Battle Born

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

  Dorian leaned forward, studying the controls. The ignition wasn’t where he was used to, but he found it lurking in the far left-hand corner. “Here goes nothing,” he said, pressing down on it with his thumb.

  The controls flickered. And from somewhere deep in the craft came a low, throaty rumbling.

  “Oh my god!” cried Saskia. “Is it really working?”

  “The engine’s working.” The strength of it rumbled up through the ship’s structure, pounding along the bottom of Dorian’s feet. He checked the fuel gauge; it was at about half, but they could grab some fuel from Mr. Garzon’s place if there wasn’t any lying around here. The air pressure looked good too. At least considering he was sitting in a hangar, not moving. There were also about a hundred other readings, and Dorian couldn’t even begin to guess what they might mean. A ship this size wasn’t going to exactly fly like the scud-rider. If Dorian was being honest with himself, the thought of even attempting to lift this thing into the air was pretty nerve-racking.

  He slid out of the seat and leaned out of the cockpit. “What do you want to do now?” he shouted down at Owen and Saskia.

  Owen gestured at him to come down. Dorian sighed, killed the engine, jumped down to the floor.

  “A prowler like that,” Owen said. “It should have a stealth mode.”

  Dorian wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. “I guess. I didn’t exactly learn to fly on one of these things.”

  Owen’s flat expression didn’t change. “It’ll be easier to get a view of the town from the air,” he said.

  “Not if I’m flying.”

  “You would need someone else with you.” Owen tilted his head toward Saskia. “I doubt the system will register her as a threat. It was more than likely registering the energy signature from my armor. It doesn’t like Spartans.”

  Dorian and Saskia looked at each other. She was as hard to read as Owen.

  “We’re running low on ammunition,” Owen said. “Reconnoitering the shelter by land is—it’s going to be dangerous.”

  “And flying over the town won’t be?” Dorian said. “The Covenant will shoot us down in a heartbeat. Even if there is a stealth mode, it’s fifty years out of date.”

  “You think a ship like this doesn’t come equipped with weaponry?” Owen’s eyes were steely. Hard. “If you can fly as well as you said you could, it’ll be safer for you to do this from the air. My guess is that the Covenant don’t have significant anti-air implements, otherwise we’d have seen them. Stay away from the shield and the Covenant ship and you’ll be fine.”

  Dorian narrowed his eyes.

  “Make a low pass over the shelter entrance locations,” Owen said. “Get a bird’s-eye view. See where the Covenant are. See where the paths are.” He nodded at the ship. “This looks like it was a Naval Intelligence bird before the rebels got a hold of it. I guarantee there’s infrared capabilities in there.”

  “He’s thought of everything,” Dorian muttered.

  “That’s my job,” Owen said flatly.

  “And if the Covenant see us while we’re doing this?” Dorian said. “What then?”

  “I told you, a ship like this will have weaponry. But activate the stealth mode. The Covenant will be too focused on the drilling to notice you.” Owen jerked his head toward the ship. “The insurrectionists were guerrilla fighters.” His voice softened. “Just like you. Like us.”

  Dorian shifted his weight, unsure of what to say.

  “It’ll have stealth mode,” Owen said, more confidently now. “Use it and you’ll be fine.”

  Dorian looked over at the ship, ten times as big as Mr. Garzon’s scud-rider and almost as old. Then he looked at Saskia. She was staring up at the ship with a dazed bafflement. She glanced up at him. Must have felt his gaze on her. She smiled.

  “I guess I’m an insurrectionist now,” she said.

  Dorian didn’t know why, but it made him laugh. No way her family would have fought with the rebels back during the war. But here they were.

  “Here goes nothing,” he said.

  The starship lifted off from the overgrown runway with an uneasy bobble from its vertical thrusters. Dorian guided it up through the rain, the holo-map glowing in the top of the viewport. He tilted the ship around until they were heading not toward town but back toward Saskia’s house. He needed to figure out how to manage a safe distance between the dome energy shield that compassed the entire town and the lone Covenant ship that still hung somewhere in the thick clouds. Owen said it was a corvette, one of their smaller capital ships. If that was small, Dorian didn’t want to see what their larger ships looked like.

  “You’re a good pilot,” Saskia said from the copilot’s seat. “Where’d you learn to fly?”

  “From a friend of my uncle.” Dorian kept his eyes on the controls, gaze flicking around between readings. He kept reaching for things in the wrong place.

  “I’ve flown a few times,” Saskia said. “Not anything like this. It was one of our classes at my old school.”

  “Flying?”

  She nodded.

  “Damn,” Dorian muttered. “What kind of school did you go to?” He was vaguely jealous—there were schools where they taught you to fly as a course?

  But then Saskia said, “It was a UNSC prep school.”

  Dorian snorted. “Figures.” They were cruising over the forest now. Dorian lowered the speed and put the ship on autopilot.

  “My dad wanted me to be an officer in the UNSC,” Saskia said, staring straight ahead, at the windshield seeming to melt with rain. “I think he expected me to be some kind of contractor for his company.” She sighed. “But then we moved out here. So who knows.”

  “Parents suck,” Dorian said.

  Saskia laughed.

  “You think you can activate the stealth mode Owen was babbling about?”

  “Oh yeah, easy.” Saskia leaned forward, the holo-lights illuminating her face. “There.” She pointed at a blazing red icon. “That looks like the old artillery icons from school. I’m not touching it, though.” She half smiled, glanced at Dorian out of the corner of her eye. “Don’t think it would like my DNA.”

  Dorian laughed at that, tapped the red icon. Sure enough, it blossomed with a new range of different controls, including one labeled, helpfully, Stealth.

  Dorian tapped it.

  The ship tilted; the engines whirred in the distance. Saskia gave a yelp of protest and clung to her seat. But then the control turned green. Stealth mode activated. The ship steadied out again.

  “Let’s hope it’s working,” Dorian murmured, pulling up on the throttle. The ship lifted. Turned. Dorian’s heart beat faster. He couldn’t believe he was just going to fly straight into town.

  “It looks like the missiles are armed,” Saskia said. “I guess I should go take up my position.”

  Dorian nodded. Saskia tottered into the rear of the cockpit. Dorian heard her slide open the view window on the cockpit floor.

  “Any sign of trouble,” Dorian said, “and you get back up here. I’m not going to be able to fire and fly at the same time.” He hoped the ship would let her work the controls. And as far as he could tell, the DNA lock was really only on the activation screen. Not in the controls themselves.

  “Sure thing.” Her voice sounded far away, muffled by the rumble of the engines. Dorian brought the ship down a little lower. Brume-sur-Mer glimmered on the holo-map, although he had zero visibility of the town itself. Everything was shrouded in black storm clouds, which ran smooth and uninterrupted up until they hit the Covenant ship anchored in town. Dorian’s heart pumped. Let’s hope this stealth mode works.

  The energy shield shimmered overhead, bathing everything in purple light.

  “Gonna have to go lower,” he said. “Because of the clouds.”

  “Got it.”

  He tilted the ship down, plunging deeper into the clouds. Raindrops streaked across the windshield in angry rivers. The cockpit trembled. Dorian gritted his teeth, kep
t pushing on the throttle—

  They burst out of the clouds, into the brunt of the storm. A smear of light gleamed up ahead. The Covenant ship. Dorian told himself not to worry about it. Reconnaissance was Saskia’s job.

  “We should be right over the old tourist houses,” Dorian said. Where he and Drowning Chromium had played in the shelter. Had it really only been a few days ago? He gripped the throttle, squeezing until his knuckles turned white. Nearly a week and still no sign that any of them had made it off Tomas’s boat.

  “I see them,” Saskia called out. “Can you get lower? I can’t tell if the area’s clear or not.”

  Dorian glanced at the altitude. Two thousand meters. He had no idea how effective the stealth mode on this thing was. Even if it weren’t fifty years old, anything lower than two thousand would be pushing it. Still, he dropped down a hundred meters, then pulled back around in an arc.

  “How about now?”

  “Yeah, I can definitely see better now—it looks like—” A pause. Dorian held his breath. “Maybe five Covenant vehicles? Locusts. Like the one they were using to drill.”

  “Five?” Dorian asked. “Why would they have so many?”

  “Who knows? But we won’t be using this entrance, that’s for sure.”

  Dorian took that as a sign to increase altitude. No one was firing on them, at least. Maybe the stealth worked better than he thought.

  He cruised around the edge of town, dropping lower anytime they came closer to another shelter entrance.

  “I can see them moving around down there,” Saskia said. “The Covenant. The view window lets me zoom in—I feel like there are more patrols than there were before? We were always able to get into town pretty easy.”

  “Well, we did blow up one of their drills,” Dorian said. “I can’t imagine they were pleased about that.” Probably out scouring the woods for them and not even thinking to look up. Just like he and Evie had figured out during their training.

  “We should fly over the drill site,” Saskia said. “See how they’re dealing with it.”

  Dorian knew they shouldn’t. It wasn’t worth the risk. But the part of him that had gone cloud-diving before the invasion couldn’t resist.

  “Just once,” he said. “We need to figure out how to get people out of the shelter.”

  “We will,” Saskia said. “I just want to see.”

  Dorian tilted the ship to the right, went soaring straight across the town. Straight across Covenant territory. They were low enough that he could see the glow of their machines seeping through the dark below, streaking his home with veins of blue light. A brighter patch glowed up ahead. He checked the map.

  The drill site.

  They zoomed past. Dorian braced himself for a flood of plasma fire. But the stealth was still working.

  “Hope you saw what you wanted,” he said. “’Cause it’s probably not a good idea to do it again.”

  “They’re repairing it.” Saskia’s voice was small.

  “At least they’re distracted,” Dorian said. “If they bring their patrols in to help with the repairs, it’ll be easier for us to get to the shelter.”

  They flew in silence for a few moments as Dorian wove his way toward the edge of town again.

  “Your brother’s down here, isn’t he?” Saskia asked the question too lightly.

  “I don’t have a brother.” Dorian tilted the vessel toward one of the older shelter entrances, one that was built out in the woods. When the shelter was for the Sundered Legion, and not rich tourists.

  “Oh, I thought—”

  “I have a nephew. Remy. He’s—he’s like my brother. Do you see anyone down there?”

  “No.” She almost sounded surprised. “Are you sure there’s a shelter entrance here?”

  Dorian glanced at the holo-map again. “Yeah, I’m sure. Any sign of a patrol?” He didn’t let himself get excited.

  “Not like earlier, no. Could we do another loop?”

  Dorian soared out over the forest. The rain misted across the viewport. Still pounding down, overflowing the basins that helped keep the waters regulated in the shelter. A system as old as this ship, though not nearly as effective.

  “We’ll be able to save him,” Saskia said suddenly. “Remy.”

  Hearing his name in her voice was a shock. Dorian flinched and was grateful she was peering out the window and not looking at him. “I don’t know how we’re going to do this,” he finally said. “Without any real weapons. Even if we do find a clear path back to your house.”

  She fell quiet. Must not have anything to say to that. Dorian didn’t like thinking about it himself. If there were any way of landing this ship near the shelter, he’d do it in a heartbeat. But they’d have to go by foot. And he didn’t think carpet-bombing a bunch of evacuees to get at the Covenant was much of a defensive strategy.

  “I’m still not seeing any signs of Covenant patrols out here,” Saskia said after a time. “The woods look pretty undisturbed, although it’s hard to tell from this far up.”

  Dorian looked at the map again. “We’re only about a kilometer from your house,” he said.

  “That’s not bad.”

  “It could be better.” He thought again about the rifle, the plasma weaponry. Worthless without ammo. “I’m going to loop us around again,” he said, knowing it was a risk. “Just to be sure.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Dorian pulled up on the throttle. The engines groaned. The rain pounded against the cockpit. The world below was pitch-black. No sign of Covenant activity.

  “It’s clear,” Saskia said, for the third time.

  Saskia listened to the hum of voices carrying over from the next room. The others were mapping out a strategy for the shelter rescue. She’d told them she was going to the bathroom, but she’d gone halfway down the hall before she stopped and leaned against the wall, her eyes closed.

  She and Dorian might have managed to find a way to get the survivors to her house. But all she could think about was Dorian mentioning the weapons. How they were fast becoming worthless without ammo.

  She should have told them about her father’s prototype room at the beginning. She should have trusted them.

  The voices swelled; it sounded like Dorian was yelling about something. Saskia took a deep breath. Then she slipped down the hall, looping around into the kitchen. It was easier to hear them in here—the yelling was definitely Dorian. Now he was calling someone crazy. Victor? It could be any of them, really.

  Saskia stepped into the safe room, slipped down into the main room, then off into the narrow little hallway that led to the prototype room. They never bothered to come down here except when they needed to use the comm station, and even that was rare. None of them had ever mentioned the door to nowhere.

  She stopped in front of the door leading into the prototype room. Pressed her fingers to the lock. It thrummed beneath her touch but didn’t snap open. They’d have to hack in.

  “What are you doing down here?”

  Saskia jumped and whipped around, her heart pounding. Owen stood a few paces away, almost too big for the confined space of the safe room.

  Saskia didn’t say anything.

  “What’s that door lead to?” Owen nodded at it. “I noticed it my first night here. Noticed the lock.”

  Saskia’s mouth went dry. Her tongue flopped around uselessly. Owen’s dark gaze bored into her.

  “Why didn’t you mention it before?” she finally said.

  Owen raised an eyebrow. “I assumed it was unimportant. After all, you would have told us otherwise, right?”

  Saskia trembled. She pressed her back against the cool wall. Owen just stared at her.

  “I’m not like the others,” she finally said.

  Owen tilted his head. She was struck then by how much of the wrong thing it was for her to say—he wasn’t like the others. He was an urban legend that turned out to be true. She’d just been a rich girl living in a poor town, so unusual that everyone hate
d her for it. And she didn’t really blame them, honestly.

  “What’s behind the door, Saskia?” Owen said.

  Saskia tilted her head toward the room. Her heart pounded. She could feel the heat of Owen’s gaze on her, and she knew she’d been so stupid, and so selfish.

  “Weapons,” she whispered.

  Owen said nothing.

  Saskia gestured limply. “Prototypes of my parents’ designs.” Confessing was like throwing up. She felt worse and worse until it was out, and then she felt better. “They keep them locked down here for safekeeping. I don’t—I don’t have the code—”

  “Is that why you kept it from me?” Owen stepped forward. “From the rest of your team?”

  Saskia laughed. Shook her head. “They’re not my team.”

  Owen took another step forward. “Why do you say that?”

  Saskia shrugged. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Not really.” Owen sounded genuinely confused, something Saskia hadn’t thought he could be. “You’ve been working alongside them. You warned us about the Covenant during the mission the other day—I mean, you ran through the woods to get to us in time.”

  “Well, I didn’t want anyone to die.” The hallway felt too narrow, the air too stale. Owen took up too much space. “But I’m not—I don’t have anyone in the shelter. I’m pretty sure my parents knew about the invasion before anyone else and took off when they could—”

  Owen’s eyes flashed. “Why would they do that?”

  “They’re contractors with Chalybs Defense Solutions for weapon design,” Saskia said. “They make weapons for UNSC, but—” She hesitated. “I’m pretty sure they don’t make weapons just for UNSC, if you know what I mean.”

  Owen went silent for a moment. Saskia looked down at the lock, the light turning her fingers red. She was still waiting for him to grab her by the arm and throw her out of the house, into the storm.

  “I see,” he finally said. Then: “They still left you here.”

  Saskia looked at him. Her skin felt clammy and shivery, and she wrapped her arms around her chest.