Original story based on and including characters and material created by Project Aces for Namco Bandai. The author claims no ownership over them.
In a Blaze of Glory (Soldier)
Chapter 2
"Older men declare war. But is the youth that must fight and die." - Herbert Hoover
AFB GR-Sand Island, Osea
August 2017
1711 hrs.
"You lucky bastard," was the first thing out of Blaze's mouth as he came out of the Crew Ready room with a frustrated smile on his face.
"Excuse me?" I replied, shocked and trying not to be angry.
"They postponed the training exercise because President Carvalho is trying to play negotiator for the war in Leasath."
"That's a shame," I replied, obviously very relieved. "What happens now?"
The Federal Republic of Terceiro was the biggest country in South Osea, famous for its lush rainforests, long beaches and the occasional drug wars in the shanty towns of their large cities. But what made them such an upstart was the fact that they were willing to build relationships with virtually anyone regardless of their traditional allegiance. President Daniel Carvalho had been able to keep historical relationships with Osea warm while simultaneously cuddling up to Yuktobania and Verusa. That meant three times the foreign investment into the country before GR's contributions, and that made them one of the world's fastest-growing economies.
This put them in a unique position when it came to relations with their southern neighbor Leasath, which had been caught in its latest civil war for some time. Terceiro was their bridge to the world, and not just because their Leasath border town were home to some of the world's biggest smuggling syndicates. A joint training mission with Osea would not bode well for their diplomatic credentials if Carvalho wanted to serve as the negotiator for the many factions in that war.
"Well, they've given me 48 hours leave while Alex and the board talk things over with Terceiro," he replied, "I'll finish up your tour with Oruma and then see how much of the seven years we can catch up with on our flight out."
Twenty-two years ago, there was a war...
2LT Ricardo Villa
People come up with stories and narratives to fill in what they don't know. It helps them sleep at night. The bigger the gap, the bigger the story. Eventually people come to think that story is true, and they don't quite like it when there's real evidence to the contrary. I've heard and read quite my fair share of Razgriz stories under the identities I got under WitSec, and even I'm amazed at what people have come up with.
Some say I'm the Demon Lord of Ustio or his hellspawn, who rose up from the fires of hell and damnation itself to lead my band of minions to rule the heavens once again. Others say I'm some traumatized and disillusioned Belkan just looking for peace before realizing he has to redeem his country against the remnants of the fascists. All I know is that I'm not Mobius 1 or Yellow 13. If I were that amazing I wouldn't have been tossed into WitSec in the first place.
My hometown was Las Violas, the biggest city on Osea's Pacific Coast. The City of Violets was, as the rap lyrics go, almost completely devoid of flowers. The neighborhood I grew up in wasn't exactly like in the video games where everyone openly carried a chrome-plated handgun and expected every other passing car to initiate a driveby on a random group of assembled gangstas. Hell, we were even in one of the most prosperous states in the Federation. But the neighborhood where I lived was definitely one of those places where the Osean Dream came to die. Nobody trusted cops or politicians, and every attempt to improve things just seemed to sputter out before it even began.
My parents moved over here from the Islas Gracias, that archipelago off Eastern Usea where people claimed Osea ran a puppet government to keep tabs on the FCU. As Osean policy implied, they probably fled here because the dictators the government installed provided a steady source of immigrants. In any case, they were so engrossed in the rampant consumerism that the family values fell apart before I learned to walk. I spent most of my childhood in a small apartment with my divorced mom.
I mean, it's not that I don't love her. I still write her, as much as I have to grit my teeth through all the cover story bullshit the FIB makes me write down. She was always a bit of an evangelist though, which meant a lot of corporal punishment. I suppose I not only learned 'good and evil,' but like every kid growing up got jaded about this morality a lot easier. Especially when it came to war.
To a lot of us in the L-V-O, the war in Belka was one of those things that a lot of people down here hated and weren't afraid to say it, even before the blog was invented. Osea had been engaged non-stop in some campaign somewhere leading up to that war because they just didn't like those damn Commies across the ocean. And because Osea had been at war with Belka several times this century alone, people just figured the government needed some way to burn up the surplus prosperity from 1980s. People from my neighborhood got recruited and fought there, coming home with stories to tell their families and the occasional bout of PTSD turning them into homeless drunks. The war in 1995 wasn't any different. And everyone would be home for the Nineteenth of July, the commentators at Weazel News would say.
It didn't even matter that we were allied with the Yukes that time. Osea established and ended alliances at the drop of a hat just like Orwell said. After the war ended, we figured, it would be business as usual and then the FCU would be our friends again.
But then came the nukes. It was one of those rare events that caused even the Bahas and 5th Street Vagos to drop their guns in the middle of a turf war and go to their television sets to see. I remember being dismissed from school early and coming home to see my mom silently crying as she watched seven mountain towns obliterated in gigantic mushroom clouds. Before long she had buried her head in evangelistic literature proclaiming the impending rapture. But I was probably more curious than afraid or scared. This was something I'd never thought I'd see happening today...or today in 1995, anyway.
Suddenly, we were all Belkans. Or Oseans. Or whatever nationality took front page on whatever newspaper. We were all united as one.
And having watched all that, I began to feel uncertain...almost afraid of what would happen next.
President Herbert Walker was one of those classic conservative Middle Osea tax-cutter types that thought that everything he did was endorsed by God. But looking back, I could say that I liked how things were a lot more predictable when he was in power, at least up until after the nukes hit. Or maybe my youth meant I still wasn't quite aware of how shitty everything really became. It wasn't the kind of shitty situation that could only be manipulated by some conspiracy. No, a system so big and faulty wouldn't even be capable of pulling it off.
Big business profited during wartime, that was how they worked. When peacetime became profitable, they did that too. It was just the natural cycle of things that often needed a "revolution" or two to spice things up. But the nukes weren't "natural". Nobody expected the fascists to actually make good on upping the ante that high. Suddenly, the natural peace-and-war cycle of industry started to collapse. The fear of the asteroids did a damn good job of covering up the cracks, especially since business found a quick patch building all those superweapons. But after that smoke cleared, shit really hit the fan. And here in Las Violas, we actually started to feel the hard times getting pretty damn hard.
Factories and businesses closed, the zollar and the ruble and the Usean Credit faltered as the global economy came crashing down and the next two administrations couldn't do shit to stop it. The mayor stepped up police presence just to keep protests from turning into riots too often. The government faced assassination plots left and right from everyone from disgruntled survivalists to disgruntled Belkans. Sure, the media tried to find some other global threat to harp on, like the Eruseans' war. None of it ever matched the asteroids though, but that didn't matter. The world just wanted something to put their hope in if they wanted to make it through the next decade without collapsing.
Harling-Appelrouth '04 was supposed to be that Ticket of Hope™. A Senator and a Federation Councilman from two opposing parties, putting aside their political differences to become the first cross-party independent ticket ever voted to power in the country's history. It was all about Restoring Osea, Bringing Our Troops Home and more slogans than half the commercials in the goddamn Mega Bowl. The military-industrial complex was quick to complain, but when the world was already starting to tip over the brink, their opinions weren't so much invalid as they were unwelcome in the arena of political discourse.
All over Las Violas, politicians scrambled for an endorsement on their ticket. Pseudo-marxist community activists and Bible-thumping preachers shook hands before the cameras, promising to step up their efforts to help raise my part of town out of its seemingly endless squalor.
Perhaps the only thing it really did was make the bullshit a lot more apparent than it normally was.
Sure, Harling served as a negotiator for ISAF and the Eruseans after their war. Sure, Osea and Yuktobania signed those important treaties and got rid of all but their biggest nukes. Sure, there were G8 summits in space, captivating the mind of every kid with pipe dreams of being an astronaut. 2008 was the first year Osean soldiers weren't actively involved in some overseas conflict.
But we never saw any of the benefits of peacetime trickle back down to us in Las Violas.
And we never saw any of that promised community improvement as I got out of high school. I certainly didn't. I managed to graduate without dealing drugs and getting gunned down in slow motion drive-by on a street corner to some profound rap lyrics. But the neighborhood had actually found some way to get even shittier than before thanks to the crisis, and everyone wanted a way to leave for greener pastures fast. 9-5 as a supermarket manager like my mom's job since I was in junior high kept food on the table but that wasn't going to cut it for me. Neither was her suggestion that I go into something religious by trade.
So when I enrolled in the Air Force Academy that one wintery morning, I wasn't expecting to end up a hero. Or in WitSec. Or in the private military. Hell, I wasn't even expecting to end up a pilot in the first place. I was just another one of those - and I do quote - "innocent high-school graduates from a poor neighborhood ready to be snatched up by some opportunistic recruiter and sent to die for some lucrative natural resource that multinational corporations needed to boost profits." Or someone who had to be snatched up because the military was the only other alternative to gang life.
Either way, it was subsidized college education with a paycheck. And I could live with stomaching rations three meals a day.
I wasn't surprised that the recruiter tried his best to paint Air Force life as something out of a 1980s action movie. This despite the fact that he looked afraid that a lot of the soldiers being discharged from the Army's downsizing would come back to this neighborhood.
Still, I was thankful that the Air Defense Force recruiting center was a block closer to my house than the Marine Corps. I could chill in a hangar piecing wires and wings back together out in some countryside base and not have to worry about being forward-deployed to some god-forsaken hellhole out in a desert littered with insurgent mud-huts and IEDs. Plus, it was the Air Force...well, the Air Defense Force. Harling wasn't bullshitting when they said they were going to really pursue disarmament. But I figured it was the least painful of the armed services to enlist to, at least after BMT. All I had to do was follow some drill sergeant's orders from sun-up to sundown, march 20 miles a day through rain and mud and not give second thoughts about them. Hard, yeah, but it wouldn't last forever.
And that was something that - after some close calls with flunking - I did all too well. Four years later, I managed to end up on the Fighter track of undergraduate pilot training. And for that I was shipped up to Heierlark in the glorious 57th State of the Federation to spend some time in the cold among a few million disgruntled Belkans.
I earned my callsign during my first training session. My instructor was Captain Frank Friedrich, a not-so-disgruntled Belkan and a veteran of the last war. I know a lot of people think there must be some kind of mystical meaning behind it, but I distinctly remember being called 'Blaze' because that's exactly how Cap'n Fred said I would go down. Only without the glory. Though I think that was probably because I mentioned the term "North Osea" in his earshot. I still don't think the southern Belkans have gotten used to that term yet.
As things turned out though, learning to fly and memorizing the different bits of a plane and what they were wired to was the easy part of fighter pilot training.
It was during SERE where I deeply regretted thinking this would be the least painful of the armed services to enlist to, especially since being a fighter pilot was considered a "high-risk profession". On the other hand, it was where I first met Alvin H. Davenport. Chopper and I ended up in the same sleeping area of the specially-built POW camp. I'm not really allowed to say anything else about happened at SERE thanks to this non-disclosure agreement I signed, other than it was everything anybody would expect a Yuke prison camp in Tiberia to feel like...if you could still feel anything after you were "released." But I will say that he did dispense some rather useful if not disturbing advice - that I had to actually mentally enjoy what our instructors had planned during those two weeks.
Unfortunately that advice didn't come to much when I tried acting like an action hero and spit in my torturer's face during an interrogation session. We would have gotten a good laugh out of it if Chopper hadn't tried pulling a similar stunt and we ended up groaning ourselves to sleep for the next couple of nights.
The two of us survived though, and we got assigned to Sand Island, an auxiliary base west of Cape Landers as a reward for attaining our "freedom". The 108th TFS stationed there was called "Wardog," but because Osea relied so much on aircraft carriers these days the last time the entire base saw anything close to a 'war' was when an old Yuke premier moved an ICBM launcher a little too close to their eastern coastline just to see if Osea would flinch. At last, here was the sun, sand and scuba dive spots that the recruiting posters advertised.
And I knew I jinxed it from the moment I joked to Chopper that there had to be a catch.
The cast of characters were colorful enough. The base commander Orson Perrault was still living in the Cold War, with nothing good to say about the 'godless pinkos' only a couple hundred miles across the sea. And that wasn't counting anything he had to say about people that usually got in his way. Of course, his adjutant Captain Allen Hamilton always managed to keep his boss's rage from bursting out of his morbidly obese frame.
By contrast, Sand Island's most senior mechanic was Perrault's "good" twin. Although the old F-5s we flew probably predated the Cold War, Peter "Pops" Beagle and his crews kept them flying like they were fresh out of the factory. Apparently he got his name from the fact that he always tended to act like someone's dad whenever anyone assigned to him performed well - or messed up during maintenance. Pops had a dog called Kirk that followed him around wherever he went, but his best human friend was the base's senior instructor Captain Jack Bartlett, a veteran of the war in Belka who never got promoted since, for reasons nobody understood. From the way Perrault talked about him, it probably had something to do with him once dating a Yuke Army recon major. The man was a firebrand in training, but really no worse than an average drill sergeant.
Bartlett and Beagle had both been shot down over the infamous Round Table. That the two were able to find each other in that wasteland and escape together would probably forge a friendship probably bordering closer to a 'bromance' than the one me and Chopper nearly built while locked away in SERE. And that was perfectly fine with us, because whenever we seemed to do something wrong during one of Bartlett's training flights, we would have to go to Pops to figure out how to do it right next time.
No, the catch was our squadron leader, Lieutenant Colonel Garrett Ford. There was a reason Chopper called him "His Highness." Ford was the real emperor of the base. The man would have us doing kitchen patrol for missing something during a walkaround check. Or cleaning toilets for possessing something on his broad-brush definition of "contraband." He nearly had Chopper put on court martial for blasting his Rolling Thunder CDs a little too loud in the rec room. Even after summer ended, we could barely think about watching the sunsets and sipping tropical drinks because we were afraid he was conveniently lurking somewhere nearby.
It was on one morning in September that Ford was called back to the mainland for some good old fashioned bureaucratic wrangling. Everyone could breathe a little easier without him, knowing that Colonel Perrault was mostly hot air.
As it happened though, the same aircraft that shuttled him out to the mainland also shuttled a guest in.
Albert Genette
Sand Island AFB, Osea
23 September 2010
0744 hrs.
I was awoken from my in-flight nap by the aircraft's landing gear hitting the runway. I had to squint as I looked out the window of this old prop-driven transport plane, but the view woke me up like a good cup of coffee. The sun was rising behind the plane, and the entire island and its modest air base was drenched in a warm autumn glow with the control tower and hangars co-existing peacefully amidst the palm trees. Although my weighty camera bag was safely slung around my neck, I reflexively kept one hand on it as if to keep it from blowing away as I made my way out of the exit door.
The first person to greet me was a man in a Captain's dress uniform, walking briskly over to the old prop-plane's exit from a group of higher-ranking officers he accompanied. Those higher-ups boarded the plane as soon as I disembarked.
"You're the guy from the Journal?" the Captain shouted over the din of the prop motors still running, "Welcome to Sand Island!"
"Good morning to you too!" I replied as we walked away from the aircraft. "I'm Albert Genette."
"Captain Allen C. Hamilton. I'm the Adjutant Base Commander here," he replied, shaking my hand briefly yet firmly. His voice was a bit of a monotone, but at least he sounded like he meant what he said. "I've been notified about your assignment. This your first time off the mainland?"
"Yeah, well, it's my first time in a place like this," I replied, outstretching my arms a little to behold the tropical expanse.
My first real post with the Oured Journal was for their 'interest' section. These were the articles tucked into a little corner somewhere between the business and Lifestyle/Travel sections of the daily news, about unique people and places that weren't considered 'trendy' or economically significant. It wasn't a particularly important post, but I did get my tickets paid for off the company budget. I'd interviewed Wielvakian city planners laying out eco-friendly mass transit systems and Gebeto farmers who found a way to capitalize and collectivize at the same time. Belka was a forbidden fruit though. Nobody really spoke of that place in good terms since the war, but at the same time everyone also wanted to go, just to see if life was returning there at all.
This assignment was my first with the military, my supervising editor joking about how I'd be "embedded" like I was being deployed to an active warzone. The flight crew aboard the transport even gave me some complimentary body armor and a helmet. I played along and accepted their little gifts. After all it seemed like a good excuse to add a little excitement to a part of the world that hadn't seen much in the way of conflict for decades.
Still, I had been told that the subject of this article was the island's rather unique squadron leader, and that his life story would make great filler for the September 24 issue.
"So what's the bad news?" I asked, toning my voice down as the sound of the motors faded quickly.
"The bad news is that your interview piece is just about to take off on a training sortie."
"That it?" I chuckled, "I can wait if you like-"
"Actually, that's also the good news," Hamilton suddenly said, "You ever been in a fighter plane before?"
My smile turned to shock as I realized what that meant.
Captain Jack Bartlett, callsign Heartbreak One, was one of the few active pilots in the Osean Air Defense Force that had "seen it all." He was a fighter ace of the Belkan War infamous for his playboy antics, but he had never been promoted since the war ended and it appeared only he would know why. Rumors abounded in military circles about him. One went that he had flown in an Osean detachment managed under the notorious Ustio 6th Air Division and once shook hands with the mysterious Demon Lord. Another was that he had been sympathetic to the World With No Boundaries group. Or perhaps his little 'fling' with a Yuktobanian Army officer wasn't quite politically favorable even 15 years ago.
In any event, he was the 108th's most senior trainer, a man that could take the greenest of nuggets and forge them into a fearsome fighter pilot.
I would soon find out firsthand how "unique" he really was - as well as how "unique" his students would turn out to be.
2LT Ricardo Villa
Mess Hall
1231 hrs.
The skies that morning were as blue as they always had been, with the occasional clump of cumulus clouds floating several thousand feet above our heads. Everyone that wasn't out on the morning training flight had already reported to the mess hall for lunch. The mood was lighter than it normally was, but the big-screen TV by the back wall broadcasting Jim Willis' show on Weazel was the only 'conversation' that wasn't hushed.
Ford had only left that morning, but we still hadn't quite gotten used to not worrying if he was around. I'd already stopped "checking my six" in case Ford was lurking behind me. Of course, the only other thing I could really pay attention to until Chopper arrived was trying to figure out what was on Weazel's news ticker from the other side of the mess hall. It was better than watching Jim Willis go off on some tangent on whatever was his boogeyman of the week, and better than having Perrault shout anyone down that changed the channel whenever Willis was on. Nobody ever got put on KP duty for that, because the humiliation pretty much did the trick.
"Oh thank God," I groaned, as Chopper arrived and sat down opposite me, "I was getting tired of looking at old Jimbo."
"Hey Blaze. Speaking of being photogenic, you seen that reporter guy?" Chopper grinned as he set his food down, "We still haven't had our exclusive interview yet." He talked about the interview like we were fresh out of TOPGUN.
"You mean the guy from the Journal? Hamilton said he was here to interview Bartlett," I replied, my mouth already half-full. "My guess is they went off on this morning's training flight."
"They dragged the old Phantom outta the hangar, eh?" Chopper replied, looking out the window. Apart from the NAE Hawks used for the newest rookies, the only other two-seater fighter on the base was Bartlett's personal F-4. "Geez, ya think we'd already be up there in F-16s by now."
"That's the trade-off, I guess," I sighed before taking a sip of water. "We're on an island resort, paid for by the air defense force. We probably don't even get half of TOPGUN's budget."
"That's true, and we are an auxiliary squadron," Chopper replied with a grin, "Least we don't have to wait for mainland leave to enjoy our freedom, with Ford gone and all."
"Amen to that, brother," I replied, raising my cup to meet his in a toast, "A toast... to freedom."
Chopper grinned sheepishly as he raised his cup to mine. The only thing going through my mind was the piña coladas that would fill that glass this evening. But it wasn't the muffled clack of plastic that I heard next.
"MOTHERFU-" was the first thing out of my mouth the toast suddenly appeared to rumble across the hall.
"The hell was that?" Chopper exclaimed as he got half-out of his seat.
Everyone looked around wondering what direction the rumbling came from - along with what caused it. It didn't take long before we found out what it was - the fire alarm began ringing and everyone filed toward the exits. Chopper and I got separated in the crowd, but nobody panicked.
At least until they got outside.
The scene that greeted us was almost utter chaos. Fire crews and MPs raced from one side of the base to another, and to and from the giant plume of black smoke rising from somewhere on the runway. Half the runway was streaked with burning oil and debris as the fire crews raced out to put out the flames, and we could feel the heat all the way over here.
I can recall exactly what I felt as I watched the smoke blot out the sun. It wasn't quite fear, not quite depression. It was more of some unsettling feeling of uncertainty.
The same kind of uncertainty, I recall, from watching those nukes on TV.
Something had happened up there. Something I wouldn't know would change the world until it was happening to me.
Albert Genette
1354 hrs.
Journalists are always supposed to expect the unexpected, and being embedded with the military was - aptly - no exception. But a roller-coaster ride in the weapons systems officer's seat of an F-4 Phantom was beyond anything me or my stomach had expected, and the very least of the day's unexpected turns.
The three survivors of the flight had managed to take out a few of the unknown planes and send the rest home packing...wherever their 'home' was. Lieutenant Nagase didn't even seem to have panicked from what I picked up on the radio. Unfortunately, 'bad' turned to worse when the other surviving trainer crashed on landing, leaving Bartlett, Nagase and I to circle around the base for another hour while they scooped up the wreckage.
Bartlett apologized for what happened after we landed, though it apparently wasn't his fault that whoever planned today's training exercise happened to send them right into the path of the mystery fighter patrol. He didn't expect them to attack, and he didn't expect to lose most of the rookies and their trainers. In the meantime, I decided to take a picture of the lone surviving trainee. Shaken but not shaking, she managed to smile just a little for the camera. I could barely notice it at first glance, but this was the relieved smile of a survivor. It was a rare find, and if I managed not to over-exploit it, it would at least be a keeper.
But the moment I figured the day couldn't have any more surprises than it did, another one suddenly bounced me. I had only finished winding the film from taking Nagase's picture when I turned to find Hamilton and a surly MP approaching me from behind.
"Uh...can I..." I found myself at a loss for words, though I was a little fortunate that Hamilton answered the question I was about to ask.
"Sorry about this, Albert," Hamilton replied. It was the second apology I received from Air Defense Force personnel today. "But I'm afraid we'll have to detain you and confiscate your camera."
That didn't make me any less surprised. "But I didn't take a picture of anything suspicious," was my thin excuse.
Most of the pictures I took were of personnel I'd met, and of the other planes on the training flight right before combat. I wasn't even sure if the pictures taken during the dogfight would come out blurry until they were actually developed. That would have been my fault for still preferring film over digital when it came to taking pictures for the Journal.
"We'll be the judge of that," Hamilton continued, "In the meantime, you're not allowed to leave the base until we've figured what went on up there."
"Oh, all right..." I groaned as I removed the camera from around my neck and handed it to the MP, who proceeded to tuck it under his arm. "My editors will still hear of this, won't they?"
Hamilton waved it off as he began to walk back to the command building with the MP and I in tow. "Don't worry about it, Albert," he reassured me as much as his voice seemed to allow, "We've already notified them. They'll understand if it's a matter of national security."
I sighed in frustration, trying to figure out what to do next. None of the pilots would know any more of what went on there than Bartlett or Edge would. "But what am I supposed to do now?" I pleaded.
"Well," he said with a soft smile, "You'll be 'detained' in the Crew Quarters, so you can at least get to know the other pilots. Just think of it as a little unpaid vacation."
Apparently he also figured they wouldn't know enough to compromise national security either.
Of course, the pilots and I would unfortunately learn plenty of that in the months ahead...
2LT Ricardo Villa
Crew Ready Room
1607 hrs.
Captain Bartlett was already there, slumping back in his chair and staring up at the ceiling like he'd just had the worst day of his life. Well, third worst day. Second was probably that day he got shot down over B7R back in 1995. The chatter was that the first happened right before that, when he'd earned his callsign from being dumped by a Yuktobanian recon major.
He led the training flight that morning. The only other survivors of the flight were Edge and the journalist riding shotgun with him. From what I heard, Perrault had the journalist arrested and probably shipped off to a secret OCIA torture camp to figure out what he was really up to. Edge, well, Edge never liked to talk about anything.
Everyone in the room was trying their best not to look shaken up, but none of us thought any less of each other when we failed to do so.
"Hey buddy, you're breathing kinda funny." Chopper began, as we took our seats.
I shook my head. "It's just all the smoke from earlier. I thought it was gonna get into the air conditioning."
"Hey, you don't have to hide it," he replied, "Svenson's crash really shook me up too."
"Yeah," I sighed as if letting out all that built-up tension, "I mean, what if it was us up there instead of Foreman and Hendrick?"
Foreman and Hendrick, callsigns Cavalier and Mustang, were the two names right before ours on the training sorties for the day. If the morning's flight went as it was supposed to, Chopper and I would have breathed easy because we would be assigned to Captain Fritz Svenson for the afternoon session instead of having to face the firebrand tutelage of Heartbreak One.
As bad luck would have it, it was Svenson's plane that painted the runway with fire and debris earlier this morning. There probably wasn't enough of him left to send back for a closed-casket burial.
"You mean like in that movie where...what was that..." he silently snapped one finger trying to recall, "...the dude cheated death by not getting on that plane?"
"And then death came looking for him afterward because it wasn't part of the plan? That one."
Chopper then leaned in toward me. "Hey, at least we definitely weren't supposed to be there," I whispered, "Edge looks frozen stiff."
"You mean colder than normal?" I quipped quietly. I didn't think she heard that, but I didn't feel like it was as funny as it should have been as we stared at the girl sitting at the front row, almost perfectly still.
Kei "Edge" Nagase arrived here before me and Chopper did, and she was literally a mystery woman. Despite her deceptively-frail frame, she reputedly aced her examinations and evaluations and survived SERE with her dignity intact. Counting mock battles, she already earned her ace wings and gained her callsign from a famous Usean mercenary that her flight instructor said she reminded him of. It wasn't hard to imagine her as a ruthless aerial ice queen if a war did break out.
But she wasn't shy about supporting a President who had actively downsized the Air Force into an Air Defense Force since he took power. And she could always be heard grumbling to herself in the mess hall whenever Jim Willis was on. Those were about the only windows into her mind, let alone her room. My guess was she wanted to be an astronaut from when I noticed a small model of the Arkbird in her quarters. Either that or she had to be a member of some secret FSA intelligence force that needed a fighter pilot's qualifications for some black-ops need-to-know-basis assignment. But she rarely talked to anyone outside of the sorties, which was fine with us because there was a story of how she dealt with someone trying to make a rather forward advance on her.
Chopper still claimed he couldn't walk straight after that, but I kept his little humiliation between the two of us.
It was then that Bartlett sat up like a vampire. Me and Chopper feigned flinching and sat up at attention as we took a good look at his sullen mug.
"I know you don't like this, but we're short on people," he began. "Starting tomorrow, all you nuggets are gonna be sitting on alert. If we launch, stay glued to me up there."
He then turned to Edge, whom I guessed had been sitting up at attention since before we got here.
"Sir!"
"You're flying Number Two on my wing. Gotta keep an eye on you or who knows what you'll get yourself into." Edge nodded silently in response, before Bartlett then turned his attention to the rest of us. Looking into his eyebag-riddled mug made us sit up at attention as rigid as she was. "As for the rest of you, we're gonna draw straws to see which of you lives to see Halloween."
He leaned forward and withdrew a set of straws from his desk drawer. Although we'd done the routine several times before to figure out who flew with which trainer, I could practically taste the tension as we all lined up to draw. The premise was simple enough: the straws were cut to different lengths to decide our position in the formation, and because all the other trainers were dead they were notched to decide which of us were going up first. Edge already had her assignment, but we all hoped that she wouldn't be the only survivor if we went up with them.
"Dude, you go first," Chopper said, giving me a gentle shove as I got in line.
"Dammit Chopper, this isn't like last time, we might actually fucking die out there and our loved ones will be told it's an accident," I muttered through a clenched jaw. Unfortunately, it wasn't soft enough for Bartlett not to hear.
"I heard that, Lieutenant Villa," he suddenly said, glaring at me like he wished I died with everyone else. I felt my face go red as everyone in the room turned to look at me, "For that, you get a free pass to the front of the line. Now hurry up, you're holding everybody up."
Chopper and half the cadets grinned sheepishly as I moved to the front of the line, wanting to take the straw and sit back down.
Unfortunately for me, I found myself silently praying to a God I didn't really put much effort into believing in when I drew the short straw. I would probably need all the divine intervention I could get in order to survive what would happen before the year ended.
To be continued...
A/N: Yes, I am making Blaze a smartass instead of the usual upstanding or pseudo-grimdark type. Makes things interesting. Apologies to darkgriffon4321 if anything here sounds similar to his "Demons and Ghosts".
A/N 2: The N in NAE Hawk stands for Nordland, I like to think that country is the equivalent of the UK in this canon. And I'm still not good with the military lingo. ;_;