They’re shifting into an arrowhead. An attack pattern. My mouth goes dry. This isn’t disobedience. This isn’t just to stick it to me. This is something more. Something worse.
“Gods,” Gal whispers over the comm. “Not now. Not…Ett—”
Seely’s voice overpowers the line, full of authority I never suspected him of possessing. “Wraith One, authorizing weapons free.”
Every lesson I’ve ever had about leadership under pressure crystalizes in my mind. “Gold One, evasive action immediately,” I scream at what’s left of my fighters. The Vipers split like they’ve been cleaved by a knife.
All except for Gal, who bolts across the black with no regard for pattern, for order, for any sort of direction that might save his ass.
Something in his brain has gone animal. Not the pack-animal mentality you sometimes slip into when you’re flying in formation. No, Gal’s just doing everything in his power to run.
“Heavens and hells,” I swear, twist out of formation, and take off after him. The comms go live with confusion, the other pilots uncertain whether they’re supposed to follow me.
Above the chatter, Seely’s voice comes through loud and clear: “This is Wraith One. Shoot to kill.”
I throw everything I have into the engines as the vacuum around me comes alive with the flash of boltfire. Gal swerves erratically, and my heart leaps into my throat as one of the bolts skims his Viper’s wing. I hazard another glance at my instrumentation. Watch as the twenty defectors point their arrowhead directly at Gal’s retreating tail. Not at the remaining nine Vipers holding formation as they flee across the black.
Just Gal.
“What the rut do you think you’re doing?” I seethe through my teeth. I watch Gal on the instruments, my face heating with fury as another burst to the engines drives me deeper into my seat. This isn’t the Gal I know—the Gal I’ve known for years, the one who pranks the senior staff, who struggles to keep even the most stalwart ships flying steady, who doesn’t fear anything the way he should. Something’s terribly wrong.
My calm evaporates into the vacuum.
I flip a switch on my radio controls, activating every distress beacon on my dashboard. “Base, this is Gold One. Twenty of my squad have…They’re not following orders, and they’ve turned on one of my pilots. They’re shooting to kill. Requesting—”
I hesitate. I shouldn’t hesitate—the whole point of the academy is training me to act when the situation is dire. I twitch my controls to dodge another round of boltfire that streaks across my Viper’s nose.
“Requesting ground support and awaiting further instructions,” I conclude. The Viper rattles around me as my engines max out their burn. I flip the radio back over to the exercise channel, where Seely’s still spinning orders to his mutiny. A note of indignation lances through my panic. It’s bad enough Seely’s trying to kill Gal, but with the single line available between our ships, everyone has to listen to him do it.
“Gold One, the rest of you go to ground,” I shout over Seely’s noise.
“Wraith One, split it. Let’s cut him.”
The drumming starts as a single beat, a single hand slapping a dashboard, the noise big enough to fill a single cockpit. One hand, then ten, then twenty as the defectors’ formation cracks in half. Variations slip into the rhythm, and my vision goes fuzzy as I watch the nine cadets still under my command bolt for Rana’s gravity.
I know this beat too. It’s been seven years since I heard it last, but the rhythm of an Archon war cadence is etched into my heart. It’s the rallying cry of our fallen empire, and for a terrifying moment, I forget every word I told Seely this morning.
The defectors cast their net wide, herding Gal, playing off the way fear is driving him. But fear’s not driving me—not in the same way. As Gal swerves again, burning off his speed, I nose up along his wing.
“Gal,” I say, and his vector steadies. Even over the rumble of the drumming, he hears me.
“Ettian, I’m so sorry—”
“No apologies.” I try not to flinch as another scattering of bolts slices past us. Gal’s Viper jerks, and I’m forced to swerve, tipping my gyros enough to dodge him. Even in all this confusion, my reflexes are as sharp as they were in the years after the empire fell. That time taught me a lot of things, but above all else, it taught me to improvise.
“Hold steady. I’m going to try something,” I grunt.
“Easier said.”
“I know.” I twist my gyros, flipping my craft belly-up, and punch the attitude thrusters. My Viper slots neatly underneath his.
Gal’s voice is on the edge of panicked laughter. “Don’t you dare hump my ship.”
“Thank me later.” I yank my landing gear’s release and jam the button that spins up my electromagnets. These things are meant to hold a Viper to the skin of a dreadnought, but they work just as well on the metal of another light craft. My ship snaps against his with a dull thud, and Gal yelps.
“You’re going to get us both killed,” he mutters, but he’s already cutting his engine and stilling his gyros.
If he can’t fly his way out of this, I’m going to do it for him.
With a heavy burst from my thrusters, I pull us into an arc, taking stock of the defector formation closing in on us. Two lines of ships spread out in a V, meaning to herd and crosscut us with their fire. Already they’re adjusting course to follow where we lead. The drumming fades—the pilots need both hands now.
My vision goes dark at the edges as I tighten our vector. Vipers were designed to move around the pilot, keeping inertial forces on the body as minor as possible. Flying in curved lines is bad for biology, doubly so when the ship’s center of mass is no longer focused on your head.
“Gal, you with me?” I choke, leveling us off. “You gotta talk, elsewise I’m going to think you blacked out.”
“Or one of these bastards got me.”
“That too.” I glance up through my windshield, trying to pinpoint the academy on Rana’s vast surface. I don’t know if they’re responding to my distress call. It’ll take time for missiles to claw their way out of the planet’s gravity. I don’t know if I can keep us clear of the boltfire for that long. “Gal,” I warn as another violent twist of the gyros steals my sight.
“Remember that time we got leave and went to Ikar?”
I grin. “Not particularly.”
“You got so hammered, you started singing the Umber Anthem at the top of your lungs in an open market. In a former Archon territory,” Gal chokes out as we level off onto a new vector.