Rebellion in the Shadows

My eyes popped open. Not nearly enough time had passed since I went to sleep. The scherlot was awake as well. His large doleful eyes were open wide and staring towards the front door.

Something was in my room.

I slid the covers back as I crept out of bed. A loud crashing sound came from the front room, a plate shattering on my floor. Someone mumbled a curse word.

“Who’s there?” I asked, half-expecting Notawa’s peppy voice to respond. Footsteps rushed towards my room without any answer.

With the largest book in my hand, I put my back to the wall right next to the doorway. My heart stopped when I saw a shadow slink between the dark shadows in the room.

“Drop the book and come out with your arms raised,” a deep voice ordered.

“No dice asshole. What do you want?”

They jumped into my bedroom. Three of them covered from head to toe in black. I launched the heavy book at the one closest to me. He was hit in the face and dropped to the floor. The others grabbed my arms and pinned them behind my back. The person on the ground was cursing and rubbing his covered face.

“Son of a- ugh!” he said. I was thrashing to escape my captors, but it was no use. The same person I had hit with the book threw a pillow case over my head.

It wasn’t a clean pillowcase. Whoever used it last had smeared some sort of horrible hair gel on it, and it smelled like a dead animal that had been soaked in jet fuel. The stale breath from my mouth was making it worse.

“You ok?” another voice asked. It wasn’t directed at me.

“No, damn it all,” the man said.

My fear ebbed a bit when I recognized the voice. Even though I had only heard it at training, I had a good idea of who it was.

The tile was freezing on my feet, and the smell of the pillowcase was so strong it was making me nauseous.

They pushed me down the hall. As we walked, I heard more feet join us. Maybe twenty people in all.

“It feels broken again.” The man said to someone. That was my final clue.

“Kirtis is that you?” I turned my covered head towards the sound of his voice.

“No talking,” he said. It was him alright. How in the hell did he find so many people to help get his revenge? On second thought, it made sense. Everyone hated me.

We walked on in silence. Several turns later, I was lost. They led me outside, and the hard cement hurt my bare feet. Tiny pebbles shoved into my heels with each step. Drones were warming up somewhere. The hum of their engines resonated through my body.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Somewhere,” the deep voice said. Laughter erupted around me. It would have been so nice to be able to laugh with them or break the rest of their noses. A buzzing alarm to my left made my head snap around. We came to a final stop.

“Sit here,” someone else commanded.

They pushed on my shoulder and I half-sat, half-fell onto a hard metal seat. Someone ripped the pillowcase off. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the overhead lights. When they did, I saw where they had brought me.

The hangar bay. Walking me in from outside was to confuse me. A large crowd was gathered, and I was seated in front of them. Notawa waved at me from off to the side with a smile said more than anything else. She wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me. Kirtis was near the front too, dressed all in black and sporting a bloody nose. It looked worse than before. Whatever else happened tonight, that alone would be worth the trouble.

Santeeg was in the front. When he stood up, the roar of the crowd died down.

“Everyone! This is Select Reconist Talaya Hawtati. This tradition of induction into the Union of the Elite Flyers dates to AE 4206. Her talents as a pilot have granted her this honor. In order to be fully inducted, one must be challenged to a flight of skill, daring, and speed. We have received permission to use two T150s for this test, but we need a volunteer to challenge her. Who will volunteer?” There had been whispers about the Union of Elite Flyers since my very first day in the World Flying Force seven years ago. This was a huge honor and would hopefully grant me more respect from my peers, maybe even get some of them to like me. No one raised their hand or came forward.

“Please step forward if you wish to volunteer,” he repeated. No one moved. I looked at Santeeg.

“Win by default?” I said with a weak smile. He did not return the smile but let out a heavy sigh.

“Oh come on, someone challenge her so I can go back to bed!”

“If I volunteer, I have one condition, if I win the challenge, Talaya must quit the World Flying Force,” it was Kirtis.

My eye roll was over the top. “You serious? Come on it’s supposed to be for fun. Is that even allowed?” Santeeg shrugged.

To refuse the challenge would upset everyone in the hangar bay. The Flying Force was all about traditions like these. If I lost, I would never live it down. Not to mention the fact that life without flying would be a complete bore.

“Well?” Santeeg asked. His foot tapped against the ground.

“I accept the challenge. But Kirtis has to quit if I win, too,” I said.

“Fantastic,” Santeeg said, as if it were the most boring news of the year. Kirtis smiled and turned away.

Everyone else shuffled around. A Coordinator brought me a flight suit, and a Technician handed me a helmet. The rest of the crowd moved outside.

“Talaya! Isn’t this excellent?” Notawa found me in the mess of people. With her was the youngest Privy mate I had ever seen. When she saw me staring, she said, “This is Prelle.” Her friend was tall and from the looks of her, an Admin. Her glasses were low on her nose, and she stood without smiling.

“Nice to meet you too,” I said half under my breath.

“Good luck. Now get going,” Notawa said and waved me away.

There were forty or fifty people gathered, most in their button-down pajamas. Even our sleepwear was assigned. I was the only one that didn’t have shoes on. It would be difficult to use the brake pedals on the drone without them, but there shouldn’t be much use for them anyway.

People surrounded two T150’s that were warming up outside. A tiny group was near mine, and the rest all cluttered around Kirtis. Arwago, Tesser from the lab, Notawa and her friend, were the only ones around mine. Tesser was staring with intensity that stoked the building anxiety in my stomach. Arwago wasn’t even paying attention. He was lost in his calcumat, scrolling though pages and pages of information I couldn’t read.

“Be safe,” Notawa said with another happy wave as I climbed on board. I nodded to her.

“Your calcumats have directions for the race. It should take approximately 8 minutes to complete the course outlined in the programming. There will be no flying above 5,000 feet for this race. Safety is the key here,” Santeeg said.

Someone else started on the countdown, while I revved the drone engines. No one knew these T150’s better than me. If I tried to take off full throttle right away, it would overwhelm the engines and the drone would take two extra minutes to restart.

“3… 2… 1… GO!” I eased the throttle forward.

Kirtis did the same. It was stupid to think he wouldn’t know, but I had hoped. It was all I could do not to ram the cyclic control forward. I could see Kirtis through the windshield as both our drones rose into the air. As soon as the RPMs hit 5,000, both our drones took off. My back squished against the seat when I blasted forward following the green arrow displayed on the windshield in front of me. We were heading into the mountains, neck or neck.

By the time we got to the foothills, my heart was pounding. The grass fluttered under the wind of our blades, scaring several wild zweihorns. Ahead of us were trees, but the top of the mountains had to be over the 5,000-foot ceiling and moving through the trees would have to be slow. Tortuously slow in a race. The drone climbed higher into the air as Kirtis pulled ahead right before the forest.

Kirtis turned and looked at me as he passed. His smirk boiling my blood and causing a silent scream to rise from the pit of my stomach. He edged the nose of his drone down and shot a full length in front of me. The trees were coming fast.

I yanked the cyclic control back and brought the collective down, right before the thick trees, my entire body lurch against the harnesses, while Kirtis shot farther into the distance. He was nuts to go that fast. My drone swayed in and out of the dense foliage. At only 180 miles an hour, it felt like moving backwards.

“Come on, come on. Move!”

“Talaya?” Notawa’s voice sounded in my ears.

“What?” I asked.

“Just wondering if I can help?”

“No! Not unless you can tell me how to get over these trees without breaking the ceiling restriction.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Then get off comms.” Static came over my headset. I had come far too close to a giant fir tree, billowing needles into the air around me. My palms were slick against the cyclic control stick.

Static cracked again, “Wait! Tesser says the sensor won’t register height properly if you flip,” Notawa said.

“Invert?” I asked.

“Roger,” she said. Good gods, I didn’t know if I could do that. A flip here or there was fine, but flying upside down for a couple hundred feet? That sounded crazy. Kirtis’s drone pulled farther ahead in the trees.

“Shit,” I whispered, then shouted, “The hell with it!” I yanked the control stick back and soared up through the tree tops. The alarm started blaring again. One swipe of my left hand silenced it. It was now or never. My bare foot slammed on the right pedal and I jabbed the control stick all the way right. My stomach fell into my head, but it worked. I was upside down above the treeline. The control stick shook in my hand, this had been a terrible idea. Three hundred more feet and I would be home free, out of the mountains and back to the foothills. The green arrow was arcing around back to the FFSA. My head tilted up to look at the ground. There was no sign of Kirtis. 310 miles an hour felt a hell of a lot faster upside down.

The drone dipped a dozen feet at once and the shaking spread from the control stick to the entire aircraft. If I didn’t flip back over now, I was going to crash. My left foot slammed on the opposite pedal, but it was slick with sweat and slipped off the metal. The left front propeller hit the tip of a tree chopping the tip off and the aircraft careened out of control. My calcumat shrieked with alarms: high heart rate, too many g-forces, high blood pressure. I was panicking.

“Talaya! What’s happening? Your stats are through the roof.” Notawa said, breathless in her worry.

“Everything’s fine! Just a regular spring day,” I grunted though the words, trying not to vomit all over the cockpit. The spinning was nauseating.

This had happened before. The Condor-99 last year that had almost crashed. The initial panic turned to action. My finger clawed at the control stick, when it gripped on, I cut all power forward, then lowered the collective to neutral. My foot slammed the pedal opposite the direction of the spin.

“One, two, three!” and shoved the power as far as it would go. The drone straightened out, half-dozen feet from the ground and I gunned it, flying over the foothills at max speed.

Something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. Kirtis’s aircraft was a few lengths back. There was nothing I could do. Any harder and the drone might shut down. There were only two hundred feet left. I tapped the control stick forward another half inch. The engines roared in protest, but my lead increased by a few feet. I was already celebrating when something slammed into me.

Kirtis had rammed his drone into the landing strut. I looked over my shoulder in time to see him give a mock salute that turned into his middle finger. He pulled the drone back only to force it into the side again, this time into the passenger door. The metal crunched inward and the whole aircraft jerked to the side. My jaw dropped. I looked forward, the end of the race was in sight. I was still ahead, and he was running out of room. He realized it one second after I did and backed off my drone.

I crossed the finish line two seconds before he did. As soon as I landed, my fist pumped in the air. Technicians filed into my drone and began to unbuckle me from my harness. Notawa waited just outside of the aircraft.

“Inverted at 5,000 feet for two-point-six seconds?”

“Was it that long? Huh, felt longer somehow,” I said with a shrug.

Kirtis jumped in my face. “That’s how you wanted to win this?” he asked.

Someone behind him asked, “What did she do?”

“Check the recall video. She’s a cheat.”

“Cheat? You knocked into my drone, twice! Machinist Technicians are gonna love replacing that panel.” I shoved him and Santeeg stepped in between us.

“Both of you shut the hell up. Talaya won, get over it.” He turned to me holding the coveted gold pin in his hand.

“From now until she stops flying, Select Master Guardian Prime Reconist Talaya Hawtati is a member of the Union of Elite Flyers.” He pinned the tiny gold purthis to my shirt, then said to the crowd, “Now everyone go to bed.”

It felt a little silly, standing out here barefoot and in my pajamas. For a moment, I flashed back to four years old. Every morning my mother had fastened an identical pin to her uniform. The memory passed and I looked at the group around me.

Half of them had left before he had started talking. The people that remained didn’t look happy about my victory. Even though I won the race, not one person here would consider me a true member. A small pang of guilt hit me in the gut. Maybe I was in the Union, but Kirtis was gone, and no one was happy.