MK2K: Patrol

by Mystic

Derek Blaine dimmed the lights of his console and leaned back. It was no great feat, given that he was already strapped to the leather seat by a harness, but the spirit of the act was there. A one-of-a-kind diamond sky unfolded above him beyond the glass canopy, and mountainous cloud-tops lay beneath. He’d primarily joined Metamor’s air force out of a sense of duty, but he had to admit that moments like this hadn’t made the choice very tough.

His Wyvern 4 was drifting lazily over the outskirts of Metamor Valley on routine exercises. Despite its name, people often joked that the fighter plane looked like the love-child of a bat and a seagull. Concave, rotatable wings arced out from either side of a boxy fuselage. The leg-like landing gear was tucked up close to the belly, out of the way of the air currents. She wasn’t much to look at, but it was hard to argue with how she handled. “Drifting lazily” meant that the metallic craft was hurtling along at half the speed of sound, propelled by the neon blue jets of his mana engines.

Even as he allowed himself a moment of reverie he remained very conscious of the do not cross line about a mile to his west that marked the beginning of Dragon airspace. Little more than a line in the sand, no more or less special than any other stretch of sky, but every pilot who came near would observe that longitude as an ancient sailor might have the unmarred horizon: with an element of curiosity and dread; far more the latter than the former.

As if summoned by his thoughts, the channel crackled to life. “Tower to Sparrow-1. Do you copy?”

“I’m here, Tower,” Derek replied, stomach already clenched over what he knew was to come next.

“Sparrow-1, Sparrow-2 has come under attack by an unaffiliated draconic entity. We suspect his communications are being jammed. Please move to provide support.” Dropping the professional pretext, the operator continued, “Damn bastard came out of nowhere. Not more than a two-second blip in the Aether fabric before he ‘ported in. I swear, someday we are going to get a trace on this guy.”

Blaine pulled hard on the stick, banking his wings and his craft toward the coordinates being fed to him. “I’m telling you, he has to have someone in the force, Mike. There is no way he’s running this show without some kind of insider information.”

“He’s got something going on for him, that’s for sure,” Mike answered. “Make it quick, Derek. The greenhorn sounded like he was about to lose it when we lost contact.” There was silence for a moment. “I tell you something else, man. No matter how many times we go through this I can never get used to the screams.”

The Wyvern pilot paused as well, letting the ice finish its drip along his spine. “You never forget making them, either. He does something with your head; cuts right to the bone,” Derek responded. As the memory surfaced it brought more rage than anything, though, and the Metamoran pushed the throttle forward and dipped into the clouds.

On the other side waited the dark landscape of the ground, and off to the northeast the shining, incomparable heights of Metamor City. His attention, however, was focused on the distant blue of Jeremy Felps's engines. At a gesture the image was magnified and Blain could see the bat-like craft being held fast in the arms of a black drake. The beast’s maw was clamped over the top of the cockpit, bathing it in the red glow of the spelltech prosthetic that had replaced his left eye, and providing a view that gave pilots nightmares years after their encounters with Guerra.

Derek knew he had crossed the boundary of the jamming spell when his channel came alive with the sound of a raw-throated scream.

“Jeremy, this is Derek. Everything’s going to be just fine. He’s been doing this to our pilots for nearly a hundred years now, and not a one has come out with so much as a scratch.”

“There is a first time for everything,” a telepathic voice replied maliciously. It belonged not to Felps, who was now sobbing across the radio, but rather to the black wyrm himself.

“Guerra, this is 3rd Tier Aeromancer Derek Blaine of the Imperial Air Force informing you that you are engaged in hostile activity with one of our fighters. You are to stand down immediately or I will be authorized to use force to dissuade you,” Derek stated in a monotone. “And now that the formalities are out of the way, you overgrown hand bag, you let go of that pilot before I give you history’s worst sunburn.”

“I accept either fear or respect, and that was neither,” the dragon replied, narrowing his good eye, and salivating more fiercely over the Wyvern in his mouth.

Derek thumbed his ship’s weapons to life, and drew a bead on the ebon form clinging to the top of Felps’s vessel. He checked exactly once that the cannons were cycled to spell circuits only, and then thumbed the trigger. Arcane energy poured through the rune-lined channels in the ship and streaked out into the night sky. At the current power draw they’d splash harmlessly against most modern craft, and do no worse than a heat rash to dragon hide.

Still clinging to the listless Metamoran fighter, the dragon banked comfortably out of the line of fire. Derek adjusted his angle as his craft rapidly closed on the pair. The stream of projectiles arced in close to the drake’s wing and narrowed the gap, as Derek adjusted with his thumb held firmly against the firing stud. At the last moment his foe rolled over and slipped back to the left. The shots burst across the belly of Jeremy’s Wyvern. In real combat, they’d have ripped the craft open and incinerated the components inside; at the current energy level they cascaded inertly along the metal skin.

Blaine pounded his fist against the flight couch in frustration. He could almost feel Guerra’s smirk across the distance. The dragon swooped low and dropped the “slain” Wyvern on the ground, killing the engines with a spell that Felps could have easily countered if he had still been conscious.

Some rational part of Derek’s brain told him, “Okay, mission accomplished. Jeremy is no long in danger of hurting himself; let’s just hang back and chuck a pellet his way if he doesn’t take off.” That part was ignored as he brought the craft around sharply for another pass.

The dragon flew toward the Wyvern, bobbing and weaving through the hail of mage bolts with a speed and grace that belied his physiology. Derek was forced to bank hard as a trail of fire lanced across his intended path. With a twist of a wing Guerra was right behind him. Derek tightened his grip around the throttle and flight controls, carefully watching the rear camera view as he guided his ship back and forth.

A moment later he saw the drake’s jaw muscles flex and he threw the stick hard. The Wyvern’s wings rotated in their sockets, redirecting the engines and throwing the craft back and upward hard over the jet of flame. Derek’s body was thrown with bruising force against his harness, but he grinned over the pain as he settled in behind his enemy.

The cross-hairs burned gold on and off as Guerra drifted back and forth across them. Suddenly the air ahead shimmered and swallowed the black drake. Derek read the mana signatures and had already begun to juke his plane hard by the time the Wyvern’s proximity klaxon went off, signaling the dragon’s reappearance right behind him.

“Damn, he’s good,” Derek grudgingly admitted as he continued his evasions. It was challenging enough just getting from point A to point B with teleportation. To be able to time it for positioning at jet speeds was something altogether more rare.

The Metamoran looped, rolled, and banked, trying to shake his opponent. He threw the throttle forward, knowing he needed to open up the gap between them if he was to have a prayer of shaking his opponent. The spell fencing began in earnest as the pair spun and darted through the night: conjured nets, smoke screens, illusions, arcane projectiles, metal and flesh corroding mists, inertial redirections, immobilization fields and all the other little spells that never actually manifest themselves in an air battle. This time was no exception, as each mage threw tangles into the other’s weaves.

Derek forcibly kept his eyes off of the sealed reagent bins and automatic scroll dispensers in his cockpit. He was going to get chewed out for pushing this situation as far as he already had, but wasting taxpayer dollars would mean the end of his career. Denied the components, Derek drew upon a bank of one hundred familiars, stacked like cordwood behind his cockpit in magical hibernation.

The Metamoran rolled right in response to Guerra’s movement, interrupting the spell his plane’s wings had been tracing. A small smile graced the aeromancer’s face despite that. He was incrementally opening up the distance between himself and the dragon. He just needed a little more room.

Then, suddenly, there it was, looming up before him again: the border of the Dragon Mountains. There was too little distance and too much speed to hope to make the turn and avoid Guerra. In the heat of a real battle he would have dove hard. The backwash from his engines would have kept the slightly higher dragon at bay. At this altitude he probably would have completed the loop before crashing into the earth, but there was just enough risk that he couldn’t justify the maneuver in the current situation.

He pulled up hard, out of an international incident and right into the arms of his enemy. The Wyvern shuddered under the impact as Guerra latched on to the top of it. Derek wrestled with the stick and the foot pedals, trying to regain control, but there was no arguing with the thaumaturgical field of a dragon. Even what feeble struggles he was capable of came to an end as he felt a spell slip past his defenses and kill his mana engines.

The bat-like craft hung limply from the drake’s talons. The world passed languidly beneath, with Guerra’s grip the only thing between Derek and the ground hundreds of feet below. With a sickening lurch, predator and catch swooped toward the earth. The altimeter’s needle dropped at a dizzying rate, and soon pine boughs and treetops were literally snapping against the underside of his ship in a hellish cacophony.

With a jarring impact he felt his plane planted on the ground, and with the speed of a viper strike the dragon had set its jaws around his canopy. They scraped and screeched along the glass, just enough pressure to make the horrible sound without leaving marks. Saliva streamed over the clear surface like a heavy rain, and beyond it was the burning glow of dragon-fire.

He clutched the seat of his cockpit in a white-knuckled grip, looking up into the blazing pit and jagged maw, knowing that they wouldn’t be used, but aware of what they could effortlessly do. Derek could feel the dragonfear picking almost mockingly at his consciousness for what seemed like an eternity before the drake finally pulled away. The dragon gave him one last smug appraisal and then took off with a rush of air that rocked the land-bound craft on its legs.

After several moments, the pilot felt his heart rate and breath slow to a more normal rhythm. He popped the canopy and climbed on top of the ship. He opened a panel in the Wyvern’s sleek metal skin, revealing a metal bar and socket which joined together to form a lever. It was going to be another thirty minutes before he’d be able to restart the mana engines, and his familiars weren’t likely to stay in hibernation that long.

With steady, repeated cranks he began to raise out the rows upon rows of cats contained within. Further cranking caused the cages to unfold like lotus blossoms, granting some room to the animals that wasn’t available during flight. A few began to yawn and blink lazily as they shook off their enchanted slumber.

Derek sat down wearily on edge of the new opening in the ship's back, the sweat of labor and fear cooling in the night air. Beyond the dark line of pine trees Metamor City rose, bright as the moon. With any luck Jeremy would be able to shake the experience off in a week and be back in the air; most did. A few never climbed into a fighter again. Derek looked back at his watch and willed the numbers to tick faster. The sooner this night was over, the better.

FIN

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