"Attention all students."
"Class █ has been eliminated."
"I repeat, Class █████████ has been eliminated. 38 students are with the stars."
"All remaining pilots are requested to convene in Hangar B for immediate launch preparations."
"This is not an exercise. St Light Academy is under attack."
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Io Temperance Harmony Zebulon tightened her Z-suit and watched her Rehoboam sling down the curved hangar rails, a bee-like interceptor that narrowed from an armor-caked cockpit to a narrow waist, slamming into the endstop with the rattle of spare parts. When it settled, she peeked on tiptoes at the neighboring launchers. Five interceptors' bodies blinked in the yellow strobe in time with the squawking of the scramble alarm.
She waved her arm at the boy whose ship sat next to hers, one Melchizedek, about her age and a little shorter, with a fraying, vegetable-dyed shawl over his gray z-suit. He nodded deferentially and threw her a 'go' thumbs up before strapping himself into the pod.
Before she could join him, Io had... an important ceremony to conduct. She looked over her shoulder at the lead technician, whose body curled in slubby overalls over a laptop's glow.
"Rikka, smudge please..." Io had a small voice, but the victorious look on her face said more than words.
"H...Hold on," the technician stalled as she teased out a glitch. "This is really stupid. I swear to the Seven this is the dumbest thing you've made me do."
"Grandma Tallulah said we smudge before battle. You wouldn't want to make the Elder upset, would you?"
"This is going to make her upset. You're not clever."
With a gulp, Rikka hammered the return key and covered her face as if hiding from her ancestors.
Servos whined. The repair arms unfurled from the ceiling bearing bushels of white sage, whipping them past another arm that held a hissing blowtorch. In seconds they pulled ropes of pleasant smelling smoke around the Rehoboam as a canned prayer blared from a speaker.
Io sneezed and sucked her nose, her pride deflating slightly at how her plan seemed to trigger a bout of rhinitis. For a second she pawed around her suit for a pack of tissues that didn't exist. The scruff of her neck itched from the heat, cooking under her short white hair. Shrugging, she reclined and clicked into the five point harness, then closed the cockpit.
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The girl's fists gripped the yoke as the mag-launch crushed her into the cold gel seat. For a second the old Rehoboam's alarms smeared into a uniform groan, the viewport a succession of dull red magnetic coils, every subsystem protesting the acceleration—and then she was out into the black, nudging the throttle with her pinky to keep up with Melchizedek and the others.
She heard Mel push to talk and linger on it, as if he were embarrassed to say something. "Care for a uhh, quick recap, Boss?"
Io cleared her throat. "We're due some guests aboard the Vesta hardship Silver Needle. However, and this is bad timing—"
She left a beat there. They could all hear the dull bong of IRST spikes and hundreds of small red contacts swirling around the approaching freighter in the distance.
"—a couple of pod rustlers chose today to try their luck."
She leaned on the throttle and the others slinked into formation behind her. Unless her eyes deceived her, there was also a single green blip orbiting the Silver Needle: a lone Rehoboam like theirs, its engines fighting to outpace a tail of ten or so smooth white bulbs reaching out towards it with tracers from 20mm cannons.
Io took a deep breath, swallowing her irritation. "Oh, and the Chieftain's son Erik went out earlier to 'escort' the Needle into dock. That needs attention."
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In a minute the interceptors had traced a pursuit arc and arrayed in the Silver Needle's wash, each pilot using their eye-tracking to light up a target. From this position they could see their own home looming over the comparatively small freighter: the great spindle Zebulon, a Drifter colony so huge that it eclipsed the moon behind it. The disc-like shield at the end of the spindle bore a mural of the Serpent that was never without a scattering of micrometeorite divots. Spherical grow pods glistened in the sunlight like grapes on a vine.
"I'll handle the kid," Io told them.
Without another word, the Rehoboams each broke off towards their own marks. There was not a snowball's chance of pulling enough missiles out of the pantry to swat this many drones, so it was guns hunting. On the Needle's hull, an illustration of a pastoral farm winked in the light of the Rehoboams' cannons. Io herself pushed hard on the throttle and blew past the Needle's conning tower, towards the boy Erik's Rehoboam.
At some point, the rustlers had figured their drones were safer hiding in the Zebulon's superstructure, and so'd Erik, apparently. This was normally the point where the enemy blew the supports for the grow pods in preparation to whisk them away to a hardship just over the horizon. This time they were after the kid, weaving after him through the trusses.
Io's suit compressed around the legs as she leaned into a back-to-back series of turns, her breath hitching as she dragged the nose from side to side, until she finally had a picture on a bulbous white drone that had turned around to face her.
She pulled the trigger first.
The viewport filled with fire and the drone burst into winking shrapnel. The girl gulped and pulled the nose onto the next one, when that lone Rehoboam buzzed right past her, turning the entire viewport black for an instant.
The boy had nearly killed both of them. Her heart almost in her throat, Io wound down the throttle and depressed her throat mic.
"Erik? Are you there?"
She could almost feel him roll his eyes. "Yeah. K...Kinda busy here."
She craned her neck to get a better look. The Chief's kid still had a massive entourage of drones that he was now liable to run into an I-beam trying to outmaneuver. His breathing was audibly labored.
Io smiled coquettishly, even though she knew he couldn't see it.
"Erik, would you like to dock with the Zebulon and leave aaall of this to us?"
"N—No. I can handle myself. Dumbass."
She winced at the epithet. "Excuse me?"
"You're such a meanie. That's why nobody likes you or your weirdo dad. My dad wants to make me the next captain of the Guard. Bet you didn't know that."
"You're a bad liar," she growled. He didn't reply.
This was not working. If the kid crashed into a grow pod like she'd done last cycle, Elder Tallulah might actually kill her. Clicking her tongue, Io slammed the engines and accelerated after him and the swarm. She had a plan, but it was going to get messy.
"Erik, I'm coming in from behind," she said. "When I tell you, you're going to cut your engines and eject."
"No. Dishonorable," he said, gulping down tears.
She was tailing the whole entourage now. Erik's ship was barely visible past the pale cloud of drones. A different plan of action had begun to take shape in Io's mind, the kinematics aligning as if in a simulation. At first she batted it from her thoughts like a fly, but it was becoming clear she didn't have any other choice.
She waited for him to stop jinking. The drones always fired their cannons together, in a burning wave of tracers—that's how he'd been timing his dodges.
Then—yoke slippery with perspiration—she led his nose slightly, aiming for the thin section that connected the piloting pod to his engines, and fired.
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Tallulah was waiting for them in the hangar. The force with which the silvering woman totted forward on her twisted walking stick gave Io the impression that she was somewhat unhappy.
Io crawled tentatively from the Rehoboam like a beaten dog. Her hair was pasted to her forehead with sweat. The others watched their captain emerge with flat, frog-like expressions, also soaked after what had proved to be an hours-long recovery.
"Io dear." The Elder smiled, her eyebrow twitching. "There's just one word I want to hear from you. You wouldn't happen to know what it would be?"
Io looked left and right, hoping for an out. She saw Melchizedek shake his head as if to tell her 'Boss, don't'. Despite knowing it was a bad idea, she opened her mouth to say some other thing.
"It was the most effective use of resources."
"So—rry," Tallulah corrected her, flicking Io's forehead with a gnarled index finger. To hammer down the point, she leaned in further and pinched both of the girl's cheeks in her thumbs, moving them in time with the word she hoped to teach if only by force. "Sorry. Sorry. So—rry."
It hurt. But Io kept her face stony as the Elder berated her. She'd already justified her decision.
"There were so many other ways you could've handled that. You could have talked him down slightly more diplomatically, or diverted Mel or one of your other lackeys to clean up his tail. Seven—use your words!
"It's true what he said—we were going to groom him to be the captain of a different squad, but now the kid is mewling in the med bay that he doesn't want to do it anymore because the current captain shot him. And what was that thing about an automatic smudging?"
"F...For emergencies." Io batted her eyes, not feeling quite as superior as she'd hoped.
"It was such a waste of poor Rikka's time. I mean, just read between the lines and scramble. Seven, it's like you want to get grounded. Actually, you know what?"
Tallulah reached over, and with a snapping noise ripped the velcro patch of the Guard from her shoulder. Io's face slackened and she struggled to stand, the blood draining from her face. It was as if the one brick holding her together had been knocked out of the mortar.
"Acting Captain Melchizedek. Catch."
Mel's mouth flopped open like a fish as he resisted. "Ma'am, I don't—I can't—"
The boy shrieked as Tallulah beaned him in the head with it. It stuck to his hair.
"All of you, out of my sight." Tallulah turned to leave, her walking stick stabbing the floor in that clockwork time. She pinched her nose. "And take a fucking shower."