Eclipse the Skies

by Maura Milan

  What on Ancient Earth was she doing here?

  If he was a good officer, he would be listening for his orders, but seriously, when did he ever do that?

  He jogged through several groups of engineers and their flyers, each beelining to their own vessel for hasty prep or gathered in the center of the flight deck to await their squadron assignments. As his footsteps hastened, he pulled up a holoscreen to call Aaron. His face flickered into view, his expression as belabored as any borg’s could be.

  “Where are you? Ia is out here, doing Deus knows what.”

  “Apologies, Headmaster,” Aaron replied, and he angled his screen to show the lower half of his body, one of his legs severed at the knee. “Ia disabled me before I could even apprehend her,” Aaron explained.

  Knives closed the screen. Sometimes he wished Ia still had that tracker in her heart.

  He broke into a run. As he cleared the crowds, a voice on the speaker made announcements. “Farview. Asterix. Karien. Opo. Pronn. On the Nix Squadron.” The names went on, assigning everyone into their squadrons. Knives tried as best he could to keep his focus on Ia so that he wouldn’t lose her in the chaos.

  Knives knew what she was searching for. A jet to take off in. But she had already passed so many of them, her attention quickly zipping all around her as if she hadn’t found exactly what she was looking for.

  He cut her off before she could venture any farther.

  “Escaping again?” he said. Just like old times, he thought, but knowing her temper, he didn’t dare say it.

  She pushed right past him. “I know Einn is behind this. The thing that’s tearing up the sky looks an awful lot like Bastian’s science experiment we just finished watching footage of. So give me a jet so I can properly whack my brother in the head and stop this.”

  She was right. That thing outside looked eerily familiar, a tear in the fabric of space and time like in the experiment tape.

  “Even if I wanted to, I don’t have the clearance to give you access.”

  “Who gives a mif about clearance?” she argued. “All that matters is surviving past today.”

  A chorus of shouts came from the people passing, catching on to each nearby group like wildfire. Outside, a battleship had appeared from within the tear, half of it anchored in some other part of the All Black and the other half now peeking into their corner of the universe. It was a strange design, with a planetoid as its foundation, yet the actual structures that were integrated into it were sleek and almost too advanced for a Dark Space vessel. Still, no matter what it looked like, a battleship was only meant to do one thing.

  Destroy.

  It took less than a second for the enemy ship’s laser cannons to charge up. They fired at full power. For a brief moment, the beams burned the color of the sky. Knives’s eyes landed on the RSF battleship stationed across from them. The lasers were strong enough to penetrate its force field. The battleship had taken a hit, fragments of glass and gnarled steel breaking away, catching glints of sunlight as they spiraled downward. Another explosion sounded, this time from the engine section. Knives held his breath, watching the vessel quickly lose altitude, on a collision course with the city below. Now only two battleships of Nauticanne were left to defend.

  Alarms screeched around them, and a voice on the speaker repeated “Code 24,” over and over.

  They were no longer working with natural disaster protocol. This was an attack.

  Ia edged back in haste. “I gotta get down there.”

  “Down?” he interrupted. Any fool would know that the battlefield was in the air, trying to deflect the enemy’s next move.

  “That right there,” Ia pointed out to the fiery chaos igniting the sky, “is just the diversion.”

  “I can’t let you go,” he said. “Not alone.”

  “Then come with me, Knives.”

  He looked at her in silence. If he went with her, he’d be court-martialed for going against orders. But his squadron hadn’t been assigned yet, cementing his fate. He could go with her. If he wanted to.

  “I heard your name,” she said.

  He knit his eyebrows together. “What?”

  She pointed to the center of the commotion. The speakers had been cut off, and the squadron leaders were repeating their announcements, their screams growing hoarse as they went down their lists. In the center of it all was Captain Nema, who held all the flyers’ attention, each one hoping to hear their name because all they had ever wanted since the day they were born was to fly with him.

  “FiFo Squadron,” the captain yelled, his voice booming out with enough confidence to fill a whole star system. “Joves, Irenan, Pokoy, Minnow, and Adams. You’re flying with me.”

  “Looks like your squadron’s up.” Her eyes locked onto his. “So what are you going to do?”

  Those were his orders. Sure, he hadn’t given a mif about orders in the past. But now there was a battleship going down right before his eyes. He was a flyer, trained for situations like this. This was his city, the one he grew up in; he could help save it. He felt his jaw tighten, knowing this was what his father wanted for him. “I have to go, Ia.”

  She grabbed his shoulder. “Before you leave, give me a jet.”

  “You know I can’t.”

  He expected a grumble of protest, but Ia had already brushed past him and stopped in front of a large cabinet. She opened it, revealing a line of windpacks hanging evenly on a metal rod. She picked one out, shrugged it over her shoulders, and fastened the clasp at her chest.

  So that was what she was looking for all along, he realized.

  “Well, then,” she said, her voice so calculated, so certain. “I’ll just have to jump.”

  She touched a button on a black metal band around the base of her neck, and her helmet assembled upward around her head, one smooth panel over the next, until he stared back at that red feather slashing crimson against the black visor.

  Life was all about choices. He could stop her if he wanted to, but he knew he couldn’t keep her. He watched her run to the end of the tarmac, and then, like the first day they met, she spread her arms wide open and leapt.

  “Yeah,” he whispered, “just like old times.”

  CHAPTER 15

  BRINN

  BRINN LOOKED TO THE SKY, watching as the Star Force battleship burned. It descended like a shooting star from the heavens, a mixture of gray and red smeared against a bright-blue canvas. All around her, silence overtook the crowd as the hull finally buried its nose into a tall, curving building in the city center. It left a trail of crushed steel and mortar in its wake, demolishing the entire city block before it came to a stop.

  At that point, panic set in. Screams curdled around Brinn, distorting and roaring together in a wave.

  The people inside the museum rushed into the street, pushing and shoving in order to get someplace safe. But there was none. Not when the city was burning. Not when the sky was torn up above.

  Brinn looked around her, trying to find a familiar face, but her eyes landed on the protestors who were still standing in the park across from her. One of them looked at her, whispering to the others. Their heads turned to stare at her, and their whispers grew into shrill words that set her frozen in place.

  “Mungbringer!” they cried. “You did this!”

  They raised their signs overhead. Those who didn’t have signs extended their fists in their air with hate.

  She wiped the tears that were still fresh in her eyes, revealing what was underneath. The sadness and fear now replaced by anger. Rage. “Ignorant mifs!” she wanted to scream. There was no way this was her fault. Any average Citizen would have seen that—but no. All Citizens, she was beginning to realize, were heartless. For pointing fingers. For blaming any refugee in their sights.

  For killing her brother.

  The Olympus Commonwealth was the greatest governing alliance in all the galaxies. Or so she had thought. Until she started asking questions, and those questions became stones, pierci
ng holes in her beliefs.

  She was a Citizen, just like them, she could have said. But what was the point when she was starting to hate the word? Why be a Citizen of a place that didn’t want you?

  Brinn clenched her fists at her sides.

  Why be a Citizen of a place you didn’t want either?

  The sky was coated in a black veil of smoke, and all these people wanted to do was point fingers. Their fingers became fists, and some of those fists held rocks. Soon, all she could see were blurs of black and gray as stones flew toward her. She backed away, but she couldn’t dodge all of them.

  A crack flooded her ears, and sharp pain flared at the side of her head. She caught a glimpse of a rock, slick with her blood, tumbling to the pavement as she fell to her knees. The world folded in as people crowded around her. All she could see were their open mouths screaming, their voices louder and hoarser with each chant, as if they were summoning the heat from deep inside their lungs.

  But a similar fire was growing in her own core, stoked by the birth of something very new. She would no longer be complaisant.

  Roaring like a beast who’d found its voice, Brinn rose, pushing and screaming at them, and she didn’t even care if they pushed back.

  Suddenly, she felt fingers clamp onto one of her shoulders.

  She swung blindly. Those same fingers held her arm back before it struck. She stood, facing Liam, his dark eyebrows knit in a V.

  Her legs went weak from shame. She’d almost hit Liam, a boy who had stood on her side of the line no matter where it moved.

  “Come on.” Liam wrapped his arm around her to shield her from the people still pressing close. “We have to get out of here.”

  He pushed his way through the protestors. Their faces blurred together. Ash was heavy in the air, coating her face, disintegrating on her eyelashes.

  As they squeezed their way through the mob, the people swore at her, hissed at her, and she tried to block them all out. She wanted to forget the anger in their eyes; it was everywhere she looked.

  But there was one voice that managed to find her. So different and clear in the sea of anger.

  “Brinn! Brinn!” she heard Angie cry. Brinn’s eyes scanned the crowd, trying to find her friend’s face. She opened her mouth to respond, but before she could call back to her, the second battleship caught on fire.

  And the rumble of the aftermath drowned out everything.

  CHAPTER 16

  KNIVES

  KNIVES SLOTTED HIS KAIKEN into Vic formation, flanking everyone at the rear. The jets before him were all Star Force-issued, so his 504 Kaiken looked out of place. Their fleet consisted of battle-ready Wakizashi 87s, equipped with the most powerful engines available on the market and built so slim they were mere slivers in the bright-blue sky. At the lead position was a Wakizashi with a black outline of a fist on each of its wings. Captain Nema’s jet.

  A separate squadron flew past them in the other direction, back to the base of RSF battleships, which they were losing one by one. A second battleship had been hit, leaving Nauticanne’s air campus and battleship in a precariously defensive position. Half of the squadrons fell back, setting up a perimeter around what was left of Nauticanne. They would be the city’s last means of defense.

  To the right of the control board, a line of holoscreens hovered side by side, displaying the faces of each flyer in the squadron. But the only person he needed to listen to was Captain Nema, whose screen was magnified among the clutter of comms screens.

  “If the battle gets to the ground, we’ll have a lot of our Citizens’ blood on our hands,” Nema said. “So we stick to the skies, got that?”

  Everyone voiced their agreement and followed Nema’s jet as it drove its way to the tear in the sky.

  By the time they approached, the enemy battleship had retreated beyond the wormhole.

  “Assemble into combat formation with Nix Squadron,” Nema ordered over the comms line. “We’re going in.”

  They were what? Only a complete mung would fly into that wormhole. Wherever it was, it was in a completely different star system, and if that wormhole decided to close, they’d be cut off from backup.

  Knives didn’t like this plan. Not at all.

  It wasn’t even heroic; it was complete idiocy.

  The squadrons came together, assembling into two separate but tight Finger Four formations, one jet angled behind the other. Nix Squadron stacked below their own, its formation mirroring theirs so that from the top it came together in a perfect V. As before, Knives was in the rear guard. He was thankful. To him, that meant safe. Or at least safer than the fools who were in front.

  Nema’s jet and Nix’s lead crossed through the wormhole to the other side. In the rear, Knives was just one second behind, but that second stretched out before him like a rubber band, threatening to slap back at him at any moment. Knives felt outside of himself, as though he was watching a Kinna Downton stream, the one where she was leading her squadron to victory. How ridiculous, being in the same circumstances as the final battle in a Downton action stream. He just wanted to be in his quarters, enjoying a delicious orange imported straight from the Kiln forest on Targary because they were in season now.

  Instead, he was flying straight into enemy territory.

  All of the jets in formation had crossed, and he was the next and last in line. Within moments, he cleared the threshold, and the view before him, which had been just the inside of a circle moments before, had widened out to infinity. He took a deep breath as he viewed the enemy battleship, a behemoth, twice the length of any RSF warship. And behind it was something he had read about in maps reports but never experienced in person: Aokonic, the largest black hole in the whole Commonwealth, maybe even the known galaxies.

  Yet despite the grand vista that sprawled before them, there was no enemy activity. It was ominously still.

  What on Ancient Earth was the enemy planning?

  “Behind!” Nema’s voice ripped through his speakers. “They’re coming from behind!”

  “Rear view,” Knives called out, and the Kaiken’s displays reacted at the sound of his voice. A screen enlarged, hovering within his periphery, enough to focus without obstructing his view.

  The enemy battleship hadn’t been retreating, he realized. It was luring them.

  A line of jets coated in pure stealth-black was on their tail, surfacing from their hiding place right along the cusp of the gate that held the wormhole’s ring.

  It was an ambush.

  Knives only had a short moment to glance at the enemy jets, noticeably sleeker than the Wakizashis in their fleet. The frames of these jets were built so small that either the pilots were lying down flat or the jets were being controlled remotely.

  The Royal Star Force had developed and bought the most advanced jets in all of Olympus, but this tech was unlike anything he’d ever seen. It was too advanced for a Dead Space ship and surpassed the tech of their own fleet.

  His mouth hung open at what he saw next. Almost in sync, lines of light flowed through the metal surface of their ships like blood through veins, coursing to a single point at the nose of each vessel.

  As if they were part of one body, the enemy jets fired all at once.

  “Shields at full power,” Knives yelled.

  Immediately, a flash of blue rippled around the Kaiken’s exterior, his force fields fully absorbing the particle-beam blast. Usually, his Kaiken was able to automatically recalibrate its thrusters to compensate for the hit, but the blast created such an impact that it veered him completely off course and out of formation from everyone else. But flight formations were useless now. It was time for the flyers to put their natural-born reflexes and field-honed skills into play.

  He had programmed simulators this difficult before, but he wasn’t in a simulator right now. This wasn’t a pod that he could step out of whenever he wanted to. Every move he made out here would determine whether he lived or died. All the enemy needed was one lucky hit.

  He
flew in small arcs, trying to keep his path as unpredictable as possible. At the same time, he kept his eye on the combat. The enemy blasts weren’t just meant for attack. They were using them for crowd control, corralling a few of their starjets dangerously close to the black hole that lay beyond the battleship.

  “Keep your distance,” he warned over the comms screens.

  It was too late. Half of the Nix Squadron had already been pulled into Aokonic’s grip. They were gone.

  There was no time to mourn. Knives had to keep his mind on the battle.

  A RSF Wakizashi soared into his quadrant, leading the enemy right to him.

  Knives spotted the black fists on the Wakizashi’s wings, which made it stand out from the others. It was supposed to warn those who came after it, much like Ia’s iconic red feather. But it was because of those fists that everyone was on its tail. They knew Nema was the head of this outfit. Chop off the head, and the rest would flail.

  Knives couldn’t help but think about what Ia would do if she were there.

  She wouldn’t figure out overly clever ways to goad the enemy or get hero brain and rush into the thick of battle. She would stay out of the line of fire long enough to find an opening, an opportunity, a weakness. Anything so that she would come out of this alive.

  And she would play dirty.

  He flipped his Kaiken and headed toward the battleship. To avoid a skirmish, he turned off his engines, relying on his air thrusts, so the enemy jets wouldn’t be able to track him on their heat sensors.

  Like all the other vessels, the battleship had shields, even more powerful than the ones on their own jets. It would take more than a couple of particle blasts to bring those shields down.

  He flew the Kaiken just above the surface of the battleship’s force field, anchoring in one position like a parasite. His eyes scanned the structure. One hundred meters away he spotted a large square opening with force field chargers laced along its frame.

  It was the opening to their flight deck.