AFTERMATH
Three hammerheads came back...
Three. The core had sent seventeen of their best pilots, and three had come back, one ship damaged beyond repair, and a pilot with hypothermia. Edwards walked across the dock, to the exhausted pilots, asking: Did you get him?
One of the two pilots just stared at his shattered ship, the other visibly flinched. Ye...yessir. the man stammered, the best pilots the Guild Core could find, broken.
Good job, son.
Edwards stood in medical, staring down at the comatose Holly Kay...
You know, i could have had a battleship for what you cost me, Kayvesk.... I sent seventeen of the best pilots the core can find me, each with a full support wing, thats nearly a hundred pilots, do you have any idea what the support for seventeen fighter wings costs? Coming in damaged every day for three months? Hell, usually, they needed completely new ships. Edwards stopped, shook his head, sighed. And I'm talking to a vegetable. Great.
Morika base was more a nursery than the fortress I had expected, there were cots in the halls, and little girls playing in the docking bays. As i looked around, i noticed that all of them had orange stains around their lips. I turned to my partner, Blood Dragon pilot Hiroki Matsoturi; "You call this a charity? all these girls are addicts."
"Hie, and they weren't before they came...they were Samura slaves, or worse. with any luck, these girls will live to be a hundred, in realative luxury"....
She was fast, and moved oddly, knocking other girls down onto the mats, spinning a half-sized naganata the way a normal girl would spin a jump rope, constantly licking her orange stained lips and grinning...she gazed at me with bright green eyes, not exactly Kusari stock.
"I'm Kietan Juno, Kay san...the sisters have assigned me to be your guide" she was twelve, and eighty pounds, and could probably kill me...
"Holly, Holly, don't go, stay here, stay. don't leave me, please." Little girl wouldn't let go, and and as i walked toward my brand new Dragon, she dragged along behind me, clutching at my flight-suit.
I stood in the observatory on Casablanca Base...waiting, holding Helen's hand...my nurse pulled in a shocked breath, and i jumped, standing tiptoe to see a the top of a Sabre moving into the bay over the windowsill....emblazoned over the top in red were the words "Kay's Nightmares"... "Mama's back, mama's back" I yelled... and then i looked around, at Helen, crying. "What's wrong, Helen?"
The Natturturn Zwie was the only thing my mother had....the only thing that was left. Hessians live out of their ships, and between the Corsairs and Rhienland, living wasn't easy....not at all...hard enough, in fact, that living killed my mother. They hung the Natturturn over my bed like normal children had mobiles....and there it stayed...until i was nineteen, and then I had it mounted on my Sabre.
WRATH
The guns were hot, and the roar of the thruster shook the entire ship... I quivered, fear and excitement made my arms ache, my thumbs balanced just above the trigger. Just a little squeeze...the distinctive zing of the Natturturn...and a Bang...loud and furious, and i was enveloped in flame...blood splattered my hull...and i was through...and that Rhienland SoB was dead. Just as dead as my dear mama.
"It's a Taiidan, lad. A bomber." The Count was quick, and sharp, speaking with a jovial snap that drew me along, down paths I would never have dreamed...still, this was too much.
"It's a pig. Powerful as a matter of course, but, can it dodge a shot? It's a pig, couldn't dodge a mortar."
Comms crackled, and the Count laughed. "Well...come on then...talon isn't good enough...taiidan isn't good enough...should put you back in a Sabre and be done with it...come on lad, lets go fishing."
LOVE
She had a dromedary....and a couple girls drifting around it, doing something. She had it decked in gold...and those damn flowers, trying to hide her scars, her sisters' pain. Almost worked, but for their eyes. Their eyes bore horrors...terror, starvation, pain. I saw her soul, her mania, and I loved her, would cross any obstacle for her, destroy nations to defend her.
