Skyward

by Brandon Sanderson

  “Yes, sir.”

  I still couldn’t help watching the fight for the lifebuster. If it blew, we’d have to be ready to overburn away before its sequence of explosions completed. So I was relieved when eventually, the lifebuster and its escort pulled up into the sky, retreating. The aces gave token chase, but eventually let the bomb escape back up where it had come from. I smiled.

  “Mayday!” a voice called on the general line. “This is Bog. Shields down. Wingmate down. Please. Someone!”

  “55.5-699-4000!” FM said, and I looked toward the coordinates, spotting a beleaguered Poco trailing smoke and fleeing outward, away from the main battlefield. Four Krell followed. The best way to get yourself killed was to let them isolate you, but Bog clearly didn’t have a choice.

  “Skyward Flight here, Bog,” Jorgen said, taking point. “We have you. Hold on and try to bear left.”

  We stormed after him and fired at will on Jorgen’s order. Our hailstorm of destructor fire didn’t bring down any enemy ships, but it made most of them scatter. Three went left—which would cut Bog off. Jorgen turned after those, and FM followed him.

  “There’s still one on his tail,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

  “All right,” Jorgen said with a moment’s pause. He obviously hated splitting the flight.

  I fell in after the ship. Straight ahead, Bog was going through increasingly crazy maneuvers—reckless ones—to avoid being hit.

  “Shoot it!” he screamed. “Please shoot it. Just shoot it!”

  Desperation, frantic worry—things I hadn’t expected of a full pilot. Of course, he looked young. Though it should have occurred to me earlier, I realized he’d probably graduated in one of the classes right before mine. Six months, maybe a year, as a pilot—but still an eighteen-year-old boy.

  I picked up two tails that concentrated fire on me. Scud. Bog had led our chase so far out, it was going to be hard to pick up support. I didn’t dare IMP, not with destructors flashing around me—but that Krell ahead of me still had a shield up.

  I gritted my teeth, then hit my overburn. G-forces pressed me back in my seat, and I got closer to the Krell, sticking to its tail, barely able to dodge. I’d hit Mag-3, and at this speed, flight maneuvers were going to be difficult to control.

  Just a second longer…

  I got in close and speared the Krell ship with my light-lance. Then I turned, pulling the Krell ship out of line with Bog.

  The cockpit trembled around me as my captive Krell cut in the other direction, fighting me, sending us both into a frantic out-of-control spin.

  My tails turned and concentrated fire on me. They didn’t care if they hit the ship I had lanced; Krell never cared about that.

  A storm of fire swallowed me, hitting my shield and drilling it down. The Krell ship I’d speared exploded under fire from its allies, and I was forced to pull into a sharp climb on full overburn to try to get away.

  That was a risky move. My GravCaps cut out, and the g-force hit like a kick to the face. It pulled me downward, forced the blood into my feet. My flight suit inflated, pushing against my skin, and I did my breathing exercises as trained.

  My vision still blackened at the edges.

  Flashing lights on my console.

  My shield was down.

  I cut my acclivity ring, spun on my axis, then overburned right back downward. The GravCaps managed to absorb some of the whiplash, but a human body simply wasn’t meant to handle that kind of reversal. I felt sick, and almost threw up as I passed through the middle of the Krell.

  My hands were trembling on the controls, my vision growing red this time. Most of the Krell didn’t respond in time, but one of them—one ship—managed to spin on its own axis as I had.

  It focused on me, then fired.

  A flash on my wing; an explosion.

  I’d been hit.

  Beeps screamed at me from my console. Lights flashed. My control sphere suddenly didn’t seem to do anything, going slack as I tried to maneuver.

  The cockpit rocked, and the world rotated as my ship started spiraling out of control.

  “Spin!” I somehow heard Jorgen’s shout over the chaos of the beeping.

  “Eject, Spin! You’re going down!”

  Eject.

  You weren’t supposed to be able to think during moments like these. It was all supposed to happen in a flash. And yet, that second seemed frozen to me.

  My hand, hovering as it reached for the eject lever between my legs.

  The world a spinning blur. My wing, gone. My ship on fire, my acclivity ring unresponsive.

  A moment frozen between life and death.

  And Hurl, in the back of my head. Brave to the end. Not cowards. A pact.

  I would not eject. I could steer this ship down! I was NO COWARD! I was not afraid to die.

  And what will it do to them, something else within me asked, if you do? What would it do to my flight to lose me? What would it do to Cobb, to my mother?

  Screaming, I grabbed the eject lever and yanked hard. My canopy exploded off, and my seat blasted out into the sky.

  * * *

  —

  I woke to silence.

  And…wind, brushing against my face. My seat lay on the dusty ground and I faced the sky. The parachute flapped behind me; I could hear the wind playing with it.

  I had blacked out.

  I lay there, staring upward. Red streaks in the distance. Explosions. Blossoms of orange light. Just faint pops, from this far down.

  I shifted to the side. What was left of my Poco burned in the near distance, destroyed.

  My future, my life, burned away with it. I lay there until the battle ended, the Krell retreating. Jorgen did a flyby to check if I was all right, and I waved to him to allay his worry.

  By the time a rescue transport came for me—lowering silently on its acclivity ring—I had unbuckled. My radio and my canteen had survived the ejection attached to my seat; I had used one to call in and drank from the other. A medic had me sit on a seat in the transport, then inspected me while a member of the Survey Corps walked out and looked over the wreckage of my Poco.

  The salvage woman eventually walked back, holding a clipboard.

  “Well?” I asked softly.

  “In-seat GravCaps kept you from smashing your own spine,” the medic said. “You seem to have only minimal whiplash, unless there’s a pain you’re not telling me about.”

  “I didn’t mean me.” I looked at the salvage woman, then over at my Poco.

  “The acclivity ring is destroyed,” she said. “Not much to salvage.”

  That was what I’d been afraid of. I strapped into the transport’s seat, then looked out the window as it took off. I watched the burning light of my Poco’s fire fade, then vanish.

  At last we landed at Alta, and I climbed out of the vehicle, stiff, body aching. I limped across the tarmac. Somehow I knew—before I even saw her face—that one of the figures standing in the darkness beside the landing site would be Admiral Ironsides.

  Of course she had come. She finally had a real excuse to kick me out. And could I blame her, now that I knew what I did?

  I stopped in front of her and saluted. She, remarkably, saluted me back. Then she unpinned my cadet’s pin from my uniform.

  I didn’t cry. Honestly, I was too tired, and my head hurt too much.

  Ironsides turned the pin over in her fingers.

  “Sir?” I said.

  She handed my pin back. “Cadet Spensa Nightshade, you are dismissed from flight school. By tradition, as a cadet who was shot down soon before graduation, you’ll be added to the list of possible pilots to call up should we have extra ships.”

  Those “possible pilots” could be summoned by the admiral’s order only. It would never happen to me.

  “You
can keep your pin,” Ironsides added. “Wear it with pride, but return your other gear to the quartermaster by twelve hundred tomorrow.” Then without another word, she turned and left.

  I held a second salute until she was out of sight, pin gripped in the fingers of my other hand. It was over. I was done.

  Skyward Flight would graduate only two members after all.

  That is one problem handled, thought Judy “Ironsides” Ivans as she walked away from the launchpad. Rikolfr, her aide-de-camp, hurried along beside her, holding his ever-present clipboard full of things Judy needed to do.

  At the door to her command building, she looked over her shoulder. Chaser’s daughter—the defect—held her salute, then pressed her cadet’s pin against her chest.

  Judy felt a small spike of guilt, then pushed her way into Flight Command. I’ve fought that fight, she thought, and bear the battle scars. The last time she’d ignored the defect, she’d been forced to watch a friend go crazy and kill his flightmates.

  This was a good outcome. The girl would get some honor, as she was due for her passion. And Judy now had some data about the brains of people with the defect. She had to give credit to Cobb’s scheme for that—if he hadn’t forced her to let the child into the DDF, Judy would never have had that opportunity.

  Now, fortunately, she had a solid, traditional reason for never putting Chaser’s daughter in a fighter again. And she could watch each new cadet for signs of the defect. This was actually an ideal outcome in every possible way.

  If only other problems could be dealt with so easily. Judy approached a small conference room, then stopped, looking at Rikolfr. “Are they here?”

  “NAL Weight is in attendance,” Rikolfr said. “As are NALs Mendez and Ukrit.”

  That was three National Assembly Leaders. Normally, they sent underlings to these post-battle briefings, but Judy had been expecting a larger confrontation for some time. She would need something to give them. A plan. “Have the radio technicians confirmed the existence of that shipyard the scouts spotted tonight?”

  Rikolfr handed her a sheet of paper. “It’s too far for traditional scanners, but we’ve been able to send up a science ship to investigate, from a safe distance. The shipyard is there, and the scientists are optimistic. If it’s like the other one—and if we can protect it from the Krell—we could recover hundreds of acclivity rings.”

  She nodded, reading the statistics.

  “The orbit is decaying rapidly, sir,” Rikolfr noted. “The old shipyard seems to be suffering a severe power failure. Scientists guess the proximity guns will stop firing in a couple of days, right about the time it drops into the atmosphere. The Krell will undoubtedly try to get in and destroy it.”

  “Then we’ll have to prevent that,” Judy said. “Anything else I need to know?”

  “This many assembly leaders? It smells of an ambush, sir. Be prepared.”

  She nodded, put on her political face, and strode into the small room, Rikolfr following. A collection of the most powerful people in the lower caverns waited for her, each of them wearing a military dress uniform and pins indicating their merits.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “I’m pleased to see you taking a direct interest in—”

  “Dispense with the platitudes, Ironsides,” said Algernon Weight—young Jorgen’s father. The stiff, greying man sat at the head of the conference table, opposite Judy. “You lost more ships tonight.”

  “We have successfully scared away a lifebuster, scoring a great victory over—”

  “You’re driving the DDF into the ground,” Weight said.

  “During your tenure,” Ukrit added, “our reserve of ships has fallen to historic lows. I hear that broken fighters are just sitting in hangars, lacking parts for repair.”

  “Your pilot casualty rates are terrible,” Valda Mendez said. She was a petite woman with tan skin. Ironsides had flown with her, once upon a time. “We want to know what your plan is for ending the DDF’s spiral of failure.”

  It would help, Judy thought, if you would stop taking our best pilots away. Valda herself seemed completely unashamed of stealing her son from the DDF to keep him out of battle.

  But Judy couldn’t say that. She couldn’t explain how desperate the DDF was, now that the better admirals and commanders were dead. She couldn’t explain how she’d foreseen this years ago, and no amount of scraping and scrambling had been able to prevent the descent. She couldn’t explain that her people were overworked, and that their morale was crumbling beneath so many losses and pilot casualties.

  She couldn’t say any of that because, although it was true, it was no excuse. Her job was to offer a solution. A miracle.

  She held up one of the sheets Rikolfr had given her. “Lanchester’s Law,” she said. “Do you know it?”

  “Equal armies of soldiers with equal skill will impose equivalent casualties upon each other,” Weight said. “But the larger the imbalance in troops, the more disproportionate the casualties. Essentially, the more you outnumber your enemy, the less damage you can expect each of their soldiers to impose.”

  “The bigger your numerical odds,” Valda said, “the fewer people you lose.”

  Judy handed the page to the group. “This,” she said, “is a scout report—with initial scientific analysis—of a large piece of salvage that should crash down in two days. The Krell never field more than a hundred ships at once—but if we can salvage this shipyard, we can top that.”

  “Hundreds of potential acclivity rings,” Valda said, reading the report. “You think you can do it? Salvage this?”

  “I think we have no other choice,” Judy said. “Until we can field more ships than the Krell, we’ll be fighting a losing battle. If we can stop them from destroying that shipyard as it falls, it might be just what we need.”

  “The report says it will crash down on graduation day,” Ukrit said with a grunt. “Looks like it will be a short ceremony.”

  “Let’s be clear,” Weight said. “Ivans, what are you proposing?”

  “We must capture this piece of salvage,” Judy said. “We have to be ready to throw everything we have at protecting it. As soon as its orbit starts to degrade, and its proximity guns run out of power, we have to destroy every Krell ship that tries to get close to it.”

  “Bold,” Ukrit said.

  “They won’t let that salvage go easily,” Rikolfr said, looking toward the others. “If they don’t retreat, we won’t be able to either. We could end up engaged in a battle where our every ship is committed. If we lose, it will leave us devastated.”

  “It will be a second Battle of Alta,” Weight said softly. “All or nothing.”

  “I fought in the Battle of Alta,” Ironsides said. “And I know the risks involved in such an engagement. But frankly, we’re out of options. Either we try this, or we waste away. Can I count on your support for this proposal?”

  One at a time, the assembly leaders nodded. They knew as well as she did. The time to make a stand was when you were still strong enough to possibly win.

  Just like that, they were committed.

  Stars help us all, Judy thought.

  I attended the graduation.

  I stood in the audience with everyone else, on the parade ground beside the statue park inside Alta Base.

  On a wooden stage, Ironsides pinned each of the eight graduates with the symbol of their success. I hung near the back of the small crowd, among a few other people wearing cadet’s pins. People who had washed out, like me. Though we couldn’t fly, our pins would get us access to the elevators whenever we wanted, and we were invited to functions like this. I’d gotten a form letter from Ironsides.

  My emotions were complicated as I watched Jorgen and FM, in turn, accept their pins. I was certainly proud of them. And deeply envious, while somewhat ashamedly relieved at the same time. I didn�
��t know if I could be trusted to be up on that stand. This solved the problem. I didn’t have to decide.

  Deep in my heart though, my world was crumbling. To never fly again? Could I live knowing that?

  Jorgen and FM saluted with gloved hands while wearing new, crisp white uniforms. I clapped with the rest of the crowd for the eight graduates, but I couldn’t help thinking that we’d lost at least three times that many ships in the last four months. Not so long ago, a good pilot in the DDF could fly for five years, rack up a couple dozen kills, and retire to fly cargo. But casualties were getting worse and worse, and fewer and fewer pilots lasted five years.

  The Krell were winning. Slowly but surely.

  Ironsides stepped up to speak. “Normally, you’d expect a bad speech from me right now. It’s practically tradition. But we have an operation today of some importance, so I’m going to leave it at a few words. These behind me represent our best. They are our pride, the symbol of our Defiance. We will not hide. We will not back down. We will reclaim our homeland in the stars, and it starts today.”

  More applause, though I gathered—from conversations around me—that such a brief speech was odd. As some refreshments were set up on tables to our right, the admiral and her command staff walked away without mingling. More strangely, the newly commissioned pilots followed her.

  I craned my neck, and saw a flight of fighters shoot up into the air from a nearby launchpad. Was there an incursion happening? Did they really need all the graduates? After spending the last few days down with my mother and Gran-Gran, I had been looking forward to seeing Jorgen and FM again.

  Booms sounded in the distance as the fighters got a safe distance from the base, then hit overburn and accelerated past the sound barrier. A nearby man noted that the important assembly leaders—including those who had children in the graduating class—weren’t in attendance at the graduation. Something was happening.

  I took a step toward the launchpads, then shoved my hands in my jumpsuit pockets. I turned to go, but stopped. Cobb was standing there, holding a cane with a golden top. That was odd; I didn’t think I’d ever seen him carry one of those.