Breaking Sky Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Cori McCarthy

  Cover and internal design © 2015 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Sammy Yuen

  Cover art by Sammy Yuen

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Fire, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McCarthy, Cori.

  Breaking sky / Cori McCarthy.

  pages cm

  Summary: In the year 2048 Chase Harcourt, call sign “Nyx,” is one of only two pilots chosen to fly the experimental “Streaker” jets at the junior Air Force Academy, but few know the pain and loneliness of her past or the dark secret about her father, and as the world tilts toward war, Chase cracks open a military secret.

  (hard cover : alk. paper) [1. Air pilots—Fiction. 2. Secrets—Fiction. 3. Science fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M47841233Br 2015

  [Fic]—dc23

  2014036355

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  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Delta

  Alfa

  1. Sound Barrier

  2. Drone

  3. Colorful Actions

  4. Brigadier General

  5. Knife Fight in a Phone Booth

  6. No Joy

  7. Mayday

  8. Boards Out

  9. Turbulence

  10. Hook Slap

  11. Tag the Bogey

  12. Zero Dark Thirty

  Bravo

  13. Lost the Bubble

  14. Check Six

  15. Missle Lock

  16. Lethal Cone

  17. Bought the Farm

  18. Grayout

  19. Hotas

  20. Up to Speed

  21. Playmates

  22. Red Flag

  23. Hawk Circle

  24. Boola-boola

  Charlie

  25. Deadstick

  26. Behind the Power Curve

  27. Merged Plot

  28. Fur Ball

  29. Punching Out

  30. Waypoint

  31. Pucker Factor

  32. Quick Fix

  33. Preflight

  34. Redline

  Delta

  35. Smoking Hole

  Echo

  36. Hard Deck

  37. Wingmen

  38. Indian Night Noises

  39. Boresight

  40. Downtown

  41. Bravo Zulu

  42. Kick the Tires, Light the Fires

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Maverick Archer,

  my wingman

  “There is an art, or rather, a knack to flying.

  The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground

  and miss.”

  —Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

  DELTA

  The lake held up a mirror to the sky’s razor-blue, and Chase heard glass cracking in that color. An icy wind dried the blood on her chapped hands. She made a fist and her knuckles split.

  She had killed him.

  His body drained a red thread into the faint waves, blooming, fading, and pulling deeper into the water. She said his name in a whisper. Then a scream. She said it as if the word might let her keep him, but his name only echoed once over the lake and then died.

  The government would take that name. Stamp it onto some monument, and he’d be nothing more than the first casualty of the war. The world war that had started moments ago.

  Oh God.

  All her senses were misfiring. Her jet was in three pieces and half-sunk against the shore. Chase stared at its crumpled body as the wind turned on her, pitching black smoke at her face. She squeezed her eyes, but the blue world stabbed inward.

  Everything was fracturing, and it had been ever since she chased Phoenix out of the sky.

  ALFA

  1

  SOUND BARRIER

  Break It, Baby

  Speed turned her on.

  The other cadets talked about the thrill of flying, but Chase didn’t relate. Her love was more specific. She flew for the high-g press of ten times the weight of gravity. For the throttle thrust forward, the roar-rev of the engines, and then, the mach rush.

  Chase was in the atmosphere—flying so fast she felt like solid muscle. Her thoughts were a dance of impulse as she backed off the speed and looked through the tempered glass canopy. The earth knelt before her like she was holding court over the whole damn planet.

  She smiled.

  “I don’t suppose you see a gas station.” Pippin sat a few feet behind her, but his voice was closer, a direct link from his mask to her helmet’s headphones. “Nearing bingo fuel, Nyx.”

  “Give me two minutes.” Chase smelled a challenge. Or she imagined one. Anything to prolong the hop and do something fun. She pulled back on the stick, pointing the nose of her jet straight at the midday sun.

  Brilliance charged the crystal dome.

  “Tower to Nyx. Come in, Nyx,” Pippin mocked. “My sense of mortality insists I ask if we’re coming down anytime soon. As much as I wanted to be an astronaut when I was five, Dragon isn’t a starship. Where are we going exactly?”

  “Somewhere. Anywhere.” The sun blinded through her smoky visor, but she kept her eyes ahead. “Up.”

  “Yes, I was going to point out that somewhere feels like up today. Sylph is already halfway home.”

  “Good.” Chase gripped the throttle, and the leather of her gloves gripped back. “We don’t need Sylph sniffing around for this.”

  Moments scratched by, and Pippin cleared his throat. Twice.

  “We got to get high, Pip. Real high. Otherwise, we’ll smash into the ground before we can break the sound barrier in a downward spiral.”

  “WHAT? WHY?”

  Her reasons stacked. Because the training runs were tedious. Because Sylph, the pilot of the other experimental Streaker jet, had never and would never try such a stunt. And because Chase was Nyx, and with that title came certain wild expectations.

  And the cherry on top? Because Chase needed to prove she could do it.

  When they were nearly thirty miles up, about to leave the stratosphere, she turned the jet toward the curve of the earth’s surface and let them freefall. Gravity took hold, and she steeled herself to punch through it.

  �
��Wait, Nyx. I’m all for fun, but this is—”

  The engine howl took over. They blazed at the blue-on-blue planet, the green smatterings coming into focus. She felt the mach tuck, the air trying to slow her down, just as the sound barrier broke.

  The sonic boom was lost behind them, but a pearly halo erupted in their wake.

  She crowed.

  Chase Harcourt, call sign “Nyx,” had broken the speed of sound at absolute zero sink rate. The other cadets could put that on her headstone.

  Speaking of, she was about to die.

  “Nyx!” Pippin yelled. “We’re not going to pull up in time!”

  The earth was growing larger fast.

  Too fast.

  Chase reeled in the speed, but the jet resisted. Pippin panic-hummed “Ode to Joy,” and Chase’s arm muscles shook. Land filled the cockpit glass. They were going to slam into it. Houses came into focus.

  Trees.

  People even.

  Chase caught an updraft at the last second. They soared into the sky, leveling above the blush of wispy clouds. Pippin ripped off his mask to gasp, while Chase’s eyes stuck a little too wide. Far below, the humped back of South America led to the arm of Panama, rising fist-up through the Caribbean Sea.

  Chase let go of the throttle slowly, her fingers stiff. “Christ. That was fun.”

  “Balls of fi—”

  A flash of shining silver cut Pippin off. Cut everything off. Dragon flipped. Chase fought to frame the horizon, but what she saw next iced her blood.

  A Streaker. A twin to the prototype she sat in.

  It was like walking by a mirror she didn’t know existed. It made her jump, defensively jinking her wings. The other pilot looked her way right before jet-washing Dragon. Chase and Pippin spun through the fiery engine wake. Long seconds passed before she won the stick back and blinked the red out of her vision. By the time Dragon had stabilized, nothing but the other Streaker’s contrail remained. A white highway.

  Chase exploded after it.

  “Time for a conference call, Nyx.” Pippin’s tight voice belied his mocking. “What in the blazes was that?”

  “A bogey.”

  “That looked like Sylph.”

  “Sylph’s almost home. You said it yourself. That was someone else.”

  Pippin didn’t bother to agree. He was into his controls in a desperate way. After all, he was her RIO, her radar intercept officer. The sky was his ingrained map, and it was his job to make sure the air was clear around them, like a human satellite. “That bird has no signal,” he finally said, a hint of wonder in his voice. “How could it have no signal?”

  “No signal and it’s headed for U.S. soil.” Chase’s pulse picked up. Her muscles went tight as she leaned into the pursuit. This wasn’t like the stunt she’d just pulled. This was what she was trained for, and she left safe speeds way behind.

  “What are you going to do if we catch it? We’re not armed, Nyx.”

  “Track it. See where it lands.” Make sure it isn’t a sneaking spy from China, she added to herself.

  They passed Mach 3.

  Chase grinned so fiercely from the pressure that she felt crazed. “There. You see him?”

  Far below, metal winked over the serpentine glisten of the Mississippi. She pulled lower, closer to the blue-ferocity of the engines—dual engines that reached under each narrow wing and married together at the back like the infinity symbol. Just like Dragon’s engines.

  Chase dove under the jet. God, it was blinding fast. The pilot tilted into her space, their wings nearly kissing. She’d never gotten remotely this close to Sylph’s bird in the air…it made her laugh out loud and test how much closer she could get. The other pilot’s bloodred helmet shot a look her way, and she had the funniest feeling he was laughing too.

  “Pip, look at that helmet—”

  Dragon’s emergency low fuel alarm pierced the cockpit. She slapped at the control board to turn it off, but her speed died as the engines defaulted to reserve levels. The other jet broke east toward the indigo muscles of the Great Lakes.

  Chase had just enough time to read the sharp military stenciling along its side:

  PHOENIX

  2

  DRONE

  An Enemy without a Face

  Pippin wanted that jet to be Sylph. He wouldn’t let it go. “The Star could be trying out some new music or a block. Maybe they fuzzed my radar to see how close Sylph could get.”

  “Sylph doesn’t have the lady balls to fly that fast,” Chase said. Dragon was far west now, above Seattle, and headed due north. The clouds evaporated, revealing a jagged coastline. “Pip, I saw red.”

  “No, surely not.” He checked his sarcasm with a growling sigh. “You went feral flyboy. You would have followed that contrail straight across the d-line if it had headed that way.”

  “Red helmet.” She touched her black standard-issue helmet. Chase wasn’t technically in the Air Force yet, but as a top-ranked cadet, she had fought for the opportunity to pilot one of two Streaker prototypes.

  One of three…

  “Are you scanning for drones?” Chase’s voice pitched, betraying her standard cool. Pippin grunted a confirmation. They were only a few hundred miles from the demarcation line, the invisible boundary that split the Pacific Ocean and kept the Second Cold War so chilly.

  She pulled her mask from her face only to reattach it. Bingo fuel meant autopilot, and autopilot meant that Dragon was flying at tricycle pace. In the meantime, Chase drilled her emotions, set up each worry like a toy soldier. Where did that bird come from? Who knew about it? And more importantly, who didn’t know about it?

  “Did you see its name, Pip? That bird had Phoenix stenciled on its side.”

  “Phoenix looks a lot like Sylph’s Pegasus. Seven letters. Begins with P.”

  “Except for the fact that they’re different words.”

  “Different mythological beasts, in fact.”

  “That wasn’t Sylph, Henry.” She hoped using his real name might emphasize her point. “Why do I feel like you’re trying to convince me to drop it?”

  “Because I’m smarter than you. Chase.”

  “You’re smarter than everybody.”

  “My cross to bear.”

  Chase’s impatience held down her smirk. She drummed her fingers on the cockpit. Most canopies were made of thick plastic, but Dragon’s was crafted from tempered glass, the strongest in the world. “That Phoenix had the same crystal canopy. The same blue-silver skin.”

  In Chase’s mind, the Streakers stood apart in the sky and in aviation history. Light, sleek, and fueled by rip-roaring twin engines. They were hybrids of the older manned jets with HOTAS controls—hands-on throttle and stick—and the popular aerodynamic drones of the early twenty-first century.

  “You saw it,” she said a little harder.

  “Maybe it’s a backup,” Pippin tried. “The Air Force’s dirty little secret. Or hey, maybe the Navy academy has a Streaker we don’t know about.”

  “Bite your tongue,” Chase grumbled. “The Streakers are the Air Force’s babies. Kale promised me that much.”

  “I forgot. You think the brigadier general is all hand to God.”

  “Hey, now,” she said. “You’re supposed to warn me before you snark that hard.”

  He chuckled, and that alone was worth the bickering. Pippin needed a laugh these days like most two-year-olds needed a nap. Not that Pippin was the only one struggling. Chase, the other cadets, the airmen at the Star—everyone needed a break from the strangling tension of the Second Cold War. Chase’s thoughts plunged as she watched the beach below run a white scar toward the horizon. She couldn’t stop herself from imagining World War III. Battleships crowding the West Coast. The black rain of missiles falling.

  America on fire.

  The blaze she im
agined was a collage of crimson. Red drones. Ri Xiong Di’s bleeding flag. And that maroon-helmeted pilot. Could Phoenix have come from the New Eastern Bloc? Did the Asians steal the design? Build their own Streaker?

  No. That would be impossible. Catastrophic.

  “You think Kale is fuming in the tower right now?” Chase asked. “No doubt they caught that near collision on the satellite feed.”

  “By design, Dragon comes up as little more than a speeding blip on their radar. If we didn’t, the bad guys would have crossed the line and taken us down two years ago.”

  “Don’t say ‘bad guys,’” Chase said. “That makes them feel like a joke.”

  “I prefer when they feel like a joke.” He added under his breath, “So do you.” Pippin sprinkled everything with cynicism.

  “We could radio in,” she tried. “Let Kale know about the phantom Streaker.”

  “Nyx, that bird wasn’t armed. It’s not an immediate threat. Kale wouldn’t want you to risk opening up our signal to anyone waiting to shake us down.” Pippin said anyone, but he meant Ri Xiong Di. Spying jerks, they were always listening, always sending out code viruses that could cripple navigation, misfire missiles, or worst of all, crash jets kamikaze-style into civilian areas. Bam.

  So the Streakers flew off the grid, which necessitated a two-man team and radio silence. But Ri Xiong Di’s cyber superiority affected more than just airpower. Any time they wanted to take over a TV station or satellite, they did. Even the U.S. military’s network had been hacked in the past.

  Nothing was safe.

  Chase leaned into the canopy glass. They crossed the Canadian border, skirting a never-ending white-on-woods landscape. Canada was rumored to be as depressed as America these days. No one could say for sure—the borders had been closed since 2022—and communication wasn’t permitted between America and other countries.

  The U.S. had been on its own for twenty-six years, which meant constant vigilance and a raw state of survival. Chase felt that responsibility through her hands, her gloves, her throttle and stick. Straight to the titanium bones of the beautiful bird she called Dragon.

  “Kale needs to know about that Streaker, Pip. ASAP. I’m going to break autopilot.”