A Perverted Path to Victory

Chona

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“Ready for deployment?”

“Um. Maybe?”

She plucked at the roll of thin, stringy copper, giving its free end a tug. The roll spun a bit, then caught, something further along within the hidden mechanism stopping it from progressing.

“What do you mean, maybe?” Tinvel asked, glancing up at the rearview mirror. She hated that thing. It was never fun to work with someone watching you. She held up the roll, giving it a demonstrative tug.

“See, look? It keeps getting caught on-” The wire unspun beautifully, as if ironic timing and spite were necessary to motivate its function. She scoffed. “Fine. Nevermind. Let me just see if we can get it to actually deploy and then we’re ready to go.”

After so many hours spent crammed into the third seat of a plane meant for two, she felt like she had all the room in the world as she leaned forward and undid a latch, letting the wooden drum spin freely.

Copper wire immediately zipped! its way free, a hundred kilometer-an-hour winds dragging it out into the open skies. She looked up at the wingtip and saw the line deploying just as smoothly there, navigating the internal pulleys without a hitch as it chased after the assembly’s tail end, where a tiny canvas drogue chute was catching its fill of wind.

She and Tinvel hadn’t been involved in the design process of this one, but she could tell at a glance that it wouldn’t have been an easy problem to solve. The copper wire that was spooling out two, four, and finally six meters behind the plane’s wingtip was hardly an ideal subject to repeatedly wrap and unravel. Its rear half carried sixteen separate quartz crystals, each of them heavily engraved, half-millimeter valleys etched as a slot for the thin copper wire to wrap them a dozen times over. It looked like the Fulleye was displaying the captured prey of some horrifying spider, one large enough to use metal strands to ensnare its prey. Getting the chunky lumps of crystal to feed through the wing, while still maintaining an unbroken connection to the cockpit, couldn’t have been easy.

“It’s deployed!” She called. Still raising her voice again. A bad habit. With the voice tubes connecting them, she and Tinvel could hear each other as clearly as they could in an empty room.

“Good. I’m gonna switch masks, alright?”

She threw him a thumbs-up. Tinvel lifted his speaking mask off, letting it dangle off his shoulder, then put another one over his face, this one much bulkier than the one either of them wore. While Chona’s mask had two tubes, one going from her mouth to Tinvel’s ear and another doing the same for him, so they could both hear each other, this new mask had an odder face. It ended in a dog-like snout, a thick leather wrap protecting one of Tulian’s precious communication crystals.

She saw his jaw working as he talked, but she couldn’t hear him. The wind rushing into his discarded mask was loud as all the hells in her ear, louder even than the natural noise would have otherwise been. She took her own earpiece off, letting it hang as she watched him work.

They were flying high above the Tulian coastline, right above the line of tan sand separating endless expanses of green fields and blue waters. As they were about thirty or so miles north of Tulian itself, the area was, for all intents and purposes, abandoned. Maybe some people still walked through the area every once in a while, but she couldn’t imagine why they’d bother. After the last war, virtually all of Tulian’s population had relocated to shelter beneath the capital city’s walls, or even gone so far as to move much further south. Everyone knew the Sporaton King would be coming again. It was only a matter of when.

That migration had left a number of abandoned villages in its wake. They were flying over one right now, in fact. Either its former occupants or the advancing Sporatons had burned it to the ground in the year before, leaving little more than a few rotted timbers still sprouting from the ground, piles of rain-stirred ash staining the ground wherever there happened to be shelter from the scouring wind. It had been a fishing village once upon a time, Chona recalled, though she didn’t remember its name. She’d never visited it. Before Old Tulian fell, her family hadn’t had the right to travel, and in the chaotic years after that, it had been suicidally idiotic to spend weeks covering the hundred kilometers between that once-quaint coastal village and her home.

She took a grip on the back of Tinvel’s seat and raised herself up, looking at the instrument panel. By its (admittedly inaccurate) reckoning, they were currently cruising at a hundred and forty kilometers an hour.

Chona looked down and to the west, over the verdant land. For once they weren’t the only ones traveling that fast. Six Halfeye planes were flying abreast of one another, about a kilometer below and five hundred meters off their port side. It was a rickety, awkward formation, the furthest two planes several full wingwidths more spaced apart than the others, while another was so much lower than the rest it could have kicked its rudder hard over and sliced across the entire formation without hitting any landing gear. Ugly by any standards; the birds that flapped far below them all were probably laughing at them.

As she watched, however, that began to change. The plane that was too low began to twitchily shift its elevator, its body rising slowly, until it was finally in line with its fellows. The two who’d been drifting so far away from their flightmates as to be borderline unrelated to the formation began to rudder back into place as well, the inboard one starting first, though their flight was characterized by jerky, hesitant corrections, the pilot clearly nervous when flying so close to other planes. Then the next plane came in, much more smoothly than the first, until the six-plane line was finally in a fairly decent approximation of an unbroken line.

“Ha! It works!” Chona kicked the back of Tinvel’s chair, moving around so she could shout in the ear that wasn’t covered by a hearing cup. “It’s working, isn’t it?!”

He nodded his head, still focusing down below, jaw bobbing as he gave yet more instructions. Chona laughed again, clapping her hands in delight.

After how much good they’d done Tulian during the war, and in the year or so after it, everyone who knew about the existence of the Crystal Communication Network had been absurdly desperate to expand the system. The problem with that, however, was the absurd rarity and expense of paired communication crystals. While a few had been purchased here or there, they were purchased at exorbitant sums, often costing the same (or more!) than three or four ships would have cost to commission from a foreign dockyard. The Governess had only been able to acquire so many in the first place because she’d been borderline scamming those who sold them to her, implying with a wink and a nod that the seller was effectively purchasing a favor from a Divine Champion. When foreign nobility had realized Sara Brown was never going to help them with anything save lessons on how to swallow a bullet, the price had gone up. Considerably.

This flight was the first test of their stopgap measure. Making communication crystals of their own might be possible, technically, when Tulian artificers had twenty years and ten Levels of practice behind them, but that wouldn’t matter if they couldn’t live to see it happen. Thus, Professor Brown had apparently, in secret, been working on what he cheerfully named the CBS: the crystal broadcast system.

If she’d understood his explanation correctly— and there was no guarantee she had— the sixteen copper-wrapped crystals that were now trailing behind the Fulleye were using a mixture of magic and technology to broadcast a fraction of Tinvel’s voice into the air. Each crystal had been tuned to a certain type of invisible energy called radiation, which was supposedly similar to the same physical mechanisms that let a fire heat something without touching it. As Tinvel’s voice hit the speaking crystal, it was creating tiny fractions of electrical charge that rippled down the wire, where each appropriately tuned crystal would pick it up and begin spewing radiation out in every direction.

That radiation normally did nothing at all. Some objects it would pass through like sunlight through a window, others it would bounce right off of, but apparently it was possible, with just the right type of quartz, to create a crystal that would respond to that radiation by vibrating in near-invisible ways. It was then possible, with a bit of mechanical and electrical doodads wrapped around the quartz, to transform those vibrations into the original sound of Tinvel’s voice.

She watched the six-plane flight begin to curve right, heading out toward the sea as one united group, their wings tilting in unison. Just barely, in the lulls between bursts of gusting wind, she caught Tinvel saying “Good job.”

Chona laid back in her seat, still grinning. It was a damn fancy toy that Tulian had cooked up. Sure, it had plenty of flaws, from the way it required one to be high in the air to avoid the radiation from being hopelessly scrambled by bouncing off the ground, a talking range that didn’t expand much further than a few kilometers, and the fact that the broadcasting plane had to keep a calm, consistent course, but all she cared about was the fact it worked. Chona was only on her fifth Level as a mage, Tinvel probably wasn’t far behind, and yet they’d help create and operate something closely approximating the work of genuine master mages. Professor Brown had complained endlessly about the CBS’s inadequacies, agonizing over things like frequency modulation, vacuum tubes, and circuits, but personally, she didn’t really care. He said he would keep improving it, maybe enough so that the transmitter could be mounted inside a plane rather than trailing behind it, and she couldn’t wait. The ability to scream in Affe’s ear mid-flight would be worth just about anything to Chona.

While she waited for that golden opportunity, however, she contented herself to watch the training going on below. After their late-night return from the Empire, they’d had to wake up before dawn to begin the first of General Voth’s planned training excursions. He’d wanted Tinvel and Chona to begin teaching pilots and mages, respectively, how to survive combat with Imperial griffons. After taking off for the first flight of the day with plans to stage a mock dogfight over Tulian, Tinvel had landed fifteen minutes later and told Voth it was impossible: the pilots were nowhere near competent enough to face combat. They needed work.

Affe, Tulian’s only other combat-experienced pilot, had sheepishly agreed. He’d been in charge of training the pilots while Tinvel and Chona had been flying errands all across the continent, and it was now clear that he’d been overwhelmed, yet too stubborn to admit it. He could spend an entire day sitting behind a pilot and guiding them through maneuvers, and often did, but so what? They had nearly twenty prospective pilots lined up. Spending an entire day giving one pilot the dedicated training they needed meant that it would be literal weeks before Affe got a chance to sit in on a flight with them again. Practice could maintain the skills he’d taught them in the meantime, but it couldn’t teach them anything new. With how much industrial might the Governess had allocated to the newly-formed Air Force, new planes were being produced faster than pilots could be taught, even after accounting for training crashes.

That’s why the CBS was such a game-changer. As Chona watched, the six trainee pilots began to break up, not as an undisciplined rabble, but rather in a practiced, coordinated dispersion of their planes. Of the six planes, the two on either outer edge peeled away at right angles to the core, while the remaining center two tucked into a dive, noses pointed at the black, weathered remains of that long-dead fishing village.

Taking the CBS mask off for a second, Tinvel called over his shoulder, “Watch this! We’re gonna see how they do!”

“With what?” She yelled back, pressing forward, but it was too late. He’d already replaced the mask and begun talking again.

Chona followed the twin planes on their rocketing descent. From the way Professor Brown talked about his old world, she’d gotten the impression that Tulian’s planes would be considered slow, primitive, borderline-useless combatants on the world he’d come from.

She didn’t see how.

The twin Halfeyes tore through the air at speeds that would have sent them blurring past the fastest messenger horses, their altitude dropping dozens of meters with every second. In the time it would take most soldiers to draw and nock an arrow, they went from unreachably high above the burnt-out village to right above it, close enough that the clank and crash of their artifice engines would have been deafening.

Two thin clouds leapt from the undersides of their wings.

“Shit!” Chona yelled, one hand going up to dig into Tinvel’s shoulder. “Holy shit, you gave them some-”

The rockets struck the ground before she could finish her thought. A huge cloud of black ash and clumps of brown mud leapt into the air, some pieces of their target, a broken home’s still-standing chimney, flew hundreds of meters in every direction.

The two Halfeyes burst through the cloud they’d created with propellers whirring, their tails drawing a trail of ash and dust after them like ink on a paintbrush.

Tinvel immediately clasped the CBS mask harder to his face, his brow broken by a furious scowl as he shouted into the mask. Chona didn’t quite get why, beyond the obvious fact that someone had screwed up, and it wasn’t until she saw the second pair of planes come in that she got it.

The next two Halfeyes stooped into their dives just like the first, falcons falling down on their prey from on high, but with one obvious change. When each plane fired their single rocket, rather than watch it all the way to impact, they jerked back hard on the controls, rolling in opposite directions to form a set of mirrored J paths. There was another large cloud of smoke and debris from the rocket impacts, but this pair of pilots were already gone, motoring away at their best speed, already regaining height. With another lull of the wind, this time Chona actually overheard Tinvel’s furious shouting.

“How many fucking times do I have to tell you?! Speed is life, altitude is speed! Every second near the ground is another second closer to a crash! Now Group C, dive, dive, dive!”

Chona could see the effect of his tirade. The third pair of planes slammed hard on their control columns, throwing themselves into the descent. Tails twitched and ailerons fluttered as they adjusted their aim until, with a rush of blackpowder smoke, the rockets abandoned their carriers.

Group C was not fucking around. Chona could see their wings physically bending under the stress, both pilots declining to do the fancy J-turn that Group B had, instead turning the momentum of their dive into as furious an ascent as they could muster.

If the goal was to regain altitude, it worked. By the time the rockets impacted, both of Group C’s pilots were easily five times the height of the resulting blast, safe as could be. They spent all the energy they could, until they were teetering on the very precipice of a stall, and only then did they return to level flight, circling over their target.

Tinvel dropped his mask, replacing it with the speaking tube. Chona hurriedly got her kit back on.

“They still need to work on release range, don’t they?” Tinvel asked, his words turned hard by frustration. “If you’d been down there, you would have gotten them with a fire spell, right?”

“Yeah, but those rockets would have killed me, too,” she replied. “If they were aiming for that chimney, their accuracy was pretty good.”

Indeed, there was nothing left of the old brick structure. Just a dent in the landscape where it had once stood, barely visible through the swirling dust.

“I don’t care if they kill their target,” Tinvel snapped, “I care if they live through the fight.”

“Sure. Do you think they…”

She stopped herself mid-sentence. Tinvel had already dropped the speaking mask and replaced it with the CBS, his expression steely as he gave another set of orders.

Chona leaned back in her seat, unhooking her earpiece so it wouldn’t be shattering her eardrums with every gust that flew down Tinvel’s discarded mouthpiece. Shifting so she could see him in the rearview mirror, she propped her head up with an elbow on the rim of the cockpit, watching.

He was serious. Deadly serious. She didn’t think he’d been half as stressed in their actual dogfights as this training session was making him. As reluctant as he’d been to start on the whole project, he was throwing himself into it with a will. With the northern spring barely more than a month away and true aerial opponents already darkening the horizon, there just wasn’t any time left to half-ass things. He seemed to recognize that in a way that she’d never seen from him before. From the very first day they’d met at the Tulian University, he’d been a tinkerer, an experimenter. Always with his head in a notebook or his fingers chipping away at some engraving. Their first argument had come from him walking into the room she’d been practicing in and, without speaking a word, closing every blind on every window. When she’d snapped at him, he’d just told her that light crystals provided a more even light than the sun, so he always blocked it out. With his pale skin and delicate fingers, she’d been able to tell he meant it, too.

She let her eyes roam over his face. Beneath the leather flight cap was a tan, bronzed face, a sprinkling of freckles dashed across his upper cheeks. His jaw was clenched between words, his shoulders tense beneath the smooth, pebbled texture of his new leather jacket. She could see the calloused fingers of one hand unconsciously adjusting the control stick between his knees, his other hand pressed to the CBS crystal, tiny static pops of magic helping it adjust to better transmit his voice.

She leaned forward, grabbing his attention by dangling an arm over his shoulder, which she pressed tightly to his surprisingly firm chest.

So she didn’t get in the way, of course.

“You’re gonna grind your teeth to dust if you keep that up!” She hollered into his ear. “Relax a bit! I’m sure they’re trying their best!”

Tinvel pulled the CBS away, rolling his eyes at her.

“I’ll relax when we’re on the ground! I don’t want to see any of these idiots get themselves killed because they got a bad case of target fixation and didn’t pull up in time!”

“I’ll hold you to that!” She called.

Tinvel didn’t respond, nor notice her smarmy grin. He was already talking again, guiding the A Group into their second attack.

Chona decided to follow her own advice. She loosened her harness enough to slump in her chair, more fully resting against the seat. The fact that the position gave her a good view of Tinvel’s face via the rearview mirror was, of course, entirely incidental.

She chuckled at herself.

Incidental. Sure. Just like the way he definitely doesn’t use it to see if I’m impressed after one of his maneuvers.

With the CBS finally operational, the second half of the training flight went a lot smoother than the first. With the ability to give corrective advice in real time, progress on the pilot’s individual talents and group flight maneuvers were advancing in leaps and bounds. Once all six pilots had expended both their rockets on the abandoned town, Tinvel began leading them all farther and farther north, requiring at least one half-hour stop for the crystals to recharge from their engine’s internal geodes.

Finally, just when the sun began to slip away from its absolute apex, they reached their destination. As always, Chona was the one to spot it on the horizon. A little inlet bay, deep into what had once been the intentionally unsettled no-man’s-land between the Kingdom of Tulian and Sporatos. It had been more than a decade since anyone had bothered to enforce the edict, which meant that the small aeroplane base that had been established a few months before was, predictably, thriving.

Tinvel and Chona touched down last, of course. Not just because Tinvel wanted to see the other pilot’s landings from above, unfortunately. The CBS antenna was a bitch and a half to retract. It turned out that a thin, flapping piece of wire that had over a dozen crystals tied into its length didn’t really play all that well with being retracted into a plane mid-flight. Every time she tried to wind the cable in, it would work for barely a few cranks before one of the crystals would jam up somewhere in the line. Because brutishly forcing the one-of-a-kind prototype artificing equipment through sheer stubbornness was apparently a bad idea, Chona had to repeat the process of letting the cable out, bringing it in, stopping when it jammed, then letting it out to begin the process all over again.

I really hope this isn’t a sign of how tonight’s gonna go, Chona thought, glancing at Tinvel as he fretted over the fragile equipment. Then she mentally swatted herself. No, no, no. Not tonight. Today. Stop being a wimp about this, Chona. It’s too quiet at night and the tent won’t cast any shadows in the afternoon, so it’s the best time. You’ve got this.

Her stomach didn’t seem to agree. It squirmed and flipped and flopped, torturing her with a queasiness that even the most violent of aerial combat couldn’t equal. Ever since she and Tinvel had started getting closer, she’d been paying more attention to things she’d never cared about before. Relationship stuff, mostly. Girls in the university who talked about their boyfriends and what they did together, or the precious few romantic ballads and stories that had found their way to the University’s library. She’d gone to them because she felt at a total loss; she’d barely had any relationship experience to start with, and she’d never imagined she’d end up with a guy.

I wonder if my parents ever would have guessed I’d be more ready to get in a war than a relationship.

It didn’t help that things weren’t progressing at all like the stories would have led her to expect. The romantic tomes she’d slipped out of the library seemed to assume that lovers were always the product of a mystical fait accompli, as if the gods themselves were pulling the strings. A peculiar coincidence would bring them together, their eyes sparkling like a thunderstorm as they were drawn inexorably toward one another, flirting and hinting and fluttering their eyelashes until, finally, they came crashing together in a night of incredible passion.

That was unrealistic, she knew. It was a story for a reason. But the thing was, when she talked to the other girls at the University, she felt like their “real” experiences were barely any more relatable. When a few beers shared in the dorms had finally let Chona work up the courage to ask how they’d pushed their romances to the next stage, they’d talked about all sorts of things. Waiting for the right moment, reading the boy’s signs, and lots of pushing forward only to back off the moment it became obvious the moment wasn’t right. All their ideas and experiences sounded so finicky, so complicated and uncertain, that it drove Chona mad.

She didn’t have that kind of luxury. She and Tinvel were both high-ranking military officers who were constantly moving from mission to mission. When they weren’t passed out from exhaustion, they were working on projects, practicing spells, or designing new equipment. Their hours of free time could be counted on one hand. Waiting for the right moment was about as realistic for her as a heavenly sign and divine thunderclap were for anyone else. Now that there was an open time slot in their schedule, by the gods, Chona was going to seize the moment.

Or you could be patient and just wait a while until things have calmed down, she told herself. Don’t you remember? You were soooo confident that he was going to come to you instead of the other way around.

Well, self, she haughtily replied, he gained twenty pounds of muscle and the Champion of Passion gave him a tailor-made pilot’s uniform, so how about you shut the hell up?

It still felt profoundly weird to confront her own attraction like that, but really, she just had to. Using that weird halfway silence magic of hers, Sara had spoken to her briefly on the flight out of Tulian, discussing a few topics. Offering encouragement here and there, occasionally warning her about going too far in one way or another— particularly in one way.

Spring was coming. And with it, her yearly cycle.

As the last student pilot finished landing in the harbor, Tinvel whipped the plane around, preparing to land. She wished she could have blamed her squeamishness on the rolling acrobatics, but she’d gotten used to them forever ago. No, she was nervous thinking about springtime and its consequences.

You should have gone home when you had the chance, she scolded herself. So what if Mom and Dad saw Tinvel? You had a LOT you needed to ask them.

Really, Chona shouldn’t have blown them off the first time they’d tried to talk with her about it. Every other girl in the village her age, all humans or catfolk, had spent so long complaining about their monthly cycles that Chona’s only reaction to her vanara ancestry’s quirks had been gratitude. A couple weeks out of the year with an aching stomach and cleaning up a few bits of spotty blood was nothing next to what she’d heard the other girls complaining about, so she’d been happy to flee from the wildly uncomfortable conversation her mother had tried to have with her about growing up. At the time, she’d stubbornly argued, it didn’t matter that her cycle could become far more intense when she was in a relationship. It would only do that if she was with a man, and that was never going to happen.

Right?

Oh, gods. Chona tucked her head into an elbow and tried to will her blushing fur to fall flat. All those stories she’d gotten from the other University students didn’t mean anything for her. They weren’t working on a time limit, knowing that if they waited a few weeks too long, their first time with their partner would be a horribly embarrassing affair. They didn’t have to… to awkwardly schedule things out, figuring out how to take the one precious opportunity they could find.

The descent began, Tinvel angling for the strip of grass that had been cleared at the west end of the natural bay. While the other pilots had used their floats to glide down onto the flat waters, she and Tinvel had once again swapped their landing equipment out, preferring the less drag-inducing wheeled landing gear wherever they had the chance. It was even more important than usual to extend their flight time when they were training others, after all.

The landing was smooth, as expected. They taxied to the wooden shacks that had been constructed to shelter their planes, joining the collection of crews who were in various stages of post-flight wrapup. Affe, who’d arrived at the base hours before, was already walking around and talking to the pilots, evaluating them on their landing approaches.

For a while, Chona lost herself in the work at hand. With two engines on a single plane, the Fulleye was nearly twice as much work to maintain as its Halfeye predecessors. She and Tinvel lubricated various joints, opened up panels to inspect equipment for wear and tear, and generally made sure nothing had been damaged during flight. Tinvel spent most of his time inspecting the aerial crystal cable, fretting over it like a nervous parent.

The blissful distraction couldn’t last forever, unfortunately. They’d left Tulian with plenty of time to spare, out of caution for weather or mechanical issues delaying them, and the uneventful trip meant there was only so much work to be done. While Chona finished up an inspection of the flight surfaces Tinvel spoke with the trainees, giving them a bit more detailed advice than he could over the CBS.

Then they were done. There was nothing else to be done until the morning flight, and General Voth had specifically ordered them all to spend time resting and recovering before the next day’s mission. Flying may not have been the most physically taxing of tasks, but it was mentally exhausting. He wanted them sharp.

Tinvel, of course, was disobeying the order. As Chona laid out on the sun-warmed sand, bay waves lapping at her feet, she was serenaded by the scratching of a pen across paper and mumbled numbers and figures. The workers who’d stayed behind had made some notable improvements since the last time they’d come to the hidden bay. Basic wooden shelters had been erected right where the sandy beach turned into grass-dusted dunes, and though they were little more than stacked logs held together with dried mud, they at least had enough of a roof to keep the rain out. Tinvel was using a small tree stump for a chair, a taller one as a table, his multitude of diagrams pinned down by stones so the wind wouldn’t send them up and away. With him sitting in the shade of the rudimentary building, it actually seemed like a pretty comfortable setup to get work done.

A lapping wave passed Chona’s feet and rolled over her ankles, soaking her fur. The tide was coming in, and that meant she’d already spent too much time screwing around.

Come on. Just… just get it over with. You want to do this, he wants to do this.

Probably. Hopefully. It’s been a while since our first kiss, right? Like a month or two? That’s not moving too fast, right? He won’t be weirded out by it?

Recognizing the rolling anxiety in her stomach for the unproductive panic it was, she forced herself to hop up to her feet, tail swiping up the book she’d long since stopped pretending to read.

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