Chase spent the next five minutes getting chewed out by the deck officer. Irresponsible. Show-off. Reckless. Maverick. He spent all the standard criticisms so fast that she couldn’t help being impressed. All that for a slightly rushed parking job—he didn’t even know about the stunt she’d pulled in the air.
A couple of freshman ground crew waited by the fuel tanks, chatting up Pippin. They gave her thumbs-ups from behind the officer’s back. Chase knew her fan club by sight, but she hadn’t bothered to learn their names. That might have seemed flyboy elitist like everything else at the Star, but she really just wasn’t the kind of girl to focus on anyone or anything outside of Dragon.
When the officer finally stomped away, Chase strode over with her helmet under her arm. She couldn’t keep back a smile. She loved riling up an officer—putting on a show. It was better than being overlooked, and it also kept people at a manageable distance.
“You flew Dragon to her vapors, Nyx,” one of the freshmen said. He had a zit the size of Mount Vesuvius on his forehead, but his eyes were headlight bright. “What happened? Red drones?”
“You know I can’t answer that.” Chase dropped her helmet into his outstretched hands. She rubbed the now cold sweat through her short hair and respiked her fauxhawk.
“So what happened?” a girl asked. She had acne too. Working in the grease mist of the hangar wreaked havoc on skin. “Did you almost die?”
“Would you say twice?” Chase asked Pippin.
“Counting the wall? Three.” Her RIO was sweatier than normal after their garden-variety flights, and when she tried to catch his eye, he rubbed the back of his neck and looked elsewhere.
“Sweet.” The freshman cradled Chase’s helmet. He started to talk a little too fast about a secret party that he was throwing in his barracks that weekend. Chase wasn’t really listening until the girl broke in.
“Don’t ask her. She’s just going to say no.” The last name on the girl’s jumpsuit was HELENA. “Flyboys never hang out with the ground crew.”
Her comment was aimed at Chase, but Helena was sending missiles at the wrong bogey. Chase wasn’t the one who set the rules. Flyboys kept their own company. Ground crew kept theirs. Add to that the divisions of the grades… These guys were not only ground crew but freshmen to boot. They were circles away.
“Thanks for the invite, Jameson, but I’m busy with train—”
“See?” Helena broke in. “Told you, Stephens. She doesn’t even know your name.”
Stephens didn’t seem to care. He was giving Chase I-want-to-hug-on-you eyes. She redirected. “I need Kale. Is he in the tower?”
Helena said yes while Stephens said no. Chase left them to debate, taking off at a tired jog and weaving a path through the cavernous hangar with Pippin at her heels. They both knew that when they finally stopped moving, really stopped, they’d knock out. Flight was exhausting; non-flyboys never quite got that. A few hours in the air and she was beat—and that was at lower speeds. The faster she flew, the harder the strain on her body to fight the extra gravity. Kale said it was the equivalent of running a half marathon every time she broke mach speed for more than five minutes.
It didn’t help that the hangar was a lesson in cold, sinking ice fingers into her muscles. The building was cement-floored with four-story-high ceilings. Chase jogged around planes, jets, and helicopters in a range of working order. There were even a few older, now obsolete drones. Some birds stood under huge tarps like veiled dinosaur bones while others were shiny and fueled, ready to fly far and fast in case someone turned up the burner on the Second Cold War. The pilots stationed here lived at the ready.
“You could have said you’d try to make it.” Pippin jogged faster to catch up. “Let them dream a little.”
“Hope is sugar. Truth is protein,” she said, unwittingly quoting her father.
“Cheers, Gandhi.”
“Come on. A freshman ground crew party in the barracks? It’ll be broken up in fifteen minutes, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t need any more demerits.”
“It couldn’t hurt to have a few more friends, Chase. Even out your reputation a little.”
“Not my concern,” she said, ignoring his jibe. There were a little more than a thousand cadets at the Star, and while everyone seemed to know Chase because of her status as a Streaker pilot, she only knew the flyboys she interacted with daily—and the ones she singled out for a little fun.
Chase flung open the door to the tower and took the steps two at a time. “You’re one to talk, Pip. I don’t see you socializing with anyone outside of Baggins or Skywalker during free hour.”
At the top of the stairs, she entered a circular room bustling with airmen and lined with windows. Outside, the sky lapsed into navy twilight while the green mist of the northern lights shone down.
The academy and the Air Force base, known jointly as the Star, lay within view of Canada’s glacial rolls and epic forests. Banks Island was formerly a Canadian National Park, a forgotten little piece of ice that the U.S. had purchased decades back, right before Ri Xiong Di took over. It was an “out of sight, out of mind” kind of location. A pain in the butt to get to for those people who didn’t have military aircraft at their disposal. It was also strategically located just east of Alaska—a likely invasion point if Ri Xiong Di stormed through Siberia.