PmWiki | Waylight / Skyknights

The Sky Knights

Fleet battles, with ships of the line lobbing artillery at each other and ground targets, bomber rigs trying to take them down, and fighters covering or assaulting the bombers, are ultimately a new thing -- the Big War saw the apotheosis of this method of fighting, introduced with great success during Cascadian Imperial times and ultimately countered by a wider application of itself.

However, the modern heavier-than-air rig is about a century old in its current incarnation -- we know that both Humanity and Invaders battled it out using very fast but very fragile rigs that required extensive ground support, but that is besides the point.

Before then, ships and aerostats ruled the sky for most of recorded history -- cantonal militias would ride wyverns or insect, as they occasionally still do, but the open sky belonged to galleons and gunboats.

And yet, handfuls of men and women could take down the greatest airship. They were the Sky Knights.

Ordinarily, a knight would be a minor nobleman (or cantonal equivalent) endowed with enogugh land to support their military service in defense of their canton. A sky knight, also called a knight errant, was a psionically gifted individual able to instinctively operate the contraptions that preceded modern thermal engine rigs -- small mounts, usually in the shape of flying beasts, powered by the knight's willpower and a named crystal that would shift the air within the machine itself in order to give it propulsion. These sky rides were nearly always one-of-a-kind wonders, whether rebuilt from Invader skimmers or ancient human technology or painstakingly made over lifetimes and attuned to the pilot throughout the span of years.

Skyknights would be beholden to their canton by oath of fealty and, before the advent of reliable wireless communications that didn't depend on psi, afforded great operational autonomy; banding in small squadrons numbering from 3 to 7, or operting alone, they would serve as much as champions of their canton's values as as special forces and deep-strike infiltrators; a squadron would be assigned a small airship to hitch their rides to and allow movement past a single person's endurance.

With the coming of mass-produceable thermal-engine rigs that could keep up with these nigh-magical sky rides (rigs were in fact originally named for second-fiddle rides assigned to landed knights in similar roles) the role of skyknights changed as their tactical value decreased from champions to elite agents to ambassadors and some would argue, tools of propaganda.

Although few like to admit it, their role in warfare was already becoming irrelevant during the Big War; the cost of a sky knight in training and gear was simply not cost effective for a canton when specialized rigs could at least match a skyride's performance in one measure, for a small fraction of the cost and allowing pilots who weren't psionically gifted to specialize.

Skyknight squadrons seemed slated to go gently into the night, but history gave them a last hurrah in the Black Lance Incident; squadrons from nearly all the cantons joined together to defeat the shadowy organization based on Land Axius. Indeed, what diplomacy could not achieve and conventional warfare would have failed at mobilizing in time to thwart, less than a hundred brave men and women managed through stealth and daring and incredible skill to expose and then cripple an enemy bent on engulfing the Slipstream in war again. Unfortunately, the sky knights went out with a bang -- most failing to escape the indiscriminate destruction that they themselves had provoked into action, in the form of Tsuxian ground artillery that wiped out Land Axius in its entirety, as the Black Lancers fought to the very last to bring down their vanquishers along with themselves.

Most of the few remaining Sky Knights gave up their arms and crest, seeing their very survival as cowardice or accepting that their time was past. Those who still live generally have allowed their exploits to become the stuff of reenactments and fiction reels.

Recently, a few cantonal governments have expressed an interest in reviving some of the skyknight traditions for their top pilots, forming aerobatics teams to tour the Slipstream. The Enotrians have attempted, with great embarassment for everyone involved, to revive the passing-of-the-torch tournment tradition leaving a group of brash pilots squaring off against old men in what most media other than Bruscoloni's described a poorly rehearsed pantomime.

Tsuxians had skyknight squadron equivalents in their elite Shadow Stalker teams, who still roam the Stream as secret agents and assassins; often obeying orders hundreds of years old, they will sometimes assassinate a person or destroy a building seemingly at random... which is part of why the insurance business never really took off again.