Early March, AE 4186

  The operational target, a simulation of the Abyssal Sons' fortified base on Dungali, unleashed a salvo of surface-to-air missiles, their exhaust plumes streaking upward like enraged serpents.

  Tribunis Navis Kat Stormer, commander of the 101st Female Fighter Wing, the famed Wild Gals, home of the legendary Phoenix Squadron, gripped the control yoke tightly, her lightly armored hands rock-steady despite the mounting acceleration.

  Strapped into the cockpit of a new F611 Holytiger strike fighter, she initiated a steep climb, pitching the nose upward at a sixty-degree angle, bleeding off speed while gaining altitude rapidly.

  The inertial dampeners whined in protest as g-forces built, pressing her back into the seat with over nine g’s of force. Beneath her light armor, the flight suit's compression garments squeezed her legs, preventing blood from pooling away from her brain.

  "Wild Gal One, ascending to…," she began reporting crisply over the comms channel, forgetting she didn’t need to for this dog-and-pony show, but proud her voice remained calm even as tunnel vision clawed at her sight.

  The Holytiger's drive roared, vectoring thrust downward to maintain the climb through the thinning atmosphere.

  Kat's Class, Volatorius, was an extreme rarity among gubernators, along with any other drone Class really.

  Most favored Classes with short teleports, personal shielding bubbles, and area-denial bursts that could shred incoming threats in a radial sweep.

  But Kat had always thrived on precision and control, her three passive Abilities channeled fully into her trio of drones, amplifying their durability and velocity, turning them into kinetic interceptors.

  In the unforgiving void, where the majority of engagements happened, unfolding at fractions of c, drones were often dismissed as useless. The distances made them lag in utility, unable to keep up with relativistic effects, and directing them effectively far too complicated and distracting.

  But Kat had a mind capable enough, employing tactics to make them sing, and that went double for in-atmosphere fighting.

  She thumbed the launch toggle on her throttle-and-stick controls. Three sleek slabs of steel bullet-like projectiles, fifty centimeters in diameter and ninety long, blasted from their cell-launchers. Her boys.

  Beyond the force of launch, they ignited their own micro-thrusters, accelerating ahead on programmed scripts with nudges from Kat's neural implant commands, which let her feel their positions like phantom limbs, guiding them with subconscious impulses rather than direct control.

  The missiles were closing fast, their seekers locked onto her fighter. Her drones fanned out, each diving into the barrage, zipping around like rabid jackals.

  They rammed missiles from the side, detonating them in fireballs that chained into others, or sending them rocketing in wild arcs. They’d puncture one, sideswipe a cluster, then blaze on to the next target.

  As the Holytiger pierced the mesosphere, gravity's relentless pull began to slacken, the atmo growing extremely thin.

  Kat monitored her HUD, the helm’s overlay projecting threat trajectories in glowing red arcs that disappeared as her drones cleaned up the stragglers.

  Her three boys looped back on a return vector, their thrusters blazing to match her velocity before slotting neatly into their cell-launchers.

  She eased off the throttle, letting the fighter's momentum carry it into the exosphere's near-vacuum.

  Stars sharpened into pinpricks against the black, the curve of the planet below a hazy blue arc as Kat executed a pitch-over maneuver, rolling the Holytiger 180 degrees on its longitudinal axis while cutting the main drive.

  The craft flipped end over end, its nose now pointing downward toward the planet, inertial forces flipping with it in a brief moment of weightlessness before she reignited the drive at full power.

  The fighter plunged like a meteor, accelerating with gravity's assist, the drive, and max thrusters as she dove through the thermosphere.

  Her airspeed indicator climbed rapidly, the fighter’s shields glowing as reentry friction built. The base's defenses reacted predictably, vomiting another missile barrage skyward.

  Kat squeezed the trigger on her stick. The Holytiger's nose-mounted laser array blared, beams of energy lancing out, her aim guided by targeting assist.

  The missiles had evasive scripts, but each she hit, the beams tore through casings, causing premature detonations or structural failures.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  But the volley was thick. Four dozen threats, at least, so she launched her boys again.

  The large bullet-like drones exploded from the cell-launchers, streaking ahead, their speed turning them into hypersonic rams.

  One curved, sideswiping a missile cluster in a plasmatic bloom. The others weaved through the formation, kinetic strikes crumpling warheads and sending debris raining down.

  Kat jinked the fighter minimally, just small bursts from control thrusters for yaw and pitch adjustments, conserving energy while her lasers mopped up the remnants.

  There was no need for wild evasive rolls. Even in-atmosphere, at these low velocities, predictability was still death, but so was overcorrection. She flew the probabilities, treating the yoke gently, like an inexperienced maiden, just as she’d been trained to as a rookie.

  Clear of the barrage, Kat leveled out as she entered the troposphere and air density increased. Flaps extended, and spoilers deployed to manage descent rate.

  She skimmed the base's outer edge, the point-defense turrets spitting flak that her electronic warfare suite jammed with spoofed signals.

  Locking onto the primary target of the massive, unshielded dome of the power generator for this staged dog-and-pony show, she armed a pair of precision-guided bombs, releasing the ordnance in a low-level pass.

  The bombs streaked downward on inertial guidance, impacting the generator in twin explosions that lit the horizon behind her like the day of judgment.

  In reality, during the Dungali incursion against the Abyssal Sons, the base had been a nightmare with layered shielding, overlapping anti-air batteries, and a generator buried under reinforced durarcrete.

  A full wing had flown on target. Kat alone survived that nightmare mission.

  Taking out the command base was supposed to have turned the tide, but the navy had still been forced to retreat.

  For this dog-and-pony show? Just a farce with grossly simplified threats, no real countermeasures, all just to look good as it was captured by scryers.

  As Kat brought the Holytiger around for a victory roll, banking sharply left then right, she throttled back, vectoring toward the landing strip.

  Hovering, she touched down in her designated space with textbook precision. The desk jockeys from Imperial Navy Enterprise Marketing swarmed her as she finished climbing down the ladder, erupting with applause.

  Kat forced a smile, nodding through the platitudes, tolerating the claps on the back, then slipped away to her office to jockey her own desk.

  As an O-6, a rank she was forced to accept two years ago, she'd traded combat sorties for command briefs and readiness reports. Qualification flights and demonstrations were her only tastes of the yoke now.

  This footage was to inspire Cloisteranage girls showing promise in flight sims.

  They'd already filmed her with her family, dressed for Sunday Mass, waving to the scryers. "Look, girls, you too could hit the higher Realms quickly, staying forever young. You can have it all – a handsome husband, five beautiful kids of your own to keep and raise, and a gloried career as a gubernator too.”

  She was sure they’d leave out that she was the sole survivor of that suicidal mission, and that her fighter had been downed taking out that generator.

  Or that the only reason she hit the second Realm so young was that she fought the abominations of the Abyssal Sons as she escaped and evaded capture.

  First, for weeks alone, her drones proving just as effective against ground troops as missiles in the air.

  Then battling alongside the grunts abandoned on Dungali when the navy was beaten back and forced to retreat.

  Or living like savage animals, guerrilla fighting for over three years without resupply, scavenging weapons, ammo, and tainted food from dead enemies, barely surviving, the Litany of the Soon Martyred her daily prayer.

  Or getting pregnant out of wedlock because she needed protection from the terrifying leers of those same grunts she fought alongside.

  Or the sense of relief knowing the firstborn's always tithed to the Church, so she wouldn’t receive condemnation for birthing a bastard.

  Or how impossibly hard giving it up had been.

  She, of course, was obligated to marry the officer she picked for protection. Luckily, that had worked out just fine.

  Shivyon, her husband, a good man she loved dearly, loved her back even more, and supported her and her career. He disliked that a nanny raised their children, but there was no choice there.

  The navy wouldn’t let her retire, or else she and Shiv would’ve joined the Lay Commandos. They paid much better, and they’d have spent a lot more time together, as a family.

  In her office, amid stacks of slates and reports on pilot rotations and threat assessments, she sank into her chair.

  Something on her desk snagged her eye, a strange, blocky slate, bulkier than any imperial make she’d seen, the edges ridged like armored plating.

  An earpiece was taped to its screen, alongside a handwritten note. "Turn me on," it read.

  Her brows creased. She had no idea what this was about, but curiosity won out.

  She plucked the earpiece free, slotted it into her ear, and pressed the power glyph.

  The screen blazed to life with a strange hum, and in an instant, the world tilted into pure nightmare.

  Kat's breath caught, her heart slamming against her ribs like a runaway train, fear taking control of her mind as her worst fears were realized.

  There, in the grainy scry-feed, lay her husband, her Shiv, sprawled on the cold tile of what looked like a hotel room, dark and viscous blood pooled beneath him, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling, unseeing.

  The toughest man she knew, a man who'd survived countless deployments, now…she couldn’t think about that. She couldn’t let it affect her thinking. She needed to put that aside, completely clear her mind.

  Kneeling behind him, their faces streaked with tears and misery, were four of her children.

  Little Nashi and Gab, clutching each other, Nashi’s tiny fists balled in impotent anger and confusion, Chere and Azra next to them, Azra’s face bloodied.

  Then Zhertva, their devoted nanny, trying futilely to shield them with her arms, one of her hands gripping Azra’s shoulder like a vise, preventing the boy from moving.

  The family had left to drop off Mick, her eldest, to be an aspirant at a prestigious private Cloisteranage.

  Kat couldn’t go with them, not with this recruitment farce going on.

  She thanked God that Mick, at least, seemed absent from this horror. Safe away, likely processed through intake.

  Like bile, more terror clawed up her throat as her sight locked on the man, the stranger in sleek, obsidian-black armor looming over her children.

  He pressed a compact sidearm to the temple of her youngest. Sweet Nashi, barely three, with her cherub curls and dimpled cheeks, now sobbing and trembling, her whimpers bleeding through the earpiece, piercing Kat's soul like a lancer blast.