Musings of a Weary Eye
Mikhail Andreevich Dimitriev shivered and could feel the chattering of his teeth as he clambered up the air stairs into his E-91 Lightbringer early warning aircraft. The warmth of its interior was a great relief to him as he crossed the threshold and made a right into what was once the passenger compartment. Now serving as his home for the day, converted airliners like this one guaranteed the sovereignty and integrity of the United Imperial Federation’s vast airspace. As he walked down the aisle to take his station he rendered honors to the icon of Starmarshal Jordock above, silently praying for the intercession and benediction of the patron-saint of air controllers. Neither Dimitriev nor the rest of his crew were headed to war, but superstition and religiosity held sway over many of the AWACS crews, his included. For this they were referred to by their fellow aviators as “submariners.”
Some of the other controllers were groggily rising from slumbers at their stations, having elected to spend the night at their post. The recent spike in global tensions had put the government and defense establishment on high alert, and two constant airborne radar coverage zones were established; one over the Tau Sea near Vocavium and off Diosca observing an increasingly belligerent Imperial Union after its row with the Kromans, and the other over Newseria, monitoring the Basilian and Irsmuncastine borders after a spike in regional tensions. Dimitriev and his crew had been assigned to the latter mission.
The grueling hours the crews were being subjected to had caused a general fatigue to set in over the past weeks. Lacking cabin windows, Dimitriev and his crewmates missed the first rays of sunlight and were instead subjected to the artificial light of the cabin interior as the Lightbringer’s engines roared to life on the takeoff roll. He himself had to resist the urge to let the screaming turbofans lull him to sleep, and a growing sense of concern grew in his mind; after all, if increased peacetime readiness was so draining, how would he and his “submariners” fare in an actual combat situation, heaven forbid, another Shadow Realm?
Indeed, on that note, in preparation for a future air battle of a similar magnitude, the two seats next to his, which would normally be empty, were now taken by his longtime friends, fighter allocators I.F. Serova, a Laveskan, and Claire Swihart, a Nautilian. Together they were tasked with coordinating an abnormally large mass of fighters as they patrolled the near side of the Basilian border. On the climb to cruising altitude they broke out into an old Laveskan song Serova had taught them. Five minutes later the whole cabin joined them to sing the last verse:
In vain an old lady awaits the return of her son
They’ll tell her - and she’ll break into tears
And the waves run from the screw astern
And their wake disappears into the distance.
With a close to such a resounding performance one of the flight crew poked his head into the cabin to say “Settle down!” and thus the real work began. Even still, compared to the swarm of locusts that was the Imperial Union’s air arm, the amount of foreign fighters over Irsmuncast and Basil was abnormally low, especially so for an axis that boasted so many ground vehicles.
“Would be nice if we were an airborne observatory instead, maybe we could take a proper look at their militaries instead of twiddling our thumbs up here looking at the air hobbyist’s club, wouldn’t it,” said Swihart.
The plane banked to port over the Andeus River in a lazy turn, the first of what Dimitriev and his friends expected to be many. Twenty two hundred kilometers away, oblivious to the hotbed of military activity in Newseria, troops from northern Doren crossed the border, taking the Imperial gendarmerie stationed on the border completely by surprise. Come the second turn, a radio message sounded into his ears. “Alert! This is AWACS Dark Owl! Northern Dorvic troops have crossed the Laveskan border and have launched a gas attack! Repeat! Northern Dorvic troops have launched a gas attack! Request immediate assistance!”
The nerve agent attack came as such a shock to both the crew of the AWACS as well as the entire Imperial defense establishment that the news of a freighter crashing into the State Bank of Laveska barely registered on any of their radars. All exercises and monitoring activities in their area of operations were suspended, and the primary efforts of the Armed Forces for the first time in fifty years now involved a proper shooting war.
Had they lived a hundred seventeen years ago, Dimitriev, Serova, and Swihart would have been citizens of three different countries. Dimitriev would have either died during the slow bomb strike on Comberth or at any point during the lifetime of war Aenia was set to enter into; Serova would have died to asteroids under a different name, in a land referred to as Vzaimnostovya today, but then as the Reciprocity. Swihart would have watched the deaths of her two friends from a television screen in Valenian Nautilus. One hundred seventeen years ago, a surviving Dimitriev would have entered into close to a decade of a civilizations struggle with the Combined Provinces of Doren.
Today, the three controllers kept their cool, understanding that if the forces of Aenia a century before were enough to withstand the onslaught of a unified Doren, the unified forces of their three nations would indubitably prevail over the bomb-poisoned fraction of the once-mighty CPD. Dimitriev and Swihart exchanged a glance, silently agreeing to treat Serova to dinner when they returned to base that night.