Just Another Sortie

The carrier deck roared with life beneath a gray Pacific sky.

Engines screamed as fighters lifted off the forward deck, propellers chopping the morning air into a constant metallic thunder. Crewmen in grease-stained uniforms rushed across the deck waving signal flags and guiding aircraft into position like choreographed dancers in a deadly ballet.

Through the noise and motion walked Lieutenant Silen.

His boots struck the steel deck with a hollow clang as he climbed down from the cockpit of his fighter, the smell of hot oil and aviation fuel clinging to his flight suit. Behind him, mechanics swarmed the plane he had just landed—checking bullet holes in the wing, refueling tanks, shouting numbers over the roar of engines.

To them it was just another sortie.

But to Silen, something about the flight had felt… wrong.

He removed his helmet slowly as he stepped away from the aircraft, the wind from another fighter’s propeller tugging at his hair. Sweat ran down the side of his face despite the cool ocean air.

Fragments of the mission played back in his mind.

The approach over the island.

The anti-aircraft bursts rising like black flowers in the sky.

The diving attack run that had rattled his bones as he released his bombs.

Everything had unfolded exactly as it should have.

Yet during the flight—during the long stretch of sky between the carrier and the battlefield—something had happened.

Something impossible.

Silen slowed as he walked across the deck, the noise of the carrier fading slightly behind the strange fog forming in his thoughts.

For a moment, high above the Pacific, the world had shifted.

The ocean had vanished.

In its place he had seen sand.

Not a beach.

A vast desert landscape stretching to a broken city filled with shattered towers and drifting ash. Figures moved through the ruins beneath a red sun. One of them—a woman holding a lantern—had turned as if she could see him watching.

The image had been so vivid it had made him jerk the controls of his plane.

Then it was gone.

The Pacific had returned.

The formation had remained intact.

No one had said a word.

Now, walking across the carrier deck, Silen tried to shake the memory loose.

War did strange things to a mind, he told himself. Long hours, exhaustion, adrenaline. Pilots hallucinated sometimes. It wasn’t unheard of.

But this felt different.

The vision had not felt like imagination.

It had felt like memory.

He stopped near the edge of the flight deck and looked out over the rolling gray ocean.

Far below, waves slammed against the carrier’s massive hull.

Behind him a deck officer shouted, and another fighter roared down the runway toward takeoff. The wind from its propeller whipped across the deck like a storm.

Yet Silen barely heard it.

His thoughts were somewhere else now.

That desert city…

He had never seen such a place before.

And yet, part of him knew its name.

Los Angeles.

The word appeared in his mind without explanation.

Even stranger were the flashes that had followed the desert vision.

Stone alleys.

A quiet village beneath distant mountains.

A lone figure walking through the debris of a missile strike in a place that felt ancient and wounded.

Silen rubbed his temples, trying to steady himself.

“Lieutenant?”

A crewman approached, snapping him partly back to reality.

“Your bird’s ready for refuel. Captain says we’ll likely be launching again in thirty.”

Silen nodded automatically.

“Understood.”

The crewman hurried away, disappearing into the chaos of the deck.

Silen remained at the railing a moment longer.

The ocean stretched endlessly toward the horizon, calm and indifferent beneath the morning sky.

But something inside him refused to settle.

The visions weren’t fading.

If anything, they were becoming clearer.

Somewhere deep in the back of his mind another reality seemed to be pressing forward, like an image trying to break through fogged glass.

A ruined city.

Tunnels beneath the earth.

A woman walking alone with a lantern.

And something else…

Machines.

Immense machines humming in darkness.

Silen straightened slowly, pushing the thoughts aside with effort.

There was a war to fight.

Planes to fly.

Orders to follow.

Yet as he walked back toward the ready line, one unsettling question refused to leave him.

If those visions weren’t dreams…

Then where had they come from?

And why did they feel like fragments of a life he had somehow already lived?