Then she caught sight of something flapping in the air next to the fist that held her wrist. It was his flight control device.

Another elbow slammed into her helmet, but as it did, her left hand was already in motion. She dropped her own flight control, letting it dangle by the short cord wound through her jacket while she reached over to seize his. She cranked the throttle to maximum.

He shot away from her in a bright red flash, flailing for his flight control as he went. It would only take a moment for him to recover, but she was quicker: one burst from her pack put her on the same trajectory. She stretched her arm out in front of her, peered down the sights of her pistol, and pulled the trigger as quickly as she could.

Two, three, four shots. Even with two good eyes, it would take a miracle to hit his fuel tank.

Seven, eight, nine shots. She was about to give it up as hopeless when the rocket-truppen exploded, an instant bonfire against a black backdrop.

Kate was battered and bruised, and she had one bullet left. The buzzing in her helmet was a constant now: her fuel tank was nearly dry. When it was empty, she would fall like a rock. And there was still one more fighter plane.

She aimed herself directly towards him, stretching her pistol out in front to aim as carefully as she could. Her red hair licked at the edges of her helmet’s visor. Somehow it had come loose and now it streamed out behind her, a flaming red trail to match that from the rocket pack.

The Messerschmitt pilot saw her coming. He might have had her right in his sights, but he didn’t fire. He bobbed its wings three times—the aviator’s signal for surrender—and wheeled back towards his base.

A minute later, Kate’s rocket pack sputtered on the last drops of its fuel as she passed through the side door of the S-1. Clem and Dr. Scott exploded into applause as she set down in the cabin. Even Reggie took his hands off the stick long enough to clap.

“How did you do it?” Dr. Scott gasped. “How did you drive off an entire squadron?”

Kate whipped off the helmet, allowing her red hair to cascade down over her shoulders.

“Let’s just put it this way,” she said. “They just got aced by Kate Boone: Daredevil Pilot!”

The flying wing’s turrets riddling her captured Messerschmitt with bullets. The controls shuddered violently in her hands for a moment, and then even more violently as the engine burst into bright flames and dark smoke.

“I only wanted to borrow your airplane,” she said as if the Nazis could hear her. “If you want it back so badly, I’m happy to return it.”

Kate nosed the plane upwards and slightly to starboard, and then she bounced herself out of the cockpit, happy to leave the confinement behind in favor of the open skies.

She zipped away on her rocket plume while the gun turrets hammered at the Messerschmitt. The fighter plane shed more flames and more scrap metal. One wing tore free. A fuel cell exploded. But the airplane’s momentum carried it forward, right into the flying wing. It crashed through with a fierce red flash and a collision so loud that Kate felt it in her stomach more than hear it with her ears. With the speed of gravity, the scattered fragments of the fighter plane and the two jagged halves of the flying wing plummeted down to be swallowed by the storm clouds below.

A faint buzzing sounded in Kate’s ear, alerting her that her fuel was nearly spent. Whatever she did next, she would have to do it fast. She had lost her Tommy gun, so she drew her trusty Mauser pistol. It wasn’t the best weapon for a dogfight, but it was better than nothing.

She allowed herself to freefall while she scanned the night for her enemies. The final rocket-truppen was spiraling in place, watching his mother ship go down. Kate opened her throttle for one quick burst, intending to get in close enough to make her pistol worth using. Not for the first time that night, the poor depth perception of her single good eye made her misjudge the distance and put on too much speed. He spun to face her just as they slammed together.

The impact knocked the breath out of both of them, but the Nazi was quicker to recover. He held her right wrist tight with one hand as he brought his other fist up into her ribs. She wheezed and the world went red, and then he slammed an elbow into her helmet and her red world became white.

The two tumbled through the air, and her vision was filled with his mask’s bug-eyes and bulbous nose. With him gripping her wrist, she couldn’t twist her pistol in at him, and when she attempted to bring her knee up into his groin he turned his hips to deflect the blow. He was lean, but he still outweighed her by at least 30 pounds, and he knew how to fight in close quarters. Kate realized she would never be able to win this mid-air grapple, nor could she break his grip to get away.

Kate watched her opponents converge on her from every direction. Two fighter planes and a rocket trooper against just one of her.

This isn’t a fair fight, she thought. They need more planes.

With the Mescherschmidtt barreling down on her, Kate simply cut her engines, praying that she would be harder to see without burning rocket exhaust venting behind her.

The ploy worked: the fighter rushed over her, tracer rounds searching in vain for a target. As soon as he had sailed past, she launched herself back up and forward, landing so that her boots slammed down on either side of the cockpit screen.

Earlier that night she had wished she could have seen the pilot’s face after she pulled a fancy maneuver. Now, she had her wish: he was right there, close enough to see the whites of his astonished eyes through the lenses of his goggles.

Kate slammed the butt of her empty Thompson down onto the cockpit screen. Glass exploded outward and was instantly whipped away by the wind. As she pried the screen’s frame away from its housing, the pilot reached for his pistol, but the confining seat prevented his draw. Kate’s hands darted in at him and, with a quick flip of her wrist, she undid the buckles on his chest and at his waist. She yanked him up by the scruff of his flight suit, where the slipstream grabbed him and pulled him away into the night.

Not bothering to watch his parachute open, she dropped into the cockpit and seized the controls. It was cramped for a woman wearing a rocket pack, forcing her to hunch forward and hook the front of the seat with the backs of her calves to keep herself in place. It was uncomfortable, but the position allowed her to reach the stick and the throttle, just in time to pull the plane out of its dive.  The Messerchmidtt was quick and responsive, its nose coming up eagerly under her control. There, in front of her, she could see the remaining rocket-truppen, his thruster cutting a red scar across the sky.

She thumbed the trigger and felt the fifty caliber machineguns vibrate the frame of the plane, but he was hard to hit. Tight turns. Steep ascents. Sharp drops. Still, she stuck to his tail as if she were glued to it, sending controlled bursts after him whenever his silhouette passed the crosshairs.

A flash of lightning in a cloud below revealed the rocket-truppen’s gambit. He had deliberately led her back towards his mother ship. He had probably also radioed ahead, because they began shooting at her captured plane the moment she was in range.

Kate veered upwards into a steep loop, blasting almost vertically into the air. The straps of the pack felt like they were about to yank free and take her arms and legs with them, but she decided a few bruises were a small price to pay for flaunting gravity so dramatically.

The rocket-truppen angled up after her, but they could not climb as quickly nor turn as sharply. By the completion of their loop, she had come all the way around and then some, and now she had them at twelve o’clock dead ahead.

The Nazis veered in different directions. Smart move; Kate could only follow one of them now, leaving the other free to come after her. She would just have to deal with the first one quickly.

As she aimed, she reflexively squinted with her bad eye even though she couldn’t see through it anyway. When she had him lined up in her sights, she pulled the trigger and her Thompson jerked in her hands and spat forth white fire. Beyond that, her bullets disappeared into the darkness. She wished for tracers, but at least she didn’t have to worry too much about depth and distance as she kept her target dead ahead.

She spent the rest of her clip in focused bursts and was rewarded by a cloud of golden fire and black smoke engulfing the rocket-truppen. She had ignited his fuel tank. These rocket packs—her own included—were obviously prone to explosion. They were, after all, designed by Professor Scrumtumbler.

Kate ejected the empty ammunition drum and let it fall away below her. She was reaching for her next clip when machinegun fire blazed down on her from above. One bullet pierced her flight jacket and grazed her arm. It was not a serious injury, but it was startling and a bit painful, and it knocked the spare magazine drum out of her hand.

Her ammo lost to the clouds, she blasted to the left just as the rocket-truppen swooped in from the same direction so that he overshot her and sped past. However, before she could turn and give chase, the thunder of a heavy engine beat down on her. One of the Messerschmitts, prowling the night like a massive shark, had sighted her and was moving in for the kill. She darted to the right and then straight up just in time to avoid a collision. The fighter spun as it passed beneath her. In its wake, the turbulence of the plane’s propwash flung her around like a rag doll. Her rocket pack might make her nimble, but she was now a fly-weight in a heavyweight bout.

Kate nudged just enough boost from her rocket to check her fall. As soon as she did, she saw the second Messerschmitt barreling down at her. The first fighter was wheeling around for another pass, and the rocket-truppen was zipping back in from her flank.

The skies were getting awfully crowded.

The first rocket-truppen shot in on a tail of fire, matching speeds with the S-1 airplane so that he could touch down on its back. Spikes in his boots and gloves dug into the airplane’s hull so that he could scamper across the fuselage like an insect. His head darted side to side, his thin limbs wobbled but carried him forward swiftly. He wore all black, but his mask’s round, bulging lenses and proboscis-like gas filter glinted in the night.

Kate threw open the side hatch and launched herself out and then straight up, spinning as she rose to face the unwelcomed boarder. She stalled her rocket pack at just the right instant so that she hovered in front of him, an angel in silver and brown reflected in his lenses.

He unclasped his cloves and went for his submachine gun; she already had hers out. The blast caught him square in the chest, swatting him away from the plane with such force that his spiked boots remained behind, lodged in place by their own spikes.

The recoil pushed Kate back and away from the S-1. She allowed gravity to cradle her for a moment before flattening out and slamming the throttle all the way open. Instantly, the force of the acceleration pressed against every inch of her skin. It squeezed her lungs and compacted her stomach into a tiny ball. The bitter wind pierced her jacket, and the air whistled against her helmet so loudly that she could hardly hear herself scream in delight.

Flight. True flight. Power, speed, freedom—this was her first test of the rocket pack, and she was now soaring higher than an eagle and faster than a hurricane.

Two lances of tracer fire probed the night around her, bringing her back to the problem at hand. She performed a tight roll and glanced back to see the two other rocket-truppen on her tail, guns blazing. It was time to see how her rocket pack compared to theirs.

“Take the stick,” Kate said to Reggie as she unstrapped herself.

“Wait… what?” Reggie sputtered. “I don’t know how to fly—”

“All you have to do is hold her steady. I’ll go take care of the rocket-truppen.”

“The what now?”

“The rocket-truppen. Rocket troopers. Our dear Professor Scrumtumbler accidentally designed the Nazis some rocket packs.”

The plane pitched forward as Kate swung herself out of the pilot’s seat. Reggie lunged for the stick. He clutched it with quaking hands, causing the plane to lurch and sway in its flight.

Good, Kate decided. That’ll make us harder to hit. Also, it’ll remind the boys to appreciate my expertise.

Gripping the railings to keep herself upright, she moved to a cargo locker just to the rear of the cockpit. From here, she could see Clem and Dr. Scott buckled tightly into the passenger seats, their eyes clenched shut, their faces fully green with air-sickness.

Kate opened the closet and unstrapped a footlocker from the bottom shelf. First, she removed her Tommy gun, snapped in a fresh ammo drum, and put her spare cartridge into the pocket of her flight jacket. Then she reached for the next object in the footlocker, a gleaming silver backpack consisting of a pair of thick engines strapped to short maneuvering wings.

“What are you doing?” Reggie yelled back from the cockpit. “You’re going to die and I’m not even going to get any good footage of it!”

“Scrutumbler designed their rocket packs,” she said. “But he designed mine even better.”

Kate jerked at the controls, throwing the S-1 into a barrel role to escape the Messerschmidt fire peppering its hull. There were two fighters on their tail and something else much bigger bearing down on them fast. She couldn’t outrun them and the S-1 was unarmed.

“What’re you going to do?” Reggie was strapped into the copilot’s chair and clung to the armrests with white-knuckled fists.

“Just watch,” Kate winked at him with her one good eye and then threw the lever that tilted their engines vertically.

The entire plane shuddered sickeningly and the metal hull screeched like a seasick condor. Their momentum continued to drag them forward, but now their engines wrenched them vertically into the air. As the change in velocity crushed them down into their seats, but Kate was gratified to see twin phosphorescent streaks of tracer fire ripping through the night below them, followed swiftly by the speeding fighter passing through the space they had occupied a moment earlier.

Kate guffawed. “Oh, how I wish I could see the look on that pilot’s face.”

She eased the plane right onto the tail of the fighter. Maybe five yards away, maybe three—it was hard to tell with only one eye. The fighter’s propwash created fierce turbulence, but at this distance the second fighter couldn’t gun for them without the risk of shooting down his partner.

Kate had the advantage of maneuverability, but the Messerschmitts were much faster, and she judged that her mid-flight vertical dodge was a one-time trick: try it again and she would shear the wings right off the S-1.

Then a flash of lighting from the cloud below illuminated something worse. It was a large airplane of a design she didn’t recognize. The fuselage was folded into the body in a way that made the whole thing look like a single wing studded with a series of sleek gun-turrets. Its four monstrous engines chewed through the air with a startling velocity, but Kate estimated that it was not nearly as maneuverable as the Messerchmidtts. In fact, this new plane looked like it must be a bomber, which meant she could fly circles around it. What good was a bomber in chasing down a fugitive aircraft?

The answer came a moment later when the flying wing’s bomb bay doors were opened and three small shapes dropped from its belly. An instant later, each shape flashed to life and became a red streak in the night. They swirled around each other like a swarm of angry hornets on their way to the S-1.

Another flash of lightning gave her a glimpse of what they were. They were men—individual men, each with a blazing rocket pack strapped to their backs.