This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Gamestrider09 on 2025-06-25 13:37:39+00:00.

Humidity gathered at the edges of the cockpit as the ship descended through the clouds. Each condensed, unborn raindrop hit the reinforced glass with a little peck before being pulled towards the back of the vessel, racing other raindrops to go flying off the end of the craft, ripped free by speed and wind to break apart and rejoin the stormy void.

Little was said. Little needed to be said. An unease settled over the flight group as they approached the mission zone. L’aira had been over the battle plan six times before they had launched, but she couldn’t relax.

How could she, after all? They were going against Humans.

Pilots who had barely returned alive from doomed missions told horror stories of Human atmospheric fightercraft. How they had barely seen them coming before their ships began going down. How the night sky erupted in fire from primitive missiles and streams of yellow kinetic bullets put a hundred holes in their vessels and reduced their crews to blue mist. How the pilots maneuvered in impossible ways and stalked their every action. The Validari may have been able to control the war in space, but in the atmosphere and thick gravity of Earth, Men were king.

The commander dismissed the nightmarish tales as paranoid rumors, saying they were counterproductive and bad for morale, but they still spread through the halls of the starcarrier Rae T’elia like a wildfire.  L’aira had never even seen a Human before, not even a picture, but she already hated them in some way. They had taken all the joy out of flying. Now, every sortie was filled with dread.

A bolt of lightning streaked across the sky about a kilometer in front of them and was gone in a blink. The shockwave reached the squadron a second or two later, and it rattled their craft. L’aira gripped the control throttle a little tighter. She couldn’t see her skin past the firm gray of her flight suit gloves, but she could feel her blue hands squeezing the joystick until they turned white.

The Mk.III Sera Multi-Role Attack Craft was a beautiful piece of Validari engineering. Its sleek wings, easily maneuverable thrusters, nanolaminate hull plating, and lightshield projectors had proven dominant thus far against Mankind’s primitive drone spacecraft. L’aira took comfort in the familiarity of her ship. She had memorized every inch of it for as long as her name had been painted on the side. Every panel, power conduit, bolt, screw, and seal was hers. Now, the dim red lighting that painted the cabin only added to the dread shared by her fellow pilots.

The only piece that remained untainted by the terror was the photograph of her and her father, taped just above the dashboard, taken the day she graduated from the academy, back home on Validar. She had been made fun of for using the centuries-old method of pictures instead of holograms, but it was too special to be digitized. It felt nice to have a tangible keepsake in her ship.

The voice of V’aee Keenlo, the squadron leader, crackled over her helmet comms. “Thirty seconds out from the target. Ready weapons and countermeasures.” He was trying to keep his tone professional, but she could hear the worry in his usually stable and confident voice.

The other three members of the squadron, Faen, Resilla, and D’varr, all rattled off the same confirmation of his order. “Weapons armed, ECM spooling.” Each voice bore the same unease. L’aira pressed a handful of buttons on her dashboard, and the all-too-familiar whirrs of the readying weapons systems filled her ears. “Weapons armed, ECM spooling.”

She glanced at the lidar display in her ship. Her Sera and the other four craft appeared in a comforting light blue, flying in a neat arrow on the screen. Every time a new target was detected, a ping noise would emit from the dashboard. So far, there was nothing to be found in the hailing night… not yet, anyway.

The silence was crushing her more than the planet’s gravity. She had to speak, make conversation, do something. “What name do the Humans have for this communications array?”

Faen responded in less than a second.  Despite the war between their races, he was entrapped by the culture, nomenclature, and history of Humans. He probably knew more of their many languages better than anyone else in the squadron, or even on the carrier.

“I believe they call this region 'Amazon.’ A major forest on this planet. One of the last of its kind.”

Keenlo chimed in a moment later. “Keep the channel clear for combat, we’re about to enter the operation zone.” Silence briefly filled the channel again, before Keenlo started counting down. “Entry in three… two… one… weapons free, engage all target at will. Break!”

L’aira gripped the control throttle and took a harsh roll to the right, just as a blinding flash of white and yellow bloomed in the storm. Three different alarms flared in her cockpit, and one of the blue blips on the lidar display had disappeared. Resilla cursed, and confused chatter filled the radio.

Faen’s craft had exploded. Nobody had even seen it coming, or where it was coming from. There were no indications prior, and Faen hadn’t so much as screamed in warning. L’aira’s brain immediately went into action, trying to figure out where the hidden missile had come from. It couldn’t have come from the array, because they didn’t have defenses, and they would have seen the missile coming even if they did. His craft couldn’t have just exploded randomly; it had to be something she wasn’t seeing.

Her lidar display, as if on cue, pinged a new target entering its detection radius. The automated identification system didn’t know what it was any more than she did and colored the approaching craft a neutral yellow. A moment later it turned red, which meant the lidar had detected armed weapons, and beeped twice to signal it.

Everyone had noticed it as she did, and D’varr was the first to announce its presence. “Enemy fighter, Southeast, five klicks out… four… thre-” another fireball erupted in the storm, a miniature star where D’varr and his fighter used to be, quickly doused by the torrent and gone into a puff of smoke and falling wreckage. His ship collided with the forest floor and sent a faint flicker of light back up at them.

L’aira glanced at her lidar display again. The new craft was less than two klicks away from them now, then one. Its target marker merged with hers. It was right on top of them. Before she could even blink, the silhouette of the predator vessel rocketed past her ship, burning a trail of purple and yellow from its singular engine.

Lightning flashed across the sky once again, and in that flicker of an instant, she could make out the fighter’s full form, determining that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was Human. She recognized the ship’s model instantly from a dozen different mission briefings, combat records, and training textbooks.

Humans called it the “Lightning II,” an almost humorous name, considering the weather, but Validari pilots knew it by a different name: Stalker. For a moment, L’aira swore she could have seen the pilot in the fighter cockpit, staring back at her. A logo depicting seven white rings arranged in the shape of a flower was emblazoned on the wings of the fighter, marking the ship as a defense fighter of Earth.

The lightning faded, and the Stalker disappeared into the darkness again. Time seemed to freeze in that moment as terror gripped her. A chill ran up her spine and then back down, sending the same feeling down her arms and legs. Her hands began shaking. The readings of her helmet display became blurry, and the alarms became muted. The cockpit became an echo chamber for her own rapid breathing, and the pounding of her own heart throbbed in her ears and eyes.

A new noise joined the thick smoke of muffled sounds and warnings, slowly becoming clearer. Not a noise, but a voice, calling her name. “L’aira! L’aira, respond!” The voice then called her by rank. “Lieutenant Adros, can you hear me?” The disciplined military woman inside of her pressed up through the fear to meet the voice, summoned by name.

Every sound in her cockpit came rushing back to her at once, almost making her wince. The voice of Keenlo reached her with new clarity. The awareness of every aspect of her situation came rushing back to her all at once, and she responded. “Yes sir, I hear you.”

She knew he wanted to ask if she was okay, but there was no time. Her response was good enough, and he began directing the last of the squadron. “We need to get above the cloud layer, control the fight!” Without wasting any additional time, his ship turned slowly to arc upwards, away from the target array and back into the storm. She followed right behind him, and knew Resilla was right behind her.

With how fast the Stalker had rocketed past them, her craft suddenly felt frustratingly lethargic in comparison. The advanced thrusters and internal gravity manipulation of the Sera had made it perfect in exoatmospheric battles, fighting against unarmored, skeleton-like, unmanned Human machine-craft, which could take hours to make a full turn in a space battle. The Sera could turn on a dime with its thrusters and even survive direct impacts with the frail robotic vessels, along with whatever weapons the tiny drone could carry.

But in the atmosphere, Earth’s gravity greedily tugged at the ship and its pilot, the surface below hungering for them. The amount of fuel burned to keep the spaceframe …

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