Starchild
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters... or Tear Ring Saga and any of its characters.
Chapter Eleven: The Little Prince
It was good to fly again with her brother, Eirika thought, as she and Ephraim shot above the white sands in their TR-27. The sleek little two-seater training jet could fly faster than sound, and that was how Ephraim liked to fly her on their "commutes" around Magvel. Out the window to the left Eirika could see another jet keeping pace with them, the one carrying Pilots 001 and 014.
At that speed, at that altitude, it would be impossible to survive if any of them had to eject for any reason. The parachutes would never have time to open. Eirika wondered for a moment at the needless risk of the speed and grace they took for granted, but then slipped back into a feeling of comfort. Her brother's hands were on the controls- this was, after all, how she'd learned to fly.
-x-
Eirika had never trained alongside a back-up crew before; at the time of the Gemstone mission, she had the understanding that, if she or Ephraim were ill or injured and couldn't go into space, any of the veteran pilots would simply be rotated into the assignment. But the Peace mission, with its two separate spacecraft and three crew members, was too complex for such basic contingency plans. Ephraim with his crewmates Celice and Micaiah trained alongside the "prime" crew. So, when Eirika and Marth went to the laboratory in Serafew where the rock-collecting tools to be used on the moon were developed, Ephraim and Micaiah accompanied them. Flight rules stated that a "prime" pilot could not fly with his or her direct backup, though, so that allowed Eirika to spend some time in the air with her brother. Marth didn't complain about having to fly with Micaiah... and if he had, Eirika might have made the argument that prime crew members shouldn't be in the same jet, either.
Ephraim lost the race back to Star City's landing strip. His jet's electrical system sputtered, with all the cockpit lights going black when they were only ten minutes away from their destination. Eirika didn't panic; after watching Ephraim handle the Gemstone re-entry, she felt she could trust him to deal with anything short of engine flameout. But Ephraim had a few hard words for their jet once he had them safely on the ground.
"They should sell this piece of junk to the Lieberian air force!"
"We had a requisition in for ten new TR-27As," observed Marth. Neither he nor Micaiah had offered congratulations to Ephraim on a safe landing- it wouldn't have been taken well if they had. They were all supposed to be better than that. "Chief Designer S had it cancelled, saying the money was better spent on the Air Force."
"Why would he do that?" Ephraim batted his tousled hair out of his eyes in frustration. "We are part of the Air Force."
"If missiles aren't involved, S isn't interested. You know how the saying goes- 'G works for Sephiran, A works on nonsense, and S works for us.'"
"Us," in this case, being the part of the UFN's military that was focused entirely on offensive strategies against the Lopts and their allies. Of the three Chief Designers, the shadowy geniuses who were purported to be the brains behind Magvel's technological prowess, S specialized in ballistic missiles. G, the Chief Designer behind the Human Spaceflight Programme, had other priorities when it came to launching rockets, a vision of sending humans to the moon and beyond instead of sending nuclear warheads into the heart of the Loptos Empire.
"If G works for Sephiran, maybe he should ask the premier to get us some new trainer jets," retorted Ephraim.
Arguments over the Chief Designers and their priorities lasted the entire journey back to the pilot dormitory. On arrival, Eirika and Micaiah bolted from their respective commanders and obtained themselves some dinner from the cafeteria. They took their trays back to dormitory's common room, where a delightfully familial scene was in progress. Lyn and Eliwood were playing a round of table tennis, the television chattered in the background, and Alm and Cellica had turned one corner of the room into a play area for their daughter. Eirika stepped around some toys belonging to Anteze Rima-Rudolf as she carried her tray to the couch; it was reassuring to see the world's first "space baby" had blocks and a stuffed rabbit to play with instead of little rockets or miniature spacemen.
"...the Minister for Education denounced the wild tales as the work of foreign journalists hostile to the core values of the Free Nations."
Eirika looked up at the television screen; on it, a woman with long green hair was speaking in Elibean; subtitles proclaimed that the Minister was defending the experiments on human sleep as "beneficial to the people" and vehemently denying that any subjects had participated against their will.
"What's this?" she asked Leaf, who was staring at the screen; tension showed in the set of his jaw.
"The foreign press is reporting that the University of Aqu'lea did bizarre experiments on Air Force cadets, freezing them for decades..."
"Turn it off, Leaf," Eliwood called from his end of the tennis table.
But the image on the television had already changed to the familiar sight of a rocket launch.
"The Ministry of Defense reports the successful launch of a new satellite from the spaceport in Jehanna. This satellite, bound for Mars, will be the first ever to orbit and photograph the Red Planet..."
The rocket's trail of fire was replaced by an image of Premier Sephiran. The premier's voice always disconcerted Eirika, as it seemed to belong to a man far older than Sephiran's dark hair and unlined face would indicate. Now, the premier spoke of the new milestone that this mission represented for the UFN, of how the brilliance of Chief Designer A would result in another "first" for the free peoples of Terra.
"There he goes," said Ike, with surprisingly little love for his fellow Tellian exile. "Always covering the Chief Designers in praise but never with anything to say about the men and women who actually put these machines together."
Leaf's brow wrinkled at this; his expressions often mirrored, in some curious way, the wary look of his father-in-law Finn.
"Has anyone actually seen the Chief Designers? Are they men at all, or some kind of committee?"
"They're men." This came from Alm, who had been on the carpet playing with Anteze. He stood now and looked over the junior pilots. Alm smiled easily and often, but that smile was nowhere to be seen in that moment. "You people doubt the Chief Designers? Am I hearing that right?"
"We don't even know their names," Leaf protested, though it was a weak protest- he was already looking at the ground.
"It's classified," murmured Cellica. "If anyone knew the identities of the Chief Designers, they could be targeted..."
"Have you ever seen them?" asked Ike. He wasn't being rude, exactly, but the senior pilots weren't accustomed to such forthright questions.
"Sure," replied Alm. "They attended the launches for Starlight and Nova. All three of them were there."
"Starlight and Nova, huh?" Again, Ike didn't sound doubtful, but neither did he sound entirely satisfied by the answer. "Have they attended any other launches?"
"I- I don't know. I wasn't at most of them."
"So what did they look like?" This came from Lyn; she and Eliwood had left off their game to listen in on the conversation.
"I can't tell you that." Alm shot a look of appeal at his wife.
"What exactly do they do?" Now Hector plunged into the conversation.
Eirika had the sense of something slipping, of the crack between the original pilots and their successors opening like a fissure in the ground at a fault line. She could see her fears mirrored in Alm's unsmiling face, in the way Cellica gazed at her husband. Neither of them seemed to know what to do about the barrage of questions from the junior pilots.
"All the engineers- Finn, Innes, Merric, and the rest- report to one of the Chief Designers," Cellica said quickly. "That's it. There's no mystery about it; they're the supervisors of the engineers and all their projects."
"Finn might have seen them, then." Leaf was thinking aloud. "Maybe I'll ask him..."
"Leaf, he won't be able to tell you-"
"Blast it, Lyn!"
Even though it was obvious that Pilot 009 had deliberately aimed a ball at Hector to lighten the mood, it worked; the pilots returned to their prior activities of eating, watching television, and playing with the baby. But Eirika saw the look that Pilot 002 aimed at Pilot 003, the sort of look that said, in so many words, "What the hell is wrong with these kids?"
-x-
The Peace crew divided their tasks with regards to the hardware. Whereas the Falcon I and Falcon II capsules had been produced "to spec" with minimal input from the pilots, the Falcon III was being customized to an unprecedented extent. Roy took the lead on that, as the capsule was his "baby," and so he spent many hours dealing with Chief Engineer Innes at the Falcon factory in Frelia. The rest of it fell to Marth and Eirika, including the ever-problematic lunar lander… and some even more outlandish gear.
The two of them went together- without their backups- to the facility in Carcino where the lunar "rover" was being constructed; this flimsy solar-powered buggy would serve as their transportation on the lunar surface, allowing them to travel some distance from the landing site. As Eirika and Marth, in their puffy and ungainly spacesuits, tested the rover's seats, it was very hard to imagine how all of this would feel in one-sixth the gravity they felt upon Terra. Perhaps the rover would work, but right now Eirika imagined the rover collapsing under them, sending them both bouncing away in Luna's dust.
"Will we be belted in?"
No, they would not be. Belts would add extra weight, they might snag on things, the rover couldn't even go that fast—and besides, did Eirika expect to meet any oncoming traffic up there?
After they had suggested some more feasible modifications to the rover engineers, Eirika and Marth took the box lunches they'd been provided and went out to the pleasantly park-like factory campus for their meal. The trees were bare and the grass yellowed by frost, but the Carcinese breeze was mild for winter. It was also a relief to be out of the spacesuits; they were difficult enough to wear in zero-G (Eirika still had dreams about her spacewalk going wrong), but in a hot Terran factory, in Terran gravity, they were appalling.
Eirika noticed the gibbous Luna riding fairly high in the afternoon sky; it looked hardly more substantial than the cirrus clouds around it. To see it like this, a pale and wispy apparition... Eirika simply couldn't reconcile this Luna with the cratered globe she'd seen rushing beneath her on the Gemstone mission.
How did humans ever decide it was a ball of rock at all? It looks like it was painted on the sky...
"One of the most famous children's books in Renais is about a little boy who lives on another planet as its prince," she began, simply from the desire to share some portion of feeling with her commander. "The planet is so small that, when the sun sets, all he has to do is move his chair a little to see the sun set all over again. For years I wondered what it would be like to see the sun from a different world."
"That book's famous throughout Terra," Marth said after a moment. "My mother used to read it to me."
"Really?" It was the first personal detail she could ever remember hearing from him- directly, that is, not on television or in a magazine interview. And Eirika, emboldened by what seemed like an invitation to talk personally, asked Marth the wild question that had sprung up in her brain back when news of Starlight's success had burst upon the world. "When you were in orbit, did you think of yourself as the little prince?"
He'd been looking up at Luna, but now he slowly turned to stare at her. The breeze had blown his hair down into his eyes, which were brilliantly blue and completely unrevealing.
"I thought of myself as a test pilot."
Not hostile, not even short with her... just incredulous, Eirika thought. She looked down at the dusty tips of her boots, feeling foolish for asking a silly girl's silly question. Would she ever have asked Ephraim something like that? Of course not.
"Come on," he said, sounding as though the previous exchange had never even happened. "We have to fly home if we're to be there in time to see the movie tonight."
The way he said it, it sounded as though being in Star City for that month's Movie Night was a given, something as necessary as checking out the rover here in Carcino. And Eirika, who at first had quite enjoyed the privilege of private screenings of films- even foreign films!- now felt as though seeing another war movie or inspirational romance was quite a hollow amusement. Who needed movies when living day-to-day was so very strange?
She glanced up again at the painted moon on its backdrop sky and tried turn it into the Luna she knew- the bleak and terrible expanse of endless craters, the starless void in space.
To Be Continued...
Author's note:
The plot thickens with the addition of a trio of Chief Designers who may not have the best interests of the pilots in mind. Meanwhile, the pilot corps is fracturing; don't these kids have a leader or something?
Yes, the fictional Renaitian book is inspired by the The Little Prince by Saint-Exupéry. It has a bit of a space connection.
Oh, and Lieberia is on the same planet as the Fire Emblem continents, as it ought to be.