Starchild

I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.

Warning: This chapter contains character death and a fair amount of drinking.

Chapter Twelve: Crater

One small motion of the hand, one second in time, was all it took to put the world upside down and then right again. The ailerons on the right wing of Eirika's TR-27 went up, the left ailerons went down, and so she executed a perfect corkscrew turn in the air over Frelia. In moments like this, Eirika understood how flight could be, for men like her brother, a need as deep as any physical urge. To sail over the land at her own schedule, under her own command, to be able to turn heaven and earth on their heads, if only for a moment... it was marvelous. It was magic.

One slight shift of her hand, one second in the air, one more perfect aileron roll.

Magic.

-x-

Chief Engineer Innes gave her a personal tour of the factory that had been his domain for the last four years. Innes wanted the moon with a desire so fierce he could hardly mask it; his pale-gray eyes gleamed like moonstone when he spoke of her upcoming journey to Luna. He spoke passionately of Luna, of winning her as a hero in an ancient story might win the hand of his lady, and Eirika could only sigh inwardly and shake her head at him afterward. That the Chief Engineer- with his fine suit, his spotless factory, and his cadre of loyal assistants- would want to trade the life he now had for a faded blue jumpsuit and a room in the dormitory, would want to take a place at the rear of the pilots' pecking order and jostle elbows in the common room with mere children who'd been transfigured by the state into heroes...

And yet, from the comments Innes made about goings-on in Star City, he seemed to have a decent grasp of what he might be getting into. Perhaps the allure of the moon was enough to make a man take leave of his senses... perhaps not.

Eirika was nearly done with her tour of the Falcon factory when a young technician in a smart white coat bustled up to her.

"There's a telephone call for you, Captain."

"Thank you...Vanessa," said Eirika, thankful she'd caught a glimpse of the name on the technician's badge.

Eirika thought it might be a summons from one of the generals, but happily it was her brother on the line. Ephraim was at present on the distant continent of Lieberia, visiting an air show in the company of Pilot 008. General Duessel had sent them there after catching rumors that Lopt spacefarers would make an appearance at the event, in a bid to convince the neutral continent that a good future lay in alliance with the Empire.

"Two of the Lopt pilots did come," her brother said through the crackle of the long-distance line. "One of them was a cat boy. His eyes were different colors, even. Nice kid, spoke our language pretty well. The other was a hawk-man, with wings and everything. I wasn't sure about him at first, but he turned out to be all right. I'd fly with him."

Eirika smiled at hearing her brother bestow this supreme compliment of camaraderie between pilots upon one of the Lopts, but the idea of Ephraim mingling freely with the foreigners did worry her somewhat.

"You didn't talk about anything with them, did you?"

"We drank a toast to no accidents in space, and we drank to friendship between pilots. Eliwood and I drank a toast to the pretty girls who were serving us- Lieberians are humans, did you know that? I didn't. And then we drank to how much we hate the medics, and we drank to some other things. I don't remember."

Eirika, buoyed by her brother's apparent success in foreign lands, executed more than one aileron roll on her flight back to Star City. During one of them, she glimpsed a slivery flash on the ground below, near the intersection of two Superhighways. It was the gleam of one of Frelia's greatest and newest landmarks- a statue cast in titanium of a young pilot, ten times larger than life, his arms stretched out to the skies in triumph.

-x-

Eirika had hardly settled back in to her office with its overflowing baskets of mail when the red light on her phone began to glow.

"Eirika?" The unexpected voice of Pilot 005 caused Eirika's hand to tighten upon the telephone receiver. "Please come to the Head Office. We've had a problem."

"I'll be there at once," she said, perfectly calm though her heart was thumping out a chant of Don't let this be about Ephraim, don't let this be about Ephraim.

Celice waited for her at the Head Office; his face seemed nearly as pale as his white headband.

"Celice, what is it?"

"Hec- Pilot 010 was in an accident in one of the trainer jets."

"Accident," if one was speaking of an automobile, or a bicycle, or even a train, might mean any number of things, from a bent wheel to a fireball. But when one was speaking of jets, of spacecraft, of something built to shatter the sound barrier... "accident" meant only one thing.

And now, as Eirika brought her hands to her mouth in an involuntary response to the shock, she could only think of one thing.

He was such a good pilot.

As good or better than Ephraim, far better than any of the rest of them. Not one of the shaky stick-and-rudder men, one of the pilots of whom they could have said, in hindsight, "It was bound to happen- he just didn't have the edge." No, as a pilot, pure and simple, Hector had been the best of his generation. His phenomenal skills had been his ticket into the Programme, after all- no one had any illusions about making a geologist or astrophysicist out of Hector, but give him a machine and he could fly her.

And to think a simple trainer jet had taken him down...

"How?"

"We don't know the cause yet. The investigation's started, but it'll be a while... there just wasn't much left."

Eirika knew what that meant, too. Not a pancaked jet, but an obliterated one. Something that hit the ground at supersonic speed, leaving a scar... a crater. A great blasted hole in the ground.

"He died flying," Celice said, as though it were some kind of comfort. And it should have been, from one pilot to another, but as Eirika stared into Celice's face, she could see that he wasn't feeling any reassurance in it, either. Not in a training jet and a smoking crater in the Terran soil.

Not when they'd been trained to ride rockets to the moon.

-x-

Three days later, Eirika had to pull her Air Force Captain's uniform out of the closet and deck herself in all the glittering medals that usually sat atop her dresser along with unused jewelry. Then it was off to the waiting fleet car, and a transport plane, and another fleet car, and finally she and the rest of the pilot corps stood in Freedom Square, the most hallowed of Ivaldi's ancient courtyards. The pilots in their smart caps and blue jackets were brilliant tropical birds amid the dark-clad flock of ministers and scholars; their splendor was almost ridiculous, Eirika thought. Especially as it was so evident that the finery was all hung upon small mortal bodies. They were as bright and fragile as the thousands of flowers that had lined their route to Ivaldi Court.

Eirika walked shoulder-to-shoulder with Roy in the procession; her brother was ahead in the line, part of the honor guard carrying the catafalque that held both the portrait and the ashes of Pilot 010. Just looking at that portrait ringed in blossoms, that image of Hector in his cap and jacket with a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, sent a fresh barb of grief through Eirika's heart. Already she'd caught herself looking among them for his shock of deep blue hair and his broad-shouldered form, and to think that he just wouldn't be there anymore...

Why Hector? Well, why any of them? Whose loss could they have sustained easily? How cruel it be to see Alm ripped apart from Cellica, to see either of them left alone with their little girl? How unjust would it be to lose either Celice or Leaf, both of them with pretty young wives now, both of them soon to be fathers? Or...

Eirika could not resist staring then at the other one of their number whose death would have been greeted with an echo of disbelief- "But he was such a good pilot." There was still no explanation for the way Hector's jet plunged out of the air. It could have been Ephraim, might easily have been Ephraim.

Was this an appropriate feeling or not, the feeling of relief that it was not her brother in that urn, reduced to a handful of ashes? The Commission and the State had no answers for her there. The Commissioners had no answers in their brief, rote, statements of honor, duty, and love for the motherland. Premier Sephiran had no answers when he spoke of the hardships that were necessary for glory, of the sacrifices that would enable humanity to, at long last, "awaken the goddess Luna." As Sephiran gave his speech, Eirika wondered which of those in the crowd might be Chief Designer S, the man who denied the request for new planes so that he might have more funds allocated to his Wyvern missiles. No, that was ungracious. None of their leaders would consciously condemn a pilot to a fiery death through negligence.

A true sense of humanity finally came to the service when Eliwood was permitted to say a few words in honor of his friend and fellow pilot; his clear and resonant voice imbued some genuine feeling to the stilted formal phrases. Then it was Lyn's turn, and instead of speaking she sang an Elibean mourning song, a dirge for fallen warriors. Chills raced up and down Eirika's spine as she listened to Lyn's keening vocals; Eirika didn't understand a word of the song in any literal sense, but its meaning was unmistakable.

Everything seemed so clear, so sharply defined in that moment- flags against the blue sky, and sunlight glinting off everyone's medals and braids, and Lyn's voice ringing out against the ancient walls. Eirika looked at the crescent Luna suspended above the horizon, a world apart from any great ceremonies of state, and wondered how it looked to Hector from the other side of existence.

She hoped he was still flying.

-x-

The pilot corps spent the night at the most plush hotel in the capital, as though this would somehow ease the loss of a comrade. The open bar might have done something on that account, more so than the marble, crystal, and carmine velvet of the ballroom they took over that evening.

Lyn wasn't drinking, nor did she shed any tears.

"Dance," she said, her chin high and proud. "He would want us to dance."

And she danced, by herself in a style none of them knew, the mare's tail of her bound-up hair whipping around she spun. In ones and twos the rest of them shrugged off their malaise and joined her, and voices and the sound of the piano rose as their evening of gloom became a raucous wake.

Remember when he smuggled that sandwich onto the spacecraft so we'd have some real food to eat up there?

Remember when he rode the centrifuge to 13G and then yawned like it wasn't anything?

Remember when he joined us, and the first thing he said to General Duessel was...

Remember...

Eirika measured out the hours in sips from her cocktail glass; there was an undercurrent of desperation in the room that signaled to her that this was not a night to lose control of herself. She drank just enough to dull the sharpest edges of grief, so that she felt a dreary kind of acceptance when she searched the room for Hector and didn't find him.

"It's all right to cry tonight," Ephraim whispered once in her ear. "Tomorrow we all go back on duty."

He was not weeping, and it seemed to Eirika that her brother was cold sober; Ephraim prowled the room, seeming more a sentry than a participant in the wake. Perhaps he also sensed an element of danger, she thought. When loud voices in the adjacent room caught their attention, Ephraim was the one to investigate.

"Hey, comrades," she heard him rebuke the arguing parties. "No being unsociable tonight- come on back to the table."

Marth and Alm returned a few moments later, both of them wearing the expressions of people resolutely pretending nothing was the matter. Alm's facade wavered first; he walked back to Cellica's side, tossed back a shot of vodka and sat the rest of the night regarding them all with a stare of intense disapproval. Marth, meanwhile, took over the piano and hid behind it the remainder of the night.

"What were they arguing about?" Eirika asked her brother on his next circuit of the room.

"They were both speaking that dialect from the Islands," he said. "For most of it, anyway."

In the end, Eirika neither wept nor danced, but kept to herself as she tried to puzzle out her own forebodings. It was normal, of course, to be fearful and morbid after a death, especially a shocking accident. And from the time she'd been a cadet, it seemed that accidents came in clusters, two or three following swiftly upon the initial event. Each of them knew that; were they all gauging the chances of who might fall next?

But the death of Pilot 004 had been an isolated event. They'd gone years between disasters. Cold comfort, to be sure, but it was all they had at present.

Marth did know "Together We Ride," Eirika thought hazily as the familiar melody distracted her from these dim thoughts. He moved his lips now and again, as though silently acknowledging the words, but never did sing.

-x-

Another envelope from the "Ministry of Truth" was waiting for Eirika when she returned to the office. The photograph this time was a black-and-white image of some cadets from Elibe's Air Force Academy. It looked to have been taken at least twenty years before. Three of the small blurred faces resembled those of Hector, Lyn, and Eliwood.

To Be Continued...

Author's note: Yes, that was Ranulf and Tibarn.