We flew out to our instructed coordinates to wait. I tore my attention away from the maze and hit my flight chatter button. We simply couldn’t go into training without some kind of command structure. “Hesho,” I said. “Do you want to be our flightleader? You’ve got command experience.”
“Not much,” Hesho said. “I have been a ship captain for only about three weeks, Captain Alanik. Before that, I was in politics.”
“You were absolute monarch of a small section of the kitsen home planet,” Vapor said softly.
“Details,” Hesho said. “Who cares about those dark ages, right? We’re enlightened now!” He hesitated. “But it was not small. We encompassed over a third of the planet. Regardless, I do not think it would be wise for me to command this flight. I should not divide my attention from commanding my crew while this ship is unfamiliar and my people are still learning it.”
“You can take command if you want, Alanik,” Morriumur said to me.
I grimaced. “No, please. I’m likely to charge into a black hole or something. You don’t want one of your interceptors to be in command. Vapor, you should be flightleader.”
“Me?” the quiet voice asked.
“That sounds good to me,” Morriumur said. “Alanik is right—we shouldn’t have someone who is too aggressive.”
“I accept this decision,” Hesho said. “As our sniper, Vapor can survey the battlefield and be in the best position to make decisions.”
“You all barely know me,” Vapor protested.
Which was part of the reason I’d suggested it. Maybe if Vapor was our flightleader, she’d be forced to interact with the rest of us—and maybe I’d be less likely to forget she was around. I still didn’t quite understand her purpose here.
“Brade?” I asked. “What do you think?”
“I am not allowed to vote in such matters,” she said.
Great. “All right, Vapor, the job is yours. Good luck.”
“Very well,” she said. “I suppose everyone should give me a flight status check, then.”
I smiled. That sounded very much like she had some combat experience—so I was learning about her already. It seemed that callsigns were out though, as everyone just used their names as they called in. I reluctantly did likewise, as wrong as it felt. I didn’t want to act like I had too much experience with this sort of thing.
Vapor organized us into a default flight pattern, with me and Brade flying up front, Hesho in the center, and Morriumur and herself flying in the anchor position. Then, at my suggestion, we did a few formation exercises while we waited for instructions.
As we did, I acknowledged to myself that perhaps it made sense for the Superiority to let each group make their own command structure. After all, most of the other flights contained only one species. Different cultures might have different ways of looking at military service—the fact that we had an entire crew of kitsen on one ship was evidence of that.
Still, it grated on me. It felt like the Superiority was being lazy. They wanted flights of fighters, but didn’t want to have to deal with the hassle of truly commanding them. It was a lukewarm half-in, half-out measure. After the sharply defined rules of the DDF, this felt like a sloppy mess.
Eventually, Winzik called us on the general line. “All right, everyone! Welcome and thank you for your service! We at the Department of Protective Services are very excited to be training this new bold force. You will be our first line of defense against a danger that has loomed above the Superiority for its entire existence.
“We have prepared a quick video orientation for you to watch. This should explain your goal here. Please experience the orientation and save questions until the end. Thank you again!”
“A…video orientation?” I said over the channel to my flight.
“The Superiority has a lot of graphic designers and animators,” Morriumur said. “It’s one of the most common professions chosen by those who wish to work beyond basic subsistence.”
I frowned. “What’s a graphic designer?”
The canopy of my fighter suddenly lit up with a holographic projection. It wasn’t as good as one of M-Bot’s—this one was somewhat insubstantial, and the depth was off—but the effect was still awe inspiring.
Because it was showing me a delver.
It looked like the one I’d seen back on the recording at Detritus. An enormous, oppressive shadow within a cloud of light and dust. Chunks of burning asteroids spewed from it, leaving trails in the void. They churned past my canopy, and though I knew this was just a hologram, my fingers twitched on the controls of my ship.
Every instinct I had was screaming at me to get away from this terror. This impossible, incredible monstrosity. It would destroy me and everything I loved. I could feel it.
“This is a delver!” a perky, feminine voice said. A cutesy graphic surrounded the thing on the screen—a shimmering line of stars and lightning bolts.
“Even still, no one truly knows what a delver is,” the voice continued, and icons looking like confused faces lined the sides of my canopy. “These recordings are almost two hundred years old, taken when the Acumidian delver appeared and destroyed the planet Farhaven. Every living being on the planet was turned to dust and vaporized! How scary!”
My canopy view zoomed in on the delver, as if I’d suddenly flown up to it. I jumped despite myself. From this close, it looked like a thunderstorm of dust and energy—but deep within it, I saw the shadow of something smaller. A circular, shifting…something.
“When delvers enter our realm,” the voice said, “matter coalesces around them. We think they must bring it through from the place they come from. Freaky! This matter forms a shroud around the delver; the creature itself is much smaller! At the very center of all this dust, rock, and debris is a metallic shell sometimes called a delver maze!
“Standard shields protect pilots from whatever it is about the delver that vaporizes people, so that’s nice, isn’t it! But those shields don’t last long against a delver’s attacks, and even planetary shields usually fall within a matter of minutes. Still, shielded ships can get close, and some have even traveled inside the dust, past the debris, and into the maze itself! There, they encountered a complicated network of twisting tubes and corridors made from stone and metal.”
The image of the delver vanished, replaced by a large cartoon version. It had angry eyebrows and vaguely human features, and a pair of cartoon hands pulled back the cloud of dust, revealing a polyhedral structure with a lumpy, malformed exterior. It wasn’t as polished or angular as the one we were going to train on. On the real thing, spines jutted out at various places. It was like a cross between a large asteroid, a melted chunk of steel, and a sea urchin.
“The smaller chunks that the delver expels chase after ships,” the voice explained, and cartoon meteors shot out from the delver in pursuit of little animated ships. “They’ll try to bring down your shield so the delver can munch on you! Stay away! They move with no visible source of propulsion. Maybe they’re magic! Reports say that fighting these embers is like trying to dogfight inside an asteroid field, when all the asteroids are actively trying to kill you!
“The delver itself lurks at the center of the maze. Our special Delver Attack Devices won’t work through that interference! So, you’ll need to fly into the maze and find the delver itself. It’s in there somewhere! Your training will include test runs through our specially created imitation maze. Good luck, and hopefully you won’t die! Thank you!”
After that, a list of people who had made the orientation video scrolled across my screen, many with little cute symbols next to their names. When it was finally done, my canopy went transparent again, giving me a good view of the large training maze that—compared to the delver—seemed far too ordinary.
I settled back, feeling a mounting dread. I was increasingly certain the Superiority was fille
d with people who were taking this threat far too lightly.
“All right,” Vapor said with a soft, calming voice. “They’ve sent us orders. We’re to proceed to the following coordinates, then wait our turn at the maze.”
Vapor led us on a careful approach of the maze. From up closer, I could see the lines where different segments had been fabricated, then fitted together. It didn’t have all the dust around it, like the kind that shrouded a real delver maze. That left this experience feeling even more mundane. It just didn’t evoke the same sense of dread and worry that the videos had.
“Command says to watch for interceptors,” Vapor told us. “The delvers have fighters that attack those who get close?”
“Not fighters,” Brade said in her stern voice. “The delver controls hunks of rock, called embers, which try to intercept and collide with ships that get near.”
“All right,” Vapor said. “I asked, and Command assured me that this won’t be as dangerous as our initial test was. Apparently, some people in the department made the brilliant connection that if you kill all your recruits before you have time to train them, you’ll soon run out of recruits.”
I smiled. The more Vapor spoke, the more conversational her tone became—and the less creepy she seemed. “That’s a relief,” I said.
“Well, I still would be careful,” she answered. “The Superiority hasn’t done much training like this since the human wars. For now, let’s get back into formation.”
I boosted forward at the order, settling into my position at the front of our team. Unfortunately, the others didn’t have nearly as much experience with battle formations as I did. Morriumur hung back too far, and Hesho tried to keep up with me until Vapor reminded him that his ship was to remain near the center. And Brade…
Well, Brade flew forward, far out of our pattern. Scud. They were all competent pilots, but we weren’t a true flight. We didn’t have experience fighting together. Cobb had spent weeks pounding flight maneuvers into Skyward Flight’s thick heads. He hadn’t let us fight, or even use our guns, until we’d practiced flight drills so much that we instinctively knew how to maneuver as a team.
That had saved our lives a dozen times over when the fighting had gotten bad. Here, as soon as the enemy came at us—in the form of drones that had been outfitted with rock casings to imitate flying asteroids—the team broke apart. Brade darted in to attack them without a word from Vapor. Morriumur started shooting, but…well, their shots were way off, and I had to boost farther out of formation to be sure they didn’t accidentally hit me. And to be honest, I undercompensated, as this new ship wasn’t as responsive as M-Bot, and I wasn’t used to how it maneuvered.
Vapor was so busy talking to us that she forgot that her job as sniper was to start blasting the enemy ships while they were distracted. The only one of us who didn’t embarrass himself was Hesho, whose ship performed its ordered maneuvers with precision. The diminutive fox poet might have been a little dramatic, but his crew was obviously well trained. He managed to bring down four of the drones.
These drones didn’t act like the ones we fought on Detritus. Whoever was piloting them had been instructed not to dodge, but just fly around and try to collide with us. Which made sense, since they were imitating chunks of stone being moved by the delver. I was glad to see that when one got close enough to have hit Morriumur, however, it broke off before colliding and instead radioed to say Morriumur was dead. So maybe the Superiority really had learned not to use live fire during training.
We regrouped for another run, and again Brade engaged the embers immediately. Morriumur—apparently thinking that they should use Brade as a model—waded into the fight and nearly got smashed up by an approaching drone for the second time. This one didn’t pull back fast enough, but I barely managed to spear it with my light-lance and tow it away. I was rewarded by Morriumur panicking and shooting at me in a moment of confusion. Hesho, sensing that his allies were in trouble, barreled forward and started shooting in all directions.
A private line opened from Vapor to me. “Wow,” she said softly. “They seem…confused.”
“Confused? It’s a mess. This flight needs way more work on fundamentals.”
“If you think so, then give the orders.”
“You’re the flightleader.”
“And I’m making you my assistant flightleader,” Vapor said. “How would you fix this situation? I’m curious.”
Great. I had no leadership experience. But…I winced, watching the others fight. Someone needed to stop this before we ended up as rubble.
“What do you idiots think you’re doing!” I shouted into the general line. “That was the most embarrassing excuse of a hostile approach I’ve ever seen! Brade, you were ordered to clear the firing path, not fetch a fist of enemy nose hairs! Morriumur, get back here! Don’t learn bad habits by chasing someone who disobeys orders. And Hesho, you’re flying well, but you have the fire control of a child with a new toy. Everyone, disengage and fall back.”
Next, I temporarily added the Weights and Measures to the channel. “Flight Command,” I said, “Flight Fifteen is going to need to run some exercises and learn how to coordinate. Call back the drones and reset their attack vectors. Don’t send them in again until I say we’re ready for it.”
“Pardon?” a voice asked. “Um…you’re supposed to try flying into one of those approach tunnels in the—”
“I’m not letting my flight anywhere near your training machine until I’m sure they can fly in formation!” I shouted. “Right now, I’m convinced they’ll mistake their own backsides for the approach tunnels, and end up rammed so far up there we’ll need spelunking gear to get them out!”
Hesho chuckled softly on the line.
“Um…,” Flight Command said. “I guess…I guess we can do that?”
The others started flying back, and the drones disengaged. Brade kept flying toward the delver maze though, so I opened a private line to her. “Brade, I’m serious. Vapor made me her XO, and I’m giving you an order. You damn well better get back in line, or I will flay you. I hear people will pay good money for a human skin to hang on their walls.”
With obvious reluctance, Brade disengaged and spun around to boost back toward us.
And…had that all really come out of my mouth? I sat back in my seat, my heart thundering inside me as if I’d run a race. I hadn’t specifically intended to say any of that. It had all just kind of…happened.
Scud. Cobb would be laughing his head off if he could hear me right now. As the others gathered back together, a private call came to me from Vapor.
“Well done,” she said. “But perhaps a tad aggressive for this group. Where did you learn to talk like that?”
“I…um, had an interesting flight instructor back home.”
“Tone it down,” Vapor suggested. “But I agree with you—we should do some more training before we fight. Organize them to do so.”
“You’re really going to make me do the hard part, aren’t you?” I said.
“A good commander knows when to appoint a good drill instructor. You’ve been in the military before. You obviously know this.”
I sighed, but she was right, and I’d walked right into the job. As the flight gathered together, I explained one of Cobb’s old formation exercises, one he’d adapted for space fighting once we’d started training out in the vacuum. Vapor quietly joined the line, and soon I had them flying pretty much in an organized way. As much as I hated being put in charge, I could run these exercises practically in my sleep, so I was good at watching the others and giving them tips.
They soon got the hang of it. Much faster than Skyward Flight had, actually. This group had good piloting instincts; most just didn’t have formal combat training.
Vapor is used to working on her own, I decided as we flew through a shifting exercise where we traded places in f
ormation to confuse an oncoming enemy flight.
Morriumur was timid, but willing to learn. Hesho was accustomed to having people follow his lead, and was often surprised when the rest of us didn’t know instinctively what he wanted to do. He needed to learn better communication.
Brade was the worst. Though she was the best pilot, she kept trying to go on ahead. Far too eager.
“You need to stay with the rest of us,” I said, calling her. “Don’t keep trying to go ahead.”
“I’m a human,” Brade snapped. “We’re aggressive. Deal with it.”
“Just earlier you said you didn’t spend time around humans,” I said, “and therefore didn’t know their habits. You can’t play the ‘I’m not like them’ card, then use your nature as a human as an excuse.”
“I try to hold back,” Brade said, “but deep down I know the truth. I’m going to lose my temper. It’s hopeless to plan for anything else.”
“That’s a load of yesterday’s slop,” I said. “When I started training, I was hopeless. I lost my temper so often, you could have set your clock by my tantrums.”
“Really?” Brade asked.
“Really. I literally assaulted my flightleader in class one day. But I learned. So can you.”
She fell silent, but seemed to be trying harder as we went through another exercise. As the day progressed—and we stopped for lunch in our cockpits—I found myself most impressed by Morriumur. All things considered, their flying ability was remarkable, and they were extremely eager to learn. Yeah, they couldn’t aim worth spit, but Cobb had always said he’d rather have students who could fly well. Those could stay alive long enough to be taught to fight.
I pulled my ship up beside Morriumur’s as we finished lunch and moved back into formation. “Hey,” I said, “when we do this next batch, try to watch and stay tighter in formation. You keep veering toward the outside.”
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