When the sleek, silver arrowheads of an entire phalanx of Coralate fightercraft swarmed as thick as stars into the endless night that hung between the pair of Cygnan warships and the butchered hull of the Hok, it was the combined might of both Faith’s squadrons and the fighter wings of the Von that rose up to meet them. Broken and scarred, no unit left untouched or unscathed by the fires of Tarsis, the squadrons of the Terran Galactic Naval Division clustered together like packs of wounded dogs, a few rigs still spotted with the bites and leavings of the last vision of fiery hell they had flown into and out of. Each pilot was cruelly outnumbered, each fragmented squadron a single tiny sandbag in the unstemmable tide of the Coralate advance. For some, this battle would be their last, but it was the hope of survival, the hope of winning just one more battle and holding back the ravenous blue skins just one more time that kept them going, kept them flying recklessly into the thick of it over and over again, risking life, risking death, weapons flaring, burning swathes of liquid light through the sky.

In the middle of it all, lost on the currents of fire and light, Tessa’s rig wove the dance of death like a leaf caught on a draft of wind. Tracers of plasma stitched lines across heaven and chrome as they rattled in rapid succession from her fighter’s underslung cannon, chewing through the drive assembly of a Coralate rig the instant before Tessa threw her own fighter into a sharp bank and punched back out of the melee, arcing sideways into space and doubling back for another pass. Beneath her, one of the Hok’s fighters caught the fire and the shockwave of the collapsing Cygnan drive with the trailing edge of one wing and spun erratically away, shifting abruptly and then sliding easily into the smoother pursuit of new prey.

It was a hot run– moves came reflexive, rounds and rockets squeezed off so quickly, so fluidly that it all became a symphony of light and fire, an orchestra of collapsing Coralate drives and the cascading plasma hazes of injured Seindrives inaudible to the ear. In the space of a bare second, a handful of instants– in the time it took to blink, the entire lay of the field could change, the mix and blend of Terran and Cygnan shift in the favor of one side or the other. Outnumbered five to one, the fray quickly became the mother of all uphill battles for the pilots of the Hok and the Von.

Ahead of her rig and sliding quickly right, Tessa caught the tail end of a pair of thrusters lighting up, flaring to full speed an instant before the fire of a cloud of plas-flechettes enveloped the dark-painted Seindrive in the passing haze of a kill shot. Glancing back as she ripped her rig away at the last second, Tessa’s eyes caught the slagged remains of the fighter, the glow of residual heat quickly fading into the cold vacuum of space. Of all the ways to die, being instantly vaporized was one of the quickest, one of the least painful.

“I could use an assist!” A voice crackled into the comm chatter, ate at the noise of the battlefield, and in an instant, Tessa recognized the tone as Izzy’s. For the barest moment, brows knit together, eyes darkening with resolve, need, concentration. Static blasted and squealed through the active frequency, the shouts and orders of men and women coordinating patterns, attacks, voices calling out for help. “Two blueskins on my tail, possibly third joining the party.”

“Shit.” Tessa swore, and in an instant, the Resident AI came alive with a layout of the sortie, projected Izzy’s location near the center, burning hard for the outer edge. Twin darts of chrome light traced hard lines after her, dogged her rig like a pair of angry hornets– unshakable, hunting her endlessly through the fray. Eyes moved quick, lips parted, mind spinning through the patterns, the movements– and then Tessa was gone, diving hard between silver and Seindrives to thread her way through the fight with all the deft movements of a surgeon’s needle. Fingers tightened across the stick, whitened with the careful incremental shifts of the throttle– So close, Can’t–

And then she saw it. The markings, the color. Izzy’s rig hung in space like a drifting feather of sparking slag, fuselage pitted and torn with the scorch mark wounds that only plas-flechettes could leave behind. For one terrible moment, her heart shot into her throat, lodged itself into flesh and stifled voice, breath, sound. Izzy, came the broken thought. Oh god, Izzy!

“Tess! Thank god!” Izzy’s voice crackled across the channel, pierced through the shock like a plasmatic needle. In the time it took Tessa to blink, Izzy’s rig was sliding away, shifting, the twist and spin of both aircraft and wake trail peeling off in a sharp arc back toward the guns of an equally beaten blueskin. Thrusts and shivers of throttle and stick were a clear message– she was still alive, her rig still operational, still dodging clouds of Coralate weapons fire with all the strength and deftness of a desperate acrobat lost in the movements of some unspoken, rehearsed routine. An uneasy breath filtered through Tessa’s lips, but the moment was so brief, so reflexive that it came and went on the blink of an eye. In the time it took for hands to tighten in renewed strength, she was burning a hard line through the sky again, priming L-web emitters, twisting caps off rockets whose targets were already marked and painted by her rig’s Resident AI. In that moment, there were only two rigs in the sea of Coralate slivers that mattered to Tessa– her own, and the battlescorched bird that held Izzy. In that moment, they were alive, two parts of the same equation, two hands of the same body, twin souls bound between two bodies. Tessa’s fist tightened against the stick, pumped the throttle.

But when the Coralate rigs responded, they flared faster, their rigs dancing nimbly, tactics keyed hard to a swarm mentality that the Terran brain could never hope to wrap itself around the true tenants, the intricacies and idiosyncracies of. In an instant, the blueskins hot after Izzy broke off and darted for Tessa, filling the sky with clouds of superheated light and fire that she had to bank, shift, drop and roll in order to avoid. For one terrible instant, she saw light, saw the scorching blast of plasmatic flechettes burn past her, eat the plating of one wing down to the framework.

“Tessa!” Izzy screamed, yanking her rig around in a sudden, spinning turn– but it was too late. In an instant, the Coralate fighters had swarmed onto Tessa, anticipated her moves and set themselves to intercept her head on, clusters of railcannons heating up with the trailing lights of plasmatic death. It was a form of group kamakaze maneuver, a move meant to sacrifice a pawn for a knight, a bishop, and scatter the rest of the swarm on the divine and fiery winds of the resulting detonation, boosting them to new targets with the burning corona of a momentary sun behind them. Sound froze in Tessa’s throat, her breath stolen, trapped. Lips moved absent, unable to form words as knuckles whitened across throttle, unsure. In that moment, she could see her death, could see in that fraction of a second exactly how she would die, and the knowledge that there was nothing she could do to change it bit at her and sliced her mind into a sudden and complete resignation.

Izzy. She breathed, and even in that last instant, she could not tear her eyes away from the streaming plasmatic fires of the Coralate cannons. It was death’s own gaze that had snared her sight, death’s own grinning mask of skull and rotting ivory that held her captive, breathed in the succulent breath of her last moments.

I can’t. Came the final thought. Izzy...