Hercules Chen, Zero Hunter: Toroka VS Mecha-Tsuyo, Part 1 of 17

Vigilance, Season 2 kicks off with an all-new hero fighting the Axis on the other side of the world. Hercules Chen, called the Zero Hunter by his enemies, is an ace pilot and an official, taking the fight to the Black Dragon Society in the air and in the streets. But when the Society rouses an ancient power, he must change his tactics in order to save thousands of lives.

This is the premiere of Hercules Chen, Zero Hunter: Toroka VS Mecha-Tsuyo, an epic adventure across the Pacific front. You don’t have to read Season 1 first, but some familiar characters and situations will arise.

Content warnings: violence, gun violence, death, mild swearing.

The Invader.

SATURDAY MORNING, MAY 8, 1943
ABOARD HAMOBAI
THE BERING SEA

//Translated from Japanese.//

The general quarters alarm was almost a relief when it woke Captain Inoue Hayato from his troubled dreams. He could hear his crew scrambling to their stations on the other side of his door before he was out of his bunk. Dozens of drills had readied them all for battle, but it did not make three in the morning any less jarring for an old captain.

He had feared for the entire voyage that the Americans would stumble upon his convoy's circuitous route around their islands sooner or later: an invasion force of almost twenty ships was hard to hide, no matter how careful one was.

The captain pulled on his white uniform and quick-stepped to the bridge, dodging sprinting sailors. The command crew snapped to attention at their stations. He waved them back to work then turned to his expectant executive officer, waiting by the helm.

“Matsuoka?” Inoue asked.

Commander Matsuoka Taiki handed his captain a piece of paper then recited what written on it:

“At zero-two-forty-six, a large stationary contact was detected at the edge of our surface radar range. No aircraft have been detected within one hundred kilometers.”

He had perfectly memorized the short message. Inoue stroked his gray mustache, waiting for Matsuoka to answer his next question before he asked it, as was his executive officer's custom.

“The object should be within extreme visual range in a few minutes, sir,” Matsuoka concluded, as his captain knew he would.

“Helmsmen, prepare for evasive maneuvers,” Inoue ordered, though he knew Matsuoka had already fully prepared the bridge crew for anything that they might encounter. “Ready to transmit to Admiral Koizumi, but maintain silence until ordered. Monitor the radar and extinguish our running lights.”

Inoue watched his crew pantomime the preparations they had already conducted. He suppressed a smile. His sailors were young, untested, but they had been trained spectacularly by his officers, especially Matsuoka. Inoue knew that he had taught his second-in-command well. The young man would receive a command post of his own, soon.

Inoue sat back in his chair, awaiting his spotters' report. The ship's running lights cut out, leaving them a black sliver on blacker sea.

His ship, Habomai, an Etorofu-class escort ship, mounted enough weaponry to be a threat to most enemies at close range. At the very worst, they would survive long enough to warn the rest of the fleet about the anomalous contact, whatever it may be. At three-quarters steam, they would be atop it quickly.

As point ship for Operation Kiso, the amphibious invasion of mainland Alaska, Habomai's main objective was the safety of the six other escorts and twelve troop transports that followed a third of a day behind them. It was Inoue's duty to determine the nature of the contact, be it an uncharted island, as he suspected, or something dangerous, such as a sea platform, idling carrier, or anchored battleship; the radar cross-section they had detected could be nothing smaller. All the old captain could do was wait.

“Steady yourselves,” he warned his men. The bridge crew resumed their nervous preparations and whispered supplications.

The call came down suddenly after both too many and too few minutes. It was passed with a tang of regret from a petty officer to Matsuoka. Inoue knew from the microscopic slump in his executive officer’s shoulders that the contact posed no threat. Matsuoka had yet to see combat, and the quashed prospect of battle was a disappointment to him.

“The spotters report a medium-sized iceberg on the horizon, sir,” Matsuoka reported, his voice full of regret.

Inoue nodded. The old captain knew better than to be disappointed by this news. Only the unbloodied crave battle, and Inoue had been bloodied for many years.

“A free-floating iceberg is still an exciting find in these waters, Matsuoka,” Inoue chided.

“Yes, sir,” Matsuoka replied. He knew the captain's observation was true. Icebergs were impossibly rare in the Pacific, even as far north as they were.

“Bring the running lights up, man the spot lights,” Inoue ordered his crew.

“Captain?” Matsuoka asked.

“We have already awoken the entire crew, why not study a rare sight?” Inoue replied.

“Yes, sir,” Matsuoka said. “Helmsmen, set course to intercept the iceberg.”

Inoue watched his sailors work, turning the ship to close with the iceberg. His men worked efficiently and proficiently and brought Habomai to a half-kilometer's distance from it in less than an hour.

“Maintain relative position,” Matsuoka ordered. The helmsmen powered down Habomai's diesel screws, lining her up broadside to the iceberg. Inoue stood and stepped outside to observe the phenomenon without glass between them.

The foggy glass mountain grew out of the calm sea. In some places it glowed with an ethereal blue, lit from within by the moon above. Inoue committed the fantastic sight to memory. He would write about this moment of beauty, this respite from the ugliness of battle, when he returned home.

“Sir,” Matsuoka said. Inoue looked at his second-in-command and sighed. Matsuoka was impatient, and that was understandable. The young could not comprehend the value of silence, and true beauty was wasted on them.

“How many hours ahead of the convoy are we?” Inoue asked.

“With this detour, six hours, fifty minutes,” Matsuoka replied. Inoue did the math in his head.

“At full steam we will be back on schedule within a day,” the captain said thoughtfully.

“Shall I return the crew to normal shifts, then?” Matsuoka asked. If they canceled the alarm, his off-shift crew could still sleep for two more hours before they had to to return to duty.

“No,” Inoue said. “Call them back to battle stations.”

“Battle stations, sir?” Matsuoka asked.

Inoue nodded. He had dragged his eager crew this far to inspire an old man's poetry, perhaps they deserved a reward for their patience.

“Each of the main guns may fire two rounds at the iceberg, for practice and calibration,” the captain said.

Matsuoka could not contain his grin. Hamobai had not fired a live round in two months. He ran inside and ordered the crew to full alert status. Despite the inability of young men to understand many things, the enthusiasm with which they worked at that things that interested them always brought a smile to the old captain's face. He followed Matsuoka back inside and let him take the lead.

Their route had taken them far enough from the Aleutian islands that he felt safe firing the main guns. There were one hundred thousand Americans on the way to invade Attu even then, and Inoue's countrymen were to abandon Kiska once Attu was re-taken. But those small battles did not concern Inoue or the fleet. Those retreating battalions were mere distractions. Operation Kiso’s fleet would circumnavigate the Aleutians altogether and steam straight into the heart of Alaska proper.

To enable that, the Kiso fleet had been careful. They were still far enough north that Habomai's guns would not wake any Americans.

While Matsuoka barked orders and readied the bridge, Inoue leaned back in his chair and studied the glow of the spectral structure. It seemed to burn from within with, like a diamond. The ice had warped as it formed, riddling the entire structure with twisted shadows. In Inoue's mind's eye, smoke-wrought dragons lay coiled within the blue.

“Sir, all stations are ready,” Matsuoka reported. Inoue gazed into the cerulean depths of the iceberg for a long second before nodding his assent. Matsuoka stood up straighter, then shouted:

“Fire!”

All three of Habomai's 150-millimeter cannons fired as one, blasting into the center of the iceberg. Chunks the size of houses flew free, splashing down into the water fifty meters away. Inoue imagined the chaos within his three gunnery stations, each one racing to outdo its companions, to be the first to fire again.

The center turret was fastest, which did not surprise Inoue. Lieutenant Maki ran a disciplined team down there. Maki's second shell burst in the center of the doomed iceberg, hollowing a deep crater that coughed up steam and smoke.

The bow turret was next, its shot landing a bit lower that Maki's. The structure of the iceberg shuddered and a booming crack resonated across the open sea. Water rushed into the fissure and the calved pieces shifted. Ancient air, trapped in the ice for countless eons, escaped with a bubbling, reptilian hiss.

The aft turret fired last, a fact Inoue noted for later. He would have to drill Lieutenant Kimura's gun team harder in the future. Their shot broke the iceberg apart completely, forcing the two halves in opposite directions.

Inoue watched the pieces bob in the disturbed sea, painting pictures in his mind of the glassy blue ice dipping into the black water.

Then he saw it, a mass unlike the others. It was dark, black with golden markings, uniform among the cracked shards floating around it.

The bridge hummed with excitement and celebration. Inoue's young staff were congratulating each other on their performance. None of them had the presence of mind to see what he had.

“Matsuoka,” he said, but his executive officer did not hear him. Inoue walked to the bridge windscreen and stared at the thing in the water through his binoculars.

Over thirty meters of it was visible above the water, glistening wetly in the moonlight. Inoue could see solid, angular protrusions sticking out of it at regular intervals. The captain was reminded of the ridges of a spinal column. He pulled himself away from the binoculars.

“Matsuoka!” he shouted, which instantly silenced the bridge. Inoue was known as a quiet man, and even a gentle a rise in his voice stunned his crew. The shout had nearly knocked them over.

“Yes, sir,” Matsuoka said, snapping to Inoue's side.

“Tell me what you see,” the captain said, and handed Matsuoka the binoculars. He studied the churning ice field with careful scrutiny. Inoue pointed over his shoulder: “Look there, in the center.”

“I am not sure what I should be looking at, sir,” Matsuoka said after a moment.

“What?” Inoue said. He snatched the binoculars back and looked again.

It was gone.

“There was something out there, within the iceberg,” Inoue said. His bridge staff looked at each other in confusion, but none would ever second-guess their captain. He started: “It looked like - !”

The Habomai was struck on her bow with force enough to launch every sailor from his feet, sending them sprawling meters away. Glass and instruments shattered, piping burst, machinery misaligned and ground to a halt, vomiting sparks and flame. Sailors impacted bulkheads with vicious momentum that killed them instantly, and many more suffered broken bones. It felt like the ship had been rammed.

Matsuoka struggled to his feet. The captain was gone, instead replaced by vicious cold and raspy salt. The front windscreen was shattered and far below Captain Inoue's corpse was crumpled against the deck, red spreading around him. He had been dead before he landed.

Matsuoka was bloody and suddenly cold. He had collided with the window frame, its thin steel brace the only thing that had kept him from sharing his captain's fate. The bones of his left arm were grinding together and he knew they were broken.

“What was that?” he demanded. The crew, now his crew, lay dazed. One helmsman was unconscious, his broken nose pouring red all over his instruments, and the other was nowhere to be found. The radioman, Ogami, looked up at Matsuoka from the floor, but stared through him.

“Lieutenant Ogami!” Matsuoka barked, but the radioman did not seem to hear. He staggered over other fallen sailors and dragged Ogami to his feet.

“Call the fleet,” Matsuoka growled, eliciting tears from his junior officer. Ogami touched his head and a gout of blood ran onto his hand. His scalp had opened and the crimson flow blanketed his face. Matsuoka gently placed him on the floor and hobbled to the unmanned radio. He lifted the receiver to his mouth and keyed in the fleet's emergency frequency.

“This is Commander Matsuoka Taiki of the Hamobai, mayday, mayday!” he shouted desperately. Matsuoka looked around, panicked. There was blood everywhere.

“Hamobai, what is your condition?” the radio crackled back. Matsuoka depressed the transmission button on his receiver but was reduced to stunned silence.

Matsuoka Taiki watched a creeping darkness blacken the sea, then slide up Hamobai, covering her shattered bow before snaking up and over the bridge. The entire ship was bathed in impossible shadow.

An unthinkable form was blocking the moon, striped and serpentine.

“Tora,” Matsuoka managed to stammer. “Tokage.”

‘Tiger.’ ‘Lizard.’

Three hundred nautical miles away, the radio crackled and stuttered. Matsuoka's final message was chopped into syllables by white noise. The radio operators aboard the invasion fleet could only hear one word: ‘Tor-oka.’

Matsuoka had time to scream before the transmission cut off completely. The fleet tried to raise their lead ship for another hour, but were not able to make contact again.

Operation Kiso pushed forward at full steam, anxious to discover the cause of the Hamobai's unsettling transmission and to leave the strange waters.

Within six hours, they would all share the same fate as the men of Hamobai.

The Zero Hunter.

THURSDAY MORNING, JULY 8, 1943
ABOARD JOLLY GREEN
ABOVE TARAIKA BAY

Jolly Green’s nose-mounted quad-fifties rattled Official First Class Hercules Chen to the bone every time they roared, but it was the thunderous thump of his twenty-mil cannon that got him bouncing in his seat. Each impact peeled twisted aluminum off his target like snake skin.

The swerving Japanese Zero battled as furiously as it could, but nothing could withstand sustained fire from Jolly Green for long. One last thump sent a twenty-millimeter round crashing through the Zero's soft belly. The plane collapsed it in on itself as its structure failed around it. Hercules squeezed his triggers again and sent a stream of flaming phosphorus tracers into the Zero's fuel tanks.

The enemy fighter bloomed into a crimson blossom against the dawn sky like New Year's fireworks.

Scraps and boiling oil pelted Hercules' windscreen as he pushed his P-38-O Strike Lightning through the fire and smoke. Jolly Green's metallic emerald paint took a couple nicks from shrapnel, but nothing hit hard enough to punch through her tough skin. Hercules looked back over his shoulder; his gunner was back-to-back with him, manning their rear-facing turret. The wiry redhead gave Hercules a wink and a thumbs down.

“No 'chute, Boxer,” Paul Pabst, call sign Blue, verified over his shoulder, using Hercules' callsign.

“Affirmative, Blue,” Hercules confirmed, calling Pabstby his own callsign. He twisted around in his seat, searching for more targets through the bubble canopy. “See the other two?”

“Lily Liver's busy with one on your nine,” Blue reported. The static over the radio almost completely masked his gunner's Australian accent. Hercules looked out the left side of his cockpit. Another Strike Lightning, this one with periwinkle paint on its triple belly, was twisting through the sky, hot on the tail of a swooping Zero. “No idea where the other one’s at.”

“Lily Liver, this is Jolly Green. Do you have the last Zeke in sight, Oxford?” Hercules asked wingman over the radio. It crackled back after a few seconds.

“Boxer, I am afraid I am rather busy with this one,” the radio buzzed. Jagat Dubashi, callsign Oxford, sounded more annoyed at Hercules' interruption than anything else.

“Oxford can handle one Zeke,” Hercules muttered to Blue after turning his mic off. He watched a barrage of rounds from Lily Liver's nose guns scrape the paint off the Zero's wings, but the little bugger stayed in the sky.

“At the very least you might cover us from the second one,” Oxford buzzed. His annoyance was real, now.

“Coming around to lend to lend a hand, old man,” Hercules replied. He pulled hard on the yoke, putting Jolly Green into a tight turn that closed the distance between them and Lily Liver. Oxford was mumbling in Hindi over the radio, no doubt calling Hercules some variation of a young, arrogant hot-head. Hercules ignored the Hindi; he knew Oxford would repeat it all in English for him when they were face-to-face again.

Jolly Green was beginning to level off when the radio squealed in Hercules' ear. It was Lily Liver's gunner shouting over the airwaves:

“Boxer, we got bandit on our six!”

Annabelle Lockwood, callsign Oakley, shouted some choice profanities and laid into her guns. Lily Liver's Texan tail gunner was blazing away with her own turret while she hollered into the radio. Hercules could see her loosing a steady stream of fifty-cal tracers leading the barrage of thirty-eight-mil Randall mini-rockets. She cursed once more, then radioed out again:

“He's sticking in the sun, I can't tag him!”

“Stay on yours, we got him,” Hercules said. He flipped Jolly Green into a hard barrel roll. The flaps on its jade wings flipped up, spinning Hercules toward the sun-backed silhouette bearing down on Oxford and Oakley from the east, its machine guns blazing.

“We doing a Manilla mudslide?” Blue grunted. He was being pushed against his straps by a couple G's from the plane's hard turn. Hercules could hear Blue gritting his teeth against the strain, even over the roaring engine.

“Affirmative,” Hercules replied through a clenched jaw. He leveled out and opened up the throttle, racing toward the swooping Zero at a perpendicular vector. His quad-fifties rumbled again, putting lead beneath the enemy fighter's white belly. The smaller plane peeled off from pursuing Lily Liver and whipped around to put Jolly Green in his sights. Its machine guns opened up, whipping hot metal just meters over Hercules' head.

“Line him up...” Hercules grunted into his mic.

“And knock him down!” Blue shouted back. With that, Jolly Green dipped down, diving straight down toward the blue ocean, well below the Zero's attack vector. The enemy fighter nosed down to pursue, but Blue had already opened up with his turret. The double-fifties would have been enough for the Zero, but Blue did not believe anything but steak could be overdone. His first flurry of fifty-cal rounds drilled through the Mitsubishi's windscreen and the banzai pilot behind it, followed close by a pair of M-13 Randall mini-rockets that followed the shimmering path laid out by screaming lead.

The Zero's air intake sucked the inch-and-a-half rockets up greedily. The warheads burst within, blasting the fighter's supercharged engine apart from the inside out.

“No 'chute,” Blue said while he habitually jiggled his ammo belts, making sure the feed stayed clear. He did not trust that the newly-installed Randall's mini-rockets would not jam on him. Hercules pulled back on the yoke, evening Jolly Green out of her dive and away from the falling, burning Zero. A flash of red on a twisted wing caught Hercules' eye as the ruined plane tumbled past.

“Did you see that?” he asked. Blue read his mind.

“Firecracker,” the gunner confirmed. “Damn Dragons are hooking the little red devils on to patrol flights now.”

“Unless they were not patrolling,” Hercules replied.

“That means they were expecting us,” Blue said. Hercules was silent for a second. The Zeroes were too close to Fast Freddie and too far from anything else to be lucky, and they were carrying firecrackers, air-to-air rockets designed to shred fighter planes that only the bloody bastards in the Black Dragon Society had access to. The Japanese had been hunting them.

Hercules’ thoughts were interrupted by the crackle of his radio.

“Boxer, we are in a bit of spot here,” Oxford said. Hercules looked up. Lily Liver was smoking, bleeding vaporized oil into the blue sky, tailed by the last relentless Zero. The Japanese pilot had turned the tables on Oxford and Oakley and was right on their six. His tracers were cutting so close that they burned phosphorus streaks across Lily Liver's lavender belly. Hercules opened up the throttle and closed in. Zeros might have been maneuverable, but Jolly Green had horsepower on them, and she caught up in seconds.

“We got you, Oxford,” said Hercules. He put a full second of rounds across the Zero's flight path, but the little plane swerved out of the way, not taking a single hit. “I am on his tail, hang in there.”

“This one's slippery, hiding between my tails,” Oakley growled. Her west Texas twang usually lent her some swagger, but Hercules could not hear it right then. She was losing it.

“I am on him,” Hercules reassured her.

“Careful, Boxer,” Oxford said. He wrestled against his controls. “It looks like he is equipped with - !”

Oxford was cut off by a shockingly bright flash of searing light and white smoke that emanated from the trailing edge of the Zero's wings. It was brighter than getting hit with a lightning bolt. Hercules' vision went white, then red and purple, leaving him with nothing but star fire and the shimmering ghost of the Zero's tail dancing across his eyes.

“Ah hell, flash lamps!” Blue shouted. Hercules fought every instinct he had to grab at his eyes and somehow managed to hold on to the yoke.

The Zero had strips of magnesium and potassium chlorate were installed along the trailing edge of its wings. When ignited, flash lamps burned at thousands of degrees, brighter than a dozen suns, for just a split-second. That was long enough to instantly blind Hercules, just as the Zero pilot had intended.

The Zero had freed himself to pick off Lily Liver as he pleased.

“He got me,” Hercules managed to say. Blue twisted around in his seat and put a hand on Hercules' shoulder.

“Hold her steady,” Blue whispered, then radioed Oxford and Oakley: “Lily Liver, Boxer caught that flash lamp, you are on your own for a minute.”

“Affirmative, Jolly Green,” their wingman barked. The Oxford man did everything he could to juke the pursuing Zeke, twisting his own fighter into chassis-bending barrels rolls and banking like a seagull in a hurricane. The Zero matched him turn-for-turn.

Hercules took a deep breath, careful to keep his rattling inhalation from spooking Blue. The training the Office and the RAF had given him did little to prepare him for this. He had to calm down, to use training crafted before the Office had been born.

Hercules had never mastered the art of meditation, despite his years in the Shaolin temple. Master Wong Fei-Song had tried to teach him to seek an empty mind, but his mind was always preoccupied. In his void, there were always the eyes that stared back through him whenever he tried to dream, whenever he was quiet, or still. He’d known them once, those familiar eyes he’d once welcomed before their phantasmal turn. Over the years, relegated to the depths of his mind, they had gone blind and their glare pierced him like knives.

He tried to ignore them, instead focusing on the image of the modified Zero's tail that was blast-cooked onto his retinas. The picture hung in his mind, momentarily blocking out the accusatory gaze. He studied its marking in his mind’s eye, its stenciled kill count, its scars and repairs. He considers the streaks of crimson beneath the bogey's wings, and it took him a few seconds to register what they could be: another pair of anti-fighter rockets bolted to the Zero's wings. Hercules activated his mic. He had to warn Lily Liver about the deadly weapons:

“Oxford, that bandit is carrying a pair of firecrackers.”

“Christ almighty,” Oakley grunted. She knew all too well what just one firecracker could do to a healthy Strike Lightning. The little cannonade-rockets would shred Lily Liver like wet paper.

“Suppress him, Boxer,” Oxford said. “We cannot allow him to fire even one rocket. At this range, all three of our craft would be lost.”

Hercules started to object, but Blue cut him off.

“On it, Lily Liver,” the Australian radioed back. He squeezed Hercules' shoulder again. Hercules took a deep breath, then turned off his mic.

“I cannot see a thing,” he whispered.

“We got this, Boxer,” Blue said. “I'll do the seeing, you do the flying. All we got to do is rattle that bastard's cage, anyway. This is nothing compared to New Britain.”

“Zeros blackening the sky, flak so thick you could not see the ground,” Hercules recalled.

“And who made it through without a scratch? We did. So, two Lightnings on one Zeke should be cake after that,” Blue said, patting Hercules' helmet.

“Nearly makes me forget we are flying blind in enemy territory,” Hercules chuckled. He took another breath, then gripped the yoke with the confidence he was expected to show. “You are the pilot now.”

“Pull up six degrees and hit the gas,” Blue said. Hercules eased the yoke back and jammed on the throttle, pushing their Strike Lightning through the stars and haze with the pure muscle memory of hundreds of flight hours. The plane was part of him, that he knew. It was the surest, most knowable part, a collection of finite and specific pieces. A plane was easier to master than a mind. In his mind, Hercules could not hide from the glare, the staring dead eyes that kept him from sleeping, that dissected him from beyond his reach. But his plane, he trusted, he knew what each part was for, how to use each tool and instrument to achieve the ideal result.

“Easy, easy... get her steady,” Blue told him. A nervous tremor ran through Hercules' hands that Jolly Green amplified a hundred-fold. Blue coached over his shoulder: “You know this plane, level her out.”

Hercules could hear canvas straps rasping behind him, sending a fresh thunderhead of blue lightning spiderwebbing across his vision.

“Are you adjusting your parachute?” he asked.

“It was just getting a little tight is all,” Blue said. “Keep her steady, Boxer, you're on track now.”

“Any time now,” Oakley growled over the radio. Hercules ignored her. He could hear the Zero loose another machine gun barrage.

“Two hits, both in the right rudder!” Oakley called up to Oxford. Hercules knew that kind of damage. Lily Liver would be less responsive, less able to dodge the Zero's next salvo.

The Zero pilot was good, careful to stay in the locked spot below the Strike Lightning's twin tails. Oakley's turret was mechanically disabled from firing too close to her rudders. The designers at the Office's R and D did not want rear gunners to have the option of blowing off their own tails so they built a blind spot into their planes. It looked like the Zero had figured out that trick.

“Give me some gas,” Blue said.

Hercules opened up the throttle little more, easing Jolly Green in on the tricky Zero. The revved engine added another layer to the chaos between Hercules' hands and brain.

“Four hundred meters, three,” Blue hissed. “Hold steady...”

The controls wrestled in Hercules' hands, but he knew how they moved, how his plane worked.

“Steady, steady.... you got this, brother. Another second, steady...” Blue was calm as a panther, waiting for just the right second to remind the Japanese pilot why Jolly Green was called the Zero Hunter.

“He's too close!” Oxford shouted over the radio.

“I can't pin him!” Oakley yelled back.

Just a year prior, Blue had been the only gunner willing to fly in a Strike Lightning with a Chinese pilot. Even then, before the two dozen confirmed kills and the medals and the Japanese bounty on Hercules' head, Blue had had his back. And even flying blind, Blue still trusted him and believed in him.

The star fire dancing across Hercules’ corneas smoothed into cool rivers of running light, falling away into a jet black infinity. The eyes that watched him seemed to smile and they gently faded, not all the way gone but not so angry. His breathing slowed, muscles unknotting themselves as his grip held firm.

Chaos and desperation were where Hercules Chen found his peace.

“Light him up!” Blue said.

Hercules closed his useless eyes, navigated the icy rivers through the blackness, and let loose.

The bullets went wild, but it was enough to spook the last Zero off its pursuit angle. The plane dipped low and to the left for just an instant so the pilot could twist around and put eyes on Jolly Green.

That split-second distraction was long enough for Oakley. She stuffed her cowboy hat under her seat and shoved the upper hatch of her turret open, pushing herself out into the wind up to her waist. The Zero pilot turned back around just in time to see her raise and aim a fifty-year-old Winchester repeater.

“Oh, Hell's bells!” Blue shouted.

“Oakley, no!” Oxford ordered, but she couldn't hear him. Hercules fought against his every instinct and held Jolly Green steady through the maelstrom of shooting stars and luminous minefields, against the flights of incoming shadow planes and invisible shells, all watched by living dead eyes.

Oakley's blonde pigtails whipped around her head, unraveling in the cold wind, but her aim was true. The old gun barked once and put a round into the Zero's wing root. The soft lead ripped through the Zeke's thin skin and shredded its unarmored fuel tank, spraying hot avgas into the cockpit, across the windscreen, and all over the shocked pilot. He only had a second to panic before it sparked, splashing orange flame inside then all over his plane. The Zero dropped off course, first to the right, then down, erupting in furious fire as it fell.

Oakley watched him for a moment, worked the lever action of her rifle and ejected a brass shell into the open air, then got back inside her turret. She buttoned up the hatch behind her and pulled her cowboy hat back down over her wild yellow hair.

The burning plane fell for almost half a minute. Blue watched it tumble all the way into Taraika Bay. The splash was almost invisible from their altitude, but he did not want to take any chances that the plane was still airborne: Zero pilots were sly bastards. The pilot and plane sank into the cold waters together, joining his two wingmen, and Jolly Green and Lily Liver flew on, bruised but not beaten.

The water that morning was serene, a mirror for the rippling orange and purple of the sunrise. Blue slumped back in his seat and watched the colors. All Hercules could see was his calm currents of white and red, the spectral outline of a Zero, and a pair of hovering, guilting eyes staring into an abyss.

“Blue?” he asked.

“Yes, Boxer?”

“Are we dead?”

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Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Dudu Torres.