Author's Note:
I've had a lot of fun reading the theories in the reviews regarding the Night Triangle. None of them have been right so far, but lots of good ideas all around!
Chapter 7: Throttle to Maximum
Airstrip at Alnus Garrison
"Your chance at seeing the Americans is contingent on how well you can learn to fly a plane in the next few hours. Are you willing to try?"
Ellie sat there for a moment, gobsmacked as she listened to the Japanese officer deliver his request. They were going to let her up? Just like that?
"I want to try, but I'm still getting used to all these new inventions," Ellie pointed out. "How hard is it to understand an Efftoo?"
The officer stared at her for a second, confused, then broke into a grin. "We don't let civilians touch the fighter jets. You're going to learn on a Mag-3. Built locally and much easier to learn, so I'm told."
The name sound familiar… and then she remembered. He was referring to one of the magic-powered airplanes… the same kind that had landed at her town and started her journey to Alnus in the first place. So much had happened that it felt like ages ago, and she wondered if Andromache had declared her dead yet. If the ambassadors from Sadera could learn to fly a Mag-3, then she probably could as well. "Great!" she said, "Which way?"
The officer lead her out onto the airfield—the giant road that she'd seen the Efftoo land on earlier—and past many of the flying machines. She asked the officer to name each one as they passed.
Earth flying machines were divided into two types—thick-winged planes like the F-2, and thin-winged helicopters such as the "Cobras" and "Chinooks.". As they passed a C-1 Kawasaki, she wondered how such a stiff, lumbering beast could make it into the air at all.
Eventually, she said, "You haven't pointed out any Ozz-preys. Are they an airplane or a helicopter?"
"Vee-twentytwos?" The officer thought about it for a moment, then said, "A little bit of both, I guess. It would take a while to explain, and it looks like the Americans don't have any of them are here right now. If one gets in when you get back, I'll point it out to you."
They eventually stopped at a small hangar near the end of the runway, and a young woman dashed out to meet them. "Hatori-san!" She called, a big smile on her face, "Are we going up again today?"
"Not you and I, I'm afraid. Kengun is curious to see if this girl can pick up piloting." The soldier pointed to Ellie. "I'll show her around the plane, go with you on a glide run or two, and then you can go test her on something longer-distance."
She shrugged and extended her hand, "Myuute Luna Sires, nice to meet you!"
On closer observation, Myuute was a demihuman, like her, but where Ellie was a Monarch, Myuute was a Harpy, as was made clear by her birdlike legs and feather clusters instead of hair atop her head. Ellie also stuck out her hand, and said, "Ellie Fe Agne, nice to meet you too!"
The soldier, Hatori, looked at the scene of the two girls holding out empty hands and smirked before Myuute took the extra step of grabbing Ellie's hand and shaking it. "It's an Earth custom," she explained. "Don't worry about it, you'll get used to them!"
Together, the three pushed open the large hangar doors, allowing the mid-morning sunlight to flood in and illuminate the aircraft inside.
The design was familiar to Ellie, but she hadn't been able to get close enough to touch it before.
The overall design was 33 feet long and had a wingspan fifty feet wide… in actuality, it was a double-wingspan, since there were two wings on each side, one above the other, held structurally taught by rope cables. Beneath the aircraft, two large wheels, supported by a third smaller one in the rear, suggested that the whole thing could be towed, or possibly just ridden like a cart if the plane could move on its own. The whole thing was made of wood, and when Ellie rapped on the side of it with her knuckles, she was surprised to find it to be light, but strong, not the thick heavy stuff she was used to seeing in carriages or ships. Here and there, metal fittings helped hold the aircraft together, but it was very apparent to Ellie that an aircraft like this could be sourced from several carpenters and one blacksmith, and could probably be assembled in a month or less. She ran a hand over the sanded, needle-like nose of the airplane and corrected her estimate to two months maximum. Regardless, she felt then as she had felt before; someone had put a lot of thought into this vehicle, and while it shared some similar design elements with the Eftoos and See-wons, it was clearly more than just a copy.
"Take a seat up front," Myuute called. "The front seat is the dedicated pilot, the second seat is the flight engineer and glide backup, and the third seat is the backup engineer."
"Why do you call it an 'engineer'?"
"Greta said that it was because Earth planes have Engines, and they used to have a troubleshooter onboard who knew how to control them called an Engineer. Mag-Threes use magic instead of engines, but the role of the magician as a manager and troubleshooter for the airflow ward is just the same."
Ellie wanted to ask her more about Greta, but figured that they would have plenty of time once they were up in the air. Instead, she hoisted herself aboard the aircraft and settled into the front seat.
The fuselage contained three seats, one behind the other, each facing front. Each of them relied on a belt-like strap assembly to keep the rider from floating out of their chair during a dive. In the first two of these seats, Ellie identified a rudimentary set of controls. Where a ship would have a wheel or tiller, the airplane had a single upright stick and a pair of foot pedals. "Try them out!" Myuute said.
So Ellie started with the left pedal first, and heard a creaking behind her. When she looked over her shoulder, she noticed that the vertical panel at the back of the plane had split in half— no, that wasn't right. It had been on a hinge the entire time. Pressing the pedal had pulled the hinged part out to the left. "That's the rudder controls," Myuute explained. "Just like on a ship, the rudder makes the aircraft yaw left and right."
It was as if a light came on in Ellie's head. She could vividly recall doing something similar with her legs while flying, and realized, with a start, that the whole point of the strange bending panels at the back of the airplane were there to control air flow. So if that's left and right, what if…
She pulled back on the stick in front of her, and heard another noise. "That's the elevators," Myuute continued, "They pitch the nose of the airplane up if you pull back on the stick, and down if you push it away from you."
There were only two control surfaces at the back of the plane, so Ellie was puzzled as to what left and right on the stick would move, so she tried it. This time, hinged panels on the main wings moved; one up, the other down. "And those are the ailerons," Myuute finished. "They roll the airplane to the left or right, depending on which way you move the stick."
"Let's get moving!" Hatori said, jumping into the second seat. "I'll operate the controls the first flight so you can see how it all works together. We'll see how you do with the second flight."
Myuute took her place in the third seat and began muttering an incantation. For a moment, the wings of the aircraft seemed to glow, and Ellie was suddenly caught in a gust of wind. "We use the wind for two things, thrust and lift!" Hatori called to her. "Thrust keeps us moving forward through the air, and lift pulls us up when the air is moving fast enough over the wings!"
"They don't flap?" Ellie asked.
"They don't need to," Hatori said. "The shape of the wing makes it so that the air above the wing is lower-pressure and moving faster than the air beneath the wing. If we were to look at your wings from the side, they would have a similar shape. When a bird isn't gliding but is actually flapping their wings, they bend the wing down at a slight angle and push this wing-shape forward, it creates a combination of lift and pushes you forward—thrust. Since the wards are designed to pull air through the wings, we get all the thrust we need without copying the downbeat you see in birds."
It wasn't the best explanation, but Ellie understood the general concept, and the more she thought about it, the more correct it sounded. After all, flying to her was like walking; she didn't think about the details of the motion much.
Beneath them, the wheels started to turn and the aircraft pushed its way out of the hangar and onto the tarmac. "I checked with the tower!" Hatori shouted back to Myuute. "Next air patrol won't be back for a few hours, so the runway's ours."
Together, they rode down a painted track towards the long stone path that Ellie had seen from the other side of the fence. From this angle, looking straight ahead, the airstrip looked to Ellie like she was looking down a river, rather than a road. For a moment, she was distracted by the idea that any civilization could lay down so much smooth stone, but her attention returned to the present when the gap in the wings erupted with hurricane-force winds. The airplane picked up speed, slowly at first, then faster and faster, just like the densha from before.
For Ellie, getting up in the air usually meant a running start of a few steps, or jumping off of a ledge. The Mag-3 required more than a few steps, speeding down the runway at a breakneck pace. To her surprise, she felt the plane slowly pitch forward as the tail lifted off the ground, followed by a curious sensation, as if she had suddenly dropped a foot, then was being hauled up into the air.
And indeed, around her, the ground dropped away. In a fit of ingrained panic, her wings snapped out and immediately rebounded against the sides of the fuselage with a dull thud and spike of pain like a stubbed toe. In that instant, she was of two minds; a rational component that said, of course I don't need to have my wings open, the airplane is doing the flying, while a deeper, irrational piece of her own biology screamed, you're in the air and your wings are closed! You don't want to die! Open your wings! OPEN! OPEN! OPEN!
She squinted and shook her head, but the thoughts wouldn't go away. Instead, she took a deep breath, and forced herself to find something, some part of her lessons that could save her.
In the end, she found dry, old Andromache and one of her lectures, this time on landing during a storm. "Don't fight it. If you do, you will exhaust yourself, and then you will surely die. Deep breaths. Work with the air currents to bring you down somewhere tolerable. Breathe. Move with purpose. Fly now, panic later.
And so she did just that. On the first breath, her mind cleared. On the second, her heart rate was starting to slow back to normal. On the third, her wings began to close back into place.
On the fourth, she opened her eyes.
From the air, Alnus looked much like it had from the train, with the giant windmills on the hills, and the gemlike structures reflecting sunlight below them. Yet, up here there was only the sound of the wind, the occasional creak of the control surfaces… and, the more she thought about it, the stark absence of the thrumming of her own wings. It occurred to her that she would never get tired flying this way, and that a tag-team of magicians, like what she saw at the start, could propel an aircraft well beyond the range of a flame dragon.
She glanced over her shoulder to look at Myuute, who had one arm down in the fuselage somewhere, and the other resting on the outside edge of her compartment, hand gestured up at the wing as she maintained the magical ward.
"Take the stick!" Hatori called from behind her. She looked down at the control column, otherwise ignored during the flight, and wrapped her hands around the end.
"Okay," Hatori said, "Give me a slight roll to the left."
Slowly, Ellie drew the stick in that direction. The controls were more sluggish than she was expecting, and she could feel the stick under tension as she pulled it to the side, but the plane eventually responded by rolling slightly to the left, placing them into a lazy left turn.
They went through a few other simple maneuvers, and Hatori guided her through and approach back to the runway, then took over for the actual landing. "That was amazing!" Ellie declared, once Myuute had deactivated the magical air-wards. "And it's so much like real flying...oh! Can you do flips and stunts?"
Myuute gave her a horrified look and Hatori laughed. "No one's tried yet. This plane's Falmart tech through and through, so while they learned about airplanes from copying Earth designs, they haven't done much with aerodynamic theory… and I'm under orders not to give them any ideas."
"Then can I try?"
"Let's see you properly land one of these before you hurt yourself trying anything like that… and Myuute might not be as up to it as you are."
"I'm not afraid!" Myuute protested. "It's just...I've never done anything like that before."
"How do you power the airplane anyway?" Ellie asked. "I mean, I know that it's magic, but you're moving a lot of air for a long time. Don't you get tired quickly?"
Myuute smiled. "Back during the MagOnes, I could give you about thirty seconds of flight time. You should have seen poor Greta, tearing her hair out as she tried to find ways to get the weight down, and the speed up. The MagTwos were better, lighter, easier to control, but the game didn't really change until Rondel discovered Focus Crystals."
The magician shifted a few latches in her compartment and produced a sparkling purple-blue crystal shard. "With this, even someone with latent, tiny amounts of magic power could use magic. There's been a huge explosion in magic-users over the past several years, and Rondel can't mine enough of these to keep up with the demand. For magic-powered planes, they changed everything. Suddenly, a beginner could power you halfway from Alnus to Italica, then have enough energy to race you to Countess Formal's Manor once you landed."
Ellie reached out to touch the large gemstone, but decided against it. She was here to fly, after all, not play around with magic. "What if… I don't know… Someone dropped it over the side in the middle of the flight?"
"Then you lose thrust," Myuute said. "And you'll need to glide back down to the ground. Otherwise, the airplane will stall in the air and fall out of the sky."
"And that's why you're going to practice that first," Hatori said. "Let's go up again."
They spent the next two hours practicing, and once Ellie was able to transfer the laws of flight that came naturally to control over the MagThree, she picked up powered flight remarkably quickly. On her third successful landing, she noticed Hector waiting by the hangar and rushed over to him, shouting, "Did you see that! Perfect landing, right on the centerline!"
Hector gave and amused snort and, looking to the JSDF officer, asked, "What do you think?"
Hatori grinned. "She's unnaturally good. Most people from Earth need months to learn most of these concepts, but she got the hang of it in a few minutes."
Ellie shrugged. "Maybe it's because I'm taking things I already know and putting them into flying the MagThree. If I grew up without wings, it would probably be months like Hatori said. The only thing I'm learning is how quickly the airplane acts when I move the controls, but I'm getting better at it!"
"Is it good enough to take us to the Americans?" Hector asked.
The Japanese man thought about it, then said, "She should try a solo flight first. Myuute, do you mind taking her up for a longer round-trip to Italica while I prepare a report?"
Myuute nodded and started back for the plane. Ellie, meanwhile, asked, "What have you been up to, Hector?"
The magician produced a Focus Crystal and said, "I've been experimenting with one of these things. It's remarkable, watch this."
He held up his hand, and the air seemed to shimmer for a moment before a fountain of snow burst forth, twisted around in the air, and solidified into a massive icicle. With a twist of his hand, the icicle shot across the runway where it embedded itself on the grass on the far side. "It was difficult enough to do something like that even before the Godwrecker," he said. "Now? It's simple."
"That's wonderful!" Ellie said. "See? This journey has been worth it so far!"
For a moment, Hector's smile seemed to falter, but it was quickly back. As Ellie wondered over his reaction, the magician said, "Focus Crystals are an invention of our world. Not theirs."
"You're still complaining about that? The Japanese General seemed like a good man, surely—s"
"The weapon—the atomic bomb, they called it—was not invented by Japan, and it was once used on them as it was used on us. Responsibility rests with the Americans, and until I meet the one who gave the order, I will not be satisfied."
Ellie sighed. "I won't argue with you about the Godwrecker, but look around you! Can't you see how many good things Earth technology has brought to this world? Light no longer needs to burn, people that collapse need not pass into the void, and anyone can fly. Our world is better because of it!"
Hector's smile faded. "We'll see," he said, then turned and walked away.
Myuute approached Ellie from behind and, looking after the older magician, asked, "What's his problem?"
"Stuck in the past," Ellie said. It wasn't his world anymore. It was hers, a world of wonders, and she loved it.
Together, they headed back to the plane. "Bring it back in one piece!" Hatori joked, "And if at any point, you can't take it, let Myuute know, and she'll take you in for a glide landing."
With that, the two were soon alone, wheeling out onto the runway again. "So," Ellie asked. "Italica?"
The flight engineer flashed an excited grin, held up her hands, and kicked the plane's air-wards into gear. "Italica!" She agreed.
20,000 Ft, Alnus aerial exclusion zone.
In the seven years that Kurihama had flown out of Alnus, everything had changed.
Initially, he had been the backseater for Kamkoda's combat air patrol missions in an aging F-4 Phantom II. These were the last that the JASDF operated, and the plane had been chosen for its pre-satellite communications and navigations technology. The Phantom had proven its worth in downing dragons and fighter-bombing Saderan-opposition fortresses, but lots of taxpayer Yen was being sent to America for replacement parts, and the JASDF was under pressure from the Diet to move to a home-grown system.
The pressure finally produced a diamond five years later. The crisis in Korea resulted in a sudden explosion of military spending, and JASDF airbases began to retire older planes in favor of F-35Js and Japan's new domestic interceptor, the F-3. In the push, the Phantoms were finally scrapped, and Alnus found itself in possession of the comparatively newer Mitsubishi F-2 "Viper Zero." Kamikoda had expressed his regret to him that the new plane was a single-seater, but Kurihama was looking forward to the peace and quiet.
While traditional F-2s were satellite-dependent for navigation, engineers had been able to patch the hardware absence with a software solution—a set of gyroscope sensors and input from the flight instruments were combined to calculate the airplane's position, with occasional readjustments whenever the American satellite constellation flew overhead, or the plane was line-of-sight with Alnus's radio beacons. It wasn't perfect, but the results were close enough to make up for the absent navigator.
That afternoon, as Kurihama was forty minutes into his combat air patrol by Italica, he reacted with a snort as his IFF system detected the tag from Alnus's MagThree. Hatori was a younger Japanese test pilot, and while he was honored to get to test a novel means of flying, that honor was about all he was getting from the experience. Kurihama had gotten tired of Hatori's constant, irritable moaning about how he could be back in Hokkaido working on the X-4, but no, he was stuck here, "dicking around with a Wright Brothers knockoff." That said, both Japan and the US had substantial interest in the flight dynamics of magically-powered aircraft, but neither was much closer to harnessing magic through technology back on Earth… at least not outside of the explosion of anime and Hollywood films that followed its confirmation to the general public.
As such, he pulled his aircraft up into a lazy arc that took him north, and was shocked as his AESA radar array picked up several signatures. It wasn't entirely uncommon for Wyverns or MagThrees to travel in groups, but this was the largest group he had ever seen, by far.
He decided to call it in. "Alnus ATC, this is Hawkwind 02, there's a large group of fliers inbound from Northwest of Italica. Did you hear anything about this?"
A few seconds pause before the Air Traffic Controller replied, "Nothing, but the Empire rarely shares flight plans unless they're inbound to Alnus. Do you have a bearing?"
The combination of the hilly terrain around Alnus and the demand for windmill generators meant that Alnus ATC was at a major disadvantage when it came to airspace awareness in the Special Region. Sure, the Air Surveillance Radar at the garrison gave them a sixty-mile radius of coverage, but the fact that the Special Region's most powerful airborne threats has been beaten by a pair of Generation-3 fighters diminished the case for better resources. The Diet reluctant to spend money on a Long Range array, and the JSDF felt (and rightly so) that their AWACS assets were urgently needed against threats on Earth. As a result, flights beyond ASR were managed the old-fashioned way, by some poor Non-Com with a whiteboard and a marker.
"Three-two-zero, altitude six thousand feet."
Another pause. "Understood, continue to monitor."
"Copy that." Kurihama said. He wasn't overly concerned, but the scale of the air wing still struck him the wrong way. The rules set by Command stated, however, that Earth pilots were to treat all Imperial aircraft as civilians and keep away. Besides, flying in formation with a MagThree would involve a profoundly irritating maneuver that yanked the nose of the F-2 up at an unusual angle and put him at risk of a stall. He had once seen a video of a Dutch F-16 pilot doing something similar with a helicopter, but the maneuver had been brief, and the thought of traveling at those speeds that close to the ground made him antsy.
Ultimately, he gained altitude and turned east into the start of a loop around Italica. If nothing else, watching so many wood gliders flop around in the same airspace would give him a fun way to pass the time.
For Ellie, finding Italica had been simple. Without knowing it, she had recreated an old Earth tradition of following the railroad lines to her destination, and now her plane was floating over the bustling town below.
"They have a dirt landing strip," Myuute called, pointing to a spot on the edge of Italica, "But it's really bumpy and sometimes too muddy to take off again."
Ellie looked over her shoulder and, holding up one hand to illustrate her point said, "I'm going to go around twice, then we'll start back for Alnus."
As she started into her counterclockwise circuit, Ellie noticed the sparkling glimmer of another Efftoo circling high overhead and pointed it out to her engineer. "Why's he here?"
"Combat air patrol," Myuute said. "They watch for big dragons or other large monsters and keep them away from Japanese territory."
"Do they usually wait around Italica like this?"
Myuute looked up at the fighter jet, then asked, "Why do you think he's waiting?"
"His speed and his turn are too tight. I'm trained to patrol at sea, and turns during a big scouting circle are wide. If it's a tight turn, it means you're observing, or waiting up there for something… there!"
Ellie pointed over the right-side wing. "More MagThrees."
"They might be part of a convoy," Myuute said. "Sometimes you will get a bunch of planes like that if someone important is visiting."
"Cool! Let's go over and say hello!"
Before Myuute could argue otherwise, Ellie jerked the control stick to the right and sent the aircraft off to meet the visitors.
As they got closer, Ellie was able to make out the symbols on the wings of the aircraft. The Imperial plane had been a gold emblem on a red field, and the Japanese planes she had seen, including the one she was flying, was a red circle on any background. These planes were identifiable by two bars side by side: white and turquoise. "Which city?"
"Rondel," Myuute answered. "Maybe there's an academic forum?"
But Ellie wasn't convinced. She watched as they all dived in sequence for the city and kept her distance. "Is that normal?" She asked.
The planes answered her question for her. She saw a bunch of bright pinpoint flashes, and then a series of fireballs erupted in the city below.
"What?"
"I said, the Rondel MagThrees are bombing the city." Kurihama spat into his helmet mic.
As the controller was trying to make up his mind, Kumihara checked to make sure his flight camera was running and went down a mental checklist. He was armed with four radar guided missiles (infrared-guided weapons were useless against most targets in the Special Region) and about eight hundred rounds of ammunition for the gun. Even so, he had never engaged a MagThree before. His gut told him that it would be like engaging a helicopter or Wyvern, but he had missed all the action in the F-4 Phantom days, and simulators were a far cry from experiencing the real deal.
"This is ATC Alnus," The controller said. "Do not engage."
"Are you kidding me?"
"Do not engage, continue to monitor."
"What the hell?"
"This is part of an ongoing civil dispute between Rondel and Sadera, and the rules of engagement say that we aren't getting involved."
Kumihara snorted. "Again?"
"I repeat, stand by and observe."
The pilot sent his acknowledgement, then slammed a fist into the side of his compartment. What were the higher-ups waiting for? During the Saderan civil war, billions of yen had been spent in a dragged-out conventional campaign, while the Americans had conducted one SpecOps Mission and ended the thing in one night. And here they were again, with the politicians dragging their feet. He glanced down at his fuel gauge… fortunately there was still enough to grant him decent loiter time.
Whatever they wanted him to observe, it needed to happen soon.
"Are you seeing this!?" Ellie shouted. "What's going on!?"
"Oh no," Myuute muttered. "No, no, no, no—"
The MagThree suddenly faltered and began to lose speed. "Myuute!"
The girl behind her didn't respond
"Myuute, I need thrust back!" Ellie pushed the stick forward to maintain speed. She watched as another volley of attacks fell on Italica. Below, a watchtower burst into flames as it was hit by a magic strike, while a massive ice spike went careening into the central manor.
Still not getting any response, she reached behind her, grabbed Myuute by her outstretched arm, and dragged the girl forward so that their heads were inches apart. "WAKE UP DAMN IT!" She yelled.
The magician snapped out of her stupor and Ellie felt their speed pick up again. Behind her, she heard Myuute crying, "I can't do this again! I can't do another fight! I can't!"
"We have to do something!"
"We can't—"
"I'm going to do a warning dive off the nose of their lead plane—it's how we ward off inattentive Monarchs at sea—but I need you to keep the speed UP!"
She felt, more than heard Myuute reply in the affirmative, and she pulled back on the stick to gain a bit more altitude. Thankfully, her flight engineer seemed competent enough to adjust their speed accordingly, and the wind rushing through the wards increased from a hiss to a deep rumbling. At her desired altitude, she put the plane into a turn so that she would wind up in front of the Rondel MagThrees, and then flipped the plane upside down and into a dive.
Behind her, Myuute screamed—loud enough to be heard over the air—and Ellie grit her teeth as she tried to focus on her turn. She had flown in storms before, but even then, she had never had to deal with a distraction quite like this. Nonetheless, Rondel's lead plane was a blur as they flashed by, then Ellie spun the plane right-side up again and pulled up… Too low. There were much closer to the ground than Ellie had anticipated.
"Fly now, panic later."
"Cut power!" She yelled and yanked back hard on the stick. Ellie worried for a moment that it would break off in her hand, but the airplane respond, just barely skirting the roofs of the houses below.
Ellie glanced over her shoulder. The poor girl in the back seat looked like she was about to faint. Or throw up. "We're going up again!" Ellie shouted. "Speed up!"
Myuute was fast to shake her head and start another protest, but was stopped by a loud BANG as an explosion narrowly missed them. That was enough to get her to respond, and they were soon rising again.
"What the hell is Hatori doing?" Kurihama asked. "Idiot's going to get himself killed!"
He had informed Alnus ATC about the JASDF-flagged MagThree hovering over the city. Normally that would mean Hatori and Myuute were playing around with the glider again, but protocol demanded that Japanese forces were to disengage from any conflicts In Saderan airspace until instructed otherwise by command.
"1st Lt. Hatori Just checked in," the controller replied. "He is not flying the plane."
"Then who is!?"
"A trainee...they're considering recruiting her for Ichijima."
"Was she told about the ROE?"
"No one was expecting an air raid."
"Now can I engage?"
"Negative."
20,000 feet in the air, Kurihama disengaged his mic and screamed into his oxygen mask. If they didn't let him get involved now, when would they?
"They're following us!" Myuute called. Ellie glanced over her other shoulder to see the Rondel MagThree climbing in an attempt to get into position behind her. As the glider gained on them, Ellie could barely see a figure lean over the side of the fuselage with a long, stick-like object and point it in their direction She saw a puff of smoke, and didn't hear so much as feel something narrowly miss her shoulder as it shot past.
Myuute was now in hysterics. "They're shooting too!" She cried. "We need to leave, NOW!"
For once, Ellie was completely lost in terms of what to do. Fights like this never happened between Monarchs, as bows lacked the accuracy to hit another flyer while flying, and one Monarch tackling the other was extraordinarily dangerous at best, and at worst resulted in both getting tangled and plummeting to the ground below.
Maybe Myuute was right… but at the sight of the other planes dropping explosions on the city, she couldn't turn and run. She just couldn't. Monarchs saw to the safety of the people...it was their job. It occurred to her then that if Andromache hadn't been around to keep an eye on the town after her departure, she might never have left on her journey to begin with.
And if she wanted the people of this new continent to accept her, to trust her enough to teach her the secret of the Night Triangle, then she had to do her part. She had to defend Italica.
She looked down at the stick in her hands and had a sudden burst of inspiration. "Listen," she said to her flight engineer. "When I tell you, you're going to take the controls and glide the plane in for a landing."
"What about the other MagThree? What about you!?"
"I'm going to jump onto their plane."
"WHAT!?"
But Ellie was already unbuckling her seatbelt. "I'm going to take my hunting knife, cut the lines to their control surfaces, and then fly the rest of the way down to the ground. If I can, I'll meet up with you and we'll do it again."
"You're insane!"
She stood up, stabilized herself against the fuselage, shouted, "Plane's yours!" and spread her wings.
The initial shock flipped her up into the air, somersaulting over the plane's rudder. For a moment, she was floating in the air, angled herself to catch the wing of the oncoming aircraft as she would the mast of a ship at sea, outstretched her arms, and, in a rush, grabbed down.
Ellie regretted it instantly.
She was used to grabbing on to ropes or sails during high winds, but the shock of her sudden deceleration from her MagThree to the relative acceleration of the Rondel plane yanked her Right arm around with a greater force than she was prepared for. Her right shoulder exploded with spiking, searing pain, and for an instant her world went white. A fraction of a second later, as the world returned, did she consciously realize she was screaming.
Somehow, she was on the other plane, her burning arm wrapped around one of the cross-cords holding the structure between the upper and lower main wings. Looking up, she could see the control cables to the left aileron above her head. She reached down to her side to withdraw her hunting knife, but it was no use. The shift in position put even more pressure on her damaged arm, and she collapsed back against the lower wing.
This gave her an excellent opportunity to look at the Rondel aircrew who stared back at her, mouths agape. Seconds later, the pilot turned in his seat to shout at one of the flight engineers—the one with the long stick that spat smoke—who hastily brought the stick around to point it at her.
They're shooting at us! Myuute had cried. Regardless of what the weapon was or how it worked, Ellie realized that at this distance, stabilized by the body of the aircraft, there was no way that the man could miss.
Out of time once again, she adjusted her position, jumped, and went careening into the armed flight engineer.
Since the Rondel mage was still buckled in, the only thing that went flying was the gun. The impact wasn't as bad as the first one, but it still knocked the wind out of her...and gave her enough time to react when the mage reached down and grabbed her by the throat. Her world was filled by the snarl on his face as he tried to crush her into submission.
Her hands instantly went up to the arms around her neck, but the man choking her was much too strong. Behind her, she could feel the pilot pushing at her legs, trying to knock her off the aircraft. She slid and, for a moment, she felt the hunting knife pinned to her outer thigh.
The next action was automatic instead of conscious, and it really didn't dawn on Ellie what she'd done until she felt the warm blood running down her hands as she stabbed the Rondel mage in the gut over, and over and over again. Even as she shrieked in pain, he would not let up, so Ellie's arm swung up, and the knife caught the man across the throat.
It was then that the man finally released her, collapsing to the side of the airframe as his carotid artery blasted blood over the side. The second flight engineer looked up in a panic and, out of reflex, reached with both hands over his dying comrade to grab her.
Instantly, the plane lost power and the pilot cussed, adjusting the flight path to put them on a glide. The second mage moved to correct his mistake, but Ellie moved first, reaching into the compartment in front of him, yanking out the Focus Crystal, and chucking it over the side. The mage screamed and reached after her, but couldn't get past the body of the man in the second compartment. 'I'll kill you!" He screamed, raising a hand that blistered with magically-summoned fire, "I swear on the—"
He never finished, as Ellie undid the seatbelt of the middle mage and chucked him into the airstream. Unlike Ellie, he did not perform anything remotely resembling a graceful summersault. Instead, he crashed straight into the backup flight engineer, then tumbled past him for a split second before slamming into the vertical stabilizer.
The shock and weight disparity forced the tail down and the nose high. The plane rose for a second and, robbed of its propulsion and forward velocity, dropped out of the sky.
"The JASDF MagThree has engaged the enemy," Kurihama said.
"How? It's unarmed!"
"Pilot jumped out and grabbed the Rondel plane tailing them. Looked like one of those flying girls that the Kitsashi had with them a few months ago."
The Controller was silent.
Kurihama took a deep breath, then continued. "You can approach this however you want, but as far as the observers on the ground are concerned, the JASDF has already intervened. Requesting permission to engage, or were you waiting to see if the Italica consulate and train station get bombed first?"
More silence. As the JSDF pilot watched, he could see that the boarded Rondel plane had stalled, and was falling fast. He had to hand it to the winged girl; that was an Indiana Jones level of Stupid.
Still…
"You are cleared to engage," the Controller said. "Take care with your shots to minimize casualties on the ground."
"Roger, Hawkwind 02, engaging."
He made one last check to confirm that the nose camera was running, then reached onto his front panel and disengaged the safety on the 20mm J61A1.
Ellie didn't so much jump from the plummeting MagThree as fell out of it, and not a moment too soon. The Rondel pilot tried desperately to pull up, but he only succeeded in careening into one of Italica's towers with an unsettling crunch as the aircraft crumpled around him.
Ellie herself didn't fare much better. As she threw out her wings, the movement interfered with the nearby damaged muscles in her chest and shoulder and the pain hit her once again. Ultimately, she tumbled a few feet, tried to land on unsteady legs, and then collapsed, gasping on the roof of some store or inn. Every part of her felt hurt or sore—her arms, her wings, even her lower back and legs from the exertion of the insane stunts.
Looking up, she could see another Rondel plane turning to bare down on her. Perhaps it had seen the crash and had come to exact revenge. In a panic, she tried to pick herself up, reached out with her bad arm, and fell back onto the roof tiles and the blinding, burning sensation overtook her once more. "No," she groaned, "No, no, please, I don't want to die, no, no no—"
It was if she could hear death rushing for her, a low rumbling roar like thunder that ate through her guts and bones. Ellie threw her good arm up around her head—a futile gesture—and waited for the end.
Except that, in one final moment of clarity, she realized that the thunder was not in her head. It was real—it was very, very real.
BRRRRRRRRRRRTT!
The sound was as if the sky was being sawed apart, and perhaps it was. The Rondel MagThree disintegrated in a mass of splinters, shards, and body chunks which, robbed of their momentum, rained down in smoldering lumps upon the quaking city.
Ellie finally fainted, the last sound she heard being the screech of a General Electric F110 Engine at full afterburner.