0330 KET - 24 LYN 1637
4600 Meters over the Wintry Ocean

The eternal summer twilight blended seamlessly with space above Kaponen at the curving horizon, the canopy of their interceptor wiped as spotless as it could have been, given the circumstances back on the ground. Last week some new techie from the Ashlands sold the all windshield cleaner in the hangars to her clade. Trucks came through the front gate, right past guards who pretended to be asleep, and off went the chemicals by the truckload. Entrepreneurship.

Now all of that faded beneath them - beneath even consciousness - as they hunted among the old stars and the new specks of detritus that marred the glass. They still behaved how a good Corpo should - for the Corponation, you make do with less now for more in the end. Kaponen bobbed their head back and forth in the cramped cockpit strapped to the front of their grotesquely massive fighter aircraft, testing each little point of light for parallax. Somewhere up above them - far, far above - the ground madar "Ul-Proptoss" painted something big. Not Kursibari. Not Axole. Not Egsnarti. At least, not anymore.

tak. The display unit indicated a route to notch out of the Jiko radar currently pointed in their direction. The secret CWPAA they crammed ahead of them in the nose (which cost their aircraft its gun and a good deal of delta-V) couldn't look very far up - it was only all-aspect in the sense that StimuCaff was a meal for some of their less careful co-workers. Whatever's up there, eyes alone will find it, or it will find you. A shudder rippled underneath their pressurized flight suit. How cold was the air out there?

That was the starting point.

One speck abruptly changed position. A wandering star... No. That was him. They wanted to tell the boat that they were approaching the marge, but the radio was entirely dead. That, at least, was no surprise. Other pilots had told them about this. That always happens. In any case, "Ul-Proptoss" would bear witness. They shifted attitude, the dual engines screaming murder, dagger nose stabbing at the dark. A flick of the thumb. The rocket ignited.

Several tons of hypergolic fluid (which had been kept from killing them only by a thin wall of airframe) mixed and ignited and came broiling out the back of the booster nozzle that the APS had welded to their undercarriage, costing them the craft's precious missile payload. Their body experienced the fury of Violet pressing down upon them with Her terrible foot, Inertia. They enjoyed the pain. Kaponen imagined it brought them closer to their former boss, their lovely Sabel, who they loved even though they knew they shouldn't. She died when the big reactor went out. No, in a hospital months later. They didn't prefer to remember that. The pain was good, and the fighter rose as though mere chemistry could pierce the suffering.

Was the dot closer? Did it see them? It hadn't changed direction. Maybe it was only an Extli, Egsnarti... they knew otherwise. Unlike an Egsnarti, the thing would let you catch it, if you dared badly enough. They checked the weapon rack readouts. Sometimes rocket ascent knocked things offline. Not so this Outsider missile, this "Je'eni" rocket. One and a half thousand Sraw warhead. Unguided. They had two, a tenth of the total arsenal delivered from those ingrates. Use these only in self-protection, they told Kursibar. But they didn't really mean it. Didn't really care. These were toys ancient even to already-ancient Outsiders, and the Kursibari had surpassed these examples long ago. Their only saving graces were the fireball and their durability.

By the time Kaponen looked back up, the dot had grown, squished and inflamed with a malign and golden light. They noticed a streak like an emerald meteor only after it passed. They had been fired upon. Their gloved thumb fumbled with the launch switch. Fuck. They disengaged the rocket. Everything calmed. The fighter floated like an arrow in the blackness, the control surfaces touching so little air that they didn't matter. Now their thumb found home on the yellow button.

The first Je'eni fired on a short fuse because it wouldn't reach the dot. It was Ma'alwetasa - military deception. Blast shield down over the visor.

One. Two. Three. Four. Several kilometers out, the Je'eni detonated. That far into space, there was no fireball; only a bright flash like the bulb of the newsman's camera at Kaponen's assignment to the APS. The dot was gone; everything in front of them was gone. They straightened out every control surface just in time to ride through the blast wave, the angelic white of their anti-flash paint stripping from the plane like the skin of a virgin burning over a martyr's fire.

The radar was dead now, too. The blast visor flipped back open. The squashed fucking dot was still there, slowing down now. Curious? Morbidly interested in their demise? The second Je'eni, their last, could only be fired by mechanical override. They pushed the button and, even though their blackened nose was listing several degrees off target, it didn't matter now. The visor came back down: the last cruel joke of the whole cruel job was that they wouldn't get to see what they'd done. Another nuclear flashbulb popped on the edge of the world and they rode down through its shockwave, riddled with cosmic rays and gamma rays and only Lords of Labor knew what else.

At a thousand meters, they bailed; the fighter was dead like their country was dead. A grefcraft slid over the ocean where they came down, waiting. First, they had to touch the icy sea. It burned worse than the fire of the bomb ever did. Weakly, they grimaced when they pulled them out.

No one would ever know. If only Kaponen also did not know.