“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.
PART THREE
INTERLUDE
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.