“Trying. Trying dodge.”
My ship screamed toward the battlefield. I could now see the individual fighters—a swirling mess mixed with destructor bolts and the occasional light-lance. Morningtide’s Poco pulled upward into a loop—trailed by three Krell ships.
Almost there. Almost there!
The Krell destructors flared. Hit. Hit again. And then…
A burst of light. A spray of sparks.
And Morningtide died in a massive explosion. She didn’t have a chance to eject.
Kimmalyn screamed—a high-pitched, panicked, pained sound.
“No!” Jerkface said. “No, no, no!”
I arrived, flying at Mag-3—too fast for normal dogfighting maneuvers—but still managed to spear one of the Krell ships with my light-lance. But it was too late.
The fiery sparks that had been Morningtide went out as they fell.
I spun and reversed my thrust, letting go of the light-lance and flinging the Krell ship to the side. Another of our fighters came in after it, shooting and managing to blast it down.
I fell in beside Jerkface, silently smothering my own screams. He’d lost his wingmate. Where was Arturo?
I couldn’t make out anything tactical in the fray. My flight zipped in all directions, drawing fire—yes—but also adding to the confusion. A few larger classes of DDF fighters wound through it all, mixing with some dozen Krell ships, each trailing wires in that same unfinished way.
I was crying. But I set my jaw and kept on Jorgen’s wing. He expertly speared a Krell ship with his light-lance, and it tried to break away, so I speared it as well.
“That debris, Jorgen,” I said. “Coming down at your two, falling slowly.”
“Right.” We both hit our throttles, as Cobb had taught us, and pulled the enemy ship toward the debris. At the last minute, we cut our lines and split to the sides, slamming the Krell ship into the debris in a fiery explosion.
“What are you two doing?” Cobb said over the line. “You were ordered into defensive postures.”
“Cobb!” I said. “Morningtide—”
“Keep your head, girl!” he shouted. “Grieve when the debris rests. Right now, obey orders. Defensive. Postures.”
I gritted my teeth, but didn’t argue, following Jorgen as he wound through the smoke trails left by falling chunks of debris. That looked to be Arturo and Nedd to my right, leapfrogging each other with quick accelerations and decelerations, to keep the enemy from focusing on either one of them. That kind of technique could confuse the Krell, much like overwhelming them with targets.
Morningtide…
“Quirk?” Jorgen said. “What are you doing?”
I realized I could still hear Kimmalyn’s soft whine of pain over the radio. I searched the scanner, then spotted a single Poco—without a wingmate—hovering near the perimeter of the fight.
“Quirk, move!” Jorgen said. “You’re a clear target. Get in here.”
“I…,” Kimmalyn said. “I was trying to line up a shot. I was going to save her…”
“Join the fight!” Jorgen shouted. “Cadet, hit your throttle and get in here!”
“I’ll cover her,” I said, moving to break off as we zoomed past two Krell coming the other way. So many sparks and destructor shots lit the sky, I almost felt I was down in Igneous, swallowed up by a forge.
“No,” Jorgen said to me. “You see Bim? At your eight? Cover him. I’ll deal with Kimmalyn.”
“Understood.” I zipped down and to my left, the GravCaps covering the g-forces of the sharp turn. As I moved, however, a spot on my dash lit up: a bright violet warning light near my proximity sensors.
I’d picked up a tail.
Though we’d barely touched on dogfighting, Cobb’s training snapped into my mind. Trust the scanner. Don’t waste time trying to get a visual. Keep your focus on flying.
“Spin!” FM said. “You’ve got a tail!”
I was already pulling my ship into an evasive loop, counting on the GravCaps to handle the g-force. Something clicked immediately in my head. The training, the way my face grew cold, the way my mind snapped into focus despite the fatigue, the stress, and the grief. It was almost like it didn’t matter if a Krell was following me. In that moment, it was just me and the ship. Extensions of one another.
I pulled out of my loop into a straight dive, then cut to the side and launched a perfect light-lance hook into a slowly falling chunk of debris. I didn’t go quite fast enough, and when my GravCaps cut, the g-forces rammed me down in my seat. I saw black at the corners of my vision, but held on.
I spun around sharply and buzzed another chunk of debris—trailing its smoke in my wake—then zoomed right between two Krell ships coming the other direction. My tail lost me in the turn—and I caught a flashing explosion behind me as one of the full pilots picked it off while it was trying to catch up to me.
“Good maneuver, Spin,” Cobb said softly in my ear. “Excellent maneuver, actually. But don’t get too flashy. Remember the simulation. Flashy moves can still get you killed.”
I nodded, though he couldn’t see.
“Bim is at your ten now, up about one-fifty. Get on him. That boy is too eager.”
As if on cue, Bim’s voice entered the flight line. “Guys? Do you see that? Up in front of me?”
There was a larger firefight happening in the distance; we’d been ordered to join the smaller of the two skirmishes. I could make out the falling sparks and missed destructor shots of that larger battle, but I didn’t think that was what Bim was indicating.
As I fell in at his side, I spotted it: a Krell ship, but a different model from the curved fighters. This one was bulbous, like a bulging fruit with wings at the top. Or…no, that was a ship flying with something huge attached to the bottom.
A bomber, I realized, remembering my studies. One carrying a lifebuster.
“Lifebuster,” Jorgen said. “Cobb, we’ve confirmed sighting of a lifebuster bomb.”
“The other flight radio bands are talking about it too,” Cobb said. “Steady, cadet. The admiral is already dealing with that bomber.”
“I can hit it, Cobb,” Bim said. “I can bring it down.”
I expected Cobb to dismiss that idea immediately, but he didn’t. “Let me call for orders and tell them you have a visual.”
Bim took that as confirmation. “You with me, Spin?”
“Every step,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“Wait, cadet,” Cobb said. “There’s something odd about these descriptions. Can you confirm? That bomb sounds larger than usual.”
Bim wasn’t listening. I watched out my cockpit window as he dove toward the solitary bomber, which had—following usual Krell protocol—slipped down to low altitude to try flying in underneath the AA guns.
“Something’s wrong,” Cobb said.
A group of shadows broke off the sides of the bomb—smaller Krell ships, almost invisible in the darkness. Four of them.
They lit up the air with red destructor blasts. One grazed my canopy, causing my shield to crackle with light. My nerves jolted, and I spun my ship—by instinct—to the side.
“Cobb,” I said. “Four escort ships just broke off the bomber!”
The ships buzzed us. I dodged, barely, my hands sweaty on my controls. “They’re faster than regular Krell!”
“This is something new,” Cobb said. “Fall back, you two.”
“I can hit it, Cobb!” Bim said. The light of his destructor glowed at the front of his ship as he powered up a long-range shot.
The four guardian ships swarmed toward us, firing again.
“Bim!” I screamed.
I was pretty sure I saw him look toward me—light reflecting on his helmet visor—as the blasts hit his ship, overwhelming his shield with concentrated fire.
Bim’
s ship exploded into several large chunks, one of which slammed into my ship. I was flung to the side as my Poco went into a spin. Quirk screamed my name as the world rocked. The lights on my dash went insane, the “shield down” warning blaring.
G-forces hit as the GravCaps were overwhelmed. Nausea flooded me, and everything became a blur. But my training still kicked in. Somehow—pulling hard on the control sphere—I managed to hit the dive controls, which pivoted my acclivity ring on its front hinge, like a hatch swinging open. That angled it toward the nose of my ship, and the maneuver pulled me out of the fall. The world righted itself, and I hung there in a hover, my nose pointed straight at the ground.
Lights flashed on my dash. Below, I watched as Bim’s remains hit the surface in a ripple of soft explosions.
He’d never…he’d never even picked a callsign.
“The enemy is disengaging!” Nedd said. “Looks like they’ve had enough!”
I listened, numb, to other reports. A strike team of full pilots went after the bomber, and rather than risk losing the weapon, the Krell pulled into a full retreat.
The bomber escaped, as did enough ships to keep the admiral from giving chase.
I just hung there, blue glow of the acclivity ring a cold, lifeless light in front of me.
“Spin?” Jorgen said. “Report in? Are you all right?”
“No,” I whispered, but finally reset my acclivity ring, rotating my ship to the standard axis. I channeled power to the shield igniter, waited until the light powered up, then grabbed the handle and slammed it backward. Another shield crackled to life around my Poco, then turned invisible.
I climbed up into line with the others.
“Vocal confirmation of status,” Jorgen ordered.
We responded, and everyone else was still there. But when we flew back to base, our formation had two stark holes in it. Bim and Morningtide were gone.
Skyward Flight had been reduced from nine to seven.
Admiral Judy “Ironsides” Ivans always made a point of reading the casualty reports.
She got people killed. Every battle, she made decisions—some of them mistakes—that ended lives. Perhaps there was an astral balance chart somewhere out there, kept in the stars by the ancient Saints, which weighed the Defiant lives she lost against the ones she saved.
If so, that scale had been greatly tipped by today’s battle. Two cadets were dead after barely a month of training in the cockpit. She read their names, tried to commit them to memory—though she knew she’d fail. There had just been so many.
She reverently set the list of names and short biographies on top of her desk. Two other pilots had died as well, and composing letters to their families would take a bite out of her evening, but she’d do it. To those families, the loss would take a bite out of their lives.
She was halfway done—writing by hand, instead of using a typewriter—when Cobb came to yell at her at last. She saw him reflected in the brass of the polished spyglass she kept on her desk. A relic from a much, much earlier time. He stopped in the doorway, and didn’t lay into her immediately, but let her finish her current letter. She signed it at the bottom, making a flourish with the fountain pen—a gesture that somehow seemed both necessary and ostentatious in such a letter.
“Are you happy, Judy?” he finally asked. “Now that you’ve gotten two of them killed, are you scudding happy?”
“I haven’t been happy in years, Cobb.” She turned her chair, leaning back and meeting his glare. She’d been anticipating, perhaps even relishing, his inevitable arrival. It was good she still had someone to defy her. Most everyone else who had done that was dead now.
He limped into the small room, which was piled high with papers, keepsakes, books—an embarrassingly messy office. Yet it was the only place she felt comfortable.
“You can’t keep doing this,” Cobb said. “First you lower the age of testing, now you send them into battle before they really know how to fly? You can’t keep firing on full auto while you simultaneously steal ammunition from the stores. Eventually you’re going to run out of bullets.”
“You’d rather I let Alta fall?”
He looked to the side, toward an old map she still kept on the wall. The glass was dusty with age and the paper inside had started to curl. It was a plan for Alta, from their development session almost a decade ago. They’d imagined a city with massive neighborhoods and large farms.
A fantasy. Reclaiming a dead world was harder work than they’d anticipated.
She pushed herself to her feet, the old captain’s chair creaking. “I will spend their lives, Cobb. I’ll eagerly put everyone in the DDF in danger, if it means protecting Alta.”
“At some point it stops being worth the losses, Judy.”
“Yes, and I happen to know when that point is.” She stepped up to him, holding his gaze. “It’s when the very last Defiant heaves their very last breath. Until then, we hold this base.”
If they lost Alta, then Igneous could be bombed from above—destroying the apparatus and humankind’s ability to build ships. If that happened, the Defiants would return to living in broken clans, like rats to be hunted.
They either stood their ground, or they gave up on ever becoming a true civilization again.
Finally, Cobb relented and turned to leave. From him, lack of complaint was agreement.
“I noticed,” Judy said, “that your little coward didn’t arrive at the battle until most of the fighting had already happened.”
He spun on her, practically snarling. “She lives in an unimproved cave, Judy. Alone. You realize that, don’t you? One of your pilots lives in a makeshift camp beyond the city limits because you refuse to give her a bunk.”
It was satisfying to see that anger in him. She worried he would burn out one of these days. He never had been the same, since the Battle of Alta.
“Do you know what the readouts are saying?” Judy asked. “The scans of her brain? Some of our doctors are certain they’ve figured out how to spot it now. I suppose I should thank you for that. Getting a chance to study Chaser’s daughter in flight might finally give me proof. She has the defect.”
That gave him pause. “We barely understand what it means,” he finally said. “And your doctors are biased. A few confusing events and some stories of the past aren’t enough to judge a girl’s entire life, particularly a girl so talented.”
“That’s the problem,” Judy said. She was surprised to hear Cobb argue, honestly. Many politicians denied the defect’s existence, but Cobb? He’d seen its effects personally. “As useful as this data is, I can’t risk letting her have a commission in the DDF. She would be nothing but a distraction and a blow to morale.”
“A distraction to you, maybe. A blow to your morale. The way you’re acting is a disgrace to the DDF.”
“For all intents and purposes, I am the DDF. Stars help us. There’s nobody else left.”
He glared at her. “I’m going to give the girl a personal radio. I won’t have one of my cadets outside my reach. Unless you would reconsider giving her a bunk.”
“If I make it too easy on her, she might decide to stay instead of doing the sensible thing and moving on.”
Cobb limped toward the door—he refused to use a cane, even after all these years—but paused again there, hand on the frame. “Do you ever wish one of the others had survived?” he asked. “Sousa. Nightingale. Strife. Admiral Heimline.”
“Anyone but me?” Judy asked.
“Basically.”
“I’m not sure I’d wish this command on them,” she said. “Not even the ones I hated.”
Cobb grunted, then disappeared into the hallway.
The day after Morningtide and Bim died, I arrived late for Cobb’s class. It was only by about five minutes, but it was still my first time being late.
Everything just felt
so wrong.
I vaguely remembered tromping back to my cave the day before, ignoring M-Bot—Rig had already gone home—and curling up in my cockpit bed. Then I’d just lain there. Not sleeping, but wishing that I would. Thinking, but wishing that I would stop. Not crying…but somehow wishing that I could.
Today, nobody called me on my tardiness. Cobb wasn’t there yet, though almost all of the remaining cadets had assembled. Everyone but Kimmalyn, which worried me. Was she okay?
My boots squeaked on the floor as I walked over and sat. I didn’t want to look at the conspicuously empty seats, but that made me feel like a coward, so I forced myself to stare at Morningtide’s spot. Just two days ago I’d been standing there, helping her understand…
She’d almost never said anything, but somehow the room felt so much quieter without her.
“Hey, Spin,” Nedd finally said. “You’re always talking about ‘honor’ and the ‘glory of dying like warriors’ and crap like that.”
“Yeah? So?”
“So…,” Nedd said. “Maybe we could use a little of that crap right now.”
Nedd slumped in place, barely fitting into his mockpit. He was the tallest one in the room—and burly too. I’d always thought of him simply as the larger of Jerkface’s two cronies, but there was more to him. A thoughtfulness.
“Well?” he asked.
“I…,” I said, struggling to find words. “That all feels stupid now.”
I couldn’t rattle off some line about vengeance. Not today. Doing so would feel like playing a part in one of Gran-Gran’s stories—while the loss felt so very real. But…did that make my conviction all just bravado? Was I a coward hiding behind aggressive platitudes?
A real warrior would shrug it off. Did I really think these were the last friends I’d lose?
FM climbed out of her seat and walked over to me. She squeezed me on the shoulder, a strikingly familiar gesture from a girl I knew only passingly well, despite our time in the same flight. What was her story? I’d never found a way to ask.
I glanced toward Bim’s place, thinking of the incredibly awkward—yet wonderful—way he’d tried to flirt with me.
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