Focus, Keryn, the Voice whispered. You can’t help them, but you can stay focused enough to make sure something similar doesn’t happen to you.
Across the empty space, Keryn watched the enormous hangar bay doors opening on the Terran Destroyers. From their undersides, the Destroyers disgorged their own Squadrons. Keryn realized that from the perspective of an opponent, her earlier assessment of Squadrons looking like swarms of angry insects was incorrect. It wasn’t insects that she saw spilling from the Terran ships, charging across the space toward the Alliance Squadrons. Sitting above the Revolution, Keryn saw the ships merge into a single sea of flowing fighters, rolling like waves in the ocean, until they slammed violently together. Their momentum built as more and more fighters entered the fray until they were less of crashing waves within a sea and more like a destructive tsunami. As the tsunami crested, slamming against one another, it was punctuated by a brilliant splash of plasma detonations.
Keryn watched, mouth agape. When the Revolution and Defiant had faced one another, she had struggled to find a clear opening through the net of two fighting Squadrons. Before her, filling every inch of available space as far as she could see, over a dozen Squadrons clashed together, filling the spaces not occupied by flying fighters with the wreckage of those already destroyed. Keryn shook her head in amazement and fear, unsure if she would ever be able to pilot through the insanity before her.
To her surprise, the Revolution below her began to move. Down the line, the other Cruisers broke from their positions and began individual maneuvers, leaving more difficult targets for the Terran Destroyers to attack. In response, the Terrans began similar maneuvers. Keryn sat amazed by the sheer quantity of rockets fired from each of the Cruisers and Destroyers. Engaging her engines, Keryn remained in position above the Revolution, along with the majority of other Cair ships. As they began shifting, a single Cair broke from its position and began traversing the chaos on the battlefield, eager to reach to Destroyers on the far side. Keryn found her breath caught in her throat as she watched the pilot weave past a group of Terran fighters. To the pilot’s credit, he outmaneuvered some of the more agile fighters as he streamed onward, passing into the middle of the battlefield. Just when she thought he stood a chance at making it, the wing tore free of the Cair ship, struck by a wayward rail gun slug. Spinning, the Cair ship was helpless as a Terran fighter launched its rockets. Keryn’s heart lurched in time with the exploding Cair and left her feeling empty. Just as quickly as hope had filled her, the realization that over a dozen Alliance soldiers were instantly killed weighed heavily on her.
“I can’t do this,” Keryn whispered as she watched as more and more fighters and transports were destroyed in the ensuing melee. “There’s no way through that.”
You can do this, the Voice replied. Don’t get overwhelmed and don’t get excited. Remember what we learned before. You are the Captain of this ship, which means we don’t move until you’re completely confident that you can get us from one side to the other safely.
“What if I never get that confident?”
Then you let everyone in the back of this ship die, eternally disappointed in your failure as a pilot.
Keryn frowned, biting back the tears of frustration. She hated the Voice’s blatant honesty, but couldn’t deny the wisdom of its words. More than anything, the Voice knew which of Keryn’s buttons to push to spur her into action. Taking a deep breath, Keryn looked back over the battle. She slowly let her eyes slip out of focus. When training to be a Wyndgaart warrior in the schoolhouse, Keryn had used a similar technique when facing a very agile opponent. Try to focus on each individual strike, and you miss the more subtle secondary attack. By taking in her opponent’s movements as a whole, she was able to map their strategy and find holes in their defenses. Looking back at the battlefield, Keryn tried the same thing here. Instead of focusing on a single ship and watching its inevitable demise, she took in the full scene. Slowly, the ships flowed into a single, seamless mass, writhing against one another. In this perspective, Keryn began to see that the battling ships did not fully cover the whole area of space. Small gaps appeared, though they closed almost as quickly as they appeared. Given enough time and a bit of patience, Keryn believed that she could exploit one of those openings enough to get them through.
Though Keryn now felt more confident, she wasn’t sure how to explain her strategy to the other Cair pilots, and she cringed as more and more of them grew impatient and attempted their flights. Each ship covered more and more distance than the one before, but the result was always invariably the same. Over a dozen lives lost every time, for nothing more than a few hundred feet of ground gained. Without some distracter, Keryn feared that too many of the Cair ships would be destroyed before a sufficient opening presented itself.
Keryn quickly switched her radio channel to the Squadron’s Cair-specific net. Overlapping voices filled the channel, making it difficult to distinguish true orders and strategy from mind-numbing chatter. Some of the voices were from wounded or destroyed ships, their pilots barely alive enough to call repeatedly for help, though they knew in their hearts that there was no system in place to retrieve a downed pilot until the war was over. Some of the chatter was a play-by-play narration of the Duun fighters, cheering and jeering alternately depending on how the Alliance pilots were performing. They debated between one another about which Duun would survive and which would fail. They watched their own shipmates destroyed by a malicious Terran enemy and they mocked the loss. Anger built within her. The young pilots around her treated this war like it was a game. A loss of a fighter translated to little more for them than a piece on a board game, moved incorrectly into an ill-advised location. They lost the piece, but it was quickly brushed aside as they moved on to the next. Having no more true combat experience than they did, she couldn’t fathom why she took this more seriously. Could they not hear the calls of the wounded and dying pilots?
“Shut up!” Keryn screamed into the radio, overwhelming even the most raucous conversations. Only the meek calls from the wounded could be heard on the otherwise silent net. “What is wrong with you people? Our pilots — friends and people with whom many of us graduated from the Academy with — are out there fighting and dying and you’re treating it like it’s a game!”
The stretching silence told Keryn that no one was strong enough to oppose her push for a leadership role. It had come surprisingly naturally for her at the Academy to take on the role of leader, once she had identified the tactics necessary to compete in the daily competitions. Her leadership abilities had led her to graduate at the top of her class, earning her commission as an Officer in the Fleet instead of just a Warrant. Now, whether they liked it or not, she would force her newly assumed role on them all.