Free Devon's Blade by Ken McConnell Page B

far side of our island. You could hear the sounds of screaming Swift engines and the pulsing throb of KiVs.
Except those were not KiVs. What the hell were they?
    I hadn’t gotten a good enough look at them to know for sure but I didn’t see any openings in their wings. All KiVs had cutout areas in their wings. But those dark fighters had no cut outs. The comms back in the Ops shack were blaring with pilots screaming at each other. Karvuk and I went back inside to listen to what was happening.
    The Alert pilots were trying to attack as they were trained but the enemy fighters were getting behind them somehow. Sweetness burst into the room out of breath and sweating.
    “Commander,” she said, catching her breath.
    “Those things are new. Not threes. Something else.”
    Seconds later we heard a boom from the far side of the island. Then we heard the report.
    “Alert Two down, repeat Alert Two down.”
    There was a long deadly silence and then another burst of static followed by, “Alert One, enemy retreating. No joy.”
    I looked at Sweetness. She shook her head. “They were not Three’s! They could out climb us and outgun us,” she said. I could see the terror in her eyes.
    “Okay, it’s over. Settle down and get some water. Karvuk, get an AIRCAP up and report back before engaging anything,” I said. Karvuk took off towards the pilot barracks.
    I went back outside and headed over to the EMS shack that served as our only hospital. Hilltop was being tended to on a bed near the entrance. His arm and right leg were burned pretty badly but he was conscious.
    I tried to stay out of the Doctor’s way but I had to know what he had encountered.
    “What were they?” I asked.
    Hilltop winced from the pain as they treated his burns. “They were airborne before we attacked. Never saw them until they hit us. They looked like KiVs, but they weren’t. Faster and more heavily armed. They took out Skip and Stoker before we could even engage. Sweetness and I bailed on them and high tailed it home. Those sons of bitches caught up to us and nearly finished me off. Sweetness distracted them by getting them to follow her. I don’t think she ever got a shot off at them.”
    “How many of them were there?” I pressed.
    “Two. Just two, dammit!”
    I tried to calm him down and told him to rest and recover. As I was leaving he hollered out to me. “Commander. One of them new fighters was all red.”
    I swallowed hard and left. The last thing I needed now was fear overcoming my pilots.
    * * *
    I spent the rest of the day in my office, pouring over the gun camera footage of the new Votainion fighter and all the tactical data from the flight computers of Hilltop and Sweetness. The computers pieced together the battle as best they could and filled in any details missed with logical extrapolation. No matter how you looked at it, we got our asses kicked and kicked hard. Not only did we lose three pilots in one fight, we lost all the battle hardened confidence I had worked so hard to instill in my pilots. With this Red Ace back in business, we were back to square one in more ways than one.
    Images of the new fighter were intriguing. Under any other circumstance, I’d be chomping at the bit to get into a fight with one. But now was not the time for single combat heroics. Now was the time to learn all that I could about this new weapon in order to come up with some kind of attack plan to counter it. In the past month of combat, we had taken over the skies of Kew from the Votainions. I’m not going to brag about total air superiority, but we had that and more. We chose when and where to attack the enemy and we did so with such lethality it had begun to wear them down and make them think twice about engaging us. More often than not, we’d scare them away or shoot them down before they could run. Now the tables were turned. Now we were the ones on the run and they had the advantage.
    The new fighter was impressive. I got that same sick