POV: Bertel, Znosian Dominion Marines (Rank: Five Whiskers)

  Rat-at-at-at-at-at-at.

  “Good effect on target! Continue to engage! Continue to engage!”

  Rat-at-at-at-at-at-at.

  “Six in sight, retreating from the mortar position. Take them out now!”

  Rat-at-at-at—

  “Good hits! Good hits! Maintain volume of fire!”

  Bertel watched as her rounds travel to her reticle. They hit right where she aimed, kicking up shrapnel the size of her paws. Her screen showed her the gory result in high definition black-hot thermal even as smoke and debris littered the battlefield.

  “Yes! Kill them all!” her pilot roared from behind her gunner seat.

  She frowned. That was uncharacteristically animated of Sminski. As she let loose another burst, she realized dimly that her former pilot Sminski had been dead for weeks.

  In her helmet display, the smoke in her reticle cleared. She gasped in horror as she examined the result. A platoon of Dominion Marines lay there, dead in the grass. She’d been shooting at her own people the whole time. She glanced down at her blood-stained paws. But they weren’t her dainty paws, perfectly optimized for operating control sticks by generations of superior Dominion breeding. No, they were the massive, brutish paws of a Slow Predator. Her sharp claws extended out, longer than her whiskers…

  “Kill every last one of them!” the rough voice behind her screamed into the radio.

  Bertel turned around. It wasn’t Sminski at all. It was a growling, snarling full-sized Slow Predator in the pilot seat. It bared its fangs at her. “Good work, Five Whiskers,” it said. “Keep firing until every last one of them is dinner—”

  Bertel screamed.

  “Wake up… wake up! Bertel, wake up now!”

  Bertel whimpered as a pair of urgent paws shook her awake. For a heartbeat, she looked around, disoriented, until full awareness came back to her.

  “Who— what— buh? Korchaj? Six Whiskers?” she mumbled as she identified his youthful silhouette in the dark.

  “You’re awake!” Korchaj whisper-shouted. “Thank the Prophecy! Bertel, we have to go now!”

  “What? Go?” she asked, in confusion for a second. Then, she remembered her job. She sat up in her cot. “Predator attack? Right away, Six Whiskers! We can be in the air in less than—”

  “No! Not predator attack!” he said, putting a paw on her shoulder. “We’ve been discovered!”

  “Discovered?”

  “State Security. They’ve discovered what we did! Your pilot, Krasht, he reported us!”

  “What?” she asked, still clearing the vestiges of sleep from her head.

  “We’ve been reported to State Security, and they’re going to come question us any second now. They’ll recycle us for sure!” Korchaj said in near-hysteria.

  “State Security is going to ask us questions?”

  “Yes! We have to—”

  “What’s wrong with that? I’ll answer any questions they have—”

  “Are you bred-illiterate? Do you want to end up in a shallow ditch?”

  Bertel tilted her head. “Want to? No, but our lives were forfeited to—”

  “You— screw it! Let’s go, Bertel, that’s an order. Get your flight suit and get your Skyfang warmed up!”

  “Yes, Six Whiskers… Is— is Krasht coming with us?”

  “No, you defect! I just told you, he ratted us out!”

  “Oh.” Bertel just stood there next to her cot for a few seconds as her thoughts whirled around her head.

  “What’s your problem?!” Korchaj screeched, agitated at her indecisive state. “Let’s go!“

  “But— but I’m just a Skyfang gunner. Who’s going to fly?”

  “You— you—” He stared at her for a few seconds, his snout open wide. “You don’t know how to fly?!”

  “I— I— uh, well, I know how to land. We were trained to be able to land and preserve the Skyfang if our pilots were to become incapacitated on mission,” she recalled. “But I’ve only ever done it in the simulators—”

  “Good enough for me,” Korchaj declared as he shoved her out of the barracks. “Let’s go.”

  Without the maintenance crew, it took over fifteen minutes for Bertel to run through the startup checklist. She noted with some pride in the back of her mind that she remembered enough from her training that the machine didn’t simply wreck itself as she started the engines.

  “Hurry, hurry!” Korchaj urged from next to her as he put on the radio headphones. “They’re going to be here any second now!”

  “Maybe if we answer their questions, they will understand your reasoning—” Bertel began to suggest.

  “Understand my reasoning? Understand my reasoning?! Have you ever had to deal with a State Security officer?!”

  She thought for a moment. “Hmmm… not really. I was just a reserve gunner for a Unit Zero aviation crew for a week before I got shot down.”

  “If you know what I know, then you’d know what I mean.” He pointed at the dashboard. “Are we ready to go?”

  She flipped a couple more switches as the rotors whirred to their full speed. “I… think so?” she replied uncertainly, trying not to fixate on the array of blinking warning lights on her dashboard.

  “Good, take off now.”

  Bertel concentrated on the task.

  Fwup-fwup-fwup-fwup…

  The Light Skyfang lurched upward, tilting precariously to the left before she corrected it with the slightest twitch of her paw. A metallic groan reverberated through the cabin as the aircraft shuddered, fighting her commands.

  Korchaj gripped his seat. “What was that?”

  “Nothing. It just does that,” Bertel lied.

  As they rose just above the traffic control tower, through the windshield, she spotted movement at the edge of the base — three black vehicles speeding toward them, kicking up dust clouds in their wake.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  "State Security!" Korchaj hissed, his face draining of color. "Get us out of here. Now!"

  Bertel raised the collective, sending the Skyfang climbing steadily. The warning lights multiplied, and a persistent alarm began to wail. She fumbled with switches on the panel next to her. Under normal circumstances, this was supposed to be crewed by two well-trained, well-bred Servants of the Prophecy, not her and a random passenger going to…

  Where are we going again?

  She voiced her thoughts into her headset. “Ok, where should I fly us to?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  Bertel turned sharply to look at him, taking care not to accidentally bump the controls. “What?!”

  “I have no idea,” Korchaj admitted. “I didn’t think we’d get this far. Just get us… away.”

  “Away?”

  Below them, figures poured out from the vehicles, some raising what appeared to be weapons.

  Rat-at-at-at-at-at-

  “Yes, away! Any direction!”

  Bertel banked the aircraft slightly, calmly noting a series of cracks as a volley of automatic gunfire missed it by a wide margin. She ignored the urge to get on the gun to return fire with her 20mm autocannon.

  A crackle cut through the radio, followed by a stern voice in their headsets. “Light Skyfang, this is State Security Officer Novoriv. You are not authorized for takeoff at this time. Return to base immediately!”

  Bertel instinctively moved to comply, but stopped as she saw the expression on Korchaj’s face. It was the anxious face of a frightened hatchling, but underneath all that fear, there was something else. A yearning, perhaps. Something— she couldn’t quite understand it, but she could swear that she felt the same, a feeling she could only identify when she was in the air.

  She raised both her paws in a gesture of deference. “Where do you want us to go, Six Whiskers?”

  “Just… fly us towards the city,” he said as he cut the transmission on the State Security Officer and bent over to inspect the Light Skyfang’s orbital positioning unit. He flipped a few switches on it, and—

  Huh. That interface really is intuitive if even he can—

  Within a few seconds, he gestured at a location on its map. “There! We can land there.”

  Bertel squinted at the symbols and paled when she realized what he was pointing at. “That’s— that’s a Great Predator airbase.” It was one of the new ones they built just a few weeks ago, and while they were rarer than those of the other predators, she knew enough about what happened to the Navy’s ships…

  Korchaj nodded eagerly. “Yes. Do we have enough fuel to get there?”

  She scratched her whiskers. “I don’t— I don’t know. Probably. But why are we going there?”

  “Because if we land anywhere that’s ours, they’ll hand us over to State Security. And of the predators, it seems like they’re the least likely to immediately eat us as we land.”

  “Oh. But…” She just sat, her mind roiling in indecision.

  Another loud wail from the dashboard interrupted her.

  Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

  “Radar lock!” she screamed into her headset as she put the Light Skyfang into a dive as she’d seen other pilots do it. “Radar lock, direct rear four kilometers!”

  “Ahhhhh! What do we do?” Korchaj shrieked uselessly.

  Bertel ignored him as she concentrated on avoiding the terrain in front of her.

  Beep. Beep-beep-beeeeeeeeeeep.

  The alarm got a lot more urgent right as she stabilized the Light Skyfang at thirty meters above the ground. The grassy fields of the Grantor City outskirts rushed past her just beyond her thin glass bubble. With a glance at her dashboard, it told her the now-rapidly-moving source of the radar lock, but she didn’t need to see it to know where it was launched from: the Dominion Marine forward base about two kilometers from where she took off. There was an air defense battery stationed there.

  There was also supposed to be an orbital defense battery there, but that had been trashed by the Slow Predators in their uprising. Lucky for Bertel too, because she was pretty sure the hypervelocity missiles in those tubes would hit her before she knew what was happening. She focused on the threat she did have…

  Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

  Bertel swallowed hard as she banked sharply to put the Skyfang perpendicular to the flight path of the incoming missile indicated on her console. With a flick of her paw, the Skyfang ejected a small cloud of thin aluminum strips out the back, designed to maximize and then confuse radar returns. According to the new training, this didn’t work against the predator’s imported alien weapons, but she hoped she was low enough that her maneuver and the ground clutter might be enough to temporarily confuse the pulse-Doppler radar she knew that most Dominion Marine air defense missiles used…

  Even as she contemplated whether praying to the Prophecy would help or hurt in the moment, the marker indicating the rough position of the missile flipped from incoming to outgoing as it whizzed past her.

  Bang.

  It lost its target, exploding into a cloud of shrapnel no more than a kilometer off her right. She silently gave thanks to the Prophecy under her breath even as Korchaj breathed a sigh of relief. He said, “Whew. That was close. Excellent— ahem excellent flying, Five Whiskers. If you can—”

  Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

  “Another one,” she informed him calmly. It wasn’t like he could do anything about it, but verbalizing threats was a part of her training.

  Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

  Another cloud of chaff countermeasures, and this time the missile was close enough she could see the bright flare of its rocket motor as it screamed right past her front windshield.

  Bang.

  “That one was closer,” Korchaj reminded her unnecessarily. “Can you get us into the city? Maybe they will lose—”

  Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

  He squeaked with frustration as another set of lock on warning noises interrupted him. “How many of those do they have?!”

  “Four in a standard air-defense battery,” Bertel replied without hesitation. “Then, three minutes to reload the launcher, maybe faster if they’re well-bred.”

  Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

  Bang.

  She’d later try to replay the events in her mind’s eye, but it happened faster than her reflexes could respond. This time, the air defense threw two missiles at her, one after another. The first of the two missiles saw some random bump in the fields below that looked just like her perpendicular-flying aircraft in its sensors, and it went for that, exploding uselessly in a field two kilometers before it reached her.

  The second of the two, or the fourth missile they fired at her, saw her clear as day… right up to the moment she desperately ejected another bundle of chaff. It hesitated for a brief millisecond as it tried to decide between the two promising radar returns. That slight delay saved Bertel’s life. It reacquired her in the last moment, but it was going too fast and too close. It detonated forty meters below her, and the proximity warhead peppered the rear of the Light Skyfang with hot lead.

  Bang. Whirrrrrrr.

  “We’re hit,” she said emotionlessly even as she inspected the damage on her dashboard. Despite the stressful circumstances, she’d been bred for performance in combat, not shrieking uselessly like Korchaj next to her. “Perforations in our fuel tank, and the tail rotor’s out.”

  Korchaj calmed down eventually. He turned and leaned back out the open cockpit, as if trying to assess it from his seat. “Oh yeah, huh, that rotor back there is not moving.” He scratched his head as he looked at the scenery still flying past the Light Skyfang for a few seconds. “Why aren’t we falling out of the sky?”

  “We don’t… technically need the tail rotor for flying,” Bertel explained. “It’s for stabilization at low speeds… Not having it will make landing hard, but I’ve been trained specifically to land without one. Like I said, it’s not easy, but not impossible either…”

  Korchaj looked back the orbital positioning unit and shrugged. “So we’re fine,” he said, almost reassuring himself. “We’re fine, heh. We’re fine. We just have three minutes to fly as far from that battery as we can…”

  “Three minutes is the standard trained time, Six Whiskers, but some units are faster. And I am not sure we are fast enough to get into—”

  “Just fly,” he ordered as he leaned back again to inspect the rear of the aircraft. “What about the leaky fuel tank? Are we going to run out?”

  Bertel checked the indicator and counted silently in her had for a few heartbeats. “No,” she replied a moment later. “Looks like it self-sealed properly. We should still have enough to land right outside that airbase you wanted.”

  Korchaj breathed a long sigh of relief.

  “But what if they…” Bertel began to ask.

  “No buts, Five Whiskers. Just… get us there full speed. I’m sure if they—”

  Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

  The warning beeps of the passive radar warning detector interrupted his confidence. “But it hasn’t been three minutes yet!” he cried.

  “Maybe they’re just really fast. Maybe there’s another battery somewhere else,” Bertel said, keeping the desperation out of her voice even as she concentrated on her defensive flying. She glanced at her sensor panel to check the emitter source so she could properly notch the new missiles… “Wait…”

  “We’re not going to die. We’re not going to die.” Korchaj was near catatonic in his extreme fear, both his eyes closed as he muttered his mantra, as if saying it more would make it more likely to be true.

  “New radar contacts!” Bertel reported. The new emitter source was not from near the base they’d just left. Indeed, even as it acquired a lock on her, Bertel could see the approximate speed and heading of the source, and it was going fast. “New contact! Heading our way, twenty-five hundred kilometers per hour.”

  “Twenty—” Korchaj opened his eyes again and stared at her dashboard. “Twenty-five hundred?”

  “It’s fixed-wing,” she whispered, staring towards the unseen direction of the approaching aircraft through her windshield. “20,000 meters above us.”

  A sonic boom echoed in the distance.

  “Enemy fixed-wing,” she added as the Skyfang’s computers identified the aircraft’s radar signature. “F-98 Stareater. Hypersonic long-range strike craft. It’s one of the predators’ new aircraft on loan from the—”

  There was some light scratching in the radio as it activated.

  A few seconds later, a deep, booming voice called out cheerily, “Unidentified Grass Eater rotorcraft, this is the New Granti Air Force. You have breached our airspace, in violation of the Armistice of Znos. Turn around and return to your base immediately, or you will be eaten.”