The Guardian
Mallory flew to the side of the wall, hitting the arm rail hard. She grasped to it as the whole hall shook and rumbled, a surround sound of explosions erupting far and wide around her.
She steadied herself and found her pace along the chaotic hallway again. Ducks barreled past her in the opposite direction, none of them giving her a second look. They were most likely heading to the evacuation pods and gliders, a smart move that she should have considered making.
But instead she jogged the other way, cradling her right arm to stop the vibration travelling and worsening the pain she was beginning to feel. The trip into the wall exacerbated the injury, making her grit her teeth as she stumbled along the path.
There was so much smoke blinding her way; debris kept raining down, forcing her to dodge or push herself to the side of the corridor to get through; and heat, there was so much heat!
Right, left, left, straight. There!
She nearly tripped and grabbed a hold of the door jamb to steady herself, the sliding door stuck in a partially open position. She grunted and cried out in frustration as she forced it open.
"—get your ass out of here, Captain!"
Mallory came up to the end of a conversation as she finally entered the room. The ducks in question were at a control station, the large window in front of them completely obstructed by smoke. They were watching the monitors instead, which provided a 3D layout of their surroundings.
"Sir—"
"That's an order, Captain, now get the HELL out of here!"
"Yes, Sir!" the captain, as he was addressed, paused and saluted his commander in Puckworld Military fashion: heart to shoulder and head bow.
The commander—General McMallard—gave a curt head bow in return before seeing Mallory in his peripheral vision. His eyes flashed with hot anger as the captain turned and ran past Mallory, only giving her a brief, curious glance as he passed.
"Cadet, orders have been given to evacuate. I suggest you follow them!"
Mallory took a step forward, still favoring her arm. "Commander General—"
"NOW!" General McMallard grabbed a hold of the station desk as more explosions erupted and shook the entire airship. He turned his attention back to the monitors and began pressing buttons.
Mallory had crumpled against a wall and struggled to pull herself back up during the quake. "You need to evacuate, too!"
McMallard shook his head and looked at her. "We've lost all but one engine. Autopilot can't correct this trajectory—it needs to be guided. I'll head into a pod right after. NOW GO, McMALLARD!"
"Comman—"
"GO!"
"DAD!"
He paused in his actions again, watching his daughter—his only daughter out of a brood of five. He shook his head at her. "Don't let them win, Mallory."
Win. She'd tried her whole life to win, and she never quite got the hang of it. Her two oldest brothers were ten and eight years older than her, respectively. She never really got to know them growing up, and now they were captains while she tried to prove herself as a third-year cadet in the Special Forces; a female one, at that.
Her other brothers were twins. They were less than two years older than her, and they were so protective of her. Mallory knew that they were the only reason she survived her first two years in the strict military program. They were amiable, strong lieutenants that treated their teams with a respect that she had not seen in her years living on a military base.
She would never live up to their leadership. This was the their first year out in the field, both of them having graduated last season. They were both on the fast track to becoming captains themselves, while Mallory was perfecting her icy exterior to keep her fellow cadets off her back.
They were all thriving, and she was just trying to survive.
And Mom. . . .
Mallory never got to meet her mother. Mom had wanted a daughter so desperately that, despite a difficult pregnancy with twins, she convinced Mallory's dad to try one more time.
Complications led to hemorrhaging during labor, and Mom had died giving birth to the first female McMallard.
Mallory had tried her whole life to win, and yet she was blamed for the one thing she could never fix. Dad never actually said Mallory was the reason her mother was dead, but he never really had to. Actions said so much more than words ever could.
Mere seconds had passed as she watched her father glare at her. He had never been good with words, but she finally understood him as they stared at one another.
She dumbly nodded to his request, as if her agreement made the future set in stone. Another rupture caused steam to come blowing out through the vents, startling her from doing anything more. She jumped back from the hot pressurized air, her face distorting in pain as she watched her dad.
They had never got along, and yet she ended up on the Guardian with him while her four brothers led or followed convoys on the ground, fighting the murderous Hunter Drones and Raptors plaguing their city, their home.
Their world.
Her brothers were below her, and up here in the skies her father and a hundred strong flew the massive battleship in an attempt to take down the Saurian's mothership, the large Raptor-like blood-red ship of mass destruction.
They had failed. It had disappeared, or gone invisible thanks to some foreign technology, and had left them completely unprepared. They knew how the Saurian ships had avoided detection from their monitoring satellites around the planet, now, but at a high cost.
Mallory watched her dad turn his attention back to the controls, his focus solely on guiding this giant broken vessel somewhere out of dense populations, away from the mass crowds in the city and the convoys trying desperately to protect them.
He would not turn back to her anymore; she knew that. She hesitated, watching him, but even as she hesitated she felt her feet draw back towards the exit. They betrayed her heart, her every fiber to stay—
—because it was pointless. She could do no more here.
She grew angry at the tears that formed, and she grew furious as she felt herself take another step back.
"Mallory, we gotta go!"
She jolted at her name being called behind her. She turned to find a fellow cadet—what was his name again?—see her from the hall. The steam clouded the room now and she could not see her father.
She felt her bad arm being pulled and hissed at the pain, but she let the cadet pull her. It made her feel like she wasn't making the decision alone; that she wasn't abandoning her father because of an order.
The cadet pulled her back into the chaos of the hall, as smoky and hot as ever. She let the pain of her arm cloud her thoughts as the fellow student led the way, avoiding fires from the side rooms or jumping over broken pieces of duct and wall that had begun to litter the floor. She told herself the tears were from the smoke irritating her eyes as they zigzagged through the passageways of what was once the largest military vessel Puckworld had ever had to defend its home.
The Guardian, the protector of the lands for almost a century, was plummeting to its grave.
They reached the evacuation center and found two gliders. The cadet let her go and began strapping himself in.
"Come on, Mal!"
Mallory, like a robot, got in her own glider and strapped herself in. She pulled on the controls to adjust them to her comfort level and nodded to her partner. They simultaneously pushed the eject button and found themselves falling to the city below, the Guardian a behemoth of fiery entrails above and to their left.
The wings of the glider instantly spread and they aimed their mini airships to the city's rendezvous point. They would meet up with the convoys there, if they were still holding the location, and they would end this fight.
They would win this battle.
They would win this war.
Minutes later, as they began to sail to through the tall buildings, Mallory heard the inevitable sounds of an airship taking its final breath. Even at this distance she felt the heat of the subsequent explosions and—taking a brave chance to look in her side mirror—saw that the bay had taken the brunt force of its crash.
He did it.
Now she needed to hold her promise.
fin