2510-10-29, before dawn — over Garrow Hill, Epsilon Prime

  The structure warnings lit up on the HUD one after another. Red blocks blinked in my vision like shorting circuits. They weren’t alarms so much as checklists: which joint was stressed, which panel was overheating, where to bleed thrust. I treated them like tasks—one by one.

  I’m a top pilot. I know how many commands I can throw. My APS held steady around 22; pushed, it can spike to twenty-six. That speed buys me windows, and it strips away whatever’s left of living between them—every extra command is a little less life to come back to.

  G-forces pinned me to the seat. Every yank and every roll felt like being pulled both ways. The DNI shoved numbers into my head; a delay of a few hundredths of a second is all it takes for motion to go wrong. In that slice of time I don’t think. I act. Muscle memory finishes the move. That’s what being an ace is—doing without asking why.

  Below us was Garrow Hill. We were tearing a rent across its skyline. Fires on the ground stuttered in the low cloud like rags set alight. From up here I could see people being used up, bit by bit; on the command screens they were watching the blue nodes go out one after another. Behind me, shadows of those burned-out lives tracked the tail of my flight path.

  The tactical map in my eyes shredded into pieces. Green, red, and white tracings were jagged by ECM; trajectories snapped like rent fabric. “Hammer” reported flat through the link: passive heat lock—tail-approach. Calm. No shouting, only orders.

  I didn’t look back. The airframe moved like a second hand; control surfaces and thrust conspired into the right motion. The anti-g gel pressed my body into a board. Blood felt like water pinched off. My physiology readouts on the HUD jumped into the red—heart rate, blood pressure spiking. Speed gives me reaction; reaction turns my body into hardware.

  A beam grazed my starboard wing. There is no cinematic bang in vacuum—first you feel the jolt, like a bridge flexing under a heavy truck. Hot fragments struck the outer armor; the impact sent a lagging, metallic thump through the hull. That thump reached my bones before it reached my ears. Fragments tore paint, scorched wiring, sliced through a gauge face. The closed cockpit filled with the dry iron of burned circuits and something like old blood.

  The Empire pilot behind me flailed through evasions. His moves were clumsy—too many orders, not enough improvisation—but he worked to keep his posture. I centered the lock on the most stable predicted track—three high-probability paths folded up by Janus like instructions in my retina. No thought. Finger to trigger.

  The lock beeped in a cold, steady cadence: beep-beep-beep. It felt like a metronome for prayer. I pulled the trigger. On my map the enemy icon exploded into noisy fragments of data and then — gone. Another icon went the same way. Each red point that vanished was a life at some coordinate collapsing into silence: a bioreadout that stopped, a comm channel that cut, a name never finished.

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  “Nice work, Two,” Hammer said, flat.

  “Come home,” he added. The word felt foreign in my mouth.

  We headed back. Cockpit taste was sweat and ozone—the smell of circuits under strain and air filters overtaxed. Outside, once-bright fighters listed like rusting junk in orbit; silhouettes warped and drifted. The battlefield looked like a cemetery of metal, marked by the occasional, flaring remains.

  I survived. This time.

  A tall, slightly overweight silhouette flashed through my mind—an instant of a shape and a memory, and then it was gone.

  —

  (Terran Commonwealth, Epsilon Prime, Garipalan — over Garrow Hill; 2510-10-29, before dawn)

  —

  At the same hour, Sixth Research Office, War Planning Department.

  Bratt’s plea for help lay on every screen like a hot brand: twenty-four hours. The operations floor filled with plans and counterplans; the noise was people folding fear into paperwork. Arguments didn’t feel like action; they felt like packing hopelessness into neat files.

  Jack stood in front of the projection. The ridge was flagged in red. Blue nodes along that spine blinked out one by one. A clip on the feed froze on two soldiers in a shell hole, smoking and laughing—then a burst of flame swallowed them. Leo read Clausewitz’s dossier with near-religious fervor: orphaned, drilled, hardened by discipline until he was almost a machine.

  “He’s not human,” Jack said, low. “He treats people like pieces, throws the toughest at the gap and makes us stare while they get ground down.”

  Leo pulled up the live feeds. The front logs scrolled: COMMS OFFLINE, BIO-SIGNATURES DROPPING, LOSS CONFIRMED. Tape after tape condensed the last moments of men into a shorthand: laugh, smoke, flash—everything wiped into a dark frame.

  Jack didn’t shout. He folded his anger into a plan. “Move everyone’s eyes off Garrow Hill,” he said. “Make them think that’s the problem.” It wasn’t a lie so much as a prop—turn the real into theater.

  Leo nodded and his hands ran over the console. He ripped out traffic flows, sortie logs, sensor calibrations for the quiet sectors. Those “clean” stretches looked suspiciously tidy—too tidy. Each “Calibration Sync” lined up right after an Empire jamming pulse. Leo’s brow twitched like a shorted circuit.

  “They’ve lit the stage,” Jack said. “They want us to watch the flames. The real blade slips through the quiet place. The airport’s the jugular.”

  On the main screen’s lower corner a diagnostic blinked and was swallowed by the logs:

  [PATTERN MATCH] EYE // ANOMALY_SCORE 0.94

  A few saw it. Then it was buried under other alerts—a small piece of evidence ignored in the flood.

  “Leo,” Jack said, “pull the side-road traffic into a visible feed. Build them a show. Make it look like we’re trying to save Garrow Hill. We want them to believe it.”

  Leo didn’t ask. He constructed the model: visibility variables, takeoff windows, supply delays. He amplified a sliver of comms and localized radar chatter until it looked like an emergency. Those amplified sparks will draw eyes—if the enemy believes the display, they’ll keep hammering at the light, and leave the quiet lanes open.

  A comms clerk eased a folder onto the table; nobody looked up. Each sheet seemed like a verdict. Jack braced a hand on the console, anchoring himself to the plan. His method was clean: stage the distraction, push the true strike through the silence.

  “And if we get found out?” Leo asked finally, testing the air like cold metal.

  “Then we lose,” Jack said, flat. “But maybe that’s the gamble we take.”

  He tapped the map along the placid sideline, then issued the order: “Begin.”

  —

  (HUD: CAST LOT // LONG THROW // SEED A9C // RESULT: PROCEED)