Lenn

 

The orange sun rose lazily above the horizon, casting its golden rays over the smoking chimneys and smoggy streets of New Asia. The massive perimeter wall stretching thirty kilometers around the city glowed with a dull white hue in the morning light.

A survivor of the extinction war and one of two remaining supercities, New Asia is a sprawling maze of layers upon layers of factories, residences, and slums.

As the rising sun threw down its life-giving light, the streets filled with morning commuters, rising early to attend to their work. Yellow, old, and battered taxi cabs sped through the intersections, twisting and turning through the traffic, shuttling people to and from towering skyscrapers.

Just within the walls lie the slums, a thin ring around the more central districts, where the poorest of the poor lived. Houses and shacks built primitively out of corrugated iron and plastic tarps piled upon each other like bricks of Lego.

Past the slums are the residential areas, the largest and most populous district. Towering apartment blocks, some built out of advanced plastics to save on more precious materials, house millions of citizens.

Just after that are the factories, almost always blanketed in thick brown mist, vented out of the city via massive steel pipes some tens of meters across. The factories, stacked atop each other like pancakes on a breakfast plate, churn out incredible amounts of wartime materials, goods, food, and all sorts of other stuff.

Then at the very center is the government building, the town hall, the massive spiraling tower poking out above the city skyline, whatever you want to call it. The mayor, who once built the city out of nothing, had largely faded from the public eye, replaced by an emergency wartime government.

Within the hollow perimeter walls are the many military installations—hangars filled with high-tech aircraft closed in by massive blast doors, turrets hidden behind hatches ready to spring out at the first sign of advancing enemies.

After the initial stages of the war, most land-based vehicles, unable to cross the massive distance between Europa and New Asia, became obsolete. As such, resources were refocused on building up a powerful air force. They made fighters that could dance through the skies, bombers that could shatter the sound barrier, and transports that could lift hundreds of tons.

Lenn is one of the many people who live within the hollow walls. At the tender age of sixteen, he was drafted into the air force because of a shortage of pilots. It had come as quite a welcome surprise because he had just about had enough of living in the slums.

After half a year of intense training, he had become a commander cadet of the cutting-edge JF-200 fighter.

This morning he sat in the cadet mess hall with the three others in his team, idly chatting away while waiting for a new assignment. Being the oldest among the cadets and on the verge of graduating, he and his team are well respected by the younger around them and are usually given space in the mess hall despite how crowded it is.

“I heard another one of our scouts got downed in European territory yesterday,” Rei, their flight engineer, spoke up while sipping from a carton of synthetic orange juice. His tall and muscular stature with a complexion that suggested Russian origin made him stand out among the rest of the class.

“Maybe Captain Yuki will be assigning us the recovery mission as our first solo mission,” Lenn suggested off-handedly.

“Oh? An infiltration mission as our first solo mission!?” Kang, their mission specialist, a short, tanned teen with millimeter-long hair exclaimed, smacking his hand on the table. “That’d be a crazy way to graduate!”

In the air force, a solo mission is often considered the graduation of sorts for cadets, a tradition stemming from many decades ago, back when there weren’t quite enough planes around to give everyone a wingman. Even now, when solo missions outside of patrols are few and far between, being sent on one as a cadet is still a huge honor, and often seen as a cadet team earning their rights to becoming proper combat pilots.

“Don’t be stupid,” Rei shot Kang a disapproving look, the latter’s ruckus causing many sideways glances from others in the mess hall. “A solo infiltration mission as difficult as this one is unlikely to be assigned to cadets like us.”

“We are top of our class though,” Lenn reminded Rei. “A class of almost a hundred people no less.”

“Come on now, let’s not be too cocky, we’re still some ways from graduating,” rebutted Rei calmly, putting down his juice carton.

“Come on now, that distance can be easily filled in by this solo infiltration mission,” Kang jokingly replied. “If all goes well, we’d have our Airman’s Eagle proudly on our uniform collars before the end of today.”

“Kang, let’s not…” Rei began but got cut short by someone whispering beside him.

“Captain Yuki is coming,” Ying, their gunner, a slim girl with shoulder-length black hair who never seemed to talk louder than a whisper, whispered.

They all turned their heads, and sure enough, the captain of their class, a tall man of Japanese descent, was walking down the mess hall, searching with his eyes. When his eyes met with Lenn’s, he smiled and walked over to them.

“Sir!” Lenn and his teammates stood up and saluted in perfect unison.

“At ease!” Captain Yuki boomed in his commanding, yet somewhat friendly tone.

Lenn and his teammates sat back down in perfect unison, and Captain Yuki bent over slightly.

“Briefing room at eleven hundred exactly, in your flight suits,” he spoke quietly so others in the mess hall wouldn’t hear.

“Yes, sir!” Lenn and his teammates replied in perfect unison.

Captain Yuki got up and turned to leave, but paused and turned back as if forgetting something. “And… Kang, could you please fix your collar?”

Kang, startled, quickly turned his head around to see what was wrong. When he realized his neck didn’t quite have the flexibility to look at his own collar, he reached his hand around the back of his neck instead and quickly fumbled his flipped jacket collar back into place.

“I’m sorry, sir!” Kang mumbled, but Captain Yuki had already gone. “Why didn’t you guys tell me?” Kang turned to the rest of his team, who were trying their best to suppress their laughter.

“Well, I’m afraid I don’t usually pay attention to stuff that low down,” Ying, who is half a head taller than Kang, whispered.

“What did you just say?” Kang exclaimed. “Something about not looking that far down??”

“That’s not what I said,” whispered Ying.

“No! That’s definitely what you just said!”

“Okay okay, you two, let’s go and get changed, briefing is pretty soon,” Lenn spoke through a fit of laughter.

“Yes, commander!” His team replied in unison.

 

*****

 

“Alright... engines one, two, and three are ready to go, four is still warming up.”

“Roger that, catapult is hooked up, waiting for clearance,” Lenn said, flipping some switches and going through the preflight checklist. The green text on the large displays in front of him flickered and spasmed, the digital dials and graphics morphing and shifting as the powerful aircraft came to life.

As it turned out, the recovery mission had been, in fact, assigned to them. Kang wore a smug expression during the entirety of the mission briefing.

“All engines in the green, go for launch,” Rei called out.

Less than fifty meters in front of them, the massive reinforced concrete blast doors of the catapult chamber began to slowly lift, the brilliant blue skies beyond seeping in through the gap.

The opening got bigger and bigger until there was nothing left between them and the sky.

That’s where they belong, for they were blessed with wings of steel with which to own the skies and soar as high as they wanted.

“Spy one, requesting launch on cat twelve-six,” Lenn spoke into his helmet microphone.

”Spy one, permission granted, standby for catapult launch,” traffic control replied through his earpiece.

“Green light!” Lenn called out when he saw the warning light on the side of the chamber switch from red to amber, then to green, signaling that the catapult was about to launch.

“Whoever loses their lunch will be cleaning up!” Kang shouted jokingly.

“Shut your mouth, K…” The other three said simultaneously, but before they could finish, the powerful electromagnetic catapult activated, sending their fighter forward at breakneck speed.

Lenn felt himself crushed into his seat by the acceleration as his lungs tightened, making his breath stick in his throat. His eyeballs felt like they had spun around in their sockets as the mouth of the chamber sped toward them.

Then it was gone; the crushing, suffocating, yet addictive feeling of a catapult launch.

They were airborne.

He immediately wiggled the joystick in his right hand to get a feel for the aircraft and picked up the nose so they were climbing away from the terrain. He eased back the throttle levers in his left to conserve fuel. Their engines are powerful enough to ever need full thrust outside desperate situations.

In less than a minute they had climbed to their cruising altitude of thirty thousand feet and were speeding towards the frontlines at close to twice the speed of sound.

A little more than an hour of flying later, they were beginning to near the edge of friendly airspace.

“Nearing the divide, we should start descending soon. Start warming up the visual masking unit,” said Kang as they closed in upon the boundary between friendly and contested airspace. Soon they would fly within the detection radius of enemy early warning radars, so they had to descend below treetop level to stay undetected. Even though it might sound impossible, the brilliant minds higher up have carefully planned a route through the river system, which they can traverse to stay well below treetop level.

“Roger that,” Rei replied, flipping a little switch that caused a loud mechanical hum to stir up deep within their aircraft.

The visual masking system is one of the most advanced additions to their fighter aircraft to date, able to change the color of the skin of their plane like an octopus to blend into the background. In single target mode, the system can even create an image to mirror the scene behind them to become virtually invisible to the naked eye and electronic imaging systems.

However, the system took up an incredible amount of energy and took quite a while to warm up for the projectors to work.

“Switching off radar and data link, we’ll be navigating purely on inertial guidance and compass from now on,” said Lenn.

To prevent detection, they have to cut off all incoming and outgoing signals from their plane, which could be intercepted and decoded by the enemy and reveal their position.

He rolled the fighter over upside-down to get a better view of the ground below. He saw deep green alpine trees, some jagged mountains far away, and a silvery river winding into the distance ahead of him. From up here, the river looked like a string laid down on a map, probably just barely enough to fit three fighter aircraft side by side.

“That looks awfully narrow,” Lenn mumbled to himself as they descended toward the ground rapidly, slightly unnerved by the upcoming challenge. “Ying, keep your head on a swivel for bandits, me and the others need to focus on flying and navigation.”

“Roger,” Ying replied with her soft voice. Her inward personality would make people think she’d prefer to sit behind a desk and design stuff, but for some reason, she found a strange synergy with blowing stuff up.

To be frank, Ying is probably the person Lenn knows the least well out of his team, and by a very large margin. Ever since they were put in a team during basic training, they’ve never really communicated with each other outside of conducting missions. They’re close, but not close close.

The rest of the team will probably agree with Lenn too, as even Kang’s jokey personality has failed to have an effect on Ying.

Carefully, he guided their craft into the narrow channel of the river, the belly of their fighter just barely skimming above the waves, the powerful thrusters sending up a cloud of spray as they leveled out.

“Watch the spray, too much of it could return visual signature and reveal our position,” Kang said, not lifting his eyes off a map on his display.

“What’s my altitude margin?” Lenn asked, gently nudging the joystick with the tips of his fingers to make tiny adjustments to their flight path.

“Uhh…” Kang thought for a moment, opening up another window on his display with a whole array of constantly changing numbers. “Max of ten on the radar altimeter, any higher and we risk detection.”

Lenn whistled, “That’s not a lot is it.”

“Sure isn’t. As we approach it’s gonna reduce even further. We're currently two hundred klicks from our target site, that’s around fifteen minutes of flight at our current speed, which, by the way, you should probably slow down a little unless you want to pancake into the riverbank,” Kang added jokingly.

They flew along the meandering river, the trees growing thick along the banks speeding past them in a blur of green and brown. It amazed Lenn how nature seemed to not care no matter what humans do, even through an almost omnicidal war like this one.

“Ten klicks out from target site,” Kang called out after a while, “There should be a patch of sand along the banks where you can set down.”

“Copy,” said Lenn, stretching his neck to peer a little further down the length of the river, looking for the patch of gold Kang had mentioned.

Sure enough, ahead of them, on the interior of a bend, there was a large open patch of sediment left there by the slow-flowing water. He pulled back on the throttle, gradually bleeding off their airspeed as they got closer to their landing site.

A landing like this wasn’t hard, all Lenn had to do was keep the velocity vector on his helmet-mounted display centered on the landing site, and they should gently set down right where he was aiming. To accommodate such operations, the JF-200 has swiveling thrusters that allow it to hover and land vertically when not heavily loaded.

“Transitioning to vertical flight mode,” Lenn said, flipping a large switch to his right.

The powerful thrusters threw up a small whirlwind of steam and sand as they descended onto the patch of sediment. Soon, the view out of the cockpit was obstructed by the brown mist.

Lenn had heard stories from veterans about the early days of the war when nations still operated helicopters. A so-called “brown-out” like this often led to pilots losing spatial awareness and crashing their helicopters into the ground.

But right now that wasn’t a worry for him, as the advanced suite of sensors and computer systems aboard the JF-200 means the craft can project a simulated model of the terrain inside of his helmet visor and allow him to “see” without actually being able to.

Lenn felt the landing gears of his plane gently contact the soft upper layer of the sandbank, shutting the throttles to allow the fighter to settle its weight onto the wheels. The soft sandbank gave way under the weight of their aircraft, and they sank a little way in, perhaps up to the spokes of the wheels.

“Weight on wheels!” Reported Rei. “Engines off, trim and fly-by-wire set to vertical takeoff mode, infrared masking off, cockpit lights off…” Rei said partially to himself as he went through the checklist for a field switch-off procedure. “We’re ready to go.”

“Alright,” said Lenn, a sense of relief washing over him as he shook off the sweat on his hands. The river run wasn’t easy, and he had to use complete concentration for more than twenty minutes. His mind felt tired, and his arms felt like lead, yet the adrenaline made him want to run a marathon without stopping. “Canopy opening… unbuckle guys, let’s get going.”

With the throw of a switch, the wide bubble canopy began to hinge upwards at the back. A little folded ladder extended out the right and left sides of the aircraft, allowing the crew to climb down with little difficulty.

Once everyone had hopped onto the sand, Lenn opened his mouth to speak. “You’ve read the briefing, you know what to do, scramble any software left on the computers, destroy sensitive mechanical systems and classified tech. And, if there are any, recover the bodies of the crew. The bandit who shot them down should be long gone already, but figuring out the tech should take them longer."

“Roger that,” said everyone.

“Let’s get going then.”

They pushed past the bushes surrounding the sandbank and made their way into the depths of the forest.