Fall of Icarus

insanity before her.

To her surprise, the Revolution below her began to move. Down the line, the other Cruisers broke from their positions and began individual maneuvers, leaving more difficult targets for the Terran Destroyers to attack. In response, the Terrans began similar maneuvers. Keryn sat amazed by the sheer quantity of rockets fired from each of the Cruisers and Destroyers. Engaging her engines, Keryn remained in position above the Revolution, along with the majority of other Cair ships. As they began shifting, a single Cair broke from its position and began traversing the chaos on the battlefield, eager to reach to Destroyers on the far side. Keryn found her breath caught in her throat as she watched the pilot weave past a group of Terran fighters. To the pilot’s credit, he outmaneuvered some of the more agile fighters as he streamed onward, passing into the middle of the battlefield. Just when she thought he stood a chance at making it, the wing tore free of the Cair ship, struck by a wayward rail gun slug. Spinning, the Cair ship was helpless as a Terran fighter launched its rockets. Keryn’s heart lurched in time with the exploding Cair and left her feeling empty. Just as quickly as hope had filled her, the realization that over a dozen Alliance soldiers were instantly killed weighed heavily on her.

“I can’t do this,” Keryn whispered as she watched as more and more fighters and transports were destroyed in the ensuing melee. “There’s no way through that.”

You can do this, the Voice replied. Don’t get overwhelmed and don’t get excited. Remember what we learned before. You are the Captain of this ship, which means we don’t move until you’re completely confident that you can get us from one side to the other safely.

“What if I never get that confident?”

Then you let everyone in the back of this ship die, eternally disappointed in your failure as a pilot.

Keryn frowned, biting back the tears of frustration. She hated the Voice’s blatant honesty, but couldn’t deny the wisdom of its words. More than anything, the Voice knew which of Keryn’s buttons to push to spur her into action. Taking a deep breath, Keryn looked back over the battle. She slowly let her eyes slip out of focus. When training to be a Wyndgaart warrior in the schoolhouse, Keryn had used a similar technique when facing a very agile opponent. Try to focus on each individual strike, and you miss the more subtle secondary attack. By taking in her opponent’s movements as a whole, she was able to map their strategy and find holes in their defenses. Looking back at the battlefield, Keryn tried the same thing here. Instead of focusing on a single ship and watching its inevitable demise, she took in the full scene. Slowly, the ships flowed into a single, seamless mass, writhing against one another. In this perspective, Keryn began to see that the battling ships did not fully cover the whole area of space. Small gaps appeared, though they closed almost as quickly as they appeared. Given enough time and a bit of patience, Keryn believed that she could exploit one of those openings enough to get them through.

Though Keryn now felt more confident, she wasn’t sure how to explain her strategy to the other Cair pilots, and she cringed as more and more of them grew impatient and attempted their flights. Each ship covered more and more distance than the one before, but the result was always invariably the same. Over a dozen lives lost every time, for nothing more than a few hundred feet of ground gained. Without some distracter, Keryn feared that too many of the Cair ships would be destroyed before a sufficient opening presented itself.

Keryn quickly switched her radio channel to the Squadron’s Cair-specific net. Overlapping voices filled the channel, making it difficult to distinguish true orders and strategy from mind-numbing chatter. Some of the voices were from wounded or destroyed ships, their pilots barely alive enough to call repeatedly for help, though they knew in their hearts that there was no system in place to retrieve a downed pilot until the war was over. Some of the chatter was a play-by-play narration of the Duun fighters, cheering and jeering alternately depending on how the Alliance pilots were performing. They debated between one another about which Duun would survive and which would fail. They watched their own shipmates destroyed by a malicious Terran enemy and they mocked the loss. Anger built within her. The young pilots around her treated this war like it was a game. A loss of a fighter translated to little more for them than a piece on a board game, moved incorrectly into an ill-advised location. They lost the piece, but it was quickly brushed aside as they moved on to the next. Having no more true combat experience than they did, she couldn’t fathom why she took this more seriously. Could they not hear the calls of the wounded and dying pilots?

“Shut up!” Keryn screamed into the radio, overwhelming even the most raucous conversations. Only the meek calls from the wounded could be heard on the otherwise silent net. “What is wrong with you people? Our pilots — friends and people with whom many of us graduated from the Academy with — are out there fighting and dying and you’re treating it like it’s a game!”

The stretching silence told Keryn that no one was strong enough to oppose her push for a leadership role. It had come surprisingly naturally for her at the Academy to take on the role of leader, once she had identified the tactics necessary to compete in the daily competitions. Her leadership abilities had led her to graduate at the top of her class, earning her commission as an Officer in the Fleet instead of just a Warrant. Now, whether they liked it or not, she would force her newly assumed role on them all.

“I know that some of you are scared right now. I can accept that. When I saw the Terrans pouring out of their ships, I got a little scared too. But every one of you needs to realize that you have a ship full of Infantry soldiers that are relying on you for their very survival. Do something foolish like the other Cair pilots that launched before us, and you not only sacrifice yourself, but you sacrifice all of their lives. I, for one, wouldn’t be able to go on knowing that I was so careless with someone else’s life.”

“What are you trying to say?” an anonymous gruff voice replied. The tone of his voice, though, told Keryn that he had not meant the words to be confrontational.

“When the time is right, and it isn’t yet, I need all of you to be ready to move. As soon as an opening presents itself, we’re going to latch on to the closest Terran Destroyer and let our Infantry counterparts do their job. I know you don’t know me very well. You haven’t served with me that long and many of you are already questioning as to why you’re bothering to listen to me at all. The truth is, as the most junior pilot, I don’t have the authority to order you to follow me. What I do have, though, is the confidence to tell you now that most of us will make it out of this alive if you’re willing to listen to me.”

“But not all of us,” someone replied over the radio. “Not all of us will survive, is what you’re saying.”

“I’m not one to lie to you,” Keryn answered. “This is war, and people always die in wartime. All I can promise you is that you stand a much better chance at living if you follow me than what you would if you go at this alone.”

The silence that ensued left Keryn worried that no one took her seriously. She knew that, had the tables been turned and someone else had given the same speech, she would be hesitant to trust her life to someone she barely knew. What Keryn did know, however, was that she was right. Of all the pilots she had worked with over the past few weeks, none took their job or previous training serious enough to perform at the level they needed. Trust her or not, Keryn had a plan that she believed in and would take anyone with her that volunteered. If anyone volunteered.

Either they join you or they don’t, the Voice said. You know you’re doing the right thing. Surprising to Keryn, it was reassuring to hear the Voice’s words of encouragement.

“I’m with you,” the gruff voice finally replied, breaking the tense silence. “So, what’s the plan?”

Keryn smiled as other pilots chimed in, throwing their support behind her.

“For right now, we hold tight and wait for an opening. How many of you have ever flown in a cone formation?”

Over the next few minutes, Keryn went on to explain her plan in painful detail. The cone formation had been something she had worked on with Iana Morven, her Pilgrim roommate and best friend at the Academy, at great length during some of the aerial training exercises. Though only practiced using individuals wearing jet packs, Keryn had confidence that the same techniques could be applied in their current situation. As Keryn spoke, she truly regretted spending so much time with Yen and so little time with her fellow pilots over the past few weeks. Strategies like the one they were now conducting would have been much better suited for an environment where they could have practiced. She had entered the Revolution with the mentality of being an