Skyward

by Brandon Sanderson

  I pulled out of my loop, and FM fell in behind me. Jorgen and Arturo broke off their engagement for a moment and did likewise.

  “What is this for?” Jorgen asked over the line. “What are we doing?”

  “Saving Quirk,” I said. Hopefully.

  It depended on whether my theory was right. Tense, I turned upward and hit my overburn. For a brief moment, we held the formation.

  Above, the Krell chasing Kimmalyn broke off and turned downward—toward me.

  “Cobb warned that the Krell try to destroy our command structure,” I said. “They take out flightleaders first, if they can identify them, and—”

  Destructor fire sprayed around me.

  Right.

  I pulled into the most complex set of dodging loops I knew, the Barrett sequence. An impressive four Krell found their way to chasing me. That protected Kimmalyn—but four was more than I could handle. Each time I tried to pull upward or break away, a ship or two managed to cut me off. My Poco rattled as I spun and dodged, and destructors hit my shields.

  Scud. Scud. Scud!

  “I’m coming, Spin,” Hurl said. “Hang on.”

  I kept dodging, destructors narrowly missing me. A part of my brain registered Arturo downing a Krell ship. How long had we been fighting? Had we really only shot down two? Where were those reinforcements?

  “More ships,” Jorgen said.

  “Finally,” I said with a grunt as I banked.

  “Not ours. Theirs.”

  My turn took me straight into them—another flight of six Krell interceptors. I spun through them, and somehow avoided colliding with any. In the chaos, I finally managed to get some altitude.

  My little trick must have really convinced them I was important, because three stuck on me—firing full out—as I screamed into the air. My proximity sensors blared, and my shields—

  A shot hit me, causing my shield to crackle, then go out. Warning lights lit up all over my control panel.

  I continued straight up, rotating my acclivity ring so it pointed down behind my ship. I just had to gain enough height—

  An explosion flashed behind me. The shock wave rocked my unshielded Poco. I breathed a quiet prayer to whichever gunner was manning those AA guns when—in another enormous blast—a second Krell ship vanished from my proximity sensors.

  The last Krell ship broke off, diving out of range. I leaned back against my seat, sweating, head pounding, lights flashing on my console. Alive. I was alive.

  “Hurl!” FM said over the line. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m fine,” Hurl said with a grunt. “I’m going to get this one. The shields are almost down.”

  I quickly rotated my ship, tipping to see the battlefield alive with action beneath. Kimmalyn—I was pretty sure it was her—had flown upward after me, to get out of range. The rest of the battle was a mess of Krell ships and destructor fire.

  There. I spotted Hurl chasing an enemy while being tailed by a swarm of three Krell. I’d been forced to leave her without a wingmate.

  I ignored my blinking shield light—no time to reignite—and dove back down toward the battlefield. I unleashed destructor fire toward Hurl’s tails, but I was too far away and my shots were way off. The enemy didn’t break from their chase.

  Hurl took a hit. And another.

  “Hurl, pull up!” I said.

  “I’ve almost got him. We’re never going to break any records by being cowards.” She fired, scoring the shields of the Krell in front of her.

  I hit overburn, tearing after them. But dives were dangerous on the body, and as soon as my GravCaps cut, I felt the g-forces in my eyes, forcing the blood up into my head.

  I gritted my teeth, vision going red as I reached the group of Krell. I hit my IMP by touch. It couldn’t take down my shield, after all. It was already gone.

  I didn’t see how many of them I caught. I was too close to doing myself permanent harm. I leveled out, my head pounding, my eyes aching. As my vision returned, I started my shield reignition and craned my head, trying to search for Hurl. Was she safe?

  “I’m taking heavy fire!” Arturo said. “I need help!”

  “Reinforcements are here!” Jorgen said.

  Everything was chaos. I could barely comprehend the mess, though for the moment—remarkably—nobody seemed to be targeting me.

  An explosion flashed off to my right.

  “Got him!” Hurl said.

  There. Hurl had shot down her target—but two Krell ships were still tailing her.

  “Pull up, Hurl!” I said. “You’ve still got tails. Get up into the range of the AA guns!”

  She turned upward, listening—finally. Two ships chased her. I ignited my shield, then turned after her, trying to help, but I’d lost a lot of ground.

  “Shields down,” Hurl said with a grunt.

  “Quirk!” I said, desperate, flying—too far away—toward my friend. “Pick them off. I IMPed that group. Their shields are down too. Fire!”

  “I…” Kimmalyn sounded rattled. “I…”

  “You can do it, Quirk! Just like in the sims. Come on!”

  A flash of light from a charged destructor sliced the air above us, firing toward the ships tailing Hurl.

  And missed.

  Hurl took a hit a second later, and her wing exploded, scattering pieces. The blue glow underneath her ship started to flash, the light flickering.

  No…

  Hurl’s ship plummeted. From a distance, she was like any other piece of debris.

  “Hurl!” I screamed. “Eject! Get out!”

  “I…” Her voice was soft; I could barely hear it through the warnings going off on her dash and mine. “I can control it…I can steer…”

  “Your acclivity ring is damaged!” I said. “You’re losing altitude. Eject!”

  “Not. A. Coward,” she said. “Brave to the—”

  A flash of light.

  A small explosion on the ground, insignificant in the storm of destruction that was the battlefield.

  “Pull out!” Jorgen said. “Everyone, pull out now! Leave this fight to the full pilots. We have orders to retreat!”

  Hurl…

  I couldn’t move at first. I just stared at where she’d hit the ground.

  “Spin,” Jorgen said. When had he flown in beside me? “We have to go. We’re too exhausted for this fight. Can you hear me?”

  Blinking back tears, I whispered, “Yes.” I fell into position behind him as we dove and skimmed the surface to escape the battlefield.

  We pulled up next to FM and Arturo, and I gasped. Arturo’s ship was blackened all along its left wing and side, its canopy cracked. His acclivity ring was still on, so he could stay in the air, but…scud. He’d survived a destructor hit after his shield had been knocked out.

  When he called in, his voice was subdued, rattled. He seemed to know how lucky he was to have survived.

  Hurl though…

  Kimmalyn finally came sweeping down to join us.

  “…Hurl?” FM asked.

  “She went down,” Kimmalyn said. “I…I was watching. I tried, but…”

  “She wouldn’t eject,” I said softly. “She refused.”

  “Let’s get back,” Jorgen said. Another flight of reinforcements arrived at the battlefield. As I watched them, any confidence I’d had in my abilities evaporated. Those fighters worked far more efficiently than we had, banking and flying as teams, coordinating in sharp motions.

  I suddenly felt I’d need hundreds more hours of practice before I was ready. If I would ever be ready. I wiped away tears as Jorgen’s voice, soft but firm, ordered us to accelerate to Mag-3.

  As we flew, my hands shook—revealing me for the coward I was.

  I woke up in a room.

  A room? Not M-Bot’s
cockpit?

  I sat up, my muscles aching, my head pounding. I was inside. In a bed. What had happened? Had I fallen asleep somewhere on DDF grounds? The admiral would—

  You’re in the infirmary, I remembered. After the battle. Cobb sent you here to be checked over. They ordered you to sleep and undergo observation.

  I vaguely remembered objecting, but the nurse had forced me into a hospital gown, then had ordered me into bed in a small, empty room. I’d been too numb to object. I didn’t even remember lying down; it was all a haze.

  I did distinctly remember the flash as Hurl’s ship impacted the ground. I lay back against a too-soft pillow, squeezing my eyes shut. Hurl was gone.

  Eventually I forced myself out of bed. I found my things on a stool: my jumpsuit, laundered, sitting with my light-line bracelet on top of it. My pack rested on the floor beside it, and the radio at the side was blinking. Scud…what if someone had answered that? Would M-Bot have been able to keep quiet?

  My secrets suddenly seemed insignificant. In the face of what was happening…the horror of our flight slowly being consumed one by one…Who cared? Who cared if they found out my secrets?

  Hurl was dead.

  I checked the clock. 0545. I found the restroom, where I cleansed. I went back to my little room and dressed, then walked out to the hospital’s front desk. A nurse looked me over, then handed me a red ticket.

  Medical leave for loss recovery. Orders: one week. It was imprinted with my name, stamped and signed.

  “I can’t,” I said. “The admiral will kick me out of—”

  “Your entire flight has been given mandatory medical leave,” the woman said. “On orders from Dr. Thior, head of medical. You won’t be kicked out of anything, cadet. You need a rest.”

  I stared at the ticket.

  “Go home,” the woman said. “Spend a week with your family and recover. Stars above…they push you cadets too hard.”

  I stood there for a moment before I turned and walked out, dully meandering toward the training building. I took the roundabout way, past our Pocos. Four in a line. Arturo’s ship was off to the side in a little maintenance hangar, with pieces scattered along the ground.

  Go home. Where? To live in my cave? Back down to my mother, whose disapproval of the DDF might finally make me lose the rest of my nerve?

  I crumpled the leave ticket in my pocket and walked to our classroom, where I sat down in my seat alone. I really just wanted to think, to talk to Cobb, to sort through all of this. Hurl had said…brave to the end. And she had been.

  Scud. Hurl was gone. In Gran-Gran’s stories they held feasts in honor of the fallen. But I didn’t want to feast. I wanted to crawl somewhere dark and curl up.

  Strangely, as class time approached, the door creaked open and the others—except for Jorgen—arrived in a solemn, quiet group. Hadn’t the nurse said we all had leave? Perhaps they, like me, didn’t want to accept it.

  Kimmalyn stopped by my seat and gave me a hug. I didn’t want a hug, but I took it. I needed it.

  Even Jorgen arrived about ten minutes after class normally began. “I thought I might find you all here,” he said.

  I braced myself for him to tell us to go. For him to toe the official line and tell us class was canceled because we were on forced leave.

  Instead he inspected us, then nodded in an approving way. “Skyward Flight, line up,” he said in a soft voice. He hadn’t tried that since the first day, when we’d ignored him. Today though, it felt right. We four got up and stood in a row.

  Jorgen walked to the classroom intercom and pushed one of the buttons. “Jax, will you send to Captain Cobb and tell him his flight is waiting for him, in their usual room? Thank you.”

  Jorgen then walked over and joined us in line. Together, we waited. Fifteen after. Twenty after. It was 0729 before Cobb slammed open the door and limped in.

  We snapped to attention and saluted.

  He looked at us, then roared, “SIT DOWN!”

  I started. That wasn’t what I had expected. Still, along with the others, I jumped to obey.

  “If you are in an uncontrolled descent,” he shouted at us, his face coloring, “then you eject! You hear me! You scudding EJECT!”

  He was angry. Like, actually angry. He pretended to be angry sometimes, but it was nothing like this: red-faced, spitting as he shouted.

  “How many times did I say this?” he said. “How many times did I give you orders? And still you buy into that nonsense?” He waved his hand out the window, toward the large DDF high command building. “The only reason we have this stupid culture of self-martyrdom is because somebody feels they have to justify our casualties. To make them seem honorable, righteous.

  “It’s neither one. And you’re fools for listening to them. Don’t you throw your lives away. Don’t you dare be like that idiot yesterday. Don’t you—”

  “Don’t call her an idiot,” I snapped. “She was trying to fly a controlled crash. She was trying to save her ship.”

  “She was scared of being called a coward!” Cobb bellowed. “It had nothing to do with the ship!”

  “Hurl—Hudiya—was a hero.” I glared at him.

  “She was a—”

  I stood up. “Simply because you want to justify your cowardice in ejecting doesn’t mean we have to do the same!”

  Cobb froze. Then he kind of…deflated. He sank down into the seat by his desk. He didn’t seem wise, or even grizzled. Just…old, tired, and sad.

  I immediately felt embarrassed. Cobb didn’t deserve that; he hadn’t done anything wrong in ejecting, and even the DDF didn’t blame him. And Hurl, well, I’d told her to eject. I’d practically begged her to.

  But she hadn’t. And we had to respect her choice, didn’t we?

  “You’re all on medical leave for a week,” Cobb said. “Dr. Thior has been pushing to give more leave to flights once they lose members, and it looks like she’s started to get her way.” He stood up and stared right at me. “I hope you enjoy being a hero when your corpse is rotting like your friend’s, alone in a wasteland, forgotten and ignored.”

  “She’ll be given a pilot’s burial,” I said. “Her name will be sung for generations.”

  He snorted. “If they had to sing the name of every fool cadet who died on her way to pilot, we’d never have time for anything else. And Hurl’s corpse isn’t going to be recovered for at least several weeks. The scouts confirmed that the crash destroyed her ship’s acclivity ring beyond recovery. There’s nothing on that Poco worth salvage priority, not considering that big wreck we’re still working on.

  “So your heroic friend will be left out there—another dead pilot buried by the slag of her own explosion. Scud. I have to go write a letter to her parents and explain why. I can’t trust what Ivans will say.”

  He hobbled toward the door, but stopped and turned toward Kimmalyn. I hadn’t noticed that she’d stood up. She saluted him, eyes teary. Then she dropped something on her seat.

  Her cadet’s pin.

  Cobb nodded. “Keep the pin, Quirk,” he told her. “You’re dismissed with whatever honors matter to you.”

  He turned and left.

  Dismissed? Dismissed? “He can’t do that to you!” I demanded, turning toward Kimmalyn.

  She wilted. “I asked for it after the battle. He told me to think about it overnight. And I did.”

  “But…you can’t…”

  Jorgen stepped up beside me, confronting Kimmalyn. “Spin is right, Quirk. You’re an important member of this flight.”

  “The weakest member,” Kimmalyn said. “How many times has one of you had to pull out of a fight to come and save me? I’m putting you all in danger.” Contrary to what Cobb had said, she left her pin on her seat as she walked toward the door.

  “Kimmalyn,” I said, feeling helpless. I rushed after her a
nd took her hand. “Please.”

  “I got her killed, Spin,” she whispered. “You know that as well as I do.”

  “She got herself killed.”

  “The one shot that mattered. That’s the one I missed.”

  “There were two ships chasing her. One shot, even if it had hit, might not have been enough.”

  She smiled, squeezed my hand, then left.

  I felt my world collapsing. First Hurl, now Kimmalyn. I looked toward Jorgen. Surely he could stop this. Couldn’t he?

  He stood stiffly, tall, with that too-handsome face. He stared straight ahead, and I thought I could see something in his eyes. Guilt? Pain?

  He’s watching his flight break apart around him too.

  I had to do something. Make some kind of sense out of this disaster, and of my pain. But no, I couldn’t—wouldn’t—stop Kimmalyn. At least…at least she’d be safe this way.

  Hurl though…

  “Arturo,” I said, picking up my pack, “about how far out was that battle, would you say?”

  “Pretty close to our original position, beyond the AA guns. Say, eighty klicks.”

  I shouldered my pack. “Great. I’ll see you all in a week.”

  “Where are you going?” FM asked.

  “I’m going to find Hurl,” I said, “and give her a pilot’s burial.”

  I trudged across the dry, dusty ground. My compass kept me on the right heading, which was important, because everything looked the same out here on the surface.

  I tried not to think. Thinking was dangerous. I’d barely known Bim and Morningtide, and their deaths had left me shaken for weeks. Hurl had been my wingmate.

  It was more though. She’d been like me. At least, like I pretended to be. She was usually one step ahead of me, leading the charge.

  In her death, I saw myself.