Red Checks Over Rhodes, Part 1

FEBRUARY 2524- HELP, I'M STEPPING INTO THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

“You know this is suicide, right?” Goodfella settled down into the backseat of the ASF-17E, the red checkmark of the Fighting Renegades splashed across the side of the Tactical Systems Officer’s helmet. “You do know that, right, Wick?”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “Damn good reason nobody's ever done this.” She rubbed the back of her neck, the large, empty port at the base of her skull feeling a bit heavier than usual. It was, ultimately, a bad day to die. It was her best friend’s wedding today, and she was devastated to miss it. If it hadn't been for the war, she would have felt like a real asshole, even if they had called her in. She wondered what a good day would look like, before coming to the conclusion that there perhaps was no such thing, just days where it might not be the worst.

She stared down into the cockpit of the E-model Panther, the twin sticks of the Front Office rising up from the armrests in a silent greeting. “Well, Wick?” Goodfella looked up at her, pulling the exterior sunvisor of his helmet down. “You coming, or do I gotta fly the damn thing, too?”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “No worries. Just got an itch on my back or something.” She pulled her arm back over her shoulder. She couldn't reach it. Her flight suit was too thick, anyways. That was gonna drive her nuts.

He raised an eyebrow in concern. “Alright then. Jack in and let's roll.”

The canopy glinted in the harsh light of the flight pod, cracked open and slid back to the aft. The fighter sat among the stacks, myriad siblings perched amongst a forest of manipulator arms and loading rails. Ordnance teams scattered below, loader drones led by crewmen; they carted along weapons the likes of which had only been seen the last time nations had clashed with such force and fury. Lieutenant Rafka ‘Wicked’ Smart of the US Navy stepped down, one foot on the seat, one on the gantry, before sinking into the embrace of the high-g acceleration chair. A long, thick cable, terminating in a black, curved box with connector terminals at its ends, sat at the nape of her neckrest. She scooched forward, fumbling around behind her back, and pulled the data umbilical over her lap. That one went last. Onboard oxygen and water came first. Then the heating/cooling umbilical. Everything hooked up nice and tight, green status lights on the flight suit’s wrist display.

The black box sitting on her leg wasn't pretty. It was a grim necessity of a brutal age; gone were the sleek and small neural laces of the 2200s— they had gone the way of paper cigarettes and the sudden, firy death of technogroove. In had come the cyberplague, and in its wake it had left bulky binary module interfaces as the only viable option for those who preferred their nerve endings intact. She checked her helmet’s seal against the locking collar of her flight suit and the dock surface on the neural connector on the back of her skull. They were airtight. She was good. She gulped down one last, shaky breath and lifted the plug to the jack.

Data came up the implanted synthnerve, an anasthetic numbing her to herself— starting in a trickle, mixing and weaving with the sights and sounds of her own eyes and ears, a sharp-edged, hot tingle buzzing inside her nerves. Soon she would dream in infrared visions from eyes on the back of her head, soon she would howl in every frequency of the spectrum and eat off the flames of a captive star. Now, though, she simply had to figure out where her eyeballs ended and the sensors started— too tight of a meld was dangerous.

She took a breath and curled a fist. She closed her eyes. She thought of home. It hurt.

Good.

She opened up the intercom and ran through the preflight in her head, flipping switches and checking gauges, disconnecting the offboard power, switching the reactor to POWER START mode before flipping over the cover and punching the button.

The uprated F757-SC fusion reactor’s startup was always more violent than the C-model’s 753— a thumping howl that faded into a gentle purr. It made sense. It was a bigger engine, and the heart of an artificial star had just taken up a magnetically-confined residence inside her plane. It always felt harrowing. This was a living, breathing creature. It was a part of herself, and she was part of it, and it was trying to kill her. The fighter-interdictor was a mixed breed, sure, but it begged to be let off the leash and hunt all the same as its purebred C-model cousins.

Today, the Panther would get its wish.

“Reactor hot,” Wicked nodded. “Copy,” came the reply from the backseat. “Final round back here. All green so far. Ready to button up?”

“All clear, send it.” Goodfella flipped the switch to seal them under the duraglass as she watched the shimmering gold of the bubble canopy slide forward into place. She flipped a switch on the side of her helmet, a largely redundant HUD flickering into existence as laser beams danced across her retinas. She glanced down at the screens ringing the front of the composite bathtub of a cockpit. This, too, was largely a symbolic, grounding gesture. Wicked knew the fighter was ready like she knew her tank top was too itchy at the lumbar, tucked away snugly under her airtight flight suit. She really was hoping that would go away. The glance reminded her that she was her own being, a soul that continued to exist when she stepped out of the cockpit and pulled the black box from her skull.

“Ready, Goodfella.” The aviator lofted a thumbs-up towards the roof of the canopy. “Let's get rolling.”

“Copy that, Wick.” He nodded. “CHO, this is RAGE 207, ready setdown.”

“Copy, RAGE 207.” The Craft Handling Officer’s team was fast today. “You're next in the rotation for your stack. Setting you down shortly.”

The gantry system pushed them off their catwalk bay, a lifting crane on standby to lower the fighter-interdictor to the deck. As another airframe ahead of them made contact with the deckplate, it drove away on the power of a small tractor cart waiting for it below. An icon on the main display turned green as the Craft Handling Officer called in. “RAGE 207, go for setdown and rolloff.”

The plane, wheels on the gravity-plated deck, rolled over to the arming stations as munitions drones pulled in alongside and into the trench underneath the plane. She went over the munitions loadout, a nerve ending gaining a new neighbor as the flight computer sent the knowledge of each and every weapon to the back of her head, as instinctual as breathing. Boxes of tungsten slugs slotted in up top with four hundred and twenty six rounds of 25mm each for the articulated guns sitting over each shoulder. She ran the test without thinking, glancing around in front to watch the reticles keep pace with her view, the gimballed magcannons tracking flawlessly.

She felt three BBM-241 heat-seekers lock into the starboard bay before the image even popped onto the Stores Management display. The Mamba was the Panther family's purpose-built fangs, a compact, conventionally armed missile that could serve as either a sprint-configured space to space missile or a short-ranged dogfighting missile in the skies, both with a great degree of maneuverability. The loader drones finished their jobs, and now she had six-shooters on each hip, a full twelve Mambas on their internal triple ejectors. Underneath, pallets of bombs, tipped with multimode anti-radiation seekers and kitted for a boosted glide, slid under the fuselage as “GBU-501R” blinked onto the display.

She glanced around as up and down the flight pod a row of Panthers stretched out as far as the eye could see, an air wing’s worth of aerospace fighters getting ready to leave the nest. The scale was almost incomprehensible. Even at the largest ‘elephant walk’ exercises, where they'd cram every last jet they could find down a single runway, she didn't think she'd seen so many warplanes so tightly packed together that weren't being stored. She'd already gotten the brief; twenty-eight carrier aerospace wings had been offloaded at Sol, and in their place, the USS RANGER and her sisters had been crammed to the gills with atmospheric capable fighters and strike planes. There wasn't a spare bunk aboard; the massive seven hundred meter Landing Platform, Atmospheric was standing room only. This was her ship, so she'd been able to have some time to sleep in her own rack— thank God, she thought, even if I have to share— but she knew VFA(E)-33’s skipper— and many others— had been forced to lash their sleeping bags to the wall out in the corridor. How are we going to fight, she wondered, with shitty sleep?

It didn't really matter, at this point. Operation DEADLINE’s opening gambit would be over and done with in four hours, nineteen minutes, and seven seconds, one way or another. That's what her HUD counter read. The battle would continue for weeks, of course, but it would be won or lost in that one opening move. They were supposed to be rolling in with a numerical advantage, the planners calling for three to one at the absolute worst. Minervans had SAMs on the ground, though, and a joint engagement zone. That, she thought, was going to be a bloodbath. She didn't know for who. Even with modern signature matching technology, it wasn't unheard of for a surface to air missile to go off-script and kill one of your own guys. Rare, sure. Impossible, no. Besides, the Minnie drivers were damn good, and armed with some very, very capable missiles. She'd lost a good few of her old friends to their heatseeker, a short-ranged, quick missile with a launch signature that didn't always trip missile approach warning systems. The Minervans called it the IRM-45 Falcon. The reporting name for it was the MN-AA-31 Aurora. Everyone called it the Widowmaker, and the name was no exaggeration.

As they were cleared to roll forwards, a yellow-vested crewman walking her plane along the deckplate, she came to a grim realization. In the skies of Marathon, four hours would decide who lived and who died. Four hours of steel, silicon, and blood, four hours of cold necessities or raw hatreds. Four hours would winnow the wheat from the chaff, thousands of souls swept up in the cruel harvest.

She wasn't sure what she felt for the Minervans. She used to feel pity. There had been a great deal of it amongst the ranks, back in the day. That was before they had invaded Sol, and far before the latest reports from Marathon had gotten to the fleet and been splashed across every screen in the Sol system. Minnie soldiers had uprooted entire cities to set exclusion zones around anything they considered militarily valuable, and were now drawing the demarcation lines in blood. She had always used to think there wasn't much difference between them and her, but now Goodfella would be the first to correct her on that, and she was beginning to agree. They're not just some impressionable kids enticed into service by patriotism or paychecks, his voice echoed. They're impressionable kids with innocent blood on their hands.

In all honesty, she still felt a little bit of pity for them. Some of it was genuine, from a place of common humanity. The rest of it was a different kind of pity. As she looked upon the line of strike fighters abreast, wings unfurling and contorting every which way in test patterns, the outstretched arm of the United Nations made manifest, she pitied the poor souls on the receiving end of all this.

She reached out her right hand and grabbed the primary control stick, a vestigial formality most days, but an essential fallback today. Heaven only knew what kind of cyberweapons and SCREW interference they'd face once they hit realspace. She'd heard rumors— nasty rumors— about the Minervans having some kind of mindflayer brain worm that could get in through adversarial patterning on the radar. She glanced down at the NEURAL EJECT switch. If flipped, it would trigger the system to physically punch the neural lace out of her skull. They'd all rehearsed it a million times. She hoped it would be as second-nature when there was a viral package rampaging around through her brainstem. She grimaced. It was much like an escape raft on a submarine— more there for peace of mind than any actual functionality. Hopefully Goodfella would be able to punch her out if he noticed. The Built-In Test screen flashed to life on her MFD, instructing her to unfurl the wings. She pushed forward a hat switch on the left stick and the two slim protrusions at the side of the plane jumped into action, sliding forth from the fuselage as the fore and aft wing panels followed, a single cohesive trapezoidal wing forming by virtue of addition. The MFD commanded the ruddervators be moved to their flight position, and she dutifully complied, the smaller stabilizers to the aft swinging down to an acute angle with the wings. The atmospheric control surfaces danced in the flight pod’s hard vacuum for lack of a wind; the wings soon swept in— Reaction Control System wingtips remaining fixed in their place— and the ruddervators split into their X-formation as the radiators were brought to bear. Everything checked out, with green lights across the display. It chirped a jingle of acknowledgement and she held aloft a thumbs-up to a yellow-vested aircraft handler.

The synth nodded; a tube assignment flashed across her HUD. “RAGE, CHO.” The Craft Handling Officer called in to her squadron. “Acknowledge tube assignments.”

“RAGE 200, confirm Tube Papa-Delta-One-Six.”

“RAGE 201, confirm Tube Papa-Delta-One-Seven.”

The squadron counted off, one airframe after another, and a shiver crept up her spine. It was finally becoming real. Something panicked within her. The sentence was being pronounced. The hangman’s noose hung gently on the shoulders of each and every one here. She shook her head and smothered the thought. She could feel the impression of Goodfella’s mind hovering just behind her shoulder, reaching out to a laminated prayer card taped to his cockpit rail, calling on the hand of the Archangel Michael to carry him through the day. So he was scared too. He always did this, but she didn't usually feel it this strongly. That wasn't good. C’mon, Tony, she thought. No time for that now. She hoped he didn't hear the words. She hoped he felt their shape.

The fade getting them this early was bad.

Her turn. She breathed in deep.

“RAGE 207, confirm Tube Papa-Delta-Two-Three.” Her tone was calm, professional, collected. She closed her eyes, and by the time she opened them, so was she. There were people down there counting on her. She watched the seconds tick away. Four hours, sixteen minutes, eleven seconds. Fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters all wondering why they were stuck in a flashkrete prison. If she could shave off even one second from their captivity at the barrel of a gun, she had a duty to do so. She wasn't going to let them down.

“RAGE, all tube assignments confirmed. Proceed to launch tubes and engage cat-lock. Good hunting.”

She gripped the stick, and at the urging of the yellow-vest, guided the plane, wings retracted, stabilizers folded, onto the launch armature. The front wheel locked in as the enveloping darkness of the launch tube overtook their vision, blast door sealing behind them. There was nothing beyond the lights of the cockpit before a streak overtook her vision, edge-recognition software highlighting the contours of the surroundings as the night vision on her fighter’s systems subconsciously kicked in.

“RAGE 207, Launch Control. Cat-lock engaged, alignment is green. Tube is cold, coming online. Stand by for launch clearance.” LCO’s voice was buttery and calm over the radio. She nodded as Goodfella answered in acknowledgement.

At T- four hours, seven minutes, and forty-three seconds, realspace hit her like a truck. Her stomach dropped through itself, through her gut, even. She felt like she was drowning under the weight of the void. Her fighter’s gravitometer went ballistic, throwing every number from 0 to 926 out within seconds of each other, and none were even correct, even if it felt like all of them were at once. It was the worst she had ever felt in her life, an instant, perhaps, but an unending instant of compressive, squeezing pain. She hoped nothing broke. Glancing down at a stomach that was in fact intact and a gravitometer reading the deckplates’ 0.7g downwards, she thought it was probably fine. A quick system check confirmed her suspicions. Four hours, five minutes, and thirty five seconds.

“RAGE, set launch clock for two minutes, staggered sequence.”

Four hours, five minutes.

It was only two minutes, but she wished the wait didn't take so long. She knew it wouldn't be the worst part of the day, but it certainly felt like it in the moment. She fought to keep her mind in her own head. She liked Goodfella, he was a good guy and a damn good TAC-O. She didn't want to scrape her consciousness up against his. She could tell he was rapt in wordless prayer, a silent cry for divine protection of a kind she didn't really believe in. She didn't resent him that, it was just something she didn't understand. Her parents had been faithful, but she had never really taken to it. She appreciated Chaplain O’Brien’s concern, at least. Maybe one day. She sincerely doubted that she would be finding God today, though. Meeting Him, perhaps, if they were right and she was unlucky. L-00:00:20. Go time.

The doors to the tube cracked open, blinding light spilling through the edge-highlighted void. Her neural link lit up with thousands of contacts, and she instinctively knew where each and every one of them was. She grit her teeth, flipped down her sun visor, and clutched the brace handles for dear life.

“RAGE 207, LCO.” Here it was. “Cat-lock secure. Charge sequence interval check… charge sequence go, capacitors online. Checkers green, tube is hot. I say again, tube is hot. Clear forward, charge positive. RAGE 207, you are go for launch. I say again, GO FLIGHT. Good hunting.”

“RAGE 207 confirms GO FLIGHT.” Goodfella nodded from the back. If there was any fear in his voice, Wick couldn't hear it. “Launching.”

“Punch it,” he nodded from the back. She obliged, and the world became a tunnel-vision blur for but a moment, the euphoria of pure adrenaline coursing into every muscle in her body. The sleek grey spaceframe shot out of the tube, a bolt from the blue. Chaos enveloped them.

Anti-orbital missile tracks streaked upwards from the ground as the fleet’s batteries opened up in reply, cracking off shots against a Minervan defense flotilla that was very much surprised to see them so close and so soon. Escort drones formed up around the squadron of Echo Panthers, her hand instinctively reaching for the controls to push the RCS booms out and swing open the radiators. “Space mode engaged, reactor at unrestricted output.” She took a breath. “Goodfella, you hanging in back there?”

“Yeah, all good, Wick. My jammers look good.”

“Alright.” She nodded, letting herself ease back into the Tactical Neural Datalink as she switched the Master Arm on and went down the prep checklist. The next phase was one that RAGE 207 needed to be firing on all cylinders for. The decoy drones, slim tubes not much unlike a missile but with large fold-out radiators, clustered loosely around their fighters, signature augmenters burning away in the night hoping to draw a missile, point-defense autocannons in the nose searching for inbound targets to shred. She looked out at the decoys with a shred of that sentimental pity typically reserved for particularly well-loved pencils. Sure, I don't need you, she thought, and I'm going to use you up. But everything’s just that bit easier while I've got you here.

Next came the loyal wingman drones. The Lima-Whiskeys were a fighter pilot’s best friend, a missile magazine with wings that served her two purposes: to extend her reach and to hopefully die before she did. This variety, the MQ-111 Lynx, was designed to operate with the Panther, a heat shield and small orbital maneuvering thrusters giving the unmanned microfighter the reach necessary to hit the sky running. The Lynxes were packed with AIM-173 Advanced Active Radar Ordnance missiles, scramjet-powered medium-to-long range missiles so named because the good people at Huntwell Systems rather liked the sound of “AARO”. She did too. It flowed off the tongue nicely. They looked rather like a bent sled with wings and a V-tail, not much like an aircraft at all. The shape was meant to hold as much ordnance as possible inside while concealing its presence on groundside search radars; the strange, inverted beak-tipped brick certainly got no points for looking pretty. Ugly or not, she was glad to have them near. They would be helpful, she mused. At the very least, as long as she could see that ugly thing, she was still alive.

The formations, loose as they were, coasted along their orbital tracks. They strafed as the collision or proximity alarms called for, watching as torpedo volleys shot off into the black at the defending fleet. The enemy formation was more visible from the flash of their missiles than anything else at this distance— to the naked eye, at least. Close by space combat’s standards was very far indeed, but with the aid of their airframes the Panther drivers could see every terrifying bit of it. Her CO Bubbles’ voice crackled over the radio. “RAGE, standby for deorbit burn on my mark.” She watched as the maneuver node approached on her navigation screen, and pirouetted the fighter ass-backwards before gripping the left stick tighter still. The maneuver node ticked down, calling for just a few kilometers per second of delta-V, at just the right time. The clock hit zero, Bubbles called the mark, and she punched it, letting the drives burn for a few paltry seconds before yanking back on the left stick, throttling down the main engines. The trajectory looked good, and she spun the nose prograde again, staring down the gas giant’s moon that would be the ruin of so many.

Hundreds of slate-grey spaceframes dove for the moon below, radiators set to minimum viable emissions as missiles blossomed above and below, trails of plasma carving eerie purple gashes in the sky. Hundreds turned to thousands. There were nearly fourteen thousand aerospacecraft committed to this operation, she knew. The horizon stared up at her, a thin blue blanket wrapped around a marble of a world. Exoatmospheric kill vehicles broke through the clouds, splitting from their ASAT boosters below as they rose to meet their new guests. All around her, the bollard-sized ‘kinetic effectors’— such an elegant name for a particularly fast rock— turned signature-augmented drones into vapor and debris. She switched to reentry mode just as the first tendrils of flame started to lick at the corners of her fighter’s fuselage, and as she glanced around the canopy she watched in horror as in the span of half a second another Panther became an almost perfectly spherical field of dust and smoke. There was no blood, there was no bone, there was nothing even to suggest that a young man had been there but a moment earlier. It was almost merciful in its clinical brutality. The shroud of reentry heating began to overtake her canopy’s view, and it washed away that unknown aviator’s unmarked grave as everything was consumed in flames.

The data streamed in, picking up where her vision left off. Her eyes were now hundreds of miles away, and she saw in radar waves and thermal signatures. The datalink antenna on the Panther’s tail ‘stinger’, the only part of the jet not enveloped by flame, streamed all the awareness she would get for the next five minutes as the sheath of plasma cut her off from the outside world. The picture was not good. The Skyshield decoy drones had no heat shield, so they were not expecting them to survive, but they had been estimated to last slightly longer. She didn’t have any math behind it, but based on how quickly they were coming apart she gave them a minute and a half, two if they were lucky. That was even worse. She watched the IFF blips of several other Panthers tick off her display as another wave of ASAT missiles shot off their launchers, archers below emptying their quivers. She was very thankful that the countermeasure launchers had thermal protection. She felt the faint outline of a prayer brush up against her mind, the suppressed panic of two souls in a hurtling metal box each finding solace in the other over the fighter’s neural link. She felt a wave of calm wash over the bridge, her backseater nodding as if she could see him.

Reentry decoys dropped out the back of the fighter, designed to roughly mimic the thermal signature of a Panther by inflating a large heat shield in front. They were fairly large for a countermeasure, though, and the Panthers could only stow so many. Worse still, the Echo model had cut out much of the internal space for the decoys in favor of a large conformal jammer array spaced just behind the heat shield. She cursed the engineers at Convair. Perhaps they didn’t understand that a jammer was only useful if the plane it was attached to continued to exist after you launched it. Even still, the defensive avionics system kicked the last few decoys they did have out the aft of the plane. They ballooned to life next to the jet as yet more friendly tags disappeared. The whole thing would have worked marvelously if the Minervans had simply not thought to bring so many missiles.

The MN-SO-10 Oryx was a capable hunter, and like any predator of its caliber it hunted in packs. As the waves of missiles approached, they communicated with each other, each choosing their own target, the system highlighting less probable intercepts to be covered by multiple kill vehicles. She knew there was nothing she could do, beyond a few paltry course corrections. The jinking, she thought, didn’t really matter, more for her comfort than for any real result. If an Oryx had her instead of the legion of decoys, the end would at least be quick. She felt Goodfella’s training take hold, interrupting the serenity of a mind at prayer. He reached out with his thoughts, commanding one of the Lynxes to strafe ever so slightly left. She couldn’t tell if it was dumb luck or rehearsed skill; mere moments later the missile approach warning went haywire and the drone was shredded by an impactor doubtless meant for them. “Alignment,” he said. “Missile was terminal, I put it between us and the missile. We’re good. Two and a half minutes left.”

He didn’t have to speak. She appreciated the courtesy. She was shaken by the realization that the computerized MAWS was slower than her flesh-and-blood TAC-O. She knew it was going to be running degraded; the data being streamed to her brainstem had a slight lag to it, the onboard sensors were blinded by a wall of fire, and the battlespace was so saturated that at any given moment the safe bet was to assume that there was a missile heading for you. It was a chilling feeling, and one that she didn’t know how to articulate. She trusted Goodfella, though, and that would be enough for now. It had to be.

The Skyshields had burned up just over a minute ago, slightly sooner than her more pessimistic estimate. She didn’t have the time to wonder why, but it would certainly make an interesting debrief. They were barreling down towards the surface now, the oppressive g-forces assaulting them showing no signs of relenting. Accelican™ coursed through their veins in place of blood. She knew the chemical cocktail was the only thing keeping her thoughts fast enough to stay alive, an unintended but welcome side effect of the miracle drug that would no doubt collect the Reaper’s interest one day. Even still, the g’s bit at her stomach, yanked at her bones; the rattling of her seat a comforting reminder that they were still flying. A marker, uncapped and left behind by a previous occupant, flew forward and smacked Goodfella’s visor, a streak carving a perverse red smile below blue-lit eyes. Below, she watched as rapidly scrambled fighters rose from their bases, off launchpads and airstrips, rising to meet the gauntlet thrown down ahead of them. Even with the losses they had taken, they had numerical superiority; she knew they were not done taking those losses, and even now the real battle had not yet begun. This was merely the price of admission, paid in empty graves under solemn little crosses.

The fighters on the scope were many and varied, and would not come into full view until the veil of flame had been lifted. They swarmed and swarmed and swarmed. The clock bore down, somewhere below a decision being made if she would live or die every second. She hated that it was so far out of their hands. They’d always had their fate in their hands until now. That’s how it was. They were naval aviators, the best of the best. Now they were just another star falling from a night sky erupting with nuclear auroras. It was a scene that would have been beautiful to anyone who didn’t know what it was.

She hadn’t been listening to the radio for a while. That was Goodfella’s job, usually. If it was important, he would tell her, or she would feel it over the neural bridge. Perverse curiosity got the better of her. She regretted it almost immediately. She had isolated herself from the bloody, primal chaos of it all, choosing instead to see modern war as the sterile, technical exercise it advertised.

“WANG HAI 1-4, going evasive—”

“OUTLAW 1-3— Shit, shit, shi—”

“DAKOTA 3-1, Defending! Defendi—” There were no screams, but the silence sufficed.

One after another, friendly tags dropped off the scope.

It was a hypersonic cacophany, a bitter mix where even the best disciplined aviators in the worlds struggled to keep to the brevity and sterile calm that had been mostly drilled into them. There hadn’t been anything like this in twenty generations, and even then this was only a paltry prologue. They would find their cool again once they’d made it into the skies proper, unfurled their wings, and fought like proper fighter pilots. They weren’t that, now. Now they were a bunch of scared, helpless twenty-somethings pre-packed in their own coffins, lit up like billboards in the flames of entry heating. Thirty seconds. The airbrakes popped up and the retro-thruster vanes roared.

The curtain of fire rose as slowly the fighter began to decelerate, a large, red warning zone pushed to her HUD just in time. “ALCON, ALCON, this is PECKY, danger close! Danger close, sandshot at Angels 40!”

“Mother-fucker,” Goodfella trailed. “No way.”

“How the hell are they gonna do that?” She raised an eyebrow.

“Doesn’t matter. Just get out of the damn way!”

The wings unfurled, and as shots silently rang out from the ICS FRED HAISE, the first notions of a real atmosphere suddenly but gently took hold of her plane. They were nimble now. Sorta, she thought. There still wasn’t really enough sky up here to let them do their thing, but now as she pushed the throttle forward, she knew her path was in her own hands and hers alone.

“RAGE, proceed to initial point.” Her CO had survived, evidently. “Let’s get out of the way for the folks upstairs, huh?”

“I still don’t think it’s gonna work,” RAGE 205’s TSO, FISH, shook her head.

“Okay, bet?” That was Nasty, 212’s pilot. “A hundred of your American. Real bones.”

“You wanna make a wager now, Nasty? Didn’t Secgen Portnoy teach you anything?”

“No sir.” He grinned. “And I plan to collect.”

Finally, she mused. Someone who thought they were gonna make it.

“You’re on.” FISH smirked. “And Plastic says he’s in a hundred too.”

“No I feckin don’t!—” Below, the volley of sandshot shredded a wave of rising missiles.

“Cut the chatter,” Bubbles’ demeanor shifted. Seismically, suddenly. The squadron had for a moment relaxed; letting the accumulated stress loose for the precious few seconds they had. It was a weight off their shoulders, but now they were heading down to the domain of their air-breathing cousins and their surface-dwelling friends. The whole squadron locked themselves back into their previous, deadly seriousness. Personally, she'd have rather not had the break. “We’re heading downstairs.”

The aviators split into their strike packages, two-ship formations breaking off from the squadron. She was now RAGE 4-2, and Motion and Scooter’s bird, 206, was RAGE 4-1. The Renegades were on the hunt. One by one, sleek grey shapes dove through the night sky, their lightless frames blurring against the deep, dark blue above. Wispy clouds waited many miles below as they punched down through the stratosphere. Below them, other squadrons sent in as part of the advance push opened their central bay doors for but a moment. Out came boosted glide bombs; the bombs’ rockets wouldn't ignite until they had long departed their carriers. Until then, their seeker heads searched, watching for any radar below brave enough to send up a signal. The bombs moved as a swarm, triangulating weak radar pulses between them, and made the call themselves. Flares shot up in the night as the falling bombs suddenly became missiles, shooting in on their targets and eliminating them with ruthless efficiency. She was watching on the EOTS turret, popped out from the plane’s heat shield underneath. One of the feared ‘Big Ben’ radars lit up into flames as the modified civilian truck carrying it became a spectacular burst of burning hydrogen. Then another. Then another. A streak of explosions rippled off as unchained thunder clapped across the hillside. Lightning struck twice as the launcher vehicles were next to go, on the offchance they could hit her strike package with their own sensors.

Fire hung in the sky as new boosters lit off almost as soon as the last ones faded. Streaks of light cut through the clouds as the trailing carriers, cutting a swath across the upper atmosphere, shot their missile batteries off to cover their pilots in the hope that one day soon they would be reunited with the hulls they called home. Lasers shot up from the city, invisible to most, reaching out into the sky in waving bands of deadly light. In a brief moment of curiosity, she switched off the night vision on her helmet. The winter night, steeped in darkness, flashed into brilliant fluorescence with every missile shot, bathed in sickly orange as fires blazed off below and above. Tracers snaked along the winds as they connected to their targets, the serpent’s eyes made with terrible fiery stars. She wondered what it all sounded like, and switched the synthetic audio suite on. It screeched at her ears with the furious grief of a hundred thousand freshly damned souls. It was Death’s very own rave.

She could stomach no more.

She switched the audio off, returned to the comforting blue-green aura of the night vision, and followed her mission plan to rendezvous with a pair of Charlie Panthers from the EU’s VFA(E)-801. SHARKEY 3-1 and 3-2 fell into formation next to them shortly after, a winged trident emblazoned across the twin-V stabilizers of the English jets. “SHARKEY 3-1, RAGE 4-1.” Scooter, 206’s backseater, made their introductions for the whole formation. “Good to see you guys made it.”

“Should say the same, Buffalo drivers.” 3-1’s voice was masked in a horrifically Glaswegian accent— an ironic twist of fate for an English squadron— but she could at least understand her. “You lot didn’t make out well, the fat ones.”

“We noticed.” Scooter’s tone was terse, clipped.

“Ach, sorry, lad.”

“Come, now, we have, ah, business.” 3-2 called in. The Loner crowd, ironically, was typically more boisterous than the Party Bus Crew. She was happy to hear this Frenchman— she assumed by the accent, anyway— buck the trend. His datalink reported his callsign as Renard. The Scotswoman was Nitrous.

“RAGE 4, SHARKEY 3, ah, you've already formed up! This is your A/SWACS operator, Bluejay. Do you read?” A new voice joined the fray, slick, suave, and reassured.

“RAGE 4-1, We have you, Bluejay.”

“Good. Thanks for getting on that, that makes my life a lot easier. You are under my control, by the way.” The Aerospace Battle Manager sat behind a sensor console in an EV-74 Watchdog, a spaceplane crammed to the gills with high-tech radars, EOTSes, and IRSTs galore. It saw everything, and could make sense of most of it— on a good day. Today was not a good day. She reckoned Bluejay had only a slightly better picture than she did, and hers was mostly jamming and saturation overload. “Okay. Not quite as fragged. Due to casualties, your new assigned area of responsibility is the approach run over Westbrook to the Old City, initial point DAGGER. You'll be sharing this attack run with a lot of other strike packages, so we have you at Angels 18 to deconflict with the others. First, terrain mask on approach and then pop up into an alternating, creeping racetrack, same as before. I still gotta brief a few others, so hold off and orbit until you get the go signal, it's the same as fragged. Copy?”

“RAGE 4 copies Angels one-eight, Westbrook approach.”

“SHARKEY 3 copies Angels one-eight, Westbrook approach.”

“Roger. Good hunting, you guys. Make it back and I’ll tell you a funny story when we land.”

“Knowing your sense of humor, Bluejay, I’d rather get shot down.” Goodfella’s reply was instinctual, delivered without a shred of hesitation.

“Ah, fair. I’m here if you need me. Hang tight. Bluejay out.”

The wait was excruciating. If it weren't for the neural link feeding her all the information the plane could see, every missile, every plane, every tank and car and truck— she would have been utterly terrified. The world burned, the skies alight with flashes of terrible radiance, lives blinking away with the passing second. Goodfella clacked away at his controls, updating the tasking orders for their standoff jammers to match their new targets. Her MFD refreshed, everything between Initial Point DAGGER and the end of their run marked in neat little Tactical Situation symbology, a parade of little red squares laid out along the way to the Old City. It was a shame, she thought. All those teenagers had no idea they were just waiting to die.

In fairness, she wasn’t far removed. All that separated her from the poor souls on the ground was a college degree, an officer’s commission, and about forty thousand feet, give or take. It was the luck of the draw, at this point. She knew Goodfella would have something to say about that, and maybe it was something more—

“ALCON, ALCON,” Bluejay broke her train of thought. “HAMMERFALL. I say again, HAMMERFALL.”

Shit, she blinked. Faster than I expected. She felt their minds creep closer as the flow of information between pilot and backseater started as a trickle, widening into a stream. That radio call was 3-1 and 4-1’s cue. They were the first ones in. Her job was to be the two-punch. The good news was that there wasn’t that much more waiting. They would pause only about forty-five more seconds before they went too, only forty-five more seconds to be alone with their thoughts and at home with their fears. The first loop was short, after all. Goodfella’s stopwatch was running in the corner of her HUD and the back of their shared mind, and that damn itch on her back was acting up again. She grumbled. She breathed.

It was a good day. The lava tube’s archwork ceiling loomed above like the vaults of a great cathedral. The transplanted grass swayed against his feet in the artificial breeze. He smiled.

The clock hit zero. She snapped back to her own mind without a second thought. The itch was still there.

“Ready?” She had already rolled the plane into a snap dive. “Ready.” Goodfella nodded from the backseat. She felt the IFF tags of a legion of fighters descend on the city, a wake of vultures in the making. A million gears had just begun to turn. They had been on the clock for a while now, but they had finally punched in. Her fingers moved without thought, raw, animal instinct filtered through carbon filaments and fiber optics.

They passed below twenty thousand feet, and the unshackled power of a fusion reactor dug her further into her acceleration seat, shaking and rattling the chair ever so slightly. Even that, it seemed, had failed to alleviate that damn scratching feeling from just under her tank top. Oh well. If that was her biggest problem, it was a good day at the office. They dropped like a brick, if a brick was being assisted on its way by rocket engines. She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t scared of this part. Sure, they’d practiced it a billion times. Even still, there seemed to be some part of the human psyche that resisted the notion that hurtling facefirst towards the ground was a good thing. She yanked back on the stick and the fighter carved a sloping curve until it nearly clipped the rural highway’s streetlights as the fighter’s onboard flight computer shrieked at her. PULL UP, Betty said. PULL UP. She would not comply. They and the prowl of Panthers would follow the road’s route until it went through the mountain ahead— she had no intent of finding out if anyone had left their car in the tunnel. There was a small part of her brainstem that was sounding the alarm bells about flying Mach 2 towards the side of a mountain. It was a good thing her hands didn’t seem to be listening. The cliffside grew closer, closer still, and mere moments before the Panther was about to turn pancake, she yanked back, and the fusion-powered beast and her pack roared up the side of the Greyridge Mountains, a cacophony of warning alarms now falling silent. A wave of grey-blue fighters and their escorting drones washed across the peak below, her airframe and her wingman’s lost in countless many as they popped up to their attack runs. “RAGE 4-2, SHARKEY 3-1,” Renard spoke over the comms. “I am on your wing. You have the lead.”

Blood-red symbols crept ever closer on her Tactical Situation Display as they rocketed towards the city. Two blue hemispheres caught her attention, prioritized and marked, as Bluejay’s voice cut over the silence. “RAGE 4-2, Bluejay. POPUP group bullseye one-seven-zero for eight-zero, Angels four and climbing, flanking, tally two plus six. Threat to RAGE 4-2, leaning on RAGE 4-1. Prosecute.” Two fighters with six drones, chasing down their friends. They were the closest. It was always going to be their problem, but that meant it was also their solution.

It had been a long time since mankind had first tried to hide flying objects from each other. Sensors and stealth had long been in an ever-evolving arms race, synthesizing new technologies and techniques to either deceive or deduce the identity and location of an aircraft. It turned out, today, that the best solution was just to have so damn many of them, and jam the absolute shit out of the other guy. Sometimes, she mused, the classics worked. By now, the cockpit comms had fallen silent but for the occasional sound of Goodfella’s breathing breaking a noise gate. They would speak to each other through their link, and leave more primitive methods alone.

Don’t think they see us, Goodfella thought. Still hot on 4-1. We gotta make sure they don’t see us launch.

How much track do we have from 4-1? She seized on the red chevrons marching across the screen. Thinking what I’m thinking?

Yeah.

Okay. Let’s do it.

“3-2, we have a plan.”

“Send it,” The Frenchman’s accent smacked at the fuzzy edges of the radio transmission.

“Fuse sensor tracks from A/SWACS and our Lima-Wiskeys. We’re gonna ask 4-1 to go active just before we launch, and fuse that in too. We’ll snap to course zero-six-zero, have two Lynxes roll hard left, and shoot. Clean up their drones with a volley after.”

“I like it.” Renard nodded as the two fighters and their escorts turned to their new direction. “Very clever. They will not see it coming.”

One radio burst later and Motion and Nitrous’ birds went active, their aft stinger arrays bathing the manned fighters in microwave radiation. The Minnie fighters, it revealed, were Frantics— the Minervans called them F22Ks, she recalled. Beowulf, was it? It wouldn’t much matter in a second, anyways. The UN formation spun to hide their weapons bays from their prey— Wick took special care to try to get directly between the Minnies’ line of vision and the drone that’d been cued to shoot— as Goodfella squeezed the trigger. A volley of missiles, concealed by the weight and bulk of a MQ-111 Lynx, peeled off their rails in the drone’s underside weapons bay. “Fox 3,” the Lynx’s onboard VI said in a cold, synthesized voice.

Thirty seconds or it’s free, Wick thought.

Thirty seconds or we’re fucked, you mean.

The missile streaked out ahead of the formation, aping a shot at somebody else, before careening towards the actual target.

We’ll be able to take them—

It’ll fuck up our timing. We're on the clock.

The Minervans presumably had heard their warning systems start screeching in their ears. They had begun a series of wild maneuvers, spewing radar-reflectant chaff behind them, reeling out their towed decoys as far as they would go.

“Pitbull,” the drone’s sensor suite said. The missiles were on their own now.

She watched through the plane’s sensors as the Minervans were throwing every trick in the book at the AAROs, dodging, juking, and diving. She watched as they came up short. Two fighters, two annular fragmentation warheads. Two minus two was zero. There were no chutes. Some part of her still found a way to be shocked. Goodfella, briefly, felt so very distant. The smoke hung in the sky. The fighters did not.

“Splash two.” The drones always had a way of seeming so cheerful. Perhaps it was the speech engine. Killin’ Kenny, as they called him, was much more aggressive than Betty, and the most chipper companion a combat aviator could ask for. She grimaced. The upbeat tone of the computer had been humorous before. It didn't seem funny anymore.

The aged masonry of Fanueil Hall, a jewel of garnet brick among a metropolis of glass, concrete, and steel had long been a place of refuge for her. There was a comfort in a crowd, a strange and misunderstood comfort. The world was so much larger than her problems, and listening to the hubbub of the cobbled stone square helped her tune them out. Yet there was no such consolation here. A gentle wind blew across her feet, the square abandoned and empty. The hairs on her neck went on end.

She tried to bring herself back to reality, away from the draw of the link. She was not afraid she'd get lost for too long. It all happened in an instant anyways. She wasn't afraid of staying too long. She was afraid of straying too deep. Since the inception of the Aviator Neural Link, there had been more than a few fighter pilots who, broken by the intensity of the moment, would find themselves retreating into their thoughts.

In the business, they called it a fadeout. It didn't always end pretty.

She turned around. Quincy Market, the old mall with Old Glory’s fifty-six star donut hanging between the columns of its grand facade, sat under an arched sky, great white spines rising up from formless nothing on the horizon. The whole cityscape, she realized, had retreated into a shapeless void; there was nothing and no one beyond the square’s pavers. She took an uneasy breath. She closed her eyes. She thought of home. It hurt. Good. As she opened her eyes, she realized the stonework by the entrance was haphazardly strewn, parted to make room for flashkrete and composite. She took a step up the stairs, breath shaky and ragged. The familiar red composite door taunted her. 454B, it read. She blinked.

The cockpit of the ASF-17E was comfortable, if not comforting. The familiar sight of the heads-up display, the twin sticks rising from padded armrests, and a Tactical Situation Display alight with contacts, waypoints, and timers was, however, a welcome sight. The memory of the fadeout vanished as quickly as it had come, but some part of her animal brain did not forget, a lingering unease creeping down her spine.

“RAGE 4-2, Bluejay,” the A/SWACS operator chirped in. “4-1 sends their regards. Now get back to it, we got a schedule to keep.”

The clock on her HUD wound down. One minute, twelve seconds before she needed to be at Waypoint 261, the precise altitude she needed to be at— Angels 18, 18,000 feet. She didn't like the look of this. The first run, done by 3-1 and 4-1, may have had more targets to launch on, but they also had more terrain to hide behind. As the two Panthers streaked over Westbrook, the cityscape below was a forest of concrete, composite, and glass in the middle of being razed. She looked down and the Distributed Aperture cameras gave her a view through the bottom of the plane as blue triangles zipped by, each one highlighting an incoming glide bomb about to find their forever home. Warheads kicked up debris and flame, an eerie glow rising from the streets as the tracks faded out and the bombs struck home. One by one, red rectangles flickered off her display. She had selected seven of them, the ones she had been briefed to take on before any of them had left the nest. The targeting data cascaded down the left side of the screen. Everything was coming into play now. The computer linked target to bomb, with mobile launchers getting one bomb assigned to their last known location and one to orbit and chase down any missile truck that had the good sense to pick up roots and see how things were on the other side of town. A dashed line on the Situation Display went solid, and Goodfella beat Betty to the punch. “Spike SA-14, left 10! They got us locked up!” The computer warning blared. “Music on, music on!” At Goodfella’s command, a pencil-thin beam of radiation peeled off the skin array of the fighter, a lance of radio waves dancing across the missile launcher’s radar. “They've lost lock, estimate six-five seconds to burnthrough. Wick, stay on target!”

“Rog, Goodfella, committing!” She watched her HUD as the diamond indicating the first group of bombs’ release point inched closer to the inner ring. Twenty seconds. She was running out of time. She pushed the throttle to the end of the stops, radiator panels peeling off the engine shroud, waste heat pouring out the aft. “If they didn't know we were here already, they do now!”

“Nails 22, right 4! Spike 22, right 4!” Goodfella reached for his controls. CHAFF, FLARE, Betty screamed. CHAFF, FLARE,

“Music on, music on!”

The world beeped and blared around her. Her breath sped. There was one word she needed to hear right now, the target diamond teetering on the edge of the inner ring. “Stay on target, we're almost there!” The diamond dropped below. The clock hit zero.

SHOOT, Betty shouted.

She pulled the trigger, and felt the vibration as a cascade of Scalpel-ARB glide bombs dropped from their retaining racks inside the cavernous weapons bay. Just under her canopy’s view, rocket engines lit as wings unfolded, and the weapons streaked off to find their seven new friends. “MISSILE,” the MAWS chirped. “MISSILE,” She was thankful to be ten bombs lighter as the bay doors swung shut. “Two launches, Wick! Both hot!”

“RAGE 4-2, pickle, pickle, pickle, going defensive!”

She eased off the throttle and swung the fighter around, running as fast as she could while the rear-aspect thermals were still masked by the countermeasures in the fighter’s trenchlike exhaust vanes. She glanced around, the night sky torn asunder by the flash and thunder of warheads, flames, and exhausts, the hazy lights of the city below gradually fading; the bright white of streetlights, the vibrant colors of jumbotrons and holograms, all consumed by the sickly orange glow of fire.

The missiles inbound curled off from the fighters. A flight of two Frantics turned to hound them down, the Minervan fighters firmly off the leash of intercept control. There was nothing on the sheet for moments like this. This was jazz. You could rehearse all you like, but in moments like these, you played from the heart.

The missiles, two red circles with a velocity vector on the TSD, were slowly carving their path towards them. It almost looked like a lollipop, with the stick pointed out towards them. At the end of the day, you didn't want to be holding the lollipop. If they were air-launched, they were probably radar-guided AA-26 Anglers. Anglers were bad news. Any missile was, but these were the front-page headline. Their air-breathing rocket engine let them do some crazy things, and they had excellent performance in the terminal phase. She had seen the yellow ring appear on her TSD when the fighters had launched. They were within no-escape range. She could run all she wanted, but they'd catch her eventually. One minute, thirty seconds, if the TSD was right.

The Anglers bore down from over their right shoulder, far off in the distance, trajectory constant and flat. The Anglers didn’t play their hand until they were close. She had better acceleration than the missiles, but they had raw speed on her. She took a second, breathed in, and let her neural link do the talking. Goodfella, you here?

Yeah.

They’re radar guided. She looked down at the TSD. They had time, if briefly, on their side. We got a second before we gotta do something drastic. You think the threat briefing is any good?

What else do we got? He clacked at his display controls. Towed decoy out. Be careful with my baby.

Let’s see if we can avoid the theatrics.

Sounds good to me. I’m calling the Lynxes back, too.

A hatch on the underside of the jet popped open, and a long cable streamed out, tipped with a radar-emitting endcap, gliding in the winds. According to any radar in their immediate vicinity, two more Panthers had joined the formation as the French aviator did the same. She looked at her TSD and wondered how many of those red diamonds, triangles, and boxes were fake. She only needed to look up, the fires multiplying in the distance, to know that more than enough were very, very real. The scale of it all hadn't quite set in yet. It likely wouldn't, today.

As the loyal wingman drones closed in on them, she wondered which Panther the missiles would bite on. The fake ones, streamed out behind their jets or broadcast from their drone companions, or the real ones, packed in the center of a cloud of decoys. Statistically, the odds were good. They didn’t feel it. The engineers on Minerva knew any UN aviator would do this. It didn’t take a degree to know that having decoys was better than not. She wondered if the decoys were really doing anything at all.

The missiles didn’t let her wonder long. They jumped into a sharp cut, streaking hard left. The track on the TSD started arcing, the velocity vector ticking down the seconds on their lives. The missiles were burning flat out now, cutting the distance as the measured speed in the infobox grew. Mach 4.5. Mach 4.7. Mach 5.

The Radar Warning Receiver went haywire.

“One of em’s got us!” Goodfella’s voice dripped with panic. CHAFF, FLARE. “Torch on, I’m gonna try to burn it, other one’s got Renard!”

“Shit!” The fuckers didn’t bite. She cursed her luck and gripped the stick. “Going for sensor defeat!”

“Rog, Wick!”

The fighter flung its heft and weight into a staggeringly sharp turn, the towed decoy cut loose, and cut a path until the missile was head-on. Years ago, she would think it suicide. Now, she realized that it might be the best of admittedly bad options. The missile was radar guided, and it had switched to its own onboard radar. That conformal array, nestled nicely to the inside of the nose cone, would be perfectly sufficient to overcome their stealth from behind— but the front aspect of the Panther was a different story. There, the metamaterial coatings and perfectly-aligned edges would scatter the radar waves away from the missile or absorb them outright. Hopefully, that would be enough. If not, Goodfella had a laser pointed at it. It may not be able to burn through the new generation of missiles’ heat-resistant coating, but it would be enough to hopefully keep it spinning— which meant it wouldn’t be turning. Not enough, anyway.

“RAGE 4-2, defending!”

The missile bore down on them from just off their nose, the glow of its booster silhouetting it in the enhanced night-vision, a donut of death. It closed, and closed. She thumbed the selector to guns, the left gunport ready to pop open at a moment’s notice. She pulled against the weight of the sky, hoping to line the reticle up with the missile as a last-ditch self-defense in case the gambit didn’t work. Coilgun rounds flew into the night, the arc flash casting an eerie glow across the dark. None struck true.

The missile’s motor cut as the metal dart passed under their plane, the radar warning falling silent.

“Woo!” Goodfella shook his head. “Fuck, man, I can breathe again!”

She chuckled. “Fuckin’ close one. So did you just cook it?”

“Think so!”

“Thought that didn’t work these days.”

“I guess the old tricks still hold true.” Goodfella grinned, and keyed the comms. “RAGE 4-2, missile trashed.”

Her helmet’s headset crackled. “SHARKEY 3-2, missile defeated.”

“RAGE 4-2, Bluejay. Nice moves, let’s get you back on track.”

“Roger—” MISSILE, the MAWS said.

“Shit! Shit!” Goodfella shouted. “Wick, go defensive, now!” CHAFF, FLARE. CHAFF, FLARE. CHAFF, FLARE.

There the Angler was, back from the dead, circling on their tail from below. “Torch on! Music on! I hate this damn thing!” CHAFF, FLARE. CHAFF, FLARE. She threw the fighter into a rolling dive, the g’s pushing against them, strips of metal mingling with chemical flame as the countermeasures peeled away from the fuselage. The missile chased after a cloud of metallic ribbons and a sudden blast kicked her head even further back into its headrest, a jolt running through her teeth.

She would remember the sound of his breath until the day she died. It stuttered, ragged and choked, the sputter of a gasoline engine in need of a stronger rip-start. It evened as they blinked. Neither wanted to say the first word. Both knew what it would be.

Shit, they thought in unison.

“You good?”

“Enough.”

“Let’s get back to it. Everyone’s getting close calls today.”

She eased the fighter back onto their racetrack course, and punched the throttle forward.

Goodfella thumbed the button for the radio. “Bluejay, RAGE 4-2, what the fuck!— was that? This Angler just came back on!”

“RAGE 4-2, say again your last!” Bluejay’s breath was ragged. “And be specific! I’m getting reports up and down the AO!”

“We trashed an Angler, went nose-on and beat its radar. It flamed out, we thought we had it beat. It went around while we weren’t looking… I think it reacquired us from behind. Then it restarted its motor and tried to hit us from below! Closed on us like a fucking shot!” She could feel his hands trembling over the neural link. “Tell me you got that, Bluejay!”

“Shit,” the A/SWACS operator paused. “Copy all. I’m hearing that from a lot of others. We think it’s a reserve mode. They’ve also got about fifteen percent more fuel than we thought they did.” Bluejay gulped. “Lotta people found that out the hard way. Count yourself lucky. Let’s get you back in it. Updated target packages are on the way. You guys did a good job thinning ‘em out. Get back to it.”

“Roger, Bluejay. Receiving package.” The new packet of strike orders had some changes from the briefing. The profile looked more aggressive. Deeper strike, less cover, more targets. They both knew what that meant.

How many do you think bought it? She couldn’t help but wonder.

Not a good time, he answered. We’ll talk later. Let’s just get the motherfuckers.

I wanna talk about it.

I know.

The formation, two fighters flanked by six drones, had turned towards the mountains. They were running home, streaking along in a supersonic scramble to get away from a freshly kicked hornets’ nest. She set her night vision to color mode. Missiles blossomed out from the city, an urban jungle at this point lit in equal parts by the glow of rocket exhaust as by the streetlamps that lined the roads. Outshining them both was a firestorm ripping through Midtown. She wondered if a hydrogen tank had gone up. What seemed like blazing fingers curled out into the sky, the hand of an infernal giant grasping a hold on the surface, aching to climb out into the realm of mortal men. She was glad to put it all in her rearview, the last suburbs of Westbrook starting to slip into the mountainside.

Goodfella keyed the radio. “RAGE 4-2, flowing cold.”

She tapped the screen, and the world was once again cast into high-contrast monochrome.

The radio crackled. “RAGE 4-1, flowing hot.” Her squadmates were flying right back into the fray, a speck in her night vision’s overwhelming blue-green expanse, far too distant to see. Her only indication they were there at all was a dark blue circle silhouetted by the horizon.

“Good luck, guys.” Rafka breathed an uneasy sigh.

“Good hunting,” Goodfella spat. She felt a spite press against her sorrow. She didn’t push further.

“Merde!” The radio jumped as the sky had turned just that bit brighter. “Floodlight, floodlight, floodlight! SHARKEY 3-1, Going defensive, Sunlance below! Taking fire! Say again! Sunlance below!”

An alarm blared from the backseat. “Fuck!” Goodfella had already snapped back into action. “Wick, scatter!”

“Shit, they’ve got lasers all the way out here?”

“Don’t know how they got here, they were all deeper in the city!”

To her right, the other Panther was being lit by a spotlight from below, invisible if not for the infrared cameras fused into her vision by the neural link. The Frenchman juked his plane up, down, left, and right, a cloud of beam-scattering chemical smoke starting to trail from his tail. She flicked a button on her left stick, and a smokescreen began to billow from behind her jet as well. “RAGE 4-2, Renard. I had it on my EOTS. He’s alone. Sending last known position.” The French pilot datalinked his plane to Goodfella. “Fait chier, this smoke works both ways.”

“Renard, 4-2, are you damaged?” Goodfella’s breath sped.

The other aviator was calm. “I have lost coating integrity on the left wing.”

“Bastard!” Goodfella grit his teeth. Lasers couldn't get through the stealth-treated heatshield on the underside, but the delicate, slender metamaterial wings were a different story. “Wick, let's find the motherfucker.”

“Do we have time—”

“If we run, they could still hit us. Worse, they could hit Motion. You wanna let these motherfuckers kill them?” Goodfella keyed the radio, voice dripping in the urgent flatness of outright fury. “Bluejay, RAGE 4-2, prosecuting popup Floodlight threat.”

“RAGE 4-2, copy, watch the clock!”

“We'll make it!” Goodfella barked.

As they circled around, the two searched the ground below, the plane’s cockpit becoming invisible to them with a mere glance downward. Streets bathed in night vision’s blue-green hue crisscrossed the suburban sprawl, houses and low-rises all providing a convenient cover the laser truck could hide behind. Yellow edge-detecting outlines carved across the neighborhood, their helmeted glares darting back and forth in search patterns.

“FLOODLIGHT,” one of the drones called. A beam of brilliant white overtook her vision, bathing her blended vision in the radiant glare of infrared light. She squinted, her eyes and neural link adjusting to the glare. “Goodfella, behind that lowrise!”

“Got it!” The bomb reticle on her HUD updated, the new target’s estimated location dialed in. “RAGE 4-2, Sunlance located, prosecuting!”

She grabbed her right stick and swung the plane into a sloping curve, hoping to get altitude and angle on the laser truck. Goodfella had directed one Lynx across their new path, getting ready to set a layer of protective smoke to isolate them from the laser truck. The bomb reticle crept towards the launch circle.

The computer chirped. SHOOT.

She looked down the road, little houses bathed in blue-green. In the distance, one of the Lynxes exploded, set alight by the truck that the EOTS warned her was now beginning to spin its turret around to them.

What the fuck are you waiting for? Her backseater’s eyes bore into the back of her skull. Shoot the damn bomb! HE’S LOOKING AT US!

The second drone streaked across their vision, black, suffocating smoke cutting off the truck’s view. The center of the cloud lit up a pearlescent grey.

“RAGE 4-2, pickle!” The bomb dropped away.

They pulled off their approach, the camera tracking the laser truck, an oddly-shaped contraption with a micro-fusion reactor not too much larger than their own and a large extendable arm with a laser ball turret perched on top. The doors swung open and the crew rushed out as the bomb flew towards the vehicle.

She grasped the door’s handle, and gently pushed against it, her eyes closed, her breath heavy. It pivoted ever so slightly. Unlocked, she thought.

She hesitated.

She choked on a ragged breath, retreating, pressing her back against the wall where the painted-over flashkrete cinderblock of the apartment corridor met the stone masonry of the old market. She could see starlight twinkling from the distance, points of light staring out from the distant nothing that had replaced Boston’s skyline. The stone and brick sidewalk peeled around the side of Faneuil Hall, curling out to some far-flung end.

She wondered if this was how she was going to die. It happened, every once in a while. Aviators would fadeout, brain-dead in an imperceptible moment, trapped in some artifice of the interaction between their subconscious and the computer. The system was designed to disconnect automatically before that happened, but it all happened so quickly. Few, if any, had any faith that the auto-eject would work. She knew she didn't. She knew there was nothing she could do to affect the outside world. She knew she couldn't fall back up the rabbit hole. She stared out at the great arches she now recognized from pictures of the megacities of the Moon, and she started to understand that it was going to be a long way down.

Either way, live or die, it was all out of her hands anyways. It was all an eternity trapped in a moment, and it was not hers to know the day or the hour when she would be pulled back to the land of the living. Optimistically, anyways. Most fadeouts, pilots didn't even know they happened until they checked their logs. You'd usually have about ten or fifteen of them by the time you hung up your wings. She walked along a patchwork path of cobblestone pavers and gold-hued grass, looking out at a world broken, shattered, and stitched back together. Most fadeouts were not this.

She closed her eyes. She thought of home. It hurt. Good.

She struggled to open her eyes, to wake and hold her fate in her hands once more. She knew it was more for the sake of the struggle than any real hope.

The path went on and on and on and she looked back and there was nothing. She looked ahead and there was nothing. The pavers blended into a dirt pathway lined with golden grass, brick and stone jutting out haphazardly as if it had been through a blender. She staggered back, an uneasy, stuttering breath forced from her lips as she knelt down and reached out, hand probing the endless dark to the side of the path. It was void, plain and simple nothing, her hand gliding through the emptiness just as she knew it would but hoped it wouldn't. She reached into her squadron jacket’s pockets and found them empty. All her pockets were, actually.

She shouted into the void, her exasperated voice’s echo greeting her in return.

She had an idea.

She fumbled about, hands running over the pathway until they produced a rock of appreciable size from the packed dirt. She dropped it on one of the cobblestones uprooted from the Boston sidewalk, and it dinked off the rock with a satisfying plink.

Moment of truth.

She dropped the rock over the side, waiting for the sound of the crash.

Maybe this place was bigger in the vertical dimension? Maybe the echo was really delayed? Maybe I just missed?

Her mind, she admitted, was doing a very poor job of distracting her from the very obvious reality of the situation. She couldn't see anything else because it wasn't there. The square she had been in had vanished, and all that remained was her chunk of sidewalk. The city lights of the Moon loomed off in beyond the edge of her pathway, too distant to reach. She wondered why her subconscious had drawn on the Moon. She'd never been. The lights flickered and twinkled under a great gray vault, constellations dancing on faraway walls. If this was how I am going to die, she thought, at least it's pretty.

She blinked, and tears rolled down into the dark, the wailing cries of a million fears all crashing down at once reflected off the simulated visage of ancient rock.

A decade and a half’s worth of hopes, desires, and dreams crushed, deferred, and abandoned flowed from her eyes, a river flowing forth in the field of golden grass, the blades of frozen sunlight gently swaying against her knees as she knelt in her sorrow.

She blinked and jumped to her feet, breath quickening as a remembered wind brushed a lock of bronze-brown hair from her vision. A slight fog sat on the horizon, the spires of buildings rising from the mist below. All around her, white composite terraces carved out neat, orderly boundaries for the idyllic Eden-scene they had built for themselves, a shard of the old homeland on the new world, all the more beautiful and more haunting for how clean and structured the park was. To her back, the sheer face of the ancient cave, carved long ago by the lava flows of the young Moon, loomed under its clear sealant coat.

She glanced to her feet, and she gasped.

A familiar face laid in the grass, arms splayed out, feet gently crossed, bathing in a sun that wasn't there. The green eyes looking up at her were filled with fear and apprehension, brimming with the intense desire to hold on to every breath that curled from his from bloodied, clenched lips. Blades of the yellow grass dipped into his side, swaying in the wind, dyed crimson red by their contact.

“Wait a second,” a voice from above said. “Why are you here?”

Their bomb ever so slightly missed. Chunks of asphalt flew in the night, a large fragment smacking into the side of the truck’s reactor, and a jet of pure white light shot out the flank of the truck, rocking the vehicle off its outriggers and lighting the neighborhood ablaze. She raised a hand to her eyes in instinctual shock, the plasma jet a signal flare in the eerie teal night. She gasped.

Hope this place really was evacuated. She surveyed the neighborhood, now behind and below them. Shit, man. All up in flames.

Yeah, he nodded. Still, one less.

Fuck me, man.

Yeah, and we lost Eddie. Poor lil’ drone.

“RAGE 4-2, Renard. Appreciate the assist. Coating’s nicked, but the wing will hold.”

“Roger. You’re cut off, bud. No more for you tonight.” Goodfella responded. He cued up the A/SWACS’ radio frequency. “Bluejay, RAGE 4-2,” his voice sped. “Floodlight threat neutralized, one Lynx lost. SHARKEY 3-2’s stealth is compromised, cannot recommend further action. Can you assign a new wingman?”

“RAGE 4-2, Bluejay. Unabl— Just what the fuck do you think I’m working with here? The whole plan’s almost behind schedule because of this little diversion, and I don’t even have any other wingmen for you.” He hissed. “Fuck, man, I’m sorry to go off on you. Lot going on. No. I don’t have anyone else. You gotta make it work, and you gotta step on it. How many weapons did you expend?”

“One, Scalpel.”

“Dammit!” The A/SWACS operator sighed. “I’ll reallocate target packages. Just get back in it. We have contingencies for this. Use the Lynxes. I gotta go. Get back to it.”

The line hung silent for a few moments, leaving them with enough time to think. Confusion and unease rested on her shoulders, a coldness dripping up her brainstem from who-knew-what. Had watching that plasma arc stuck with her? Part of her was glad it did. She didn’t know what she’d be if she could just shake off a neighborhood catching fire, let alone by her own hands. She knew that that wasn’t going to be the only part of this city burning tonight, but down there was somebody’s home.

Home. She shook her head. Something about home. She hadn’t been in a while. Home was where her hurt was.

Enough of that.

She was glad the radio buzzed to break her away from all that mess.

“RAGE 4-2, Bluejay. How cool are you with doing something really stupid?”

“Do I get a choice?” Goodfella sighed from the back.

“No. I just wanted to know.”

“I think we’re game.” Goodfella gulped. They had both put on their bravado as best they could, but deep down they knew it was an act. Fuck, she thought.

“Good. I need you to fly treetop-level through the Old City.”

“You gotta be shitting me.”

She blinked. Goodfella was right. What the—? That’s suicidal!

“I know, I know. We’ll put the drones ahead of you.” He paused. “Most of the drones. Most of the drones ahead of you.”

“What about Renard?”

“Yeah, him too.”

“Just lay out the plan.”

“Sorry, we’re still sort of figuring it out.”

“What?”

“Well, about five minutes ago, we were briefing our second choice for this, but they’re dead. Our first choice, with the bunker buster, had a ground fault and got stuck on the tarmac on the other side of the continent. You, my friends, are flexing to Package Delta.”

“Package Delta was fucking dumb.”

“Yeah, that’s why we trained it.”

“Fuck me, man. You want us to shove a cruise missile down a subway escalator?”

“I need you to shove a cruise missile down a subway escalator.”

Goodfella sighed. “Understood. Let’s go do it.” He grimaced. “Wick, your thoughts?”

“I think I’d like to see the approach path.” She gulped. “Bluejay, when’s the latest radar scans of the city from? They’ve been setting off a lot of heavy shit downtown.”

“It’s current. Mostly. We had a recon flight going over. Here’s the ingress. We’re working on a way to get you out.”

Goodfella thumbed the intercom. “Working on? You’re kidding me.”

“It’s all really gone to shit, huh?” She nodded, before switching back to the radio. “Alright then, send it over.”

“Sending. Confirm receipt.”

A download bar popped up on her TSD as she tapped ACCEPT. “Got it, Bluejay. How does the MANPADS threat look?”

“We haven’t had any reports. That doesn’t rule it out. Expect them. They won’t be expecting you, and you might even be below them.”

She muted her radio, turning up the intercom. “Goodfella, you ready?”

“No,” he chuckled.

“‘Cuz, we’re going.”

“Yeah,” he chuckled.

“Glad we’re on the same page.”

“Yeah.” He sighed. “Look. Best of a bad hand, right?” He turned back to the radio. “Copy all. We have the ingress path, fly below the MANPADS, Package Delta, four Scalpels open up the subway for a 5-0-4. Exfil to come.”

“Readback correct, good hunting. Proceed to initial point MADHOUSE. Bluejay out.”

Her backseater radioed the Frenchman. “Renard, Goodfella. You getting this?”

“I... I do not like that.” The worry in his voice transcended accent or language. “Merde.”

“You a praying man?” Goodfella needled his brother-in-arms.

“Yesterday, ahhh, not so. Today, I am.”

“Good, let’s hope the good Lord’s happy to see you back. I’ll keep the bulk of the drones with you, to cover for your wing coating. We’re gonna be blasting ECM the whole way in.”

“Copy. I am on your wing, RAGE.”

The two fighters pushed their throttles ahead and shot off towards the city. Fires burned below, bright teal on a backdrop of sterile aqua, the night vision painting an outline in bright yellow around the skyline and vivid red around the myriad specks in the night, each a Minervan fighter seeking to say a very violent hello. Blue and red danced in the air, great birds of death tangling with each other. The Minervan pilots in the distance found themselves in an eerie inversion of their typical charge; as they had always expected, they were the city’s shield. They had never expected to be this city’s shield. Even still, Marathonian-marked planes, atmospheric fighters and strikers alike, sent waves of high-explosive rippling across their homes, their streets, and their monuments. It made her stomach churn. Aren’t we here to save this city? She wondered, looking out at the smoke and ash rising anew with every passing moment. What’s going to be left?

Initial Point MADHOUSE was hard to miss. She didn’t think she’d ever seen an intersection that ugly. She had almost called it a cloverleaf, but clovers didn’t have five leaves. They also didn’t have strangely elevated portions just cutting across over the top. It was a work of art, in the weird, performance art kind of way. It seemed to manage traffic between Heliwa, the Old City, and Westbrook, across the river. She had no idea exactly how, and by the cars strewn empty across it, apparently neither did they. Down the street into the Old City, the forest of skyscrapers dipped down into a bowl, a small park at the center. Their target was there, actually. Washburne Park Station was one of the older, more buried stations in the subway network, built with looser tolerances and a bigger budget that generally amounted to ‘just keep pouring concrete’. As a result, it was handily one of the most dug in places in the entire city. Initially, plans had expected the Minervans to use it to house civilians— the mass evacuation of the city hadn’t been predicted by anyone this side of the Ceti Line, and as a result of the exodus, the Minnies now had a ready-made bunker waiting for an enterprising military formation to snap it right up. The 201st Air Defense Brigade had done just that, and some enterprising Marathonian partisans had tipped their UN brethren off to it months ago. Her squadron had trained on a mockup of this target at Naval Air Station Heller— ‘Dreamworld’— with all the other package options for three weeks. She had never been optimistic that this strike would actually work. She still wasn’t. Time to find out.

She lined up the nose with the highway, rolled on her back, and dove, spinning flat and pulling out of the maneuver just before the buildings started to creep up on the sides of her wings. Renard and most of the drones had gone ahead of her; two of the drones, Johnny and Hal, were sticking back with them. “RAGE 4-2, committing.”

As the skyscrapers started streaking by, her breath began to quicken. She tightened her grip on the controls. She was thankful for the neural link to her backseater— at the g’s they'd be pulling, the intercom would be a useless soup of ragged breath and pained groans. The power, it seemed, was still on in the Old City. Billboard screens and holoprojections hung between the buildings, painting her jet in red and white, the advertisements overtaken with calls from the Minervan military authority to evacuate and the dire penalties of disobedience. She had to fight herself not to look. The streets started to curve, and she banked the fighter, following the pack of Lynxes ahead of her, pulling gently back on the stick, the accelerometer’s g-indicator gently rising as the turn grew sharper and sharper as they finally entered the circular streets of the Old City.

Only a moment after they had entered the drum of concrete, composite, and glass, bathed in the candy-cane light of the evacuation notices, the world went dark. She felt a gasp roll off her lips, and had to stop herself from twitching as her eyes adjusted, the stick locked in place by sheer iron willpower. Looks like they finally got the last substations, he mused.

She nodded. Fuck, man, that got me jumpy.

They felt their stomachs drop back into their chests as the g’s kept climbing, the anti-accelerant blood-replacement coursing through their veins, the chemically-doped sweat clinging to their torsos and their legs. She heard her breath echo from inside the helmet’s integrated oxygen mask. The convoy of planes rattled the glass facades of the skyscrapers to their sides; a thundering roar resonating down the streets. She wondered how they’d have any shred of surprise left— the fighter’s pinprick-sized radar returns meant little when you could hear it.

Turn coming up, Goodfella’s mental voice was laser-focused, any panic or fear long since stowed and secured. Her backseater’s visor hung in the rear-view, the glow of night-vision silhouetting his eyes above that smudged smile the marker had left earlier. It seemed altogether inappropriate. She got everything she needed to know in one glance at his eyes— Goodfella had never been more focused in his life. Adrenaline and Accelican™ had him firing on all cylinders. Ninety seconds.

She gave him a wordless acknowledgement, a feeling of understanding running down her brainstem into the avionics of the plane. She watched the turn indicator count down, and down, and down, eighty and seventy-five and fifty and the wind whipped at her wings from the gaps between the buildings as the cold air of an alien February cut across her mind, a feeling she wasn’t feeling at all, a pastiche of temperature readings and windspeed indications, and forty and thirty and the call from her backseater that she knew before he even thought it and— ten, and five, and she spun her wings parallel to the buildings and soared, g’s abusing every inch of her gastrointestinal tract as she felt her body’s weight suddenly nonuple, a word that she found her higher reasoning grappling with before remembering that her higher reasoning was supposed to be having a day off. She felt metal and composite flex under the load, wingtips ever so slightly twisting, the glass of the skyscraper rippling under the force of the gust she left in her wake. Goodfella’s hands flew across his controls, a selection of weapons, coordinates, and taskings readied for their precise moment.

The convoy of planes leapt up towards the rooftops, and the entrance to the subway station came nicely into view, a magnified image of the Red Line’s beautiful gem in her last moments. A Minervan Marine sat at a prefab guard post outside it, scrambling down the ladder as soon as they caught sight of the jets, running for dear life. The bomb reticle fell right into place. Her finger moved gently over the trigger—

Renard broke the radio silence. “MANPADS on the roof!” No sooner had he said it than her missile launch warning blared into action, a streak of orange light erupting from a building just to her side. She dropped flares on instinct, a column of blinding light streaking through the straight avenue to Garibay Park as the Graveyard missile went wide. As her plane passed over the rooftop, one of the flares from a drone behind her fell onto the patio, a terrified Minervan dropping their missile launcher and running, blinded. Shoot, Wick!

She pulled the trigger, and four of her nine remaining bombs fell away. The wings unfurled, the boosters lit, and one after another the four Scalpels found their way home, a circle of explosions erupting around the escalator shaft turning a small hole into a much larger one. One of the trailing drones dove, popping open its missile bay, and mere moments before it was about to hit the ground, let its payload fly. A dark, chisel-shaped form slid out of the bay, disappearing down the freshly-excavated molehill before the very ground jumped, earth and stone disturbed, but generally settling back down to where they were as a massive geyser of flame and rubble erupted from the fare turnstiles.

Shack!

Fuck me, man. We hit that? Her jaw dropped.

It fuckin’ worked!

Never a doubt! Never a doubt! She shook her head. Package Delta, not once did I ever doubt!

You know, Goodfella mused. Now we actually gotta get out of here.

Garibay Park may have been large to an average pedestrian, but in a fighter moving at the rates they were, it was much, much smaller. The boulevard right off their noses was a welcome sight. The pilots and their drones continued on, lighting off flares in case any other MANPADS missileers had gotten any ideas. The streets were awash in strobing light, the metallic glow of burning chemicals dropping from the planes. Her g-meter crept upwards once more as they curved along the outside ring road, searching, seeking, for their way out of the cylindrical maze. The planned course had highlighted a highway offramp that sat below a clearing in the skyline, and as Goodfella navigated her towards it, she rolled the fighter so her canopy was facing the outer ring, the reflection of a slate-blue stealth fighter glittering in the glass under a midnight-teal ocean. Pulling the fighter around the corner, their exit and the long way home loomed in the night, stars new and old glittering above.

Goodfella keyed the radio for the first time in what felt like ages. “Bluejay, RAGE 4-2. Miller time.”

A silence hung over the radio, cut short by an incredulous laugh. “Fuck, you guys actually pulled it off? Shit, Goodfella, you just made my day. RTB, we’ve got a lot left on our plate and not a lot of time to do it.” The waypoint for Fairhope Air Guard Base, about twenty minutes away at full burner, flashed into view off their port nose.

“Woah, man.” She just wanted to say something. “We made it.” She looked down at her TSD, scrolling and zooming to try to figure out just what fresh hell had broken out in the skies over Rhodes. It was chaos. The display was designed to convey as much information as fast as possible to her, but even then and even with the help of the neural link, she wasn’t sure quite what she was looking at. “You getting any of this?”

“It’s mostly working out,” Goodfella paused. “Mostly.”

“RAGE 4-2, Bluejay,” The A/SWACS grit his teeth. “POPUP group bullseye nine-zero for one-two-zero, Angels one-six, hot, tally eight, leaning on you, RAGE 4-2. They really don’t fuckin’ like you.”

Not even a chance to get our bearings, Goodfella thought.

Hey, she mused. If I were them, I’d want to kill us too.

“Trying to get an identification, no promises. Barely picked ‘em up on radar. I’m vectoring some fighters from PALE HORSE to get you covered. Just run. You guys have done enough.”

She punched the throttle forwards. “Roger, Bluejay,” Goodfella nodded from the backseat. “No need to tell us twice.” She could feel a tinge of disappointment— not from his voice, but secreted away in his mind, rippling across their shared link. Is he just mad it isn’t him?

She sighed, content with not knowing, and sent the fighter home.

---

Fairhope Air Guard Base was a bit of a misnomer. Everyone there was hanging on to a fair bit of hope, but it was hardly an Air Guard Base. Marathonian highway planners had, some time ago, been instructed by the government that certain sections of road needed to be straight and level for a given length, and preferably be closely located to other stretches of road in varying shapes and sizes. The highways were short for a runway, and she had to wonder if that was why the deception worked at all— the Minervans had to know that it was there. They had satellites over the whole planet. They had years to plan this. Fairhope had gone operational in a span of a single day.

A medley of combat aircraft laid their weary wheels to rest on the asphalt of Highway 8, connecting the city of Fairhope with her outlying suburbs and further on to Rhodes itself. Others lit the burners and peeled off the ground, banking and climbing for a distant, lightless horizon, the faintest glow of fire and darkest trace of choking ashes long since faded away.

Interceptors peeled off their batteries below as Minervan cruise missiles tried to rectify their earlier mistake, glowing trails of rocket fuel climbing, climbing, climbing to meet their foes. It was a battle no man had any hand in except to instruct it to happen. Algorithms and VI systems made the final call here; the air defenses and the inbound ordnance would both be beyond the control of their ostensible masters. She watched as, some distance away, a Bulwark missile slammed home into a Minervan Kingwood that promptly broke into a puff of firey smoke. All around her, the scene repeated.

She could only muster a gasp.

“It’s different in person, huh?” His eyes, silhouetted in teal-blue glow, glinted off the stealth-treated canopy. “Just think about it. Last time anyone saw anything like this…”

“World War Four.” She stared down at her instruments. She wanted to know the approach path, and she didn’t want to think about this.

“Yup. Fuckin’ gen-u-ine 21st-century bloodbath.” He shook his head. “C’mon, that flag on your shoulder— don’t you take any pride in it? The Marianas Turkey Shoot? Fat Amy’s Revenge? See, I can only imagine. We got no history on the Moon.”

“Ask the Marathonians how much they like history.”

“Fair enough.” He shrugged. “Just trying to lighten the mood.”

“You really want to get back into this, don’t you?”

“They killed a lot of my friends, Wick. I know you don’t take this shit personal, but I do.”

If you don’t think I do too… She grit her teeth. Didn’t he feel enough of her emotional baggage on the neural link to know better?

“So no, I’m not runnin’ from it. Fuck that.”

“I’m not—” She was glad he couldn’t see her face, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it.

“RAGE 4-2,” A nervous voice came in over the radio. “Fairhope Tower. Cleared for… runway two-zero. C’mon down.”

Goodfella nodded, locking his attention on the map splashed across his screen. “Roger, two-zero.”

She brought the fighter in a low pass over the runway, a converted strip of highway whose streetlights had been hastily collapsed on their sides. A truck stop nicely served as the apron for this hasty setup, and the entire complex looked about as improvised as it was. She wondered if the food court was still open. She could go for a burger about now. She hadn’t really realized how hungry she was. The last four hours had done a real number on her.

She broke the jet into her landing pattern, something she had honed over years of practice. In the fighter business, air or space, everyone started with wings. She was glad she had kept hers. Her experience from flying on the atmospheric side of the Navy had honed her instincts for this day, and while Goodfella may have had all his expertise— until now— up the well, he had proven to be a quick study. It was easier for him, anyways. He didn’t have to fly the damn thing.

She put the wheels down, and took the bird with them. The rubberized compound of the landing gears was well prepared for the controlled crash of a Navy landing. It was a habit that hadn’t gone away even when the seagoing flattops mostly had. The tires screeched, the brakes went on, and the plane slowly came to a halting stop.

“Welcome to Marathon, everybody,” a National Guardsman shouted up to them as their canopy popped open, the jet making its way in an easy trundle to the apron. “Enjoy your stay.” She snapped off a weary salute in return.

The apron, originally marked out as a rest stop for truckers was awash in a veritable menagerie of combat aircraft. From Charlie Panthers and their larger Echo-model cousins chocked up on the pavement, to the sleek, light Laoying fighters and brawny Mustang interceptors that sat hooked up to the fueling trucks, they had assembled a small sampler platter of the fruits of the United Nations’ defense-industrial complex. Across the way on one of the side roads, a line of Lynx and Agbon drones were receiving their new weapons as technicians scurried across the asphalt, missile carts in tow, exo-rigs glinting under the glow of spotlights the National Guard had brought with them. On the other side of the flashkrete barrier, heavy Air Guard strike planes in their camouflage paint— Kraits, she reminded herself— rolled down the highway single-file, the enormous deltas rising into the night sky off to make new craters on their own homeworld. It was all so surreal. This happens in video games and the movies, not in real life. She wondered if it would be true if she told herself that enough times. She rolled the wings into the fuselage and brought the plane into its spot, diagonally triple-parked across spaces intended for semi-trucks. The chocks went in. A hatch swung open on the side of the cockpit, and the boarding ladder crept down towards the ground.

Safe and sound. She grinned.

She glanced up and took in a sudden, uneasy breath as she realized just how dead they both were. A man not too unlike the one lying at her feet stood on a mirror reflection of the world, a stretching expanse of terraced grass perfectly parallel to the one her feet stood on, strands of jet black hair crashing and rolling in the wind as if ocean waves. Green eyes stared aghast, looking overhead to his own revelation of doom below.

“Goodfella? That really you?”

“Yeah, it's me.” She knew she had no way to know if he was real or memory’s cruel artifice. She believed him anyways. “Wick?”

She glanced down. The body was gone, the grass once again its artificially-engineered gold. “I'm scared.”

“Yeah, me too.”

She let the silence stand between them, their two planes close together but worlds apart. It was pleasant, here, or it would have been if she wasn’t aware of what it really was.

“Is that home?” She looked out at the mirrored cityscape, a false wind gently sweeping across her jacket. “It's gorgeous.”

“Not as pretty up close.” He sighed. “But you know, it is a nice view.” He paused. “Do you think you can make it down here?”

“Uh, you sure that’s safe?”

He shook his head. “Is any of this gonna be?”

“Hang on,” She beamed. “Pebble test.”

“Pebble test?”

“Yeah, one sec. I'm going to chuck something up at you.” She fumbled around on the ground where his body once laid. “This one feels good.” She lifted up a rock roughly the size of her palm. “See it?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Okay, coming your way!” She wound up and pitched the rock as straight upwards as she could. Not quite dead upwards, she thought, but close enough.

The rock soared, slowing as it headed towards the apex of a parabolic arc, the stone’s trajectory curving ever so slightly towards the ground until, as if grabbed by some unseen hand, it began rising faster and faster, curving back like a serpent, dropping suddenly to his feet.

“Huh,” He nodded. “Pebble test. I like that.”

She sighed. “I don’t know if I can jump that high.”

“You’re— you're on the Moon, remember?”

“I haven’t… felt like it.” She shook her head. “I’ve never been there!”

“This is in your head, dude. Or mine. Not really… sure anymore.” He shook his head. “Okay, your subconscious doesn’t want to play ball. I got an idea.” He took off his squadron jacket and his sweatshirt, tying them together in a loose chain, tossing the whole line down. “Tie yours on too. They should be able to reach me. I’ll pull.”

“Will that even work?”

“Just give it a shot, man, I’m graspin’ for straws.”

“Fuck it, sure.” She tied her jacket on to the end, lasso-throwing one end of the makeshift rope down to him. “Got it?”

He leapt to catch her lifeline, and she felt the tension running down the knots. “Got it!” He nodded. “Jump!”

She ran, leaping into the air, falling short. “Fuck!” She scrambled back. “I’m gonna give you a count. Pull then!”

“Okay!”

She counted down and jumped, hoping beyond hope he could reel her in. She felt a sharp tug on the rope, and her stomach somersaulted as she came tumbling down. Her landing was not soft. She rubbed a bruised leg, limping to her feet as Goodfella leaned down to offer a hand. “You want your jacket back?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of breezy in here. Is it like that in real life?”

“Yeah, they got, like, big fans.” He shrugged. “Part of the ventilation system, I think, but I wonder if they just missed being outside.” He grimaced. “The weatherman’s at least reliable.”

She laughed. “Oh, Goodfella, what are we gonna fuckin’ do?”

They took a step forward and the grass parted for concrete, the wind fading away behind the forest of skyscrapers. The streets were awash with voices, the world flush with life once more. She jumped back as a man seemingly came into existence right in front of her, gave her a sharp rebuke for having the gall to walk ahead of him, and shook his head as he walked away. The hairs on her neck stood straight.

“None of these people are real, right?” She shot a quizzical glance at Goodfella. “Why does it feel like…” She trailed off.

“I don't think so.” He shook his head. “If they were, that'd be like… the entire battlenet fading out at once.”

“That’d be horrible.” She paused. “I didn't even know two people could.”

“…You learn something new every day.” He stared down the street before jumping behind the doorway of a coffee shop. “What the fuck are the Minnies doing here?”

She stared at him, a blank “Huh?” slipping from her mouth.

“Down the fucking boulevard, Wick!”

She caught a glimpse of the Minervan Occupation Forces, the reflective stripes on their bright orange MP armbands hanging like warning lights in the distance, the urban camouflage on their helmets and plate carriers melding into the contours of the street. They parted the crowd ahead of them, the good citizens of Imbrium knowing it was a bad idea to get mixed up in this.

She ducked into the inset entrance to the cafe where Goodfella was hiding. Silence fell over the street, the harsh tapping of boots on concrete the only sound for blocks. “About six, moving in echelon.”

“Fuck.”

“I… I didn’t see rifles.”

“Huh?” He paused. “Look again.”

“You look!”

“Oh, for—” He sighed. “Fine.” He poked his head out to see what the quiet was all about. People were running away in every direction, dead silence on their lips. “Wait, no. No, no, no…” his breath quickened as he flattened his back to the wall, an intense, childlike fear in his eyes.

“Goodfella, what the hell is going on?” She poked her head out to see. The six Minervans had bunched up outside the dental offices of Jansen, Rippy, and Barton, bats and pipes in the hands of most, a four-millimeter pistol in the hands of the sixth. The Minervans let themselves in, walking on their clubs like canes. The last man, pistol in his hand, looked back over his shoulder as he locked green eyes onto her gaze. Her breath stuttered. He rolled his shoulders, cracking his neck as he turned his glare back to the task at hand.

“Goodfella,” she backed into the doorway, an apprehensive shake in her hands. “They’re just kids.”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “We were.”

The world collapsed around them, and nothingness reigned in its place. Below, a collection of six young— too young— Minervan Marines hassled with a man behind a reception counter, void overtaking everything else. A black-haired kid shrugged, raising the gun in his hands. The man jumped back, reaching for the sky. He shook his head. You’re gonna fawkin regret this, he said. Walk away while you can, kids. I won’t tell no one. Nah, the kid with the gun said. I think we want our money.

Goodfella fell to his knees, staring down through an unseen floor, fingers curling and scraping as if trying to claw his way through the nothingness.

Fine, you want the sky crashin’ down on you? The man grit his teeth. One of the kids opened his pack, the man at gunpoint shoveling Imbrian dollars from the safe into the bag. You fawkin kids get a gun and you think you’re fawkin Whitey Bulger.

She stood above him, bewildered. “Goodfella, what’s going on?”

“We didn’t know. We didn’t know. We were young, dumb, and angry. And… and… we wanted a way up—” He choked on his words, fear churning with anger, raw emotion spiraling into utter deadlock.

“You robbed a dentist?”

“We shook down a dentist. A… another family’s dentist. We didn’t know.”

“I… I’m sorry, man.”

“You know how hard it is to hide something from somebody who’s in your head? Do you? Do you know how much it took to keep you from this?”

“No…” She felt the metal handle of a red door, a seeping cold under curling fingers, a transient panic sweeping over and past her lying mind.

They had left CAG’s office with grave faces, scowls only breaking into smiles once they had made it down the passageway. “I thought you were gonna shit yourself.” He held up a little pinch. “No…”

“This isn't me, and it didn’t quite go down like this. I never wanted you to see this. I… I wanted this dead, gone, and buried, and that's where it's been, until now! It's never been on a record, and you're going to make sure it stays off the records, okay? I have a life now. I have a purpose now. Don't fuck me here, okay?”

The lights of San Diego glinted off Tony’s eyes as they stumbled out of the basement bar in Gaslamp, the gravity weighing down on his lanky build. He was absolutely bubbly tonight, a goofy smile splayed across his face. “How the fuck... do you guys, like, walk here? It's so heavy!”

“What's gotten into you?”

“You! You've gotten into me! You got your… fingers, all up into the lowest point of my life, something that… doesn't even feel like it happened to me anymore.”

The grand exhibit hall of the U.S.S. Enterprise Sea-Air-Space Museum held a commanding view of the Earth, but all the gaggle of children were focused on was the flight-suited aviators of the Renegades standing between a red-checked F-14F Super Tomcat and a J-20 Fagin, facing off as they had centuries before. A kid jumped up ahead of them, running to Tony and tugging on his flight suit’s leg. “Hey, mister, mister fighter pilot? Have you ever… fought an alien? That'd be really cool!” He glanced over to Rafka, eyes bulging from their sockets with a stone-faced nervousness. She nodded, egging him on, holding back a chuckle. He had a moment of epiphany, and leaned down to the kid, dropping into a whisper. “Well… I gotta tell ya. I'm an extraterrestrial.”

“Was that you, in the park?”

“What the hell do you know about the park?” He grit his teeth.

“So it was real, the body.”

A heavy huffing pulsed from his nose, anger sizzling off his breath. “You… don't know shit about me.”

She blinked, and the streets returned. A mob of Marathonian National Guardsmen, their battle rattle stripped down for mobility, plate rigs worn over rolled sleeves instead of environment skins, helmets broken down to their barest bones for protection and sensor coverage, stood at the end of the sidewalk, rifles in hand. You boys are in big trouble, the man at the head of the pack said. Went stickin’ your nose where it don’t belong.

At the other end of the street, more Minervans scattered, running for cover. Hey, we didn’t do anything!

The man with the rifle laughed. Maybe not you, but one of youse did!

Images flashed before them, beatings, shootings, a back and forth battle for about two blocks’ worth of mid-rises, as the two gangs traded retaliation for retaliation.

The kid with the black hair watched as glass shattered and shockwaves rocked the street. Soot and smoke billowed from inside a nightclub, the CLOSED sign rocketing off the front door and embedding itself in the wall of the building across the way.

He dropped the gun and turned, a panic welling in his eyes, running for a shelter in the far distance, the MP armband slipping off his shoulder.

“I hate that you’re here.” His hands shook, breath heavy.

“Why? Why hide this? I mean, you said it, it’s not you anymore.”

“I don’t want you telling anyone… and I don’t want you seeing this when you look at me.”

“How’d you get out of this?”

“Follow him,” Tony’s thumb shot towards the fleeing youth, and together, they ran.

The streets of Imbrium sprawled out, a manicured grid pattern curving through the channel where ancient lava had once flown, a natural pressure vessel for a city of several million. She couldn’t tell how far each step took her, the world contracting and extending ahead and behind, one step ten paces back, the next step taking her twenty ahead. Her vision glittered as if through a glassy rain and stuttered as if bathed under a strobe light. Was this it? She didn’t want to die here. Ahead of them both, in the distant glow of a WIRED!™ billboard, a blazing white silhouette cocked his head and vanished. She stopped where she stood, glancing around. “Goodfella?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t think we’re alone.”

“What?” He paused. “It’s just our memories.”

“That didn’t…” She put her hands on her knees, breath racing. “Fuck, man, am I going insane?”

“Hope not.” He tapped the back of his skull. “Remember, we’re both in here now.”

She looked up, and panic crawled into her throat. The phantom of Goodfella’s past had vanished into the urban jungle, and as she began to look closer the red-brick shops of Newbury Street sprung out of her memory into what was then passing for reality in front of her. The edges of the buildings and the streets danced, fluid and deceitful, changing the moment she had figured out where they were. “Goodfella, what do we do now?” Despair rolled off her lips.

“I know where he's going, but…”

She looked back over his shoulder to make eye contact with him, and fell. The buildings caved in around them, a teardrop of concrete and ancient rock enveloping the two of them as they plummeted through the unseen. As the ground became the sky, she found herself flattened against the sudden embrace of a cassava field. Night hung heavy over the young plants, as the blue moonlight of an ocean world danced across a radiant band crossing through the heavens. She sat up, glancing around as her vision was drawn to a lone figure amidst the field, a silhouette of raw sunrise. She glanced away, eyes searing, as the light faded. Goodfella sat up at her left, shooting a panicked, panting glance her way. “What the fuck just happened?”

A wind rippled across the leaves, and the golden grass of the Imbrian park flowed across the ground in its wake. The glowing figure ahead of her had been eclipsed and vanished. She scrambled back, away from the Minervan Marine who now stood in its place, the reflection of ringlight’s silvered glow glancing off a faceless visor. Goodfella fumbled along the ground, fingers catching on the outline of a 2411 pistol, raising the coilgun in the glinting light of the moons.

A gentle breeze swayed against the grass, and the moment clicked. “Tony, no!” She shrieked as a cracking jolt rolled across stepped terraces, and jumped to her feet, running for the collapsing Marine. Hot blood spilled across the chest of the figure as they convulsed, dropping onto their back, and she frantically searched for the helmet release as she scrambled towards the Minervan.

“He was gonna fucking kill us, Wick!” Goodfella ran after her, pointing the handgun down at the stranger. She laid her hands on the emergency release, yanking the tab as the helmet twisted and clicked off. Green eyes stared back, blood curdling from his lips. Tony stared, his spitting image staring back. His eyes went wide.

“What did you just do?” She looked up at her friend.

“I…” Tony’s hands trembled. The gun clattered from his grip. “I don't know.” The walls of the Imbrian lava tube flashed around them and faded as quickly. “I… you know, this. Really happened.”

“I… saw it earlier. I had no idea what it was.”

“The park was bad cover, but it was so far away from there. I thought I could… if I could put enough distance between me and them, they'd…” Tony stopped, panting, eyes welling with tears. “There was a man who came for me. It grazed my lung. I would have suffocated if a doctor wasn't in the park that day.” Goodfella choked back a gasp. “I can't believe all this… whatever is doing this… put me in that fucking thing.” He gestured to the Minervan Marine battle rattle, the blood bubbling up from beneath her hands.

“Tony, nevermind that. We need to save this kid. This could kill you. We have no idea how this works.”

She glanced up to his anguished expression. “It's not fucking real. Besides. The doctor will come for him any second now. Just, what the fuck? I’m nothing like those bastards!” He shouted into the night. The streets of Imbrium rolled into focus around them, lined with quarantine notices and warnings of military authority. “They'd do the exact same fucking thing they're doing now to our home if they ever got the chance!”

“Goodfella!” Her breath sped. The scene around them melted away once again as the terraced garden of the city park bled into a monumental avenue, the shapes of one of the Pavonis Current War’s conscript squads carved into pitch-black rock, the looming stadium of Minerva’s Consensus Building only a stone’s throw away.

“This fucking nightmare!"

“Goodfella, have you ever been to Minerva?”

“What? Fuck no!”

“Then we're not alone in here! The system can’t pull something you haven't seen. I saw something earlier, I had no idea what it was—” She jumped. “Where did your body go?” The apparition of the younger Goodfella had disappeared.

“I don't know.” He stared up at the memorial. “I don't know.” He huffed. TO THE VALOR OF THOSE CALLED TO SERVE, the plinth read, the figures hewn out of towering stone as if emerging from a gateway to the warzones of the last century, rifles dangling from slings, oxygen masks tightened beneath their helmets, exoskeleton wrapping the leader’s outstretched arm, marshalling his troops against some unseen adversary. “What bullshit! Pavonis? They started that fucking war! All these people fucking think about is war, is killing us! Can't they just leave us alone?” He spat at the statue.

“Tony, calm down! You said it yourself, it's not real, we’re not here! I need you to be okay right now!”

“No! None of this is fucking okay! They started Pavonis, and can you believe they have the fucking gall to tell us that they didn't start this one?” A shower of stars fell from the sky behind him as he grimaced, his breath speeding. “I hope they burn in hell.”

In the far distance, a falling star larger than the rest cracked a mountain in two with a flash of violent light, the snowcapped peak crumbling to dust and tumbling down. She gasped. The ground trembled and split. Dust choked the world. The sickly glow of fire reigned in place of blue skies.

Goodfella was gone, the shape of his shadow seared into her retina. The bowl of the Consensus split, the titanic mosaic across its side torn at the silhouette of the Minervan flagbearer, the once triumphal fresco of Minervan liberty turned to a monument to hubris.

Pillars of fire erupted from the ground below, hallway walls closing in, a sense of panic forcing her forward, driving her through the chasm in the Consensus Building’s wall. She leapt through the opening as the world beyond turned to ruin, the once-proud streets of New Ruacnoc behind her aflame and in chaos. The vision ahead of her, too, was death— the slow, cold death of decay rather than the furious inferno behind her. Mosiac tiles crunched underneath, bootprints left in the soot. She took in a breath, and surveyed her surroundings. As politically apathetic as she was, she had never felt kindly about what this building stood for, nor had she ever particularly liked any of the people who had gathered here. Still, a part of her felt sick. Was she sick because she stood in the halls of the enemy, a place where esteemed men and women had signed the death warrants for her friends, or was she sick because she was now witnessing the destruction so many of her comrades had wished upon their enemy? She didn't know. A tile fell from a mosaic before her, a grand affair; before her an Independence Forces soldier beat his rifle’s barrel with the smith’s hammer, the shape of a plowshare slowly taking form in his hands. Beside him, his compatriots had taken to working the land, others had doffed their helmets for hard hats, others had left the tools of war behind for the pen, the gavel, and the scales, the man at the front of the pack burying a bloodied spear, his compatriot handing him a branch from a nearby olive tree.

What beautiful intentions, she thought. Why hold on to all this if you're just going to throw them all away?

A clicking echoed from the central bowl, the tunnel connecting to the monumentally decorated hallway beckoning her out as soft light cast from the opening, a sharp departure from the harsh flame outside. She turned the corner, the massive arena of the building drawing an awed breath, even if it was ruined. As she walked in towards the middle of the bowl, she felt sand parting under her tread; rubble, desks, cables and chairs emerging from the waste. To her right, an avalanche of stone and concrete had sheared down through the stands where legislators would have been sat. At the center of the arena, it seemed an office had been peeled like an orange atop a hill of sand; its walls strewn haphazardly to the sides in all directions. She knew this one from seventh grade astrography. The Office at the End of the Hall.

“There you are.” Tony’s voice resounded behind the Martyrs’ Desk, that rough concrete block. She'd seen it in movies. She'd always thought it was a little weird. A chunk of a nuked-out building, jagged edges included, the Seal of the Minervan Republics made from radioactive glass contaminated by the ashes of this country’s forefathers. It was a bit macabre for her tastes. She ran for her friend, sand kicking up behind her feet as she climbed the mound, grabbing bookshelves for handholds and swatting aside portraits, and she stopped dead in her tracks when she could see the blood.

“Oh, good.” A fountain pen lay to her right atop the desk, the nib bubbling. “I've been wondering where you were.” It was too thick to be ink, the blood spilling from the pen in an endless reserve, the desk awash from end to end in an ocean broken only by Goodfella’s heels. “I was afraid I’d lost you.” Her jaw hung open in a crimson mirror, papers floating incomprehensibly atop, “No, I couldn't lose you, could I?” handwritten by nobody as names on names on names scrawled across the page, written in scarlet from below, “We're bound at the hip, aren't we?” the list kept growing and growing and “Wick?” the blood kept spilling and the cracks kept spreading and

“Wick. Wick.” Goodfella’s eyes widened, his voice raspier than usual. “Wiiicked.”

“What.” She pointed to the desk. “Tony, what the fuck is going on— what are you doing?”

The room fell around her, the sand caved in, and the world went dark as she started to drown.

⠀

⠀

⠀

She batted aside bodies with her hands as she kicked her way to the surface. She gasped, coughing out muck and grime as she felt her feet reach solid ground below her and a sliver of foggy sky greeted her eyes, canyon walls framing a portrait of alien trees. The bog’s waterline fell slightly beneath her waist, rifle barrels and outstretched arms poking from beneath the muck as if shoots among wheat fields. The familiar ‘unicorn’s horn’ EOTS of the Hoplite-VII helmet bobbing beside her pointed down the run of the bog, and as she trudged forward she scanned the muck below. It was a cemetery immersed, UN and Minervan helmets alike frozen side by side in neat little rows. Her breath stuttered. As she looked up, fog rolled in around her.

Some distance away, a form erupted from the bog, flailing, shouting. “Rafka! Help!” The shape of her friend disappeared as soon as it had come.

She gasped, and ran as quickly as the muck would allow. Mud pulled at her legs. The cold seeped through her sweatpants into her bones. She came to a halt as Goodfella rose from the mire in front of her.

“It's okay. It's okay.” She felt something tug at the corner of her eye. She started to let her gaze fall, and he reached out a hand. “It's okay. It's me.”

She looked down with a sigh, and met her gaze in her reflection. She gasped as she saw his.

In the water’s rippling sheen, she saw double as Goodfella’s reflection held Tony’s head below water. It went no deeper than the surface of the muck but a tingling feeling at the back of her mind made its reality oh so very clear.

“Shouldn't have done that.” Venom seeped through his voice.

She backed up, pacing a circle around her friend’s mirage. The inky black muck of the bog crept up Goodfella’s back, worming its way up from his shirt collar, running right into the port for his neural lace.

She lunged, grabbing at the liquid tendril plugged into Goodfella’s brain. It felt somewhat cohesive in her hand; she yanked it partway out as black bile poured from the port, and he turned his head to face her. Obsidian pooled in his eye sockets and dribbled from his mouth, his nose, his ears. “Come on, Wick. This is what we're here for.”

She grit her teeth. Her footing slipped as she pulled the cable again, and he laughed as she fell into the water.

Just as suddenly, she fell out, her breath speeding, her hands shaking. Goodfella stood in the distance down the bog, and she found herself surrounded by bodies, the bodies from the sunken graveyard now hanging limp in the air around her, rifles and pistols dangling in the fog, adrift on an unseen wind.

“Honestly, I'm surprised.” The silhouette in the distance was cloaked in Stygian murk, the scum of the bog mixing with something much darker. “You're the trigger puller, Wick. I used to think you'd understand better than anybody. In this industry, you just can't tolerate weakness.” She shuffled forward against current and muck, fighting for every step. Her breathing sped. “What are you talking about? What are you doing to him?”

“This is for his own good, really. I mean, look at this.” Tony— or that thing wearing his face— reached a hand into the water and dragged Tony out of it by the neck. She could see her friend struggling, kicking and choking, inky blackness sputtering from his mouth as he coughed and thrashed. “Look out there, Wick! It's kill or be killed, and don't you know these motherfuckers got it coming?” The red and white candy-caning of the evacuation notices flashed from the canyon walls, jumbotron lights cutting through the fog. “You know, he almost shook me loose, but the last eight months of news… brought him right back to what really matters.” She felt her breath quicken and the walls of the canyon start closing in. The grip of a discarded 2411 pistol beckoned her from just below the surface. “I didn't even have to plead my case, the Minnies did it all for me! Not every day the rats beg you to put ‘em down.”

She reached for the gun. The cold plastic was slick. Her hands were shaking. The world narrowed. She glared down the sights at that monster. Her heart pounded.

The trigger pull was smooth and crisp, but the signature crack of a coilgun discharge was nowhere to be found. Her eyes widened. She clawed at the trigger again. And again. She turned the gun to its side as that vile darkness poured out of its barrel.

“Bad call,” Goodfella snarled. His voice sounded close. She turned the pistol to its other side and dropped it with a primal shriek as bile spilled from the chamber, inky blackness running up her hand, pulling her arm down towards the bog.

The day broke before her as the bog flash-boiled around her, evaporating in an instant. A neat circle had been carved in the muck by a figure of solid light, radiant sunrise given form, the stream held back by invisible walls encircling them. The stranger nodded.

“What?” She felt a tingling buzz across her scalp. “Who are you? Why are you following me?”

The figure gave no reply.

She felt a tugging at her vision and glanced down. The hilt of a double-edged sword rose from the ground, rusted and dented from neglect and misuse. There were many weapons scattered in the bog, she’d noticed, but this one seemed to her to be of much older make.

She grabbed hold and shook it free, the strange figure gliding hands over the blade, the visible signs of decay burning away as the weapon caught fire. The stranger pointed to Tony. She nodded. Just as quickly, the figure vanished, but the fire remained.

The walls of the bog crashed once again in on her, waves threatening to throw her off her footing; she stumbled and trudged, each next step easier and easier as she watched the bog jump away from the heat of the blade.

Tony’s assailant had fallen silent. She watched as the subconscious monster swept waves of obsidian sludge across the surface towards her, and watched as an invisible hand just as quickly batted them away.

Closing the distance, she swung at Goodfella, but the weapon felt unbearably heavy in her hands, her opponent leaping back and readying a reply as her slash froze overhead. Tony struggled against restraints of pure darkness to her right, opening his hand as he choked against the muck of the bog. She backpedaled and brought the sword’s heat close to Tony, watching as the darkness consuming him began to slowly recede.

“Rafka…” he stammered. “You… you can't do this for me.”

She nodded, and laid the sword in his hand.

The bog jumped to life around her, clawing her back and drawing her away. “Tony—!” Her shriek turned to burbling as she started to feel the water crashing in on her, her heart pounding as she thrashed against the creek, her vision narrowing as a bitter, metallic taste took her senses hostage. She poked her head above for but a moment as she watched Tony slash the sword across the monster’s shoulders before the current dragged her down into a kaleidoscopic vision. Her breath sped and her eyes widened as she was force-fed every slight, every argument, and every annoyance she'd ever known, filtered through a prism of malice. She kicked at the impossibly deep water, the feeling of muck closing in all around. Her hand broke the surface, grabbing hold of a tree’s root, when she met the gaze of her father.

How could he have done that to me?

The stray thought stabbed into her mind. Her teeth grit as her breath quickened. Only the sense of drowning broke its hold. She tugged on the root, an anchor line to a surface awash in an eerie glow. She broke through the top of the bog with a frenzied gasp, the fog rolling in around her dyed an eerie red by the memory of evacuation billboards.

She clung to the tree at the side of the bog as Tony brought the blade down over his head with a shout, the flames dancing across the sword roaring as they finally consumed their victim. Goodfella was lit ablaze and the color and definition of its features burned away until the shade was a mass of darkness. The blob of Wrath folded in on itself as if packed away by unseen hands, a wound in unreality hanging in the air, until it finally vanished.

The bog released its grip.

She trudged over to Tony as her friend was hacking up a lung, grime and sludge spit back from whence it came. “Tony?”

“Yeah.” He coughed. “Yeah.”

She nodded. That blood red fog still surrounded them in the distance, the faint outline of a canyon wall luring the two towards the shore. They walked in relieved silence.

As they clambered to the shore, the first thing Tony did was sit down. He was panting, groaning as if trying to express something beyond words. He set the sword to his side.

“Where did you get this?”

“Something gave it to me.” She scanned her surroundings. “It just… just vanished. It was that glowing man.”

“Glowing man?”

“Yeah, you… you didn't see it, did you?”

“No, I was a bit busy getting killed.” He sighed. “But, you know what? Sure. Third weirdest thing that’s happened today.”

“Do you think we're okay?” She looked up to trees and the towering wall of a canyon peering through the fog. She didn't know what she was expecting.

“What I think? I think they're sending the janitor to our cockpit right now to scrape our brains off our laps.”

She took a seat herself and hung her head. “At least they have our bodies.”

“That'd be the first time your folks see you in… what, a decade?”

She stared into the distance.

“Sorry. Sore spot.” He shook his head. “I've been through a lot today.”

“We've.”

“Yeah.”

“You haven't heard of anyone getting back from a fade this deep, have you?”

“I've never heard of anybody getting into one, let alone two people. That's not supposed to be able to happen.”

“I'm going to take it they don't have swamps like this in Boston.”

“No.”

“Not on the Moon, either.” He sighed. “And none of us have been to Minerva. I think you said earlier, we're not alone. Maybe this is where the glowing guy lives. Swamp Canyon.”

“We don't even know what that was.”

Down the bank of the creek, she could see smoke rising, mingling with the crimson fog before dissipating into the the sky above them. She stood and gestured for Tony to follow. “Be ready,” she nodded.

The soil under their tread squelched with each step, the fog beside them occasionally broken by the woodland camouflage of dead men floating on a gentle breeze, faces obscured by blackened visors, their helmets’ sensor cameras invariably turned on the two of them. The soft amber glow of dying flames began to mingle with the fog’s scarlet as they trudged along, until blackened composite and torn alloys erupted from the ground. A horseshoe of debris ringed the broken form of a man, flight helmet discarded to his side, back propped against a rock. The grey camouflage of a Vaquero fighter spread its wings above him, stuck nose-end into the ground. He raised his eyes to meet them. He coughed.

The man was tired. The eyes that met her gaze held the weight of sorrows she had not lived long enough to know. He turned his attention to Tony, eyeing the sword in his hand. “Are you here for me?”

“What?”

“No? Too bad.” He shook his head. The three stripes of the Minervan standard hung on his shoulders as velcro patches.

Rafka heard a tremor in Tony’s voice. “What are you doing here?”

“Can a man die in peace?” The stranger grumbled.

The breeze ran gently through her hair, yet an eerie heaviness weighed on the wind. A voice carried on the gust, a gentle insistence: Do you remember Titan?

The patch on his shoulder, a dragon wrapped around a spear, looked just like the tail art from the debrief. She saw Tony grip the sword’s hilt ever tighter.

Eight members of the Twenty-Fourth died on Titan, the wind whispered. Eight little Renegades, burning on the breeze. They didn't have a chance. Do you know what happens when a disconnected life support system mixes pure oxygen and methane?

Tony’s eyes widened. Rafka took a step closer. “Tony. Tony. Talk to me,”

“This guy killed our friends,” Tony snarled. The breeze felt just that little bit colder.

She glanced over to the stranger. The words fell from his mouth, crashing to the ground under the weight of regret. “Let him,” he said. She looked back to Tony, watching as the fire that had once enveloped the blade in his hands died down, the metal crumbling to dust and drifting on the wind.

“Tony, think about this.” She took another step towards him. “What were you just fighting?”

“Rafka!” His eyes widened. “Just… just…” The sword had withered into the shape of a combat knife. She watched as the bank of that bog crept ever closer to where they stood.

Tony looked down at the blade, hand trembling, and looked up at Rafka, panic in his face. Something caught the corner of his eye, and Tony spun to glare across the creek. The fog had parted, and across the bog a tall man with glasses carried a young boy in his hands, bloodied, bandaged with a torn shirt. He gasped.

“Who is that?”

“Me,” Tony said, dropping the knife in the dirt.

The bog recessed to its natural waterline, and the whisper on the wind fell silent as the breeze ran across her ears.

Tony walked over to the man. “Can you stand?”

“Please just leave me here.”

“No, I'm not going to.”

“I’m not fit for second chances.”

“Too bad.” Tony knelt down. “Rafka, his leg is screwed up. I’m going to have to carry him.”

“Where are we going?” She raised an eyebrow.

“Across. I don't know what, but there's something there.” He scooped the stranger up. The man didn't struggle. “Everything you said is true. Why would you do this for me?”

“Someone did it for me,” he trudged forward into the bog, lifting the man above the surface.

She followed them across, the bodies of the dead seemingly staring at them the whole time. As they made landfall on the other bank, a crowd of dead aviators had massed to greet them, shattered visors revealing burned faces as mangled limbs fell to their sides. Tony crept forward, the stranger in his arms heavier with each step, whispers begging for vengeance filling his ears as he came to the threshold of somewhere far more familiar.

The stranger in his arms looked up at the sign over the door and began to cry.

The whole building before them seemed to be recessed into the rock of the canyon wall. She could see the edges of memory bleeding into the scene, places where brick mingled with stone and canyon blurred into the church in front of them. It was thin, squeezed by the space constraints of Imbrian real estate pricing, likely one of the few buildings on its block that wasn't a skyscraper. Icons hung above the entrance on its second story— St. Mary and St. Joseph each cradling Baby Jesus on either side of that picture of Jesus shooting the light rays out of His chest she had seen in her mother’s wallet. She never understood that one, but the stranger in Tony’s arms seemed to be bawling his eyes out looking at it.

She turned around, and the crowd of corpses was gone. The whole bog was gone. They were perched on a ledge higher up the canyon, the nightmare they'd endured buried under the fog below.

“We're going in, then?” She glanced over to Tony.

He nodded.

The interior of St. Maximilian Kolbe’s Church was, to put it plainly, very Italian. Neo-Baroque paintings depicting the martyrdom of the parish’s patron saint hung in place of windows, the building's towering neighbors both cramping the church and making a window a moot point. The door to the confessional was a red composite, marked with the number 454B. She gasped, and the intrusion vanished as soon as it had appeared. The church seemed longer than it should have been, and the space between the pews and the altar rail had been taken over by an invasion of other memories. The burning wreckage of a crashed fighter bled into the church’s right side, a furious blaze threatening to consume the whole building. Tony walked ahead of her, the battered Minervan in his arms. He turned back towards his pilot. “He's coughing up blood.”

Goodfella’s voice echoed from the lectern behind the flames, and the two jumped.

“HE HAS PLACED BEFORE YOU FIRE AND WATER,”

She glanced to the ambo. Tony’s phantom seemed to be tearing itself apart as it spoke. The deep black of the bog seeped from its left eye as light broke from its right.

“STRETCH OUT YOUR HAND FOR WHICHEVER YOU WISH.”

Tony gasped. The wind rushed through his hair, a cold chill fighting a gentle warmth as she swore she heard the chattering of voices.

Tony trembled, and looked to his right. The pews had been filled by the bloodied corpses of his fellow aviators, a silent chorus all shouting one thing.

To the left of them both, a stone pool, glassy and calm, had gently intruded into the floor of the church. She glanced around as the whole scene started to unravel, rendering artifacts crumbling whatever sense of reality had remained in the simulation to dust.

One man sat in the pews to the left, adjusting his glasses as he looked to the tabernacle behind the altar. Tony’s eyes met the back of his head, and he was gone in the flash of a wireframe. Tony stepped forward. His hands shook. He glared over to his phantom, and stared down at the pool.

“You… don't need to.” The man in his arms struggled out the words.

He walked to the pool and crouched down, laying the man in the waters.

“I don't deserve this,” the man shouted, as his wounds started to close.

“I know.”

His phantom screamed. She spun and stared at the lectern. Half of the figure had melted into the muck of the bog as a flash of light seared her eyes and the simulation went haywire.

She was totally alone in a white void, the nothingness beneath her tread turning red, green, and blue like the flicker of a broken screen through her blurry vision. She lifted her eyes and stopped dead in her tracks as she caught sight of the glowing figure from the bog, and fell to her knees in pain and fear as her vision cleared to reveal two of them, conversing in a language she couldn't even fathom.

They turned their sights on her, and the world froze.

The blurry form leaning over her gasped. A light shone brightly in her eyes. “Doc, we got a live one!” The technician glanced over his shoulder. “Two miracles in one day.” He shook his head.

“Shoot, we got the pilot too?” The flight surgeon raised an eyebrow and ran the technician’s pen light across her eyes.

“Manual recovery’s usually a Hail Mary,” the technician blinked, staring down at his tablet’s ruggedized screen. “Guess she’s taking house calls today.”

The flight surgeon leaned in. “Hey el-tee. Tell me, you know what year it is?”

Her head felt like it had been caved in with a fire-ax. “Uhh… 2524?”

“You got it.” He grinned. “Who’s the Secretary-General?”

“TYDTWD,” she had slurred the acronym into an alphabet soup.

The smile faded from Doc’s face. “Huh?”

“Take Your Daughter to Work Day?” Rafka struggled to grin. “Y’know, she’s Admiral Jimoh’s kid.”

Tech snickered. “Some friends SecGen’s got.”

“My head hurts.”

“Sounds about right, el-tee.” The flight surgeon showed her his tablet. Brain scans showing a buzz of activity across every lobe suddenly went blank. “You almost died. You and your TSO, deepest fade I’ve ever seen. Him too, and all he does is neural laces.” Doc pointed to Tech. “Can you move?”

“I… Iunno.”

“Give it a try,” The technician stepped off to her other side, providing a helping hand. “We gotcha, el-tee.”

She groaned, swiveling on her butt to dangle her feet off the stretcher. She winced as she sat up, clutching her temple.

“Do you remember anything from your fade?”

“Not really, no…”

“One last question. What’s your name, Sailor?”

“Wi— uh, Rafka. Rafka Smart.”

Tech gave her a congratulatory slap on the shoulder. “You passed. Your backseater’s up and about. You spent a little longer unresponsive. There was some malware on your plane, but nothing that should have done that much… Both of you cheated death. I don’t know how you did it. Nobody crashes that hard and lives. You two are some very lucky nobodies. Count your blessings, ma’am.”

“Normally,” Doc said, “I’d have you grounded. Today’s not normal. How are you feeling now?”

“Uhh… a little better.”

“Good. You guys go back up in four hours. Go meet up with your squadron, get some rest, and let me know if anything gets worse. There are still a few things I can ground you for.”

“Yes, Doc.” She nodded, out of breath.

She looked out to the horizon, hoping to catch some glimpse that would tell her the battle was going well. Of course, they were too far away to see anything meaningful, and hopefully far enough away that the Minervans wouldn’t hit them. She knew they could, and they were trying.

“Two miracles in one day,” Tech had mused. She felt her breath trickle across her lips, a feeling she had a newfound gratitude for. A creeping dread set in. She wondered how many more she would get.

The distant mist flashed, a burning crimson in the night before the dawn.

She closed her eyes. She thought of home. It hurt.

“Hey, Rafka!” Her backseater’s voice broke through and jolted her back to her senses. “You… you're alive! Oh, man.” He waved her towards the gas station’s door, red composite and numbered 454B.