The scorched skies gave the dueling fighters a backdrop of blood and hope painted across the heavens, and IRIS kept her finger squarely on the trigger as she waited for him to make his move. 9M 5 hung across her vision, one shot short of an old West gunfighter's duel.
As if on cue, they dropped flares; anticipating the other would launch. He knew his student and she knew her teacher. When the launch didn't come, they had already strayed past the realm of the missile and into the old-fashioned world of the gunfighter as the two aces put their HUDs gun pippers on their targets. She fought the urge to say "Guns, guns, guns," knowing it would only tell him what she was doing. There were no friends in these skies, nor room for anything but demons and kings.
"If you kill me," he snarled over the radio. "Remember me when all you have is ashes."
Twenty millimeter fire clouded her vision, shook her cockpit, and roared in her ears. When it cleared, they had found themselves in a head-on pass too close to do anything but bank and fight desperately not to hit each other as the planes passed belly-to-belly, a tendency he did not seem to share. Does he even care about his own life? She searched for words but came up empty.
"Remember me when all your sorrows reign."
When you're up in the skies, her uncle had told her before the bombs dropped. You'll find your rhythm. You'll find your zone. When you do it'll feel like a trance. It'll beg you to let go. Listen to it.
"Remember me," he barked, "when you must wrest your freedom from the jaws of wild dogs."
The last bastions of sympathy for her former mentor had held out stubbornly, but that was then and this was now, and now it was oh so easy to just let go.
He was saying something until he wasn't, the flick of a radio knob all it took to leave her with only the sound of thunder and the roar of jets. She was detached; a spectator to herself, adrift on the breeze, as the grasping claws of instinct and training took control from the hands of her hesitating, conscious mind.
They turned to face each other as the separation grew, both watching the other's wings. Watching the pylons. Watching for the telltale smoke trail of a heat-seeking missile. She did not leave him waiting long. She watched herself pull the trigger as a Sidewinder slid off the rail under rocket power, beelining right for his plane.
He would have had some snarling commentary. She knew he would. She couldn't bring herself to hear it anymore. In place of it, his answer was a salvo of two missiles— a rebuttal and a rebuke. She watched her missile go up in flames early, and watched as the dot in her vision grew and grew, her hands already working on a counter of her own. They flew closer and closer to guns range, a heater of her own flying at the inbound missile.
She watched as her HUD projected the guns pipper, tracing its lead-indicator across the sky. The clap of thunder shook the world as her airframe shook under the stress of the gun. She wanted to scream but she was not in charge of her body. She had let go. It was trancelike, lucid, watching and feeling the world beyond her control. Feeling the airframe shake and shudder as twenty-millimeter rounds hit the aft. Hearing as alarms blared. LEFT ENGINE FIRE, it called. LEFT ENGINE FIRE. She pulled the extinguisher on instinct and cut the throttle.
She watched as she locked eyes with Zmei one last time, took one last look at Lieutenant Colonel Aleksandr Privalov's face, and would never forget how quickly it was gone, in a single clap of blood and thunder.
The two planes, back to back upright in the sky, peeled away from each other, the flames of hell trailing off them both as one of them fell.
She came back to consciousness to the pattering rhythm of gentle rain.