SOVEREIGN

Even from this height, Daybreak looked like a warzone. It was a sandy patchwork of cracked ochre clay, bone white salt flats, and distant, jagged mountains speckled with thorny scrub, but he could still pick out the scars easily enough. There were plenty of villages and fields being gradually reclaimed by the desert. You could spot the black and burned-out husks of vehicles abandoned in the roads. And every so often you’d come across earthy craters and black smoke. It was his job to make a few more of those today.

A comms chime cut through the smooth hum of his jet’s twin turbine engines. It was a call from Newsom Air Base.

“Sovereign One, what’s your ETA on the first target?” asked a thick valley accent through electronic noise.

“Two minutes. On the approach now. Smooth sailing,” he replied, voice flat.

“They’ve got our guys pinned down.”

“Tell them to sit back and relax. I’ve got this.”

He did have it, most likely. Nothing was guaranteed in Daybreak, and the CDF’s air superiority was at times oversold. Every faction was capable of shooting planes out of the sky if the pilots ever got lazy. There were SAMs, MANPADS, and fucking mechs with fuckass cannons. You couldn’t fly over Smoke Desert either, which created a massive no-go zone. But hey, it was still a lot better to be in the air than on the ground.

Folks back home didn’t know any of this. Most of them believed that Cascadia was absolutely dominating the battlefield, even when they were opposed to their country’s involvement in it. He was glad. He didn’t want his wife to know how risky it was to be out here.

He didn’t even want his wife to know that he flew a bomber. He’d let her believe that he was just doing reconnaissance missions, taking in the sights like some tourist. It wasn’t as though he’d actually ever told her that was what he was doing, so he didn’t feel like it was a lie, but she had gotten it into her head somehow and he had decided that there was no reason to correct her. It saved them and their marriage a lot of stress, he imagined.

He nudged a throttle and his jet dipped its nose, piercing white clouds and lowering into position for the first target. His helmet projected a blue vector grid over the world below, clean and mathematical, that was speckled with white thermal hotspots. It showed him where to look, a stubborn hill covered with ramshackle fortifications, and what to do.

Inbound, weapons away, and score.

Far below him, the hill exploded. Whatever they had going on down there was over. And that was as much as he thought about it.

It was something they told you during training, to not think too hard about what you’re doing, just to do it well. He’d gotten good at that kind of compartmentalization a long time ago. He’d learned it over Colorado with American lives at stake. He could manage it just fine over some nameless patch of dirt in Daybreak.

It was the same war, in a sense. Cascadia had won its independence, but it still needed to keep that independence safe and secure. To do that, it needed resources. And cheap resources meant someone, somewhere, needed to be blown up. It didn’t matter to him whether he was bombing Denver, Harapetrum, or Timbuttfuckingtu. It was all one fight and for one reason, Cascadia’s survival.

He was flying over fields now, turning the plane towards his second target. It was a large warehouse. He didn’t know who or what was inside, and he didn’t really care.

Inbound, weapons away, and shack!

These people were freaks anyway. They were somehow both godless and fundamentalist at the same time. It didn’t make any sense to him. Why did they cling so violently to a ‘religion’ without any paradise to offer? He’d decided a while ago that their brain chemistry must be pretty fucked up. Call it Occam’s razor.

Even the guys from the DNA, their allies, the ones he was theoretically saving the asses of here, just weren’t normal. They didn’t have any western values to speak of and seemed, to him, to straddle a strange line between miserable stoicism and utter degeneracy. He wasn’t proud of himself for thinking of them as less than fully human, but he couldn’t help it.

He knew that there were a growing number of Christian missionaries in Daybreak City. This continent had always been hostile to mission work before, but the DNA-CDF alliance had created some new opportunities. He wasn’t actually very religious at all, never really got into the whole church thing, but he still hoped that it would finally do the locals some good.

Third target. It was residential this time. A fairly indistinct building, but surprisingly modern for the region, like the one he’d lived in back in Portland. He caught himself, for half a second, picturing him and his wife down there in one of the apartments. She’d probably be watching one of those godawful housewife reality TV shows and he’d be pretending he hadn’t been paying enough attention to remember all their names.

Cut that shit out.

Inbound, weapons away, and score.

His wife was in Eugene now. There was just the Whilamut passage bridge between their home and Franklin, the new-build capital of Cascadia where all the big decisions were being made. He didn’t like either city at all. They were both dull and full of smug paper-pushers who’d moved there for cushy government jobs. Parasites.

Once he was back home, they’d move back north. Maybe they’d go all the way to Vancouver. He liked staying in the city at least. And he liked the cold.

This shithole was too hot. It was probably a big part of what drove the people here so crazy, and he half-suspected the same phenomenon was to blame for California. The bleeding hearts were always out protesting, doing exactly what the Texas Country propaganda mills wanted them to be doing, bringing the country down to its knees so it could suck foreign cock. They didn’t understand how good they had it. Didn’t realise that if they wanted to keep things good, they needed to keep him in the air. He had a lot of words for people like them.

Another comms chime.

“That’s all, Sovereign One. Good job. Back to base.”

Soon enough he was down at Newsom, wheels hitting the sun-baked asphalt runway with hardly a jolt. A ground crewman waved him in with a pair of glowing sticks. He taxied to a stop and pulled off his sweat-caked helmet.

Heat blasted the cockpit the moment it opened. The air was thick with the smell of jet fuel and desert dust. It made him want to hurry inside as soon as possible.

Across the tarmac, there was a mechanical whir as a massive CC-17 slowly lowered its cargo ramp. Below it, kids in desert camo waited to load it up. They had a row of coffins, each one draped with the Cascadian flag, bound for a long flight home across the Atlantic.

He climbed out of his jet with his back to the transport plane and headed straight for debrief. They were going to be happy about this one.