Amonkar had completed weeks upon weeks of training in the simulator, and logged nearly a hundred hours in the air with instructors, first in a single-engine flyer and then in the larger twin-engine and four-engine light bombers. After qualifying for solo flight, she and the rest of the graduating class had waited impatiently while the instructors reviewed their flight scores and aptitude tests, until finally the crew assignments were posted on the wall outside the main building.

A week later, she and the rest of the crew of the light bomber Fair Winds for Escort were completing one final training flight before the plane was dismantled and sent up the Bridge of Heaven to the cargo ships waiting in orbit above.

In the early years of the Second Mexic War, Amonkar had learned, crews were trained on terrestrial aircraft, then sent to Fire Star where low-gravity, low-atmospheric-pressure craft were waiting for them, already sent from the shipyards above Diamond Summit and constructed in situ on the red planet. The masters of the Interplanetary Fleet Air Corps had learned that even though the demands of flying a plane on Earth differed considerably from those involved in flying on Fire Star, there was a measurable advantage to a crew becoming acclimated to the eccentricities of their aircraft before being thrust into combat. The compromise that was reached, then, was to construct the craft on Earth, modified somewhat to fly in the heavier gravity and thicker atmosphere, and then after the crew had been allowed to familiarize themselves with their particular craft, the plane would be dismantled, sent in pieces to Fire Star, and then assembled there, the modifications removed such that it was now perfectly suited for its new environment. The attendant increase in cost of materials and manpower, to say nothing of the time and expense involved in lifting the dismantled craft from the Earth’s surface to orbit on the Bridge of Heaven elevator, was deemed well worth the benefits of crews fully accustomed to their craft before flying into enemy fire.

Fair Winds for Escort was a Deliverer class light bomber, and Amonkar Arati was proud to serve as her co-pilot. Like so many of those in the flight training school, Amonkar had long dreamt of flying, and though she was still somewhat uncertain about the combat encounters that awaited on the red planet, the war was at least allowing her to fulfill those childhood dreams. As a girl, Amonkar’s favorite stories had been drawn from the Hindi national epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and she’d obsessed over those scenes involving the vimanas, flying chariots of gods and heroes. Later, in school, her favorite subject had been the study of history, at least on those days in which they discussed the Imperial Navy of the Air in the days of the First Mexic War, precursor to the modern Interplanetary Fleet Air Corps. She’d thrilled to accounts of ace squadrons like the Flying Immortals, the Spirits of the Upper Air, and the Golden Dragons, brave aeronauts who piloted their craft in dogfights against the lumbering but still-deadly airships of the Mexic Dominion’s elite Eagle Knights.

From their discussions over meals, and late nights in the barracks, Amonkar knew that Navigator Geng, a Han woman about her own age, had also wanted to be a pilot since early childhood, but in the late stages of their training, Geng had failed a depth perception test, and so instead was tapped for the navigator’s position. It was not flying, not as she’d always dreamed of doing, but it would be the closest that she would be allowed to get.

Pilot Bosch, a slender, pale-skinned young man from Deutschland, had wanted to be a fighter pilot, Amonkar had learned, jockeying one of the rotary-winged Dragonflies, or the larger Hornets with their hulls painted stark yellow and black. But when Bosch had completed his flight training, qualifying for solo flight, there had been more need in the Air Corps for skilled bomber pilots than fighters, and so he had been denied his first choice. Though he had yet to speak of it openly, Bosch’s sour expression made plain that he was still far from pleased by the turn of events.

The other crewmen, so far as Amonkar knew, had never harbored any particular desire to fly, but had been drawn from the ranks of the Interplanetary Fleet’s newest recruits, each selected first for their height and weight, and then for their skills and aptitudes. Tail Gunner Xiao, a Han from the Middle Kingdom, was nearly ten years Amonkar’s senior, but was so diminutive that he might have passed for a teenaged boy. Nose Gunner Siagyo spoke Official Speech with a Nipponese accent, dainty and slight as a flower, but with a wicked sense of humor and an infectious laugh. Bombardier Mehdi was from Persia, so thin he was almost skeletal, his features gaunt behind his prominent nose, but he was good natured and kind, Amonkar had found, with an easy smile and expressive hands.

The interior of a Deliverer like Fair Winds for Escort was not pressurized, to cut down on the additional mass that pressure-seals and airlocks would require, and to prevent the possibility of decompression at higher altitudes. As a result, the crew was forced to wear constrictive flight suits, in design much like the surface suits worn by troops on the ground, but less extensively armored. And unlike the armored surface suits of ground troops, the flight suits had helmets which featured much larger faceplates, broad expanses of transparent material, nearly unbreakable, that allowed a full one hundred-eight degrees of visibility. Although the flight suits were bulky and uncomfortable, the crew were grateful to have them since, even on Earth, at the high altitudes their flight plans required temperatures dropped so far below water’s freezing point that if any of the crew were to touch exposed surfaces inside the craft with their bare hands the skin would have frozen to the metal.

To enter the plane, the bombardier, navigator, and nose gunner had to squat down and edge under the nose of the craft, sidling up to their stations through the nose wheel well of the plane. The bombardier hunched over the bombsight and controls, while the navigator sat forward of the bombardier on a retractable stool, her maps and instruments spread over a folding shelf, her eyes at a level with the pilots feet in the cockpit, ahead of and above her. The nose gunner, for her part, crabbed down into her turret, strapped into her seat and able to rotate a full three hundred-sixty degrees along one axis, and over one hundred-eighty degrees along the other.

The rest of the crew, the pilot, co-pilot, and tail-gunner, entered the plane by crawling up through the open bomb bay doors. There was no corridor to move from the nose of the plane to the rear, only a catwalk as narrow as a man’s shoulder, running over the bomb bay doors. The crewmen climbed up onto the catwalk, the pilot and co-pilot moving forward to the cockpit, the tail gunner aft to his turret. They had to take care not to fall off the catwalk, since the bay doors themselves, thin aluminum designed to roll up like window-blinds instead of opening on a hinge, only had a weight capacity of approximately fifty kilograms under Earth’s gravity, and anyone who fell from the catwalk onto them was likely to continue falling into the open air beyond. Amonkar sat on the right side of the cockpit, her seat unpadded and fixed into position, the bulky restraining straps over her shoulders, waist, and thighs. Pilot Bosch sat on the left side. In front of each of them was a yoke, either one of which could control the plane in flight, with an array of instruments, dials, and switches on the instrumentation panels before them. At the center of the panel was a gyro that showed the craft’s attitude, fore and aft as well as port and starboard. To the left was an altimeter, which used atmospheric pressure to gauge altitude, and to the right an airspeed gauge, which used impact pressure to measure velocity. When they reached Fire Star, all of the instruments would be recalibrated for the red planet’s atmosphere, but for this final training exercise, they had been set for use on Earth.

The crew would be using all of the instruments in this exercise, that was certain. The final stages of their training called for night flying in formation, using instrumentation only.

Instrument flying by night, their instructors had said, was the best test of a pilot’s abilities. The inner ear, the trainees were told, provided the human body’s primary sense of balance, acting in concert with sight, but when flying blind without any visual reference points the inner ear could be mislead. In instrument flying, then, one was required to learn how to ignore the senses and trust only the instruments.

To make things even more difficult, they would be flying in formation, just as if they were on a bombing run on Fire Star, with an entire squadron of light bombers flying in close quarters.

Their instructors had warned them about formation flying, drilling into them again and again the mistakes that rookie pilots made. Too often, they were told, beginning pilots had a tendency to over-control the craft, fighting to hold position with bursts of power. Then, when the craft would slip ahead of position, threatening to collide with the craft in the lead, the pilot yanked rearward on the throttle, pulling the craft out of alignment. Or they would try to hold lateral position using only the rudders, causing the plane to wallow back and forth through the air like the waddle of an overfed duck.

Throughout the early stages of the flight, Amonkar noted with approval, Pilot Bosch neatly avoided any of these rookie mistakes. She hadn’t gotten the chance to get to know Bosch well, these last weeks, and before they were assigned to crew Fair Winds for Escort together she doubted they’d spoken more than a handful of words to one another. As it was, it was clear that they weren’t likely to be friends, not like Amonkar and Geng were quickly becoming, but at least it appeared that their working relationship would be a smooth one. Still, Amonkar could see that Bosch still resented being denied his chance to pilot one of the rotary-winged fighters, and that he viewed the demands of piloting a light bomber as being beneath his level of skill. They were flying by night over the coastal plains of Guangdong, the skies beyond moonless and dark. It was almost as if they were flying through an empty void, the only illumination the faint running lights of the craft on either side and in front of them. There were more than a half-dozen light bombers in the formation, a diamond-shaped wedge, with Fair Winds for Escort taking the rear position.

They hit a rough patch of air, the plane juddering in turbulence. Over their helmet radios, she could hear Bosch cursing beneath his breath. Then he seemed to relax. “Ah,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else, “there he is.”

Amonkar glanced ahead, and saw a bright light ahead of them. She reasoned that Bosch had been disoriented by the turbulence, and now had sighted the running lights of the plane in front of them.

“Co-pilot, how long till we reach our destination?”

Amonkar leaned down, calling between her feet to the space below. “Navigator Geng, how do you read our position?”

Geng consulted her maps, the curve of her helmet just visible through the space between Amonkar’s feet. “Another hour, looks like, if course and speed hold. What’s our current velocity, Arati?”

Amonkar straightened, glancing casually at the airspeed indicator.

She fought the urge to panic.

“Pilot Bosch,” she said as quickly and calmly as possible. “We’re flying far above the craft’s top speed.”

“What?!” Bosch said, perturbed, as though she had disrupted his thinking.

The two of them glanced ahead through the windshield at the bright light ahead, moving rapidly toward them. Then they both looked to the gyro, and the rapidly spinning altimeter, and immediately understood what had happened.

The light they were chasing wasn’t the plane ahead of them in formation. It was a roadside lamp on the ground. They were plunging toward the ground, banked over to one side.

But even if they didn’t hit the ground, at their current speed, all it would take was another rough patch of air and the plane would break up, not designed for the stresses of such high velocity.

All of this passed between them, unspoken, in an instant, a matter of split seconds from the time that Amonkar first noticed their velocity. Any action they took would need to be immediate and decisive, or all onboard were going to die.

Pilot Bosch, to his credit, didn’t waste time in self-recrimination or worry, but immediately moved into action. Unfortunately, his was the exact wrong action to take. Watching him, Amonkar could see that he intended to pull back hard on the stick. Unless she stopped him, pulling back hard on the yoke with the plane still banked to one side would put them into a descending spiral, one they wouldn’t have time to pull out of.

Amonkar saw there was no time to explain, only time to stop him sending them all to their deaths. She grabbed her own stick, punching the toggle that switched full control to the co-pilot’s station. She immediately reduced power, and rolled the plane to level off their trim. The second the gauges and gyro showed a level trim, then she yanked back on the stick, pulling them out of the dive.

“What in the eighteen-hells are you doing up there?” Geng shouted over her helmet radio.

Amonkar didn’t answer, but turned to look at Bosch. The stricken expression on his face made plain that he’d realized the error of his approach, and knew just how close they’d all come to disaster. His mouth hung slightly open, eyes wide as saucers, but he remained silent, unspeaking.

He didn’t say another word during the entire flight back to base.

The next day, Bosch was gone, scrubbed out and sent off to crew a vacuum craft of the Interplanetary Fleet, stripped of the ability to fly.

Amonkar found herself bumped to pilot, with another trainee being pulled up from the ranks to serve as Fair Wind for Escort’s co-pilot.

In addition to the elevation in position, Amonkar was offered a commendation for her quick thinking at the stick, which had saved the lives of six crew members, to say nothing of the man-hours and materials that had gone into the construction of the plane itself.

Amonkar declined the commendation, with all apologies, saying that the fault had been hers almost as much as it had been Bosch’s, since she should have realized the error right away, and not so late that there was scarcely any chance to address it.

Rectifying the error was simply a question of doing her duty, and addressing the earlier oversight.

It would not be the last time that Amonkar would deny honors which others felt were her due. But it would be the first and only time she would do so as a trainee. She, the rest of the crew, and Fair Winds for Escort itself, were all on their way to Fire Star.

---

PREVIOUS CHAPTER: Hexagram 11
Peace
Below Heaven Above Earth
Heaven and Earth perfectly interact. In the same way, the ruler, by his tailoring, fulfills the Dao of Heaven and Earth and assists Heaven and Earth to stay on the right course; in so doing, he assists the people on all sides.

NEXT CHAPTER: Hexagram 13
Fellowship
Below Fire Above Heaven
This combination of Heaven and Fire. In the same way, the noble man associates with his own kind and makes clear distinctions among things.

Return to Index.

Chapter 12 of Three Unbroken by Chris Roberson. Copyright © 2007 Monkeybrain, Inc. For more action from the Celestial Empire don't miss The Dragon's Nine Sons.

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