Impact

The cockpit reverberates with screaming sirens as Risou hurls the heavy aircraft through the thinning atmosphere. Warning strobes pulse red. His body is slammed into the seat again and again, Sylph’s airframe rattling and groaning under the strain.

The altimeter blinks furiously - fifty-eight thousand feet and climbing fast. His breathing tightens, heart hammering against his ribs. Something’s wrong. Very wrong.

Missile lock.

The tone is unmistakable.

He snaps his eyes to the radar. Just a green wash. Nothing. No trail, no flare, no obvious vector. The canopy stretches above him like a dome of frozen glass, endless visibility - but he sees no plume, no telltale arc of white.

His mind races. How the hell did it even get a lock? Stealth protocol was engaged the whole run. Recon only. No emissions. No weapons online.

He rolls - hard.

Sylph groans but responds, her matte-black wings slicing through the upper air. She’s agile, still strong, but the Gs slam into him like a rising tide. His vision folds inward, corners greying out.

Quickly, he relaxes. Blacking out now would be a death sentence.

One breath. Two.

He rolls again - sharper this time. The whole frame shrieks as the aircraft twists, nose kicking out of line. Still no visuals. No missile. But the lock tone won’t go away.

He grits his teeth. The radar is still an empty dish, clear as the sky around him. False alarm?

No. Sylph’s threat systems are built for one thing - survivability. They don’t get this wrong.

He levels her out, sweat prickling beneath his collar. His gloves tremble as he runs a diagnostic, eyes darting from panel to panel.

No system errors.
No spoofing warnings.
No electromagnetic anomalies.

Then what the hell is it trying to-

CRACK.

The sound isn’t like anything he’s heard before - an almost wet, metallic shearing that rips straight through the fuselage behind him.

Sylph lurches. His shoulder slams into the harness. Every warning light flares to life. Red. Orange. Blinking furiously. She bucks beneath him like a wounded animal. A low, guttural vibration builds through the seat.

Instinct drives him to the controls. She’s still responding - but barely. His hands fly across the console, but he already knows. Something tore straight through her belly. Right between the engines. Not enough to ignite - thank God - but enough to take out the flight computer and sever a fuel line.

The HUD sputters. Then dies.

His world collapses down to analog backups and raw control feedback.

He glances over his shoulder. A faint, spiraling mist trails from beneath the right engine nacelle.

Fuel. Bleeding into the upper stratosphere.

His stomach knots. He cuts throttle. The deceleration hits like a drag chute. Sylph shudders again. More alerts scream. He thumbs through them, jaw clenched.

Fuel pressure: critical.
Auto-navigation: failed.
Stabilizer unit: offline.

Which means-

He looks at the stick. His hands are trembling. She’s his to fly now. No computer. No hundreds of corrections per second. Just him, and a warplane designed for supercomputers.

He takes his hand off the controls for half a second. Sylph immediately begins to roll.

He grips it again, harder, forcing her level. The buffeting doesn’t stop. No stabilizer means no compensation for the air currents up here, and every twitch of his hand gets amplified tenfold.

He swallows. Focus.

The fuel tank’s bleeding out. Twenty percent gone already. The line must’ve been gutted. If he leaves it running, it’ll be dry in minutes. But if he cuts it too much, the aircraft will stall in the middle of the stratosphere.

He gambles. Trims it down until she just barely stays in glide. The frame moans, but holds. For now.

His eyes flick to the structural readout. One light is blinking that wasn’t before. Integrity compromised. He hesitates, then taps for detail.

A new message crawls across the diagnostics panel in dim blue lettering.

Estimated reentry risk: 73%. Structural failure likely below 30,000 feet.

His chest tightens. The wings could shear off from atmospheric density alone. He wouldn’t even make it to blackout altitude. No warning. No escape. Just catastrophic breakup.

And he’s too high to eject. If he pulled now, he’d suffocate long before reaching breathable air.

He stares at the screen for too long.

Sylph groans again beneath him, the noise oddly organic in the sealed silence of the cockpit. Even the suit around him feels stifling now, like it knows something he doesn’t.

No way back to base. No comms beacon - not without the nav unit. He’d have to descend blind and hope - pray - that he didn’t disintegrate somewhere over the ocean.

Something flickers on the edge of the radar.

He blinks.

Just a single blip, tucked into the corner of the scope. Faint. Almost ghosting. Another aircraft.

Hope rises in his chest like a bubble.

It’s out of view, but close. At this altitude, everything is close. If they have a docking port, he might just survive this.

Or at least die with his boots on.

The radio crackles to life as he cycles through open channels, his gloved hand fumbling the selector.

Come on. Someone has to be listening.

A high-pitched whine rings in his headset - carrier tone. Lock acquired. His heart surges. He squeezes the mic. His voice spills out too fast, thin with altitude, tight with panic.

“Mayday! Mayday! Is anyone there? I’m running out of time!”

Nothing but static. He tries again, jamming the button with too much force. His hands are shaking.

“Mayday, Mayday. Come in, anyone! Please!”

The emptiness feels colder now. He starts to think it’s hopeless - that he imagined the blip on the radar - when a crackle cuts through the noise.

A voice. Sharp. Calm.

“Unknown aircraft, this is OB-12. State your intentions and allegiance.”

He exhales so hard he almost chokes on it. His eyes fly to the radar again. Still there. Same vector. Same blip.

They’re real. Someone’s in that ship, just out of sight beyond the shimmer of the atmosphere.

“I repeat,” the voice says. “State your intentions and allegiance.”

He doesn’t even process the question properly. The words barely register past the relief flooding his chest.

“Mayday!” he blurts, voice raw. “I’ve lost engine power and structural integrity. Please help me!”

Silence. Then the voice again, calm as ever. Almost… detached.

“Unknown aircraft, confirm your allegiance.”

What does that matter? he thinks. I’m dying up here.

He stares at the comm panel, then keys it again.

“Please! I’m losing altitude. I don’t know how much longer I can stay up!”

A pause. Then a sigh - audible through the link. The voice softens slightly, though it remains unreadable.

“Do you have a docking port?”

He jolts upright, adrenaline hitting like a second wind. He almost shouts.

“Yes! Yes, I do!”

“Alright.”

A pause.

“You have permission to dock with my aircraft. You’ll have to do some fancy maneuvering to make it work, though.”

His hands tremble at the controls. Relief detonates in his chest like light breaking through cloud cover.

“Thank you. Thank you.”

No answer this time. Just the cold hum of the upper atmosphere as Sylph rattles and jitters beneath him, the frame still losing pressure and balance. He adjusts the trim gently, trying to steady her.

Then, like a ghost emerging from mist, the aircraft materializes through the glinting horizon above.

It’s stunning.

Massive for a glider - longer wingspan than Sylph, and she’s considered oversized for single-pilot missions. Its hull is clean white, shimmering with a ceramic glare that hurts the eyes at this altitude. Solar panels glint along the upper surfaces. Along the underside, banks of camera pods, sensors, weather booms, and atmospheric instruments nestle into its belly like barnacles.

Clearly built for long-duration scientific missions. Observation, maybe. Maybe something more covert.

And there - just behind the central sensor array - a docking ring.

Beautiful.
Familiar.

Standard coupling, flush with the ventral midline.

He blinks rapidly, trying to stay conscious. His limbs ache with the onset of hypoxia. He can feel himself slipping, like sleep tugging at the edges of his thoughts. He bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes copper and shakes himself alert.

The radio crackles again.

“I’m positioning overhead now. You’ll need to align manually. Do not damage my bird. Got it?”

The voice is firmer now. Still clipped. Still controlled. But there’s something else beneath it - a thin thread of anxiety.

He nods automatically, though he knows they can’t see it.

“Got it.”

The glider dips slightly, easing into position above him. Its long fuselage hovers like a watchful bird of prey, graceful and immense. The nose is completely glazed, a bubble of crystal balanced at the tip. Panoramic. The kind of view pilots dream of.

He can’t see inside. The glare from the sun, the reflection of Earth below - it hides everything.

A shadow moves behind the transparency.

Just a silhouette.

Still, he feels it. Someone’s watching him. Gauging his approach.

He eases Sylph upward, careful. Gentle. Every motion a prayer. The fighter jitters at the edge of control, a drunken ballet against the clean geometry of the glider.

Short bursts from the micro-thrusters to align.
Too low - correct.
Too far forward - nudge it back.

Almost there.

And then he sees it.

The markings.

Faint, painted along the side of the tail boom. A stylized crest of the opposing bloc. Curved script along the wing flaps. Federation callouts are square. Black. Stamped with alphanumeric grids.

It isn’t an ally.

His chest tightens. The stick wavers in his hand.

It’s an enemy aircraft.

Not just that. A rival-state research glider. High-altitude, deep-survey - the kind built to hover on the edge of space for weeks without landing. He knows the model. He’s seen it in intel briefings.

Hell, he’s shot this type down before.

And now he’s docking to it like a parasite latching onto its host.

The person inside - whoever they are - knows it too. They heard his voice. They asked for his allegiance.

And they let him dock anyway.

Why?

His breathing slows. The panic doesn’t vanish, but it’s changing. Folding into something colder. Sharper.

More alert.

This just became a different kind of mission.