Solaris City,
Mars

2147

An MQ-101, a bat-like drone soars in between the black spires of the city skyscrapers, darting past what seemed to be miles and miles of lights and signboards, all blurring into neon-colored streaks of light, before the drone nosed over, rapidly descending into the streets, banking over in an aileron roll before levelling out into the confines of a canal, just wide enough for the drone to manuver.

The drone’s exhaust kicked up a cloud of red Martian dust as the sky above it alternated between flashes of dark and light, a result of passing under several culverts.

Originally designed as an unmanned fighter aircraft, this particular MQ-101 had its weapons stripped out by its owners, along with the fire control system. The IFF remained, in case somehow the drone ran into a police or military gunship, which was a rare event, as the cops and the military often kept patrols around the slums and the city outskirts. A downtown run with a drone or any unmanned craft, would be reported in as a noise complaint, which in turn would often be swept under the rug.

No one would intervene with the drone’s flight, and that’s the way the pilot liked it.

The drone’s weapon bays were converted to hold fuel, along with electronic equipment linked to the retrofitted cameras in the nose, and the guidance system that linked it to the pilot’s control room, several miles from the drone’s current location.

The original jet engines were replaced long ago with an impulse drive, scavenged from a starfighter’s wreck, the combination of both the engine and the reduced weight from the mods granting unparalelled top speed and acceleration to the craft.

The pilot, a purple haired girl named Yerim squinted hard behind her helmet, a live feed of everything in front of the drone’s camera, streaming through a screen in front of her.

Don’t think, react. Focus. Focus. She mumbled a mantra to herself as the MQ-101’s wingtip nearly scrapes a wall.

Its current path would lead the bat-like craft down the dried up remains of a river, which lead to the outskirts of the city, straight into the Solaris mountain range which the Martian city that the pilot lived in, was named after.

Tapping a button on the side of the visor, the feed flickered slightly before the pilot’s eyes teared up under the strain of her iris cams adjusted, the live feed fading into a black and white image, as the path the drone would take in its flight through the mountains manifested in a neon-colored line.

And then the feed slowly faded back into ‘real’ colors a brief moment later.

-

“Approaching Solstice Canyon. 30 seconds.” Yerim stated, quite tersely as her focus was fixated on keeping the drone in the air, as the feed started to flicker, with snow-like dots starting to pulse at the edges of her field of view. Her knuckles had already turned white, from how hard she was gripping the throttle and the control stick

“Roger. Let’s hope all that shielding we crammed in that thing works.”

A dark haired girl, a close friend of Yerim’s who went by the name of Jinsoul, herself a former military pilot, nods, watching the flight from another screen, where a map of the mountain range was displayed in a top-down view, with the drone appearing as a bright white blip.

The Solaris mountains were infamous for a rather strong electromagnetic field, because of the inherent properties of the minerals buried under all the red rock, most notably the green and blue crystals that randomly jutted out from the mountainsides, and even formed pillars and glaciers. The miners and denizens of Solaris City casually referred to it as ‘Tiberium’, after the similarly colored crystals from the Command & Conquer videogame series.

The electromagnetic field posed little danger to manned craft like jets or gunships (but with the catch being that comms going to the city would be extremely choppy, limiting pilots to local comms within a 2-5 kilometer radius of their craft), but many a drone was lost in the mountains, most notably due to the interference, which was strong enough to jam most drone control signals if the drone went too far into the mountains. After the loss of Yerim’s first few drones out there because of that, she had saved every credit she had from her day job as a courier on Earth (until a spinner crash prior to her move to Mars forced her to step out of a cockpit and stick to flying drones instead) to get her hands on the MQ-101. Herself and Jinsoul spent most of their free time modifying the drone to fly in the sandstorms that were common in the wastelands outside the city, and in areas with heavy signal interference like the Solaris mountains. Most of the empty space in the MQ-101 had been packed with shielding against electromagnetic fields and signal boosters, most of which Yerim and Jinsoul had to scavenge from the various scrapyards on the outskirts of Solaris.

“Increasing speed. Approaching Mach 2.”

One advantage to being out in the mountains, is the fact that drone and manned aircraft pilots could push their craft to the limits, with the only real danger being the risk of slamming into the side of a mountain or a Tiberium pillar

Solstice Canyon, as Yerim had found out during her first week in Solaris, was a popular place for manned aircraft pilots to race. A mostly straight line, until one reached the section where the walls would narrow, and then open up into a series of rocky outcrops before wideneing, then narrowing again before the canyon opened up again into a straight line.

Most locals knew that section as Hellfire Pass, where countless pilots had crashed and burned, quite literally.

But Yerim was determined. One way or another, she’d complete the Solstice Canyon run, all the way to the end.

“Mach 2.6… Mach 2.7.” Jinsoul rattled off the speed numbers as they appeared on her screen, Yerim slowly acknowledging as she pushed the throttle control to ‘Full’.

The drone streaked through the canyon at thrice the speed of sound now, it’s pilot’s senses now sharper than a razor as she deftly manuvered the bat-like craft around several Tiberium pillars

-

The edges of the screen flickered with bursts of static, but Yerim still managed to maintain control.

“You’ll be reaching Hellfire Pass in 10 seconds.”

“Acknowledged. Reducing speed.”

“Five… Four… Three...”

Yerim cuts the throttle as the countdown starts, the drone now slowing to exactly the speed of sound as her hands worked their magic, rolling, looping, banking through the narrowest parts of the pass.

And then disaster strikes, as the image in Yerim’s visor fades into static, followed by the MQ-101’s wing clipping an outcrop of rock. She sees the world tumbling, spinning, and then a shard of Tiberium looming right at the camera.

 And as the feed cut, Yerim had the sensation of being shot between the eyes as her breath hitched, then exhaled slowly.

With a defeated sigh, a sweat-soaked Yerim stripped off the helmet, leaving it to dangle by its cables as she slid off her seat.

“What happened? According to the tracker, you were making pretty good progress.” Jinsoul had inquired, as she helped Yerim up, handing Yerim her walking-stick as the purple haired pilot wiped off a torrent of sweat from her forehead.

“Too much interference. The controls were fine but the camera feed had too much interference. Clipped a wing on a rock because I couldn’t see anything…”

“Hey, don’t worry. We’ll get you another drone.” Jinsoul slips an arm around her friend, to which Yerim replies with a chuckle.

“So much for joining the ARL’s unmanned class.”

The ARL, which was the acronym of the Aerial Racing League, was the main form of entertainment for the more technically-inclined denizens of Solaris.

The Aerial Racing League, as the name implied, was an underground racing league for jets, rotorcraft, drones and basically anything that fell under the Martian government’s definition of an ‘aerial vehicle’

There were two classes in the ARL for prospective competitors, one for manned craft and another, the unmanned class for drones, which Yerim had aspirations of participating in. Each class in itself would have two categories; pure racing, with the kind of race being randomly decided each time it was held (and pilots earning bonus points for aerobatics or stunts performed during the races) or dogfighting where pilots would test their combat flying skills against one another.

Jinsoul was one such ARL pilot, one of many participants in the ARL’s manned-aircraft class along with Jungeun, another pilot, who had borrowed Jinsoul’s jet earlier in the day, before Yerim’s now-failed test flight of her heavily customized MQ-101.

Yerim had been taken in by Jungeun and Jinsoul a few days after she landed on Mars, being taken from Neo-Seoul into their current place at Solaris.

Jinsoul, as Yerim found out on their first flight training session in Jinsoul's own aircraft, was a former pilot with the Solaris garrison of the Mars Aerospace Force, with a pretty long service record. Serving from 2135 until 2146. Jungeun herself was an Earthling like Yerim, who had moved to Mars a decade before, meeting Jinsoul sometime in 2145 after moving to Mars in 2137. Unlike Jinsoul, Jungeun never talked much about her past, referring vaguely to it as having done some real shady things back on Earth whenever someone asked.

The purple-haired pilot proved to have a natural knack for flying, as she demonstrated with her first drone, a smaller model called the Vogel (which was later lost in her first attempt at the Solstice Canyon run).

Their team was called Odd Eye Circle, a name all three pilots had thought up after a session of voting for random words they threw on a whiteboard. And it was fitting, due to the iris cams that Jungeun had invented, in the form of removeable contact lenses, linked to the pilot helmets as a navigation systems aid.

Unfortunately, Yerim wasn’t able to join in any races, with her injuries from her crash, and now the loss of the only drone she had.

The only sounds Jinsoul heard after, when Yerim had gone off to change into a fresh set of clothes was the sounds of the younger pilot muttering, chastising herself for being so reckless with the only drone she had left.

“Hey, you alright there?”

“…Yes. I’m good, no worries!”

-

Both Jinsoul and Yerim rushed out as the sounds of jet engines resonated overhead.

Two fighters sparred in the skies above, one packing the emblem of a wolf holding a knife in its teeth on its tail, the other with the emblem of an eagle on its tail. Both of them also packed an emblem of twin moons on their nose.

Both aircraft reminded Yerim of a pair of ravens, with the aircrafts’ birdlike designs. The forward-swept wings making both jets seem even more like birds of prey.

Either the Mars Aerospace Force garrison stationed at Solaris had a new pilot whose skills they wanted to test out, or they had some new toys that the garrison’s pilots wanted to show off in an impromptu airshow.

It had to be the latter reason, and the fighters had to be some new design as not even Jinsoul, who was quite familiar with half the aircraft the military flew could identify it.

Both Jinsoul and Yerim watched from below, the two jets drawing a cluster of contrails against the red sky as they began a dance of sorts. The wolf would drop down on to the raven’s tail, only for the raven to perform an aileron roll, as the wolf quickly countered with loops.

And after several minutes of chasing each other’s tails under the cloudless sky, both fighters broke away, levelling their wings as they retreated to the east end of the city.

Jinsoul’s phone rang, as quickly as the jets left. It was Jungeun.

“Hey, word’s getting around that something crashed out there in Hellfire Pass . Saw something smoking when I flew over it.... Wasn’t one of you two, I hope?”

“Uhh about that….”

“Don’t tell me…”

“N-no! That was Yerim’s MQ-101. Camera feed cut due to interference and it clipped its wings.”

A relieved sigh, before Jungeun spoke.

“At least she’s in one piece. Drones can be replaced, we ourselves can’t be replaced…”

“…unless you’re a military spook who’s a replicant.”

Jungeun chuckled over the line, as Jinsoul finished her sentence for her.

“Heh true. Either way, get your butts to the old starport at the West end. Namjoon’s got a few things he claims we’d be interested in. Maybe we’ll get Yerim a new drone too.”

Jinsoul glanced over at Yerim, now able to walk without the stick, but still with a slight limp in her step. And then the purple-haired girl gazed skywards, arms outstretched as she imagined what it’d be like to step into an actual cockpit again.

“How soon do you want us there?”

“20 mins, then we’ll have at least a couple hours before tonight’s race.”

“Alright.”