Author's note: The following chapter was written in collaboration with my friend Firebrand. We hope you enjoy it!
The voice that echoed over the radio was an older man's— smooth, aristocratic, tinged with the barest undertone of a sharp-tongued accent. Wherever he came from, it wasn't the old drawl IRIS remembered from the Federation's core states… but, somehow, it was still familiar. "Ground, this is Sunburst One. My sincere apologies for the delay; we'll have this cleaned up in but a moment."
"Bluejay, you said five contacts. What are we looking at?" The tension in the Major's voice was palpable.
"Five contacts, irregular formation. Lead plane is… Shit, I actually don't know what that is. Tag as UNKNOWN until visual ID." The AWACS sighed. "The wingmen are Sk.37s."
"Unknown?" Zip gulped. "I don't like the sound of that."
"Yeah," Jackal quipped. "Not when Icarus Armories is involved."
The AWACS started to freak out. "Spike in EM signature from the lead plane! Shit, Polaris 1, evade! Polaris, break! Break!"
"Breaking!" The lead plane of Polaris, a woodland-toned Sk.27, scattered, and the other planes scattered to the wind.
The enemy aircraft weren't even visible yet. All there was was the distant impression that Bluejay was—for once in his life, perhaps—telling the truth, that that high rise of panic broke through his carefree mien to expose what lay beneath.
Not a moment later, thunder split the sky.
The explosive crack of a railgun's hypersonic projectile ripped the air apart where BASH's plane had once been; had their AWACS not detected the incoming round, it might have torn apart two of Polaris in a single trigger-pull. The electromagnetic radiation it left behind sizzled across the radio in the form of intrusive static, fading reluctantly like the orange-hued plasma trail the round left in the sky; it seemed that the clouds themselves were bleeding as the trail diffused, a knife-scar cut into the firmament from some distant foe little more than a circle and an UNKNOWN on the HUD.
The wrath of a god who, in this moment, seemed very far away.
The radio crackled again… but, this time, not on the intercepted channel. Whoever was addressing them did so by wide-band broadcast.
"Citizens of Cascadia. Ask yourselves: Shall you sacrifice yourself for the protection of traitors and cutthroats, and throw yourselves upon our blades for the sake of protecting the dogs you have brought to your high table? Upon my word, I will allow you to withdraw without reprisal if you leave now."
"You have until my count of twenty to turn your bearing to one-four-zero and exit the combat airspace. I am not responsible for your lives beyond then."
Bluejay sighed. "You know we can't do that, Polaris. Whatever Icarus is up to has to be stopped. JC's orders… Polaris, you're the rearguard. Cygnus Squadron— RTB. Polaris Squadron, engage."
"What about Dagger?" BASH asked over the radio. "Her plane took a hit, she's a sitting duck against planes that nimble!"
Bluejay shook his head. "Shit. Polaris 4, go with Cygnus. RTB."
"We're down to man on man," Zip said. "I don't like our odds."
IRIS steeled herself. She knew the voice over the radio. It had to have been two years ago, at that training exercise in Magadan.
What would Zmei do? What would Brian do?
They'd fight.
"We don't have to like our odds," IRIS said, "we just have to take them."
"You're goddamn crazy," Burn said. "You saw that fuckin' thing. Is that a railgun on a fighter jet? I thought they needed an airship's power supply!"
"... Nineteen…"
"...Twenty."
"I think our offer of hospitality just expired," Bluejay said. "Polaris, cut the chatter and engage. Man to man. I've seen you all fight. Spook, you got the lead plane—"
Inspiring words were interrupted by action. Indeed, the man on the radio was true to his word—
Another railgun slug snapped through the formation a beat later, yet targeting none of them.
He was not responsible for any of their lives.
Any.
That included the planes trying to run from a weapon with a range measured in kilometers.
In the distance, one of the fleeing planes erupted in a blossom of igniting fuel, fuselage splintering around fuel tanks ignited by ambient heat—a rose, caught in full bloom and snuffed out the moment it had been seen.
"Shit!" Bluejay shouted. "Cygnus 8, lost from radar! Get outta there, Cygnus, full burners!"
"A dog cannot outrun a huntsman's rifle," the Federation pilot explained patiently—as if, before him, they were but children to be calmly guided onto the correct path. This was merely the application of corporal punishment, a reassertion of discipline upon those who sought to free themselves from a distant parent who still knew better than them. Somehow, the condescension grated almost as loudly as the missile warnings. "You are no different."
"Okay. The lead's escorts are breaking off for you, Polaris. Closing WVR. Polaris 6, engage the lead. Everyone else find an escort and stick to 'em like glue."
IRIS' missile warning alarm was eerily silent as she gunned for the leader. She watched as the missiles bobbed and weaved for her comrades, spewing flares and chaff as they went defensive, yet found herself practically unengaged.
"Polaris 6, evade! EM spike!" Sweat rolled down Bluejay's face.
"Evading!" She pulled back the stick as her insides pushed back against each other, watching as an orange beam of ionized air lanced over where her cockpit had been moments before. Lightning crackled around the plasma channel, hazel eyes widening from the blinding light.
"Polaris 6, I'm trying to figure out what's going on. I'll get back to you with a more complete analysis. That shot was slightly off-axis— the railgun isn't fixed forwards! Just get him to shoot again! Then I might be able to figure out how he's targeting that thing."
"You want me to get shot?" IRIS shouted over the radio.
"No, I want you to get shot at, not shot! There's a difference!" The AWACS slammed his fist into the console.
IRIS broke the silence on the Federation frequency. Well, I guess this might get him to shoot at me.
"Yo, gramps! You missed, asshole!" If I'm right, and this guy is who I think he is...
She was rewarded with silence, for a moment, the only sound in her ears the sound of her newfound squadron-mates fighting for their lives against the rest of the Federation squadron. One flashed by chasing Polaris 5, the Peacekeepers' characteristic emblem inverted in the emblem of a rising sun emblazoned on its high tail.
"Lieutenant Khoury! My, I knew I was hunting dogs today, but not a traitor bitch into the bargain. How have you been since Magadan?" She recoiled at his words.
His laugh—even, polite. Meant for a dinner party with an unwelcome acquaintance, not an aerial duel—was blocked off by the shrill scream of a missile alert as the unknown plane spun to the side, one of its engines cutting off as the uncontrolled thrust of the other whipped the splinter-camouflaged jet into a diving spiral. A heartbeat later, both engines flicked back on, their roar shaking the sky as the lead plane pulled out of its unstable, meteoric descent to drop in behind IRIS's tail.
"Do your new friends know whom they've thrown their lot in with? To think, you've reduced yourself to begging at Cascadia's feet for your life; is there any more Luciferian a bargain than selling the souls of your erstwhile comrades just for the chance to die here?
Fox two."
Yep. He's monologuing. As she dumped flares and evaded, pulling hard to shake the plane from her tail, she mused. Why did it have to be him?
"Long time no see, Major Desjardins." As her organs all returned to their proper resting place, the missile streaking by, she gathered the willpower to reply. "You always did have it out for me, didn't you?"
"Now, don't be absurd. You have nothing to do with it; your history, Lieutenant, does. Were that I were not proved right as to heredity predicting career—perhaps when I speak to dear Aleksandr once more, I'll assure him you died well, as any protege of his should."
The tut of his tongue clicking against the roof of his mouth sounded even over the radio, even over the muted tink of a single cannon round spalling off of IRIS's wing. It sounded with the force of memory, and of a lean man with dark hair being unable to hide an incredulous sneer even to her face two years ago.
"Earn that death."
"Spook, evade— hard EM spike, railgun's firing!"
IRIS pulled the stick hard. Uneasily, she eyed the module that was standard in almost every Peacekeeper's jet— a toggle switch on the throttle marked AoA.
She flicked it, and as she pulled the stick, her plane's fly-by-wire controls gave up trying to stop the plane from flying dangerously, and gave into its pilot's reckless desires. She carved the plane up and over his, an inverted pass giving her a good view of the plane as she turned to get weapons on the other fighter. "Bluejay, I've got a positive ID."
"Yeah, with the way you two're talking, I'd say so." Bluejay did his best to multitask.
"Not just the pilot, Bluejay, the plane. Airframe's a Chimera. Pilot callsign, unless he got a new one, is Apostle."
"Oooh, that's rare." He updated the pilots' HUD, and the proper identification flashed into place. "I think I got what I needed, by the way. The railgun's on a limited-traverse turret, and it's guided by laser designation from the wingmen."
"You did? So I can stop getting shot at now?" She grumbled.
"Sure can, but don't let Burn know I told you that." Bluejay chuckled. "Polaris, focus hard on the wingmen! Every one you kill makes the railgun less accurate!"
"How the hell are we supposed to kill them? They're almost killing us!" Jackal shouted over the radio.
"Then do your best to drag them out of the airspace!" Bluejay gripped the armrest, tense.
Nicole wasn't much in a chuckling mood. She pulled the plane in behind her former colleague, and the dogfighting missiles growled in her ears, waiting to be unleashed. This time, she happily obliged. "Leave my uncle out of this. This was my choice. Polaris 6, Fox 2!"
The man on the radio—Major Desjardins, Apostle, words that obfuscated the man beneath the mask instead of bringing him to light, had been drawing the fight progressively closer to the old refinery as they spoke. The way he flew was balletic, but no matter how strange it seemed to an outside observer, as calculated as anything he did… and where IRIS had been focusing on her own objectives, the two were suffused by not the orange light of a railgun's plasma channel, but by the cordium deposits of the Exclusion Zone.
"Then you're terribly limited, Lieutenant."
The Chimera tipped nose-down, banking off to the right and down—lowering their altitude once again from the heights Polaris had reached while dueling Morpho Squadron. The familiar trill of a missile homing closer continued to sound in IRIS's ear, even as the splinter-camouflaged prototype seemed on a direct collision course for the bubbling magma churned up by the area's geothermal activity…
… And its pilot pulled that same caution-striped trigger that the ex-Peacekeeper had, veering out of the way so close to a cliff that the Chimera's jet wash sent the unstable ground calving into the lava sea. The heat-seeker, fooled by the thermal signature of the molten earth, was swallowed by the avalanche of scorched dirt and lost to sight, its detonation a cigarette's light next to the all-pervading glow of the Exclusion Zone. Clever bastard, she thought.
"Your mentor and I have our differences, but he is right about one thing. We are not simply fighting for the preservation of Federation hegemony. We are fighting for order alone, here and across the entire world—to that, much like your skill or your prattle, Cascadia is irrelevant. It is the example that defections like yours and the betrayal of Cascadia as a nation set that threaten world stability."
"Before the year is out, millions will die across the globe if you and yours get your way. Civil wars. 'Police actions'. Proxy conflicts. Mercenaries growing rich like fattened pigs off of the leavings of your generous benefactors… the likes of which you should be no stranger to."
"Take the bullet they no doubt offered you, Lieutenant. It will be better than living to see what you have wrought."
"You always did have a way with words," she danced with the Chimera, the two planes pulling against each other across the backdrop of rock and flame. "But how many lines are you willing to cross for order? You can say whatever you want about my family, about my history… but at least I have principles!" She shouted into the radio. "They ordered us to bomb a hospital. In downtown Prospero. Because they thought the CIF was there." She squeezed a burst of her plane's gun off, tracer rounds streaking across his plane's nose. "That breaks everything I was ever taught, about the laws of war, about what's right and wrong. I won't fight for an order that kills innocent people."
"Oh, good girl, Lieutenant! You obeyed your moral principles." The prototype shifted on its axis, its broader wings practically riding the updraft thermals of the deposits below them. Where each unexpected gust of heat strained the F/E-18's airframe, sending the creaks of overstressed metal echoing along its length, the Chimera seemed at home within fire. As it should, if it was brought back from the brink of disuse here… but, then, what else might be hiding in the dust-fields that Cascadia forgot?
"Will you be there for the hospitals in West Africa? Kernuropa? The Federation Core? Your homeland, itself on the brink of civil war? Your convictions are worthless if you cannot protect everyone… and, most of all, are not willing to. Where do you draw the line between who is innocent and who is worthy of your disdain?"
One could almost imagine his smile over the radio, as the Chimera whipped around a refinery building, its rudder twisting hard right to catch an off-boresight missile lock through the chimneys.
Patrician. Thin-lipped. Disappointed.
"I told Aleksandr, when he wished to me back in Magadan that there was a better path for you, that this would never go well. Of all people, after all, was your uncle one famed for being able to discern who was innocent in Oceania? Of all people, were you intended to exercise discretion, a girl so incapable of operating without supervision she needed her callsign to point it out?"
"You were always destined for failure. Hold still, would you?"
The two were on opposite sides of the building, now, as the missile he fired was lost to sight over IRIS's wing—a once-factory crisscrossed with the silent spires of old chimneys and the silver webbing of catwalks, spaced in the middle with empty tanks that once would have held raw cordium being prepared for shipping and distribution. Two sides of a coin balancing on its edge.
It should have been impossible to hit her. Yet a bolt of thunder carved through the steel and brick and glass, splitting the building down the middle, and only narrowly missing her cockpit, the flash of light once again blinding. He's shooting through the building? She shook her head in disbelief, steadying her plane from the gust of air that the hypersonic slug left in its wake. Bluejay said it was on a turret, but damn!
"I said, leave my family out of this! This is between you and me, old man." She gripped the stick, sweat rolling down her face. "I can't protect everyone. Nobody can protect everyone. But I had the choice to pull the trigger and I didn't. You're telling me you would?"
They flew out from behind the building and she rolled to position herself above the Chimera, who… waggled its black-striped wings mockingly. Mourning stripes, added after Oceania, when someone had asked. A thought overheard two years ago.
"The Lieutenant never thought to read the definition of utilitarianism? Color me shocked.
Of course I would. Of course I have."
"...And of course you did, because you aren't in a cell right now."
"How did it feel watching those bombs fall, coward? You could not live with yourself, so you decided to try and cover up the stain on your conscience with the blood of others—the more we speak, the more I realize how pathetic you've become. I may spare Aleksandr the knowledge you survived at all."
The splinter-camouflaged plane's contrails curved up and over IRIS's F/E-18, twisting around in a corkscrew whose apparent elegance belied the aerodynamic forces that would have broken the back of a lesser jet.
No, she thought. He can't be.
He was diving straight at her, aiming to run IRIS straight into the cordium-tainted magma as she evaded. Fuck me, he is.
Instinctively, she pulled up, disabling the AoA limiter and pulling an impossibly tight turn that brought her face-to-face with a charging railgun. As she looked up, electricity crackled along the length of the barrel, a cyan glow lighting the inside of her cockpit. The shell kicked up magma into the sky below the two fighters as it struck the ground— if it could be called that— below.
Over the Federation channel, a woman's voice crackled, sharing the same well-practiced calm as her squadron leader. To a lay observer, it would seem as if neither had broken a sweat; to IRIS, one could hear the strain of a fight made unduly difficult.
"Apostle, Cascadian attackers have been either downed or escaped beyond effective intercept range. Do we continue engagement against their escorts?"
The Major's words began with a bitter sigh—that of a man whose entertainment had been stolen away from him all too swiftly. "Negative, Stiletto. Primary mission objective is accomplished to the extent it can be; overarching orders remain technology preservation. Turn to bearing oh-nine-six and leave the combat airspace. As was written, better the work of the righteous than the strivings of the sinner."
"Copy all, Apostle."
The wideband clicked on a moment later, as the Chimera shifted away at the last second from another near-suicidal joust; enough of those, perhaps, and IRIS would have been hit eventually. And even one hit… I better not think about that. Not while I'm over the lava.
"Citizens of Cascadia. Those who you have fought alongside have bathed themselves in the blood of their comrades once already, and made traitors of themselves to retreat from their sin. You have allowed wild beasts to sniff at your hands, and think yourself friends to them. When you are finally alone with the vultures in the ruin of your cities, know that no one will be there to stop them from tearing you apart as well."
"Take action whilst you still can."
The bright flare of twinned afterburners kicked on, drowning the F/E-18's cockpit in light, and the Chimera pulled away from its dance partner with the ease of a man's dying breath.
IRIS saw her opportunity, and followed his advice, taking action where she still could. She squeezed her flight stick's trigger, a hail of twenty-millimeter shells pouring from her Hornet's nose. They pinged off the Chimera's right stabilizer, shredding the ruddervator's mourning stripe and punching a hole in the squadron emblem.
The plane ahead of her banked, spiraling wildly for a split second before regaining control— the control, the composure, that its pilot was so renowned for.
"Always the cheap shot. I'd tell you to go to hell, Lieutenant, if you weren't already there." A moment of weariness… and then nothing but static, mocking in its hissing white noise, likely a pre-prepared code switch by Sunburst's own AWACS.
Soon, he would be gone without another word— and IRIS was left alone with her own thoughts, and whatever was left of the Cascadians.