The fabric of my suit tightened against my chest as the seat whirled and locked me into place, an influx of fresh air pumped into my helmet as the direct oxygen hose attached to the rear of it. My visor overlay lit up and the fighter powered on while the cockpit lights dimmed to complete darkness.

A lance of glare swung down through the window as the bay doors opened, soon thwarted by the auto tint. I could see fighter after fighter being slingshot out below the rapid fire from Mortifera‘s turrets. My breath became shaken while I waited for authorisation to deploy.

“Carter you are clear to launch” called in Miltech ops.

I slammed my thrusters on, heard the whirling power up of the fighter before I was pushed back into my seat, and was plunged into the heat of the battle. The overlay on my visor lit up like a Christmas tree, a mix of friendly green arrows with enemy red.

In the time from when the first fighters deployed to mine, chaos had broken out. Swarms of fighters flowed around Salvation and the Dominus almost in a fluid like motion with flashes of light indicated that a battle was in full swing.

“You’re making a mistake Alex” said Ro over the voice-link as I accelerated toward the Dominus.

“It’ll be fine, now wheres —“

A flashing red arrow with an alarm started to sound. I barely had been out for a minute before I was in the midst of the battle. My pulse started to rack up as I grabbed the controls and yanked it vertically and toward starboard side, hoping to get behind the enemy fighter. Our two fighters were locked in a funnel, circling around each other, both of us waiting for the other to exit.

It was getting harder to hold on and impatience was going to be my down fall, until finally they pulled out before I did and it turned into a chase. I adjusted my orientation carefully until the circle on my visor centred before turning into a crosshair and the auto-lock flashed, letting me know it had finally kicked in. “See ya” I muttered as a ‘wumph’ noise left my fighter, followed by a flash - decimating the enemy fighter.

‘You’ve gotta be kidding me’ I shouted as more arrows started flashing rapidly behind me. All I wanted was a clean break over the Dominus.

I started to panic as my control panels blared telling me that I had been locked before I heard Ro come over the comms. “Release the disabling mines Carter, now!”

Three clunks in rapid succession told me that they had been deployed, with two successfully disabling enemy fighters as their arrows turned a stable orange colour on my visor. The third disappeared as Ro cleaned them up. All indicators were now in front of me except for one blinking green arrow behind me.

“Ro are you on my tail?” I asked in which she quickly responded that she wasn’t.

“Uh well I have a blinking green indicator on me?”

“That’s a friendly lock Carter, it’s either Kai or Bill” said Ro with urgency.

“Ahh shit, well you just had to ruin the fun, didn’t you Ro” said Kai with a laugh.

For the first time since I had entered the battle, the fear that had been lurking in the back of my mind started to surface. I did everything I could to get Kai off my tail but he was too good and had a wealth of experience flying with Ro that I didn’t. The only reason why he hadn’t been able to take me out yet was because Ro was on him as well.

“Catch me if you can traitor” I called out to Kai.

It was ‘follow the leader’ as I snaked our chain into the swarm of the battle. It was a light show of seizure proportions - flashes of impacts as the fighter crafts exchanged fire, icons showing enemy and friendly crafts on my visor, and smudges of light from fighters zipping every direction. The clangs from the debris of destroyed ships peppered my own as we weaved our way around the swarm.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I committed to the first red crosshair my fighter locked onto, my body tensed as I started to chase the Dominus fighter down, expecting a random impact at any moment from another craft.

Eventually, they led us back out of the swarm where I managed to gain on them and get my second kill of the battle when they made an unfortunate error of turning back into my line of fire. Also unfortunate was that Kai had managed to stay behind me through the swarm, determined to kill me before Ro took him out no doubt.

“Carter I’ve got Bill on my six now, I’ve gotta pull back to deal with him. Hold tight until the rest of the squad arrives” announced Ro as she pulled back and manoeuvred behind him, leaving me to shake off Kai on my own until backup arrived.

Is she really going to fucking ditch me now after she was so worried about me dying? I thought as I kept trying to turn all different directions to confuse Kai. It didn’t deter him in the slightest as he managed to clip my wing with a disabling shot.

I pushed myself downward to face Biterra and caught site of Bill and Ro punching along the foreground of Biterras land masses - a cool sight to see if I weren’t about to die.

I was certain that this was it, that Kai was about to push down as well and finish me, but he seemed to drop back and disengage from chasing me altogether. I assumed he just gave up for now and would return any moment, like coming back to a wounded animal when they’ve tired themselves out.

That’s until I realised we had started to fall too close to the mesosphere and had crossed the threshold, sending my fighters warning alerts nuts. Soon after I started to feel some weird resistance, kind of like driving a car on a windy day, and that's when I began to hear the thunderous roar of an atmosphere against my craft. I was way too low but I needed to get to Ro.

Looking ahead of me now as I circled around to get behind Bill, I could see the trails from Ro’s fighter ahead, fighting against Biterra’s forces with Bill right behind her.

My heart started thumping as I saw that Bill was gaining on her and fast. “Ro don’t pull up just-“

There wasn’t enough time to warn her, Ro pulled up 90 degrees to thrust away and Bill was just far enough behind her to adjust his incline slightly, launching two precise projectiles right into Ro’s fighter, throwing out flames on the impact.

My stomach knotted and I felt physically ill as I saw debris from Ro’s craft flake away and burn up. The main hull was still intact but was flaming as it started to tumble out of control.

“Ro” I yelled as grief snatched at me after what i just witnessed.

It manifested into a short burst of anger again as I yelled into the silence of my own craft and lined up Bills fighter. He mustn’t have been aware the I dropped behind them because he didn’t seem to react defensively. It allowed me to cycle through my fighters arsenal, selecting the biggest missile I could find. The time between my auto-lock and letting loose was in the milliseconds, giving Bill no time at all to react. It was a bullseye right on the nose of his fighter, with a flash as bright as a nuke, even too much for my visor and tinted windows. He was dead a thousand times over. I closed my eyes and started to feel my craft rattle, bang and hiss as it went through the two debris fields and more alarm bells rang out, leaving my systems badly damaged and they slowly started to power down.

“Jeremy. Ro’s been shot down. My fighter is toast and altitude dropping. Bill is dead. Kai is still active” I called in across the comms.

I may have killed Bill, but I was a defeated man. The thought of losing Ro had made me accept my impending death all the easier as my ship started rolling in violent shakes as it re-entered Biterras atmosphere.

I wasn’t even sure I had been able to get through to Jeremy back on the Mortifera before the comms severed. All I could hope was that the hull stayed intact on the way down and that Ro’s too, survived somehow.

The shaking eased as my hull entered deeper into the atmosphere, meeting with a less fierce resistance but with a heavy gravity starting to pull me down. I had gotten use to the falling feeling of zero gravity in space but this time I was actually falling.

My fighter was in a slow spin and I could hear the thrusters trying to stabilise before deploying the chutes. Luckily all fighters from the Mortifera were built with space and atmospheric conditions in mind.

The chutes finally deployed with a jolt and everything became steady. My visor was on the fritz with damaged pixels flashing all around my field of vision. I flipped the visor up, confident the worst of the rough and tumble was over now that a sudden calmness set in. During the gentle descent it gave me time to assess the broken fighter and my scratched and beaten body and lucky for me nothing was broken or life threatening.

As the wind of Biterra caught my emergency chutes I tried to pay attention to the ground that was fast approaching and the surrounding landscape. I was inland from the coast, not too far but far enough that it would be a trek in itself to get there. The ground below was dry and shrubby and slowly became more green as it led toward the coastline. You would of thought I was dropped back to a remote part of Earth except this planet, I guessed, was void of intelligent life until today.

Mountain ranges dotted along the horizon further inland and I couldn’t see any small cluster of islands and took a guess that I was somewhere on one of the main land masses.

The final few feet before hitting the ground felt like forever, the wind dragged the hull along for a few hundred metres, grinding against the surfac before the chutes got tangled and I had finally come to a stop.

Although I had finally come to a stop, I just sat there in my seat unable to move. Not from any sort of injury but pure exhaustion. All I wanted to do was close my eyes and deal with this whole situation later.

After a bunch of frustration and profanity, I finally managed to release the airlock manually and step out onto Biterra. A dry heat of the purest air I’ve felt or breathed flowed over me, the glare was surprisingly difficult to adjust to as it reflected off patches of sandy soil.

I kept my hand raised to keep the sunlight from my eyes as I scanned across the horizon, hoping for a sign of Ro’s crash site until finally I saw a small billow of smoke in the distance. I went back into my crashed fighter and pulled out the emergency bag, flung it over my shoulder, and started my walk to Ro’s crash site.