won, Dad, I told him silently.

  I studied my father’s face, remembering what happened on this day five years ago. I’d been trying to shut out the details, but now they came vividly. The field of grass rustling in the breeze. The sound of my father’s dying gasps, mixing with the creak of grasshoppers and my own sobs.

  I won, I repeated to myself. The victory felt hard inside of me now.

  “Congratulations,” said a bright voice, making me jump.

  I turned away from my locker and started getting dressed. “Thanks.”

  Vera had the next locker over. She was my age, eighteen, with cherry-blonde hair set in pin curls. Her gaze went to the photo too, but she didn’t comment. Not a soul here ever would. That was why it felt safe to have it on display. No one would ask about the memories it contained.

  Or about the half of it that had been ripped away.

  “What was your win, do you know?” Vera asked instead. She mechanically undid the curls; wavy locks tumbled free. She wore them set under her flight helmet if she had a date later.

  I glanced in my mirror and combed my own hair from my face, not looking at the photo this time. “I retained some of our oil rights.”

  Vera smiled. “Oil rights…hanging onto those is pretty good, I bet.”

  “Well, except that people will have to find other ways to get rid of their money now.”

  It was supposed to be a joke, but Vera gave me a quick glance and I knew I’d done it again – sounded too dry and sarcastic and made someone feel like I was poking fun at them when I wasn’t. Why couldn’t I ever manage the light tone that others handled with such ease?

  “Sorry,” I said awkwardly. “Yes, it’s good. It means the price of fuel won’t go up – at least, no more than usual.”

  Vera seemed placated. She was an open, easy-going girl, pretty much the opposite of me. She fluffed out her hair and stepped into a bright blue dress.

  “I lost my fight,” she said. “I tried to get down but I had to bail.” She sighed and started fastening her buttons, each like a tiny pearl. “At least my fights aren’t as important as yours. So maybe it wasn’t anything too serious.”

  Though I didn’t say it, sometimes the smaller fights made a big difference, their consequences spiralling out unexpectedly as the months passed. I made a mental note to figure out from the papers which Tier Three fight she’d had; I knew Vera wouldn’t check. A lot of the team didn’t. They didn’t want to know what they’d won or lost; it made it easier for them.

  For me, though, I had to know. I couldn’t stand not knowing something so important. Even before I became a Peacefighter, I always read the paper front to back, trying to understand what was going on in the world through all the flowery prose. I’d write down my questions in a special notebook and wait impatiently for my father to come home.

  Or else my best friend and I would try to figure things out for ourselves. My eyes went to the photo again – to the face that wasn’t there.

  No. Irritated with myself, I pushed it all away.

  Vera still looked glum as she rummaged through her locker.

  “Try not to worry about it,” I told her. “‘A peaceful loss is better than war’.” That idea was what the World for Peace had been founded on.

  She smiled slightly. “I know. Thanks.”

  She sat on a wooden bench to pull on her stockings, rolling them expertly up each leg. I stood in my denims and brassiere and rubbed my favourite lotion on my arms. It smelled like summertime. Like home.

  “Hey, Vancour!” A muscular brown-haired guy named Harlan appeared around the end of our locker row. He wore only a towel and had a scantily-clad woman tattooed on one bicep. “Rumour has it you’re the hero of the hour,” he drawled.

  I couldn’t help laughing. “The rumour where? In the funny papers?”

  Harlan grinned. “Careful with those daredevil fights, girlie – if there’s not enough left of you, they’ll just throw you out with the trash. Not that we care, but it might make
your mama sad not to get a funeral.”

  “Noted.”

  “How’d you do?” Vera called over to him.

  Harlan punched both fists to the ceiling. “Vic-to-ry!” he chanted.

  “Hey, good!” I pulled on my shirt and started doing up the buttons. “Who were you fighting?”

  “The Scando-Finns. Don’t know what our beef was with them, but we’ve won it now.”

  Vera laughed. “The Scando-Finns? I bet you just won us some moose rights.”

  My spirits fell slightly. “Too bad it wasn’t against Gunnison,” I said.

  The one thing that would have improved my own win was if it had been a strike against the Central States’ dictator – his power seemed to be growing every day. You could hardly watch a single news story without seeing John Gunnison’s grainy black-and-white grin. He looked so inoffensive…yet we’d heard stories about a vicious police force called Guns, and of people he disapproved of being taken away in unmarked vans.

  “Maybe we can use our new moose rights against him,” said Harlan. “Stop pissing on my picnic, Vancour. I won.”

  I shrugged. “I’m just saying, that’s all. It is too bad your win wasn’t against him. Mine, too.”

  “That’s for sure,” muttered Vera. “He’s got a screw loose, that guy.”

  It was strange to think that only twelve years ago the Western Seaboard and the Central States had been one country: Can-Amer, stretching from the west coast to the Mizsippi River. But the eastern provinces had thought the west held too much sway. I could still remember all the debates about it, with people shouting at each other on the telio.

  Then Senator John Gunnison announced the stars had shown him the answer: the vast region east of the desert should secede. The idea caught fire; tensions exploded. When the civil war Peacefight came, millions huddled around their telios listening. I hadn’t really understood it all back then, but my heart had still clenched when we lost.