The inside of the Guild dropship was surprisingly well-lit, but also very cramped.
Despite being the size of a small building, most of that space was occupied by the enormous engines and the internal hangar bay. I suppose it resembled a cartoon whale, with a strong and powerful body that was filled with a cavernous internal space, making it mostly hollow.
Hollow, but filled with Dragonsuits. Anchoring cables, flexible metal gimbal-mounts, and other mechanical restraints held the Suits in place so that they wouldn’t rattle around inside the bay.
It felt kind of like the inside of a military cargo plane, but one from the distant future. Rubberized protective coatings were sprayed over sharp edges, bold-font warnings were stenciled over various levers or controls.
At one end of the dropship’s bay, rumbling lightly, was a Heavy-weight Dragonsuit that was shaped like a conventional tank, with a turret housing the long barrel of a railgun, and two smaller but no less dangerous muzzles for plasma rifles. Two Medium-weight Suits filled up more of the space, leaving only enough room for one Light-weight Suit, and then three normal human beings. Or, well, two parahumans, and me – nobody on this rocket-sled could be called ‘normal’.Nobody spoke as we took off from the Guild’s headquarters. I did my best to keep a straight face, and act like I’d been here before. It was hard, since the takeoff was at much, much faster speeds than I’d ever experienced while not being safely enmeshed in my own Suit, with my body’s sensations muted.There were no windows, no cameras, but I knew the moment that we were off the ground, because the Pilot went near vertical instantly. The g-forces pulled me against my bucket-seat, and only the extensive safety-harness and the pod-like structure of the seat kept me from tumbling out. It was still a lot of pressure on my right shoulder and leg, rather than distributing across my back.
It was like a carnival ride, but I was riding sideways, staring across the narrow aisle of the bay to the Light-weight Suit that was clamped into its own mechanical restraints. The Suit was a standard humanoid, and it was clearly designed with a more medieval look, with a solid torso and legs, but thinner arms that mimicked human musculature. The torso and legs both had a weirdly patterned fabric look, like studded leather from those tabletop games. Combined with the stylized helmet and the large metal quiver hanging off its hip, and it looked vaguely like an archer from an old war movie.After only a short while of this stomach-churning vertical rise, gravity slowly returned to its rightful orientation as we leveled out. The engines started roaring louder, and louder, and I became very thankful for the helmet that Narwhal handed me before we took off, which muffled the sound.
“So, who’s the newbie?” a voice asked over the radio.
It was one of the Medium-weights. I could tell by the way the helmet shifted. The muscle movement hadn’t been fluid or human to be a brainwave harness, like what I had.
A nerve suit, maybe? Dragon didn’t often stick manual controls in anything smaller than a Heavy-weight, but the thought of having to use a nerve suit in a Medium-weight suit almost made me wince in sympathy for the man. He didn’t have enough room for full movements, so he had to re-learn his own muscle memory just to walk. Hopefully, Dragon’s nanites had solved that for him.His tone, however, drove that thought of sympathy away. It was… insolent, I suppose. Not just bold, but also a bit of a sneering, condescending thing, while still somehow sounding like a child complaining to the parent about something unfair.“That ‘newbie’ was an Ace by the Guild’s standards before any of you got a Suit, and she did it solo,” Narwhal cut in from where she was sitting in the seat next to me. She was wearing a repainted army-surplus helmet with earmuffs, like me, but I could still feel her glare as she turned her head to look at the rest of them. “Stow the attitude, right now. This is Wraith. She’s trustworthy.”“You sure, boss?” the Medium-weight Pilot asked, with a slightly nicer tone – though his doubt made up for it.“Holy shit, Mayonnaise, shut the fuck up,” groaned another voice over the comms. The other Medium Suit, judging by how it was rolling its helmet. “Narwhal decided to bring her, Lurch was escorting her around the base earlier, she’s got solo kills, and her callsign is Wraith. If those four fucking facts weren’t enough of a clue for you to figure it out, I’m gonna start a vote right now to change your goddamn callsign to Q-Tip.”The complainer shut up, but unfortunately, things didn’t get better from there.
More heads starting turning towards me. That little rant had apparently piqued the interest of some of the other passengers inside the belly of this Fortress-weight dropship. Wieldmaiden, the other parahuman, was eyeing me with a wary expression. The archer in the Lightweight Suit across from me was also giving me a careful appraisal.“Why Q-Tip?” I asked, taking care to keep my voice casual.“You’re supposed to stop the Q-Tip after you meet resistance,” the Pilot explained. “Clearly, he didn’t.”I didn’t get it, but I nodded, as if I did.The other Pilot grumbled, but without intelligible worlds, and he settled down after that.It was quiet for another few minutes. I thought about asking some questions about this ‘Khagan’ that we were going up against, but Narwhal was a professional, and she’d already promised me a briefing on the way. She’d deliver.“All hands, brace for transformation to travel mode,” said a new voice suddenly, over the radio. Nobody had moved, however, so it must have come from the Pilot, up in the cockpit.Transformation? I thought to myself.
But before I could ask the question out loud, my eyes widened as the walls of the cargo bay started to shift and twist.
Metal plates that had looked like segmented scales rotated and folded inwards, collapsing the cargo bay even tighter. The seats and docking pods all spun, rotating to face the front of the fuselage, to better handle the g-force.
The plane around us kept squeezing tighter, until it had almost pushed my seat into the Light-weight archer suit next to me. No. ‘Plane’ was wrong. I’d forgotten, if only for a second, that this was a Dragonsuit. Something made by the greatest Tinker to ever live.And then, trapped like sardines in a can, the unseen Pilot flipped a switch. Acceleration hit me in the chest like a 40mm round. No, not quite. A round from a Bofors was a narrow, isolated pain, limited to whatever armor surface it had struck. This was more like being kicked by Crawler – a massive surge of blunt force pressure that made every part of my body quail.For a moment, I wondered if we were going to space. I think I remembered the Dragonsuit leveling out to a regular flight-path, but with this kind of acceleration, it felt like we were trying to imitate a Saturn rocket and fly straight to the Moon.Slowly, I sucked in a breath. In. Out. That’s all I could do. Just focus on my breathing, just try to maintain consciousness. It was hard. I felt like I was sitting on an alien world, trying to breath under vastly more gravity than Earth had. I was Atlas, laboring under the weight of the entire sky on my shoulders.
Academically, I knew what was happening. The g-force of the acceleration was so great that my blood was literally compressing, like toothpaste in a tube being squeezed out.
I’d had training on this, though it was limited. I’d been too scared to attend Armsmaster’s regular training sessions in person, but thanks to Amy, I’d still been able to watch some videos and try to replicate the exercises that had been cribbed from the U.S. Air Force and NASA. Clenching and unclenching muscle groups to try to restrict my blood flow, things like that.Even with that training, I knew it wouldn’t have been enough. If I hadn’t been wearing my Pilot undersuit, which was specifically designed to handle those issues, then my blood might have all pooled down at the bottom of my feet, away from my brain. I would have fainted from blood-loss without a single drop leaving my skin. Even then, I could see darkness at the corners of my vision. I wanted to close my eyes, but I couldn’t even do that.
Gradually, the acceleration lessened. Soon, I was able to take deeper breaths. My chest was no longer crushed under more weight than had killed Giles Corey, and the darkness retreated from my vision.I waited until the g-force had entirely vanished, and then I waited another minute to even out my breathing, before I spoke.“Are we there yet?” I asked sarcastically, with as much nonchalance and as flat a voice as I could manage.
Chuckles echoed over the radio from multiple voices. Someone brayed out a laugh like a donkey, though thankfully with their radio off.“First time crossing the ocean?” someone asked – the Archer, I think, sitting next to me.“First time on this bird,” I replied, fighting to keep my voice level. “I must be getting old. I remember the good old days of last year, when New York to Cairo took two and a half hours. Only Mach 3, felt like a snail’s pace. Complimentary drinks and stewardesses in tiny miniskirts. I even slept on the return trip. Don’t tell Voyager.”Still, that flight had been better than using Strider’s services to get to Samarkand three years ago. I understand that he’d only been trying to help, and that had been before we’d had a lot of experienced Pilots with big Fortress-weight carriers to ship everyone around, but it had been a wild and incredibly uncomfortable ride.“That’s right, you were there that day, weren’t you?” came an older man’s voice, one that I hadn’t heard before. “I think I remember you.”I looked around as best as I could, even with the newly tightened confines of the dropship. But nobody appeared to be looking at me. It wasn’t my next-door-neighbor the Archer, nor the two parahumans sitting in front of me, and though I couldn’t see the two Medium Suits, I knew both of their voices. That left only one person it could be.“Is this the tank?” I asked, already certain. “Yeah, I’ve been around a little. Were you at Cairo?”“Yes,” the tank’s Pilot replied. “I was with the Legion, back then. Got there late. Lot of violence in Algeria on the way.”The man’s voice didn’t sound French and his English was remarkably accent-free… but then, the French Foreign Legion had a long history of accepting anyone and everyone willing to die for them. He could have come from anywhere in the world.“We could swap stories, but business comes first,” I said. “How long will this ride take, Narwhal?”“About ninety minutes,” the Canadian heroine replied, with a shrug that I could see even while sitting behind her. “I’ll save the briefing until we’re thirty minutes out, so everyone can focus on it. Until then, you’ve got the time to spare.”“Thanks, boss,” one of the Medium Pilots said. “I’m gonna catch a quick nap then.”His Suit slumped a little, hanging slightly more limp in its restraint harness.
Coincidentally, it was also just enough for me to sneak a peak at the Heavy-weight Suit through the gap of the Suit’s armpit. I looked through, searching for anything interesting about the tank.
Sure enough, the Suit bore a series of unit badges and insignias. The largest, in a place of pride on the tank’s main glacis plate, was the spear and banner of the Guild. Just beneath it, in a neat little pair, was the French Foreign Legion’s flaming fleur-de-lis. Next to that was what looked like a shield with an eagle crest across it. The shield was painted in red, white, and black, while the eagle itself was gold. The Egyptian flag, I recognized.
“You were with the Iron Phalanx?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes, I was,” the Tanker confirmed. “I served for perhaps six months, then joined the Legion for a year, and after that, I have been with the Guild.”Interesting and more interesting. The Iron Phalanx was the Egyptian government’s attempt to rally a fighting force out of parahumans and Dragonsuits. It was a decent attempt, especially with how much territory Egypt nominally controlled out in the wide reaches of the Sahara, where they could potentially collect Dragonsuits as they fell to Earth like meteorites… but much like the name itself, it wasn’t really Egyptian.Egypt had long been a transitional space between sub-Saharan Africa and the classical world. One nation after another had conquered or assimilated the once-home of the Pharaohs. Greek, Roman, Arab, French, British, and so many more in between the major ones. Add in the Suez Canal, and Egypt was a middle-ground between so many different groups. The best modern demonstration of that was their piece-meal military forces, left over from the Cold War. They had old Soviet tanks next to American M1 Abrams, homebuilt copies of AK’s next to M-16’s. Their parahumans and Dragonsuits were scarcely more uniform than that.
That chaotic lack of organization had made the Battle of Cairo a real fucking mess. Perhaps without superpowers it would have been like the Suez Crisis in the 50’s… but in the modern day, it had been a bloodbath. Like an Endbringer battle, but solely between humans.
All because a faction of Pilots had wanted to take over the Canal, and decided to skip straight to overthrowing the entire Egyptian government. New parahumans had been triggering on the streets, there had been open fighting all across the city. A dark day.“Must have been weird, going back to Cairo in a different uniform,” I remarked, keeping my tone very polite and mild. I didn’t know if the tanker was Egyptian or not. Best to tread lightly… but at the same time, he’d opened the page.“Not the first time,” the Tanker replied, with an audible nonchalance, as if conveying a shrug. “But perhaps the first time as anything more than a rifleman.”“Always good to have more veterans in Suits,” the Archer next to me spoke up. “Nothing against you, Wraith, but the less kids wearing these things, the better.”“I agree,” I said, nodding to him. “Of course, the only time frame that matters today is how long you’ve been a Pilot... so get off my lawn, you whippersnappers.”The Archer chuckled, and the Tanker let out a deeper, booming laugh. I smiled, just a little. It was funny how I found this kind of interaction so much easier than talking to anybody back at the university. I had so much less experience with it, since I’d been a loner for so long – but it came naturally, rather than the grinding awkwardness of every interaction with another college student that I didn’t know how to talk to.“One day, Armsmaster will catch you,” the Tanker said. “Then you can share stories about your hometown with him, yes?”My smile died.“Why would he be chasing me?” I asked slowly, my voice flattening out despite an attempt to keep it casual.“Right, you wouldn’t know,” the Archer said, with a shrug. “It’s nothing bad, just an interview. He does it for every new Pilot he can find. Asks some questions about how long they’ve been active, if he can copy their Suit’s original manifest, as well as the audio log that played when they bonded to the Suit. Stuff like that. Some of us think he’s trying to put together some puzzle that Dragon left him, but he doesn’t know which Suits have the right pieces.”My throat tightened. Of course. The audio logs.
They were like beacons for the Suits, playing on repeat from the pod’s speakers after it crash-landed. Many Pilots got the prepared Last Will and Testament of Dragon… but other people got different things. Random pieces of audio from Dragon’s memory files. Snippets of conversations between Dragon and other capes, or government officials, or even with the Birdcage prisoners as they rode that one-way elevator down to their eternal imprisonment.When I’d found my Suit, I hadn’t gotten the Last Will and Testament of Dragon.
I’d gotten a far more terrifying message. Her last words.I still remembered it. I could still hear the desperate, pleading voice echoing through the trash-heaps in the Brockton Bay landfill. I’d been there because I was stupid enough to think that I could find my mother’s flute among the garbage.
The pod had landed in the middle of one of the stacks of crushed, condensed metal and plastic and fabric, scattering it around… and then it had let out that crying, begging, distorted electronic voice. I’d thought, foolishly, that someone else was in the dump and had been injured by the ‘bomb’ going off. I’d tried to find them, to help them.That was when I found the pod. I’d touched it, bare fingers against the cool, frictionless metal. And when I did, the audio log had played back from the beginning… and I had listened to the last words that Dragon spoke, even as Saint was killing her. Her dying pleas.I shook my head swiftly, repressing a shudder at the memory. I didn’t need to remind myself of those words right now. I didn’t need more guilt on my shoulders, not when I was trying my hardest to live up to those words.“Maybe I’ll talk to him, one of these days,” I said, unsure if I was lying or not.
I was forcing myself to rejoin the conversation. To distract myself with something. But even then, it was still good. I was talking to people again. I was growing those human connections. We had an hour to kill before we’d get to Singapore. I knew that if I sat there silently, my mind would just obsess over my own failures. I didn’t want that. I wanted to do something to fill that time. I wanted to“In fact, let me tell you about the Leviathan fight in Brockton Bay,” I said, pushing a weak smile to my lips. “It was my first real fight. Hell of an introduction for me.”
“The last old-school Endbringer fight,” Narwhal chuckled. “Before all this modern stuff.”
“This is Khagan,” Narwhal introduced, nearly an hour later, as holograms floated in front of our seats. “He’s been active now for a little over two years.”
We were thirty minutes out from Singapore. It was game time.
“He started his career by hitting Vladivostok, Russia, with a Squadron of five other Pilots,” Narwhal continued. “He raided the port, destroyed the dockyard infrastructure, sank a couple Russian ships, and escaped in just over twenty minutes. Notably, his men got inside the city and deployed from a container-ship inside the port, and exited over land, heading north, deeper into Russia.”I inspected the image carefully.
Khagan had a rare quadrupedal design that resembled a classical centaur. From the waist up, it was a human torso. From the waist down, it was a horse. Being a Dragonsuit, the entire thing had an armored motif to it – but despite his Mongolian name, his suit was clearly inspired by European knights, with shining plate armor and bright blue decorative highlights. His Suit carried a lance, and in the hologram footage, the tip was sparking. It might be a power fist, I considered. Those weapons were rare, and technically less deadly than my own beam saber… but their crackling corona of energy allowed them to stun Dragonsuits just like an ion cannon could.My gut instinct was to inspect the rest of his Suit for weapons, signs of equipment, and other things that would matter when I fought him – but I forced myself to stop and listen to Narwhal.
I wasn’t a lone wolf any more. I was working with a team, and I didn’t need to handle everything alone. I quieted down the part of me that was worrying about fighting Khagan all by myself.“Given that it was the home port of the Russian Pacific Fleet, there were initial concerns that Khagan was being employed by a nearby state actor as a deniable asset,” Narwhal continued. “The obvious candidates were Japan, North Korea, South Korea, China, and Taiwan.”
The hologram advanced again, and showed a map of East Asian. Marked spots popped up all over the places – targets of Khagan’s raids.
“Lesser thought was given to Mongolia, until his second raid at an airbase in Kazakhstan, a month later,” Narwhal said. “In the first attack, Khagan has just been one of the Suits present – but after the second, he was the clear leader of the Squadron, and we learned his name, and his claim of being a Mongolian patriot fighting their ‘ancestral enemies’. At that point, the Guild took notice of him.”Someone snorted in disbelief, the sound echoing over the radio headsets.“Khagan has a regular set of favored tactics,” she said, as the hologram zoomed in, flying down towards Central Asia, towards what looked like an airstrip. “He leans hard into the Mongolian theme, and his Suits are fast and mobile, but strategically he’s closer to an armored blitzkrieg than a harasser. He doesn’t linger anywhere for long, and he doesn’t feign weakness. He gets in and out as quickly as he can, before any reinforcements can show up. With how empty a lot of Central Asia is, it works pretty well.”The hologram must have been of Khagan’s second attack, the one on Kazakhstan. Two dozen red dots approached the airstrip on the hologram, spreading out to the flanks and enveloping it… though they kept a safe distance. Green dots were emerging from buildings, but there were fewer of them, and they were slower to come out.
After a few seconds of back-and-forth skirmishing, the red dots surged from the northern flank, where the green dots were thinnest, and punched into the airstrip. Their comrades followed quickly, and the green dots were wiped out quickly.
“Officially, we don’t care what nation he’s working for,” Narwhal said, as the hologram changed back to a map of eastern Asia. “His constant raids have destroyed a lot of people’s livelihoods across a wide area, far more than many A-rank threats.”
The hologram twisted, again, and a golden outline started shining around one nation in particular.
“Unofficially, we’re confident that his backer is China,” Narwhal said flatly. “Out of all the nations he’s raided, he’s hit the Chinese the least, and each time he does, he gets ‘driven back’ by the CUI’s Pilots within ten minutes without damaging much of anything. A few Japanese and Korean Squadrons have managed to fight him off, but in those cases, there’s collateral damage that makes it clear what Khagan was targeting.”“Which makes this the exception, right, boss?” the Archer called out, interrupting.“That’s right, Beaver,” Narwhal agreed, accepting the interjection without any problems. “Khagan has hit multiple targets in the same strike before, but not like this. Singapore has only a few Pilots and parahumans, and poses little active military threat to anybody in the region. What’s more, despite the initial reports, it looks like he’s trying to be clean about this. We’ve got word that Khagan was actually seen disciplining one of his Pilots who hit a civilian apartment block.”
She paused, and waited a moment for that to sink.
“As of five minutes ago, we crossed the one hour mark for this brawl,” she said, firmly. “It’s not a raid, and we’re not turning around. Any questions?”“I get that political stuff is complicated, but why are we getting involved?” asked Guano, the other Medium Pilot. The one who’d stood up for me against Mayo.
Over the last hour I’d learned all their callsigns, though not always why.
Mayonnaise, or Mayo for short, would put mayo on anything, up to ice cream, steak, and sushi.
Guano had apparently been dubbed ‘bat shit’ after some stunt with the Royal Air Force, but he’d looked too happy with the name, so they’d changed it to Guano so he wouldn’t be.
Beaver, the Light-weight archer-lookalike near me, was still a mystery.
The Heavy-weight was called Thief. I didn’t ask, and I didn’t want to know. Some skeletons were better left buried.“Officially, it’s because he’s crossed the threshold to be an A-Rank threat,” Narwhal said, her voice a bit amused. “Unofficially, he’s been an A-ranker since that first raid, based on damage estimates alone – not that anybody acknowledged it, since they were too busy pointing fingers at each other, trying to figure out who was bankrolling him.”“Fuckin’ politicians,” Mayo grumbled.“More to the point, this is the first time he’s slowed down enough for us to hit him,” Narwhal said, ignoring him. “That will be his last mistake. If our intel assumption are right, and he’s trying to make a new home for himself, then he can’t retreat to his backers any more. This is our chance to destroy a potential criminal faction before it gets off the ground.”“Hear hear,” said Thief, in his Heavy-weight suit.
I bit my lip. Everyone else had been contributing to the briefing, while I’d been silent. Most of the time, I had a good strangle-hold over the instinctive urge to speak up and ask questions where it wasn’t needed… but right now, I think something was needed.“What’s the plan once we land?” I asked. “Are we prioritizing enemy Pilots, or protecting the city, or what? I realize you probably have procedures for all of this, and I’m sorry for slowing you down. But my experience is a little more… improvisational. Go here, kill that, things like that.”“Don’t apologize, Wraith,” Narwhal said, glancing over at me with a slight smile. “Initial plans are to take out the enemy Pilots. We’ll hit them hard enough to make them retreat, then hit them harder once they’re outside of the city and away from the population. However, we can’t rely on that plan working, so things might change on the fly.”“If we don’t know what we’re doing, then the enemy doesn’t either!” Mayo commented sarcastically, faking a cheer.“That said, I do plan to use you as a roamer,” Narwhal continued, ignoring Mayo. “Most of our Suits on this mission can’t fly. We’ll use drones for recon and light support, but you’ll be our mobile reserve, moving from hot spot to hot spot. That’ll be some combat, maybe some search and rescue, but each time you’ll get a quick briefing.”“Sounds good to me,” I agreed, nodding as my worries were addressed. “What about targets of opportunity? Take the shot?”“Only if you can get out alive,” Narwhal clarified. “Taking out enemy Suits is important, but we’re in this for the long haul. There’s no point in death-defying heroics just to take out a handful of rookies that Khagan can replace. Elite Pilots are hard to come by. I don’t want to lose a single one.”
“Understood,” I said, though I was a little disappointed by that statement.
Yeah, it was important not to die, but it felt kind of wrong to me. Like a more aggressive strategy, doubling down on offense, was a better solution.Still, this wasn’t my operation, and I was here as to support Narwhal. Not the other way around.I didn’t speak up again. I sat back and listened carefully as the other members of the Guild strike force kept asking their own questions. Most of them were insightful, and even those that weren’t still helped me get a feel for how the entire group would operate once we hit the ground.There was some kind of repetitive thumping. For a moment, I looked at the walls of the Dragonsuit we were all riding inside – but no, it couldn’t be. Nobody else was reacting, and at the speeds we were flying, turbulence would either be nothing, or an instantaneous death.I looked down, and saw my foot tapping. Not hurriedly, not frantically, but still tapping. I smiled, and stopped it with a thought.
Just the jitters. Like a race-horse in the stalls, waiting for the starting gate.
But for once… I felt like the jockey, and not the race-horse. I felt like I was in control.
The bay door opened, and Thief’s tank-like Dragonsuit thundered down the ramp, hitting the concrete and flooring it. Mayo and Guano followed him, their bulky Medium-weight suits charging off. Beaver, Narwhal, Wieldmaiden and I followed them out, into the darkness.It was night, here. Singapore was halfway around the world from Toronto, and the local time was past ten o’clock. Yet even now, the air was humid and warm, a real change from the late winter of Minneapolis-Saint Paul that I’d grown accustomed to.
Floodlights from nearby hangars and airport buildings illuminated the tarmac, while in the distance, I could see the bright crisscrossing lights from the city proper, maybe a dozen miles away. Neon glimmered in the humid haze.The other two Fortress-weight Dragonsuits were parked nearby as I emerged – unloading their own cargoes. Six Medium-weight Suits came stomping out of one, while the other had released a quartet of Lights, two more Mediums, and a towering Heavy-weight hopper with digitigrade legs that had folded itself up just to fit inside, but now loomed eight meters tall, carrying a Metalstorm cannon in its humanoid arms.I wasted no time. I jogged clear of the Guild dropships, then hit the activation sequence on my wristband, and held it out as it breached the pocket-dimension containing my Suit. As soon as it had finished shifting into existence, I popped the back hatch with a biometric scan and climbed in, feet-first.The neurohelmet descended, and my Dragonsuit purred to life around me.“This is Wraith,” I reported, as soon as I was hooked in. “Ready for overwatch duties. Who’s my controller?”“Wraith, you’ll be working with myself, and Major Jun Hao of the RSAF,” Narwhal told me, waving me towards one of the hangars.
I walked up to her. Our height differences had swapped, and now she looked small compared to me. She was standing at a table surrounded by uniformed officers of the Republic of Singapore Air Force, including a man that looked up to me and saluted. I nodded back to him, then glanced down at the map.“With Khagan’s forces primarily concentrating on the west and north of the city, you should stay low between the skyscrapers,” Narwhal said, tapping on the map’s southern reaches, where the city was. “Use them as concealment, cover if necessary.”“We would prefer if you did not bait the Mongols into attacking our buildings,” Major Jun Hao said with clipped British accent, his voice stressed and weary. “But with the necessities of war being what they are, to avoid being noticed by enemy AA… I will authorize it.”“Thank you, Major,” I replied. “Where do you need me first?”“The western flank,” Major Jun Hao replied immediately, pointing to the far edge of the city. “The north is holding, and we’re calling up all the reservists we can, but if the Mongols break into the city proper, then the population will suffer the most.”“What about that huge park in the center?” Narwhal asked, frowning as she tapped on it. “Looks like a big weakness.”“The nature reserve,” the Major identified. “The Gurkhas are deployed there. It will hold.”
Unarmored infantry against Dragonsuits? Not likely. But this was their city, and their military. I held my tongue, and nodded.I took a few running steps to get away from the table, and then soared up into the air with my jet engines.
As I gained altitude, I saw the skyscrapers much more clearly. This wasn’t the Twin Cities, all sprawled out across a wide area. This was Singapore. White LED lights and bright neons replaced the old yellow-oranges of American streetlights.I could see the gunfire even from here. Tracer rounds deflecting and spinning off into the night. Fireballs from rockets, missiles, mines, and claymores. It was like fireworks in the distance, but lower to the ground than any firework should be.I gunned the engines, and charged into the battle.