I attended the graduation.
I stood in the audience with everyone else, on the parade ground beside the statue park inside Alta Base.
On a wooden stage, Ironsides pinned each of the eight graduates with the symbol of their success. I hung near the back of the small crowd, among a few other people wearing cadet’s pins. People who had washed out, like me. Though we couldn’t fly, our pins would get us access to the elevators whenever we wanted, and we were invited to functions like this. I’d gotten a form letter from Ironsides.
My emotions were complicated as I watched Jorgen and FM, in turn, accept their pins. I was certainly proud of them. And deeply envious, while somewhat ashamedly relieved at the same time. I didn’t know if I could be trusted to be up on that stand. This solved the problem. I didn’t have to decide.
Deep in my heart though, my world was crumbling. To never fly again? Could I live knowing that?
Jorgen and FM saluted with gloved hands while wearing new, crisp white uniforms. I clapped with the rest of the crowd for the eight graduates, but I couldn’t help thinking that we’d lost at least three times that many ships in the last four months. Not so long ago, a good pilot in the DDF could fly for five years, rack up a couple dozen kills, and retire to fly cargo. But casualties were getting worse and worse, and fewer and fewer pilots lasted five years.
The Krell were winning. Slowly but surely.
Ironsides stepped up to speak. “Normally, you’d expect a bad speech from me right now. It’s practically tradition. But we have an operation today of some importance, so I’m going to leave it at a few words. These behind me represent our best. They are our pride, the symbol of our Defiance. We will not hide. We will not back down. We will reclaim our homeland in the stars, and it starts today.”
More applause, though I gathered—from conversations around me—that such a brief speech was odd. As some refreshments were set up on tables to our right, the admiral and her command staff walked away without mingling. More strangely, the newly commissioned pilots followed her.
I craned my neck, and saw a flight of fighters shoot up into the air from a nearby launchpad. Was there an incursion happening? Did they really need all the graduates? After spending the last few days down with my mother and Gran-Gran, I had been looking forward to seeing Jorgen and FM again.
Booms sounded in the distance as the fighters got a safe distance from the base, then hit overburn and accelerated past the sound barrier. A nearby man noted that the important assembly leaders—including those who had children in the graduating class—weren’t in attendance at the graduation. Something was happening.
I took a step toward the launchpads, then shoved my hands in my jumpsuit pockets. I turned to go, but stopped. Cobb was standing there, holding a cane with a golden top. That was odd; I didn’t think I’d ever seen him carry one of those.
Even in his sharp white uniform, he seemed as old as a weathered boulder lying in the dust. I saluted him. I hadn’t been able to face him, face any of them, since being shot down.
He didn’t salute back. He limped over to me, then looked me up and down. “We going to fight this?”
“What is there to fight?” I asked, still holding the salute.
“Put your hand down, girl. You were close enough to graduation. I can challenge that you should at least be given a full pin like Arturo was.”
“I’d never get to fly, so what does it matter?”
“A full pilot’s pin is worth a lot in Igneous.”
“This was never about a pin,” I said. I looked over his shoulder at another flight launching into the air. “What’s happening?”
“That shipyard you spotted? Should be falling out of orbit today. The admiral is determined to get it, and if she wins this fight there could be hundreds of new spots open for pilots—more than we can fill.”
I finally lowered my hand from the salute, watching this second flight go supersonic. A sequence of distant cracks sounded in the air, rattling dishware on the refreshments table.
“Spin?” Cobb said. “I didn’t think you were one to—”
“I’ve heard the stars, Cobb.”
He immediately fell silent.
“I saw the eyes,” I continued. “A thousand pinpricks of white light. More. Millions of them. As one, they turned to watch me. And they saw me.”
Cobb went white as a sheet. His hand trembled on his cane. We stood practically alone on the packed earth of the parade ground.
“I have the defect,” I whispered. “Like my father.”
“I … see.”
“Was he ever erratic before that day?” I asked. “Did he show any signs before he suddenly turned and attacked you?”
Cobb shook his head. “He saw things, heard things, but nothing dangerous. Judy—Ironsides—always told him that even if the defect was real, he could overcome it. She fought for him, defended him. Stuck her neck out, until …”
A third flight launched. They were really committed to getting that shipyard.
I looked up toward the twisting shadows of the debris field. I sighed, then unhooked the radio from my belt and handed it to Cobb.
He hesitated, then took it. I could see from his worried eyes, his pale face, the truth. Knowing I’d seen those eyes … it changed his mind. He didn’t want me to fly. I was too dangerous.
“I’m sorry, kid,” he said.
“It’s better this way,” I said. “We don’t have to worry about what I might or might not do.”
I forced out a smile, then turned from him to walk toward the refreshments. Inside, I was breaking.
The person I’d been four months ago would never have accepted some phantom “defect” as an excuse to keep me from flying. But I wasn’t that person anymore. I was someone else, someone who couldn’t look at courage and cowardice in the simple terms that she once had.
I’d ejected. I’d nearly crumpled under the weight of losing my friends. Even ignoring all of this craziness about hearing the stars, I wasn’t certain I deserved to fly.
It was better if I just let it all go. I lowered my head and turned away from the refreshment tables, not wanting to be around people.
A hand grabbed me by the arm. “And where do you think you’re going?”
I looked up, ready to punch … Nedd?
He wore a goofy grin. “I missed the actual ceremony, didn’t I. I thought for sure I’d be safe coming a few minutes late—Ironsides always talks for like ten hours. Where’s Jerkface? FM? I need to congratulate them.”
“They’re flying a mission.”
“Today?” Nedd said. “That’s dumb. I’m supposed to wrangle them into joining us for a real party.” He seemed genuinely upset as, behind us, a fourth flight of ships rose into the air. Nedd sighed, then grabbed me by the arm again. “Well, at least I can wrangle you.”
“Nedd, I didn’t make it. I ejected. I—”
“I know. That just means you won’t take demerits for leaving the base for the party.” He tugged me after him. “Come on. The others are there already. Arturo’s family has radio access. We can listen to the battle and cheer them on.”
I sighed, but that last part was intriguing. I let him tow me off after him as a fifth flight of ships rose into the air and flew the same direction as the others.
“Cobb said the admiral was going to try to salvage the shipyard,” I explained as Arturo set a large, boxy radio on our table at the restaurant—rattling the drinks. “Nedd and I saw at least five flights take off. They’re serious about this.”
The others gathered around. It was good to see them again, and strangely refreshing not to see condemnation in their eyes. Kimmalyn, Nedd, Arturo. The rest of the dim restaurant was empty. Just us and a couple of younger teenagers not wearing flight pins—probably the children of field or orchard workers.
“They called in everyone,” Arturo said, running a cord from the radio to the wall. “Even the reserves from the lower caverns. This is going to be some fight.”
“Yeah,” I said. I looked down at my drink and fries, neither of which I’d touched.
“Hey,” Kimmalyn said, poking me in the side. “You sulking?”
I shrugged.
“Good,” she said. “This is a day for sulking!”
“Graduation day,” Nedd said, raising his cup. “For the washout club!”
“Hurrah!” Kimmalyn said, raising hers.
“You’re both idiots,” Arturo said, fiddling with the dials on the radio. “I didn’t wash out. I graduated early.”
“Yeah?” Nedd asked. “And did they call you in to fly this battle, mister full pilot sir?”
Arturo blushed. I noticed for the first time that he wasn’t wearing his pilot’s pin. Most everyone wore theirs every day—in uniform or not.
The radio started belting out chatter, and Arturo quickly turned down the volume, then tuned it further until he landed on a channel with a firm female voice. “There we go,” he said. “The Assembly monitoring channel. This should be a straight-up explanation of the battle for government leaders, not the sanitized version piped down to the people listening in Igneous.”
We settled in as the woman on the radio spoke. “With the launch of Ivy Flight, we have eleven flights in the air and five scouting trios. The Saints and the North Star watch us this day, as the glorious fighters of the Defiant League engage.”
Nedd whistled. “Eleven? Do we have that many flights?”
“Obviously,” Arturo said. “Seriously, Nedd. Do you ever think before you speak?”
“Nope!” He took a slurp of his green fizzy drink.
“A man who speaks his mind,” Kimmalyn said solemnly, “is a man with a mind to speak of.”
“We normally maintain twelve flights,” Arturo said. “Four on duty at any given moment, usually with one or two in the air patrolling. Four on immediate call. Four more on deep reserve duty, protected in the lower caverns. In the past, we tried to keep them at ten ships each—but these days we’re down to eleven flights, and most of them are only seven or so fighters strong.”
“Eighty-seven brave pilots,” the announcer continued, “are making their way to engage the Krell to rescue the salvage. Victory will bring our league unprecedented glory and spoils!”
She had a voice like the announcers I’d listened to down below. Strong, but almost monotone—with an air of reading pages as they were put in front of her.
“This is too sterile,” I said. “Can we hear the real chatter? Tune to the pilot bands?”
Arturo looked at the others. Nedd shrugged, but Kimmalyn nodded. So Arturo turned the volume down further. “We’re not supposed to listen to these,” he said softly. “But what will they do? Kick us out of the DDF?”
He tuned a few notches until he hit the general flightleader channel. The radios in Igneous wouldn’t be able to decrypt what they were saying, but obviously Arturo’s family was important enough to have a radio with an unscrambler.
“They’re coming in,” an unfamiliar voice said. “Scud. There’s a lot of them.”
“Get us counts,” Ironsides said. “How many flights? How many ships?”
“Scouts reporting in.” I recognized that voice—it was Cloak. She was one of the scouts who had fought alongside us before. “We’ll get you numbers, Admiral.”
“All active flights,” Ironsides said, “stay on the defensive until we get enemy numbers. Flight Command out.”
I pulled my seat closer, listening to the chatter—trying to imagine the fight. A different scout described the falling shipyard. An enormous, ancient construct of steel, with gaping holes and twisting corridors.
Scout numbers came back. The first wave of Krell had been fifty strong, but another fifty followed. The enemy knew how important this fight was. They’d sent every ship; they were as committed as we were.
“A hundred ships,” Nedd said softly. “What a fight that must be . . .” He looked haunted; perhaps he was remembering our chase through the bowels of the shipyard.
“That’s it, they’re fully committed,” Ironsides said. “Riptide Flight, Valkyrie Flight, Tungsten Flight, and Nightmare Flight, I want you to provide covering fire. Inner flights, keep the Krell away from that shipyard. Don’t let them detonate a bomb on it!”
A series of affirmatives came from the flightleaders. I closed my eyes, imagining the swarm of ships, the destructor blasts in the air. It was a relatively open battlefield, with little debris except for the one enormous shipyard.
My fingers began going through motions, as if I were controlling a ship. I could feel it. The rattling of my cockpit, the rushing of the air, the flare of the booster …
Saints and stars. I was going to miss it so much.
“That’s a bomber,” one of the flightleaders said. “I have confirmation from three ships.”
“Scout confirmation,” Cloak said. “We see it too. Flight Command, a bomber is heading toward the shipyard. It’s carrying a lifebuster.”
“Drive it away!” Ironsides said. “Protecting the salvage is our most important objective.”
“Yes, sir,” a flightleader said. “Confirm. We push back, even if it means driving the bomber toward Alta?”
Silence on the line.
“It would take two or more hours of flight at bomber speeds to get within range of Alta,” Ironsides said. “We’ll have time to stop it before then. Orders stand.”
“Two hours?” Nedd said. “They’re farther out than I thought.”
“Well, bombers are about half as fast as a Poco,” Arturo said. “So the shipyard is coming down around an hour out from us—which is about how long it took our forces to get out there. It adds up, if you think long enough to calculate it.”
“Why would I have to do that?” Nedd said. “When you’ll do the hard work for me?”
“Does anyone else feel … anxious?” Kimmalyn asked.
“They said a lifebuster was out there, potentially coming our way,” Arturo said. “So yeah.”
“Not about that,” Kimmalyn said, looking at me. “About just sitting here, listening.”
“We should be up there,” I whispered. “This is it. A battle like the Battle of Alta. They need everyone … and here we are. Listening. Sipping sodas.”
“They’ve scrambled every battle-worthy ship,” Arturo said. “If we were back at the DDF, we’d only be sitting around there and listening.”
“We’ve got it on the run,” one of the flightleaders said. “I confirm, bomber has veered away from the salvage target. But Admiral, it is trying to break toward Alta.”
“This bomber is fast,” Cloak said. “Faster than most.”
“Scout contingents,” Ironsides said, “move to intercept. Everyone else, don’t get distracted. Stay on that shipyard! This could be a decoy.”
“I’m down to three ships,” a flightleader said. “Requesting support. They’re swarming us, Flight Command. Scud, it—”
Silence.
“Valkyrie flightleader is down,” someone else said. “I’m going to absorb their remaining ships. Flight Command, we’re taking a beating out here.”
“All ships,” Ironsides said, “full offensive. Drive them back. Don’t let them reach the shipyard.”
“Yes, sir,” a chorus of flightleaders said.
The battle continued for some time, and we listened, tense. Not just because of the pilots dying trying to claim the shipyard, but because each moment of the battle, that bomber was drawing closer and closer to Alta.
“Scout ships,” Ironsides eventually said. “Do you have an update on that lifebuster?”
“We’re still on it, sir!” Cloak said. “But the bomber is well defended. Ten ships.”
“Understood,” Ironsides said.
“Sir!” Cloak said. “It is going faster than ordinary bomber speed. And it just sped up. If we aren’t careful, it will get within blast range of Alta.”
“Engage them,” Ironsides said.
“With only scouts?”
“Yes,” Ironsides said.
I felt so powerless. As a child, listening to war stories, my head had been full of drama and excitement—glory and kills. But today, I could hear the strain in the voices as flightleaders watched their friends die. I heard explosions over the channel, and winced at each one.
Jorgen and FM were out there somewhere. I should be helping. Protecting.
I closed my eyes. Without really intending to, I performed Gran-Gran’s exercise, imagining myself soaring among the stars. Listening for them. Reaching …
A dozen spots of white light appeared inside my eyelids. Then hundreds. I felt the attention of something vast, something terrible, shift toward me.
I gasped and opened my eyes. The pinpricks of light vanished, but my heart thundered in my ears, and all I could think of was that inescapable sensation of things seeing me. Unnatural things. Hateful things.
When I finally managed to put my attention back on the battle, Cloak was reporting a full-on conflict with the lifebuster’s guard ships. Arturo turned a few frequencies and found their flight chatter—twelve scouts had been unified in a single flight for this battle.
Arturo switched back and forth between the scout channel and the flightleader channel. Both battles raged, but finally—at long last—some welcome news came in.
“Bomber destroyed!” Cloak said. “The lifebuster bomb is in free fall, heading toward the ground. All scouts, pull out! Over-burn! Now!” Her channel wavered and fuzzed.
We waited, anxious. And I thought I could hear the sequence of three explosions—in fact, I was sure of it—echoing in the near distance. Scud. That had been close to Alta.
“Cloak?” Ironsides asked. “Nice work.”
“She’s dead,” a soft voice said on the line. That was FM. “This is callsign: FM. Cloak died in the blast. There are … sir, there are three of us left in the scout flight. The others died in the fighting.”
“Confirmed,” Ironsides said. “Stars accept their souls.”
“Should we … return to the other battle?” FM asked.
“Yes.”
“All right.” She sounded rattled.
I looked toward the others, frustrated. Surely there was something we could do. “Arturo,” I said, “doesn’t your family have some private ships?”
“Three fighters,” he said. “Down in the deep caverns. But as a rule, they don’t get involved in DDF battles.”
“Even a desperate one like this?” Kimmalyn asked.
Arturo hesitated, then spoke more softly. “Especially a battle like this. Their job is to protect my family if we have to evacuate. The worse things get, the less likely my parents would be to commit their ships.”
“And if we didn’t ask them?” Nedd said. “What if we just took the ships?”
He and Arturo exchanged looks, then grinned. Both looked at me, and my heart trembled with excitement. To fly again. In a battle like this, like the Battle of Alta.
The battle where … where my father had broken. It was too dangerous for me to be up there. What if I did what he did, and turned on my friends?
“Take Kimmalyn,” I found myself saying.
“I’m not!” Kimmalyn said. She grabbed my hands. “Spin, you’re better than I am. I’ll just fail again.”
“My family’s ships are in a secure cavern,” Arturo said. “It will take us at least fifteen minutes to get them up the private ship elevator. That’s not counting the part where we have to somehow sneak in and steal them.”
I squeezed Kimmalyn’s hands. “Quirk,” I told her, “you’re the best shot I’ve ever seen, the best I’ve ever heard of. They need you. FM and Jorgen need you.”
“But you—”
“I can’t fly, Quirk,” I said. “There’s a medical reason I can’t explain right now. So you’ve got to go.” I squeezed her hands tighter.
“I failed Hurl,” she said softly. “I’ll fail the others.”
“No. The only way you fail, Kimmalyn, is if you’re not there. Be there.”
Her eyes watered, then she grabbed me in a hug. Arturo and Nedd rushed out of the room, and Kimmalyn ran out after them.
I sank down into my seat and leaned against the table, crossing my arms and laying my head down.
The radio chatter continued, including a new voice. “Flight Command,” the woman’s ragged voice said. “This is antiaircraft gun outpost forty-seven. We’re down, sir.”
“Down?” Ironsides said. “What happened?”
“That blast from the lifebuster hit us,” the woman said. “Stars. I’m just crawling out of the mess now. I tore this radio off my CO’s corpse. It looks like … AA guns forty-six and forty-eight are gone too. That bomb hit close. You’ve got a hole in your defenses, sir. Scud, scud, scud. I need medical transports!”
“Understood, outpost forty-seven. Sending—”
“Sir?” the gunner’s voice said again. “Tell me you have that on radar.”
“What?”
I felt a chill.
“Debris fall,” the gunner said. “North of here. Hold on a minute, I’ve got some binoculars …”
I waited, tense, imagining a single gunner climbing over the wreckage of her destroyed gun emplacement.
“I have visual on multiple Krell ships,” the gunner said. “A second group, coming down far away from the battle for the shipyard. Sir, they’re coming in right where our defenses are out. Confirm! Did you hear me!”
“We heard,” Ironsides said.
“Sir, they’re heading right for Alta. Scramble the reserves!”
There were no reserves. The chill inside me became ice. Ironsides had committed everything we had to the battle for the shipyard. And now, a second group of Krell had appeared from the sky—right where the bomb had knocked out our defenses.
It was a trick.
The Krell wanted this. They wanted to draw our fighters into a battle far from Alta. They wanted to convince us that all of the Krell ships were engaged, so that we threw everything we had at them. Then they dropped a lifebuster on our AA guns to open the path.
That way, they could bring in more ships and another bomb.
Boom.
“Riptide Flight,” Admiral Ironsides said. “I want you back at Alta immediately! Full speed!”
“Sir?” the flightleader said. “We can disengage, but we’re a good thirty minutes out, even at Mag-10.”
“Hurry!” she said. “Get back here.”
Too slow. I thought. Alta was doomed. There weren’t any ships. There weren’t any pilots.
Except one.
