The sleek, black shape of the Valkyrie raced across the turbulent dark surface of the ocean at storm. She would just barely crest the white foamed tips of racing waves. Back on Earth - the pilot spared the thought – the weather he was flying through would have been considered apocalyptic, an end of days. The thought didn’t comfort him at all.

On Deana it could get much, much worse.

He wrestled for every second of control. Gale force winds rocked the Valkyrie jet, and it was all he could do to keep level, keep going, and get as much distance between himself and the three SR-drones cutting through his vapor trail.

Only the light of the instruments guided him forward. He could make out nothing around his flight path, below or above, but the pitch-black night and the constant, unending rain lashing at his White Rabbit. His altitude was dangerously low and, even in the dark, he could imagine the ocean churning white and angry underneath, waves taller than mountains rising and falling in his path.

The alarms in his head refused to shut up.

Dangerous terrain. Low altitude. Unstable flight path

Pull up! Pull up! Pull up!

Danger! Lock on detected!

Tracer fire lit up the night, missing him by a wide arc. It came again, blazing bullets streaking through the dark, closer this time. The alarms blared in unison.

He banked and pulled away from the line of fire. More bullets flew by, missing him by inches this time. One missed by a hair the white rabbit painted on his tail wing.

‘Damn!’

His comms filled with electric chitter-chatter. The SRs flooded all frequencies and, with no jammer to drown them out, he was stuck with them. They had him in their sights and moved in for the kill. He had hoped that the hyper-storm and the violent sea underneath would keep them away. He had been foolish. With no inkling of fear or concern, the drones ate up the distance.

Three red hits on his radar projected directly on his retina. His fingers flexed, instinctually, on the trigger of his flight stick but nothing whirred to life. Only a “No Ammo” red sign came up on his HUD, with another alarm adding to the cacophony.

‘Run. Run. Run. Run. Run.’

In clear weather and at a full burn, the Valkyrie could outrun them. Maybe.

He fought to gain altitude as the silver, six winged shaped of the drones closed in. They chittered excitedly over his comms, delighted in the prospect of a kill. Wind slammed him and G-forces tore at his body as he evaded more bullets, losing wind speed.

Pull up! Pull up! Pull up!

Danger! Lock on detected!

‘RUN! Damn you, RUN!’

He gunned the engines hard, aiming to accelerate to a full burn. If he slowed down, even for a moment, they’d be on him, and it’d all have been for nothing. One Valkyrie had to return. Just one Valkyrie was enough to salvage the mission.

He was the last one. The White Rabbit ran through the storm.

.-chittering- ”…amn you… Die!” -chittering- “…uckers!” -chittering-…

Flashes of lighting grabbed his attention as his nose aimed towards the cloud cover. Tracer fire streaked across the pitch back and forth.

“Damn! Damn! Damn! Just die!” -chittering- “Just die!” -chittering-

The voice over the comms came in spurts, broken apart and molested by the immense interference all around them.

‘Jake? Idiot! Why aren’t you running?’

The Valkyrie had Taro in full battle autism, his body flooded with stimulants that would keep him on the absolute razor’s edge. In less than a heartbeat he took the grim scene in, and understood he could do nothing for his friend.

Jake had given up on surviving. His Dark Mane was half transformed and firing wild. Four SRs prodded and poked at him, swarming around the almost stalled form, pocketing its armor with impact craters. They swirled in closer for the kill, piranhas drawn to a bloodied carcass.

They had him pinned down. Every evasive move he tried to make, they countered and punished. The chittering on the comms was vicious in its inhuman delight.

The White Rabbit had long banked away from the fighting when the night turned into day for an instant. The Dark Mane had self-destructed. Both her and her tormentors evaporated in nuclear fire as the Valkyrie’s reactor erupted. It lasted for a full second before the storm’s darkness reasserted itself to full strength.

Taro’s own problems were still chasing him down, closing in. Their metal minds couldn’t care or hesitate for their own losses, not as long as the hunt for the White Rabbit was on.

But Taro had seen it. In that moment of nuclear light, he had seen the gargantuan water spout spinning over the ocean, straight in his flight path. It was the storm itself taking physical form, made solid and all the more terrifying to consider. It was an angry God running his hand over Deana’s cold, brutal surface.

Taro smiled. When the rational mind ran out of options, insanity begged for an opportunity to prove itself.

‘Follow me now, bastards!’ he thought back to his pursuers as he adjusted his course.

As if to answer his thoughts, more tracer fire blew past him, missing but correcting closer. The vortex of spinning wind and water was invisible in the night, but he knew where it was now as he flew for it. His rabbit dodged bullets and thumbed her nose at her pursuers, racing up the sky ladder towards the heavens.

‘This is suicide. You, Rabbit, will be my coffin.’

Taro bit and chewed on his lip as he clung to his flight stick. The damn thing came alive as it fought him at every moment, a snake rearing to bite back at his master. His arms felt leaden and his whole body hurt with the effects of the insane G-forces he was subjecting himself to. It would have been easier to let go, to stall and fall, and sink into the night.

His suit administered another dose of stims through its embedded syringes and his concentration snapped back into painful focus, every ache turned into a focalizing lens for his concentration. Wake up! It seemed to tell him. For all her bickering, the Rabbit wanted to live just as much as Taro did.

‘No mistakes. No errors. No slips.’

The water spout defied reason and Earth-shaped physics. It was miles across and miles tall, its apex lost high above the cloud cover. And Taro wanted to ride it.

The Valkyrie rocked viciously as she got swept up on a stream of wind and water vapor, her dark body with its forward swept wings almost tumbling back into the night. Taro wouldn’t let it. He fought for control and earned it as the plane leveled with her belly parallel to the wall of the vortex. The angry god was in control now.

Unstable flight path. Dangerous weather conditions.

Pull up! Pull up! Pull up!

His engine roared at the undignified abuse. The metal body groaned under the stress, and, for the first time, Taro wondered if the Valkyrie herself could take as much as he was asking of her. He trusted that she’d endure and pull them both through this, though it was nothing more than blind faith in the engineers back on the Wild Summer. Gales howled outside with a ferocity he could never imagine before and which, he knew, would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life if he survived the night.

Angry chittering on his comms battled for his attention, but he couldn’t be bothered to even try and listen in. If a machine could sound angry or frustrated, the SRs were managing to show it.

A streak of lightning ran down the outside of the storm wall, illuminating the titanic phenomenon for the briefest of moments before the bolt of energy earthed itself somewhere beneath. It was the most beautiful thing Taro had ever witnessed in his brief, bloodied life.

More angry and urgent chittering flooded in.

They were silenced abruptly.

Somewhere, far below, the SRs had been swallowed by the storm wall. Deana was a greedy world that would never return what it claimed. Taro wished he could have seen the moment, for what vindication it would have offered him.

He climbed higher, and higher, as he rode the winds around the still center of the hyper-storm. His instruments couldn’t manage to read his airspeed so random numbers flashed across his visor’s hud, fed right into his visual input. He only watched the level, holding his Rabbit steady and parallel even when the winds threatened to blast him apart.

A violent shudder told him he had broken into the swirling mass of clouds, and he could feel the million ice shards sandblasting across his hull. Every sound became amplified in his ears and he could imagine hearing hairline cracks forming in his canopy and in his armor, ready to strip him to the nuclear core and, finally, pulverize him out of existence.

It did not happen.

The moments stretched out into small infinities as he counted heartbeats. Each one thundered in his skull, drowning out the real, immediate cacophony of his Rabbit expressing her displeasure. Nothing mattered but to keep level and keep going. Taro had no more real control. One hiccup of fate, one temper tantrum of the hyper-storm, one chunk of ice bigger than a thimble… and it would all be over.

Gradually, imperceptibly, the dark changed shades. The violent shaking of the Valkyrie calmed. It all happened so slowly that Taro couldn’t be sure if he was finally breaking through, or if it was simply the first stages of passing out. Stims held him alert and focused, but there were no more energy reserves in him.

The White Rabbit tore through the last level of the storm cover. She streaked across the dark orange sky of late evening Deana. Her body trailed water vapor and shimmering crystals of ice as she climbed the sky, unimpeded, into the higher atmosphere. Light blinded Taro for a moment as the change came too sudden for him to expect it, but the world around him snapped into sharp focus a moment later as everything he had ignored crashed into a roar of alarms in his head.

Alert! Imminent danger! Stall imminent! Stall imminent! Stall imminent!

How could he be stalling of all things?

‘Damn you Rabbit. What now?’

In his mind a brief moment of panic flashed white hot. The Rabbit’s engines had finally given up the ghost and Taro thought he could feel gravity reasserting itself to bring them both back into the maw of the ravenous storm beneath. His stomach tightened into a painful knot.

‘No, we’re not dead metal. The instruments are still live.’

Panic passed as the many alarms overcame the feeling. The White Rabbit still breathed but he knew they had come up too sharp and too fast. There was no more lift to be gained, but the Rabbit’s engines were still roaring at maximum thrust in the thin atmosphere. He couldn’t have known how badly God’s Middle Finger had messed with his trajectory and instruments.

The name for the storm popped in his mind uninvited but it gave him a needed moment of levity, just enough for his jaw to unclench and a self-serving rictus to spread. He was alive. He had survived. The Rabbit could still run, just as soon as he could get her nose down and…

‘Fuck!’

With her belly dipping just below the clouds, the Delirium waited ahead. She threw a long shadow ahead unto the blanket of storm clouds, anchored in place like a great ship on an ocean. The last rays of the day’s sunlight flared up over the horizon behind her, giving the great ship an aura of solar fire. Her ports hung open on both sides, with SRs fluttering about her whale-like form, repairing the meager damage Taro’s bombing run had managed.

More drones came up through the clouds, returning sated from their hunt. They had, against his wildest hopes, detected him and the whole squadron of drones changed direction as one to come and meet the luckless White Rabbit.

‘I got you up here. I’ll get you away from here. Let’s play chicken,’ insanity beckoned in the back of his mind, smiling an evil little smile.

Taro knew where he needed to go now. Without the storm to blind him, the beacon of the Wild Summer blinked clearly on his HUD. All he needed to do was go through the Delirium to get there.

‘Chicken it is then.’

He knew all too well that the SRs could chase him down if he tried to run again, with the weather and the wind currents as insane as they were. He wouldn’t run this time, not as they could chase him.

The Rabbit fell.

Her nose was aimed at the storm beneath, and her engines purred eagerly. Taro waited as the silver, six-winged shapes of the drones drew closer. The alarms had quieted. Only the chittering remained, but he ignored it.

He fell and the SRs climbed to meet him, three sleek bodies forming an arrowhead ready to finally finish the hunt. It felt like a long fall.

Danger! Lock on detected!

The muzzle flash came next, ripping apart the moment’s fragile balance. Taro evaded at the very last moment and pushed the engines for a full burn. The extreme acceleration almost knocked him out cold when the afterburners kicked in. All air rushed out of him in a wheeze and his ears popped as he broke the sound barrier and continued to accelerate. The sleek, dark shape of the Valkyrie passed the SRs before they could adjust to intercept.

He aimed for the inert shape of the Delirium and dipped underneath the cloud clover. She couldn’t track him at the Valkyrie’s maximum speed, but neither could he control his Rabbit. He was now an arrow loosed but he gave in to that game of chance with a mad smile, only barely holding the flight stick stable.

The Valkyrie erupted out of the clouds behind the Delirium’s aft and, moments later, was gone again underneath the rolling waves of storm clouds, surfacing once again too far away for any drone to pursue.

The White Rabbit, against all hope and to spite all odds, had managed to get away.