Daughters of the Night Sky

“Precisely what’s making him angry,” I answered, remembering the biting comments from the schoolmaster, Comrade Dokorov, when I outperformed the boys in mathematics or the indifference from Captain Karlov when I navigated the aircraft without fault. “We’re doing well enough that he can’t discipline us for genuine infractions, so he’s making capital offenses out of the least missteps.”

“God, I think you’re right, Katya,” Sofia chimed in. “I didn’t take him for being so petty, but it fits.”

“It’s nonsense,” Taisiya said. “If the men in a regiment took the parachutes off their flares, he would say they’re just doing what was necessary to complete the mission. He wouldn’t care what they did with the scrap fabric. He wouldn’t berate them for drinking on a sanctioned holiday. They get their daily measures of vodka, and we never touch the stuff.”

“We have to leave him with no choice,” I said. “We have to fly so well, so clean, that no one would hear a word against us.”

“How do we do more than what we’re doing?” Taisiya asked. “We fly constantly as it is.”

“We have to be the best. Not just good,” I said, steel filling my bones. “We need to fly more missions than the men. We have to be more efficient than they are. We can’t be excellent. We have to be exemplary.”

“Katya’s right,” Sofia said. “Winter is upon us. They expect us to balk at the long nights and the cold weather. We have to show them how wrong they are. I want all of us to think of what we can do to streamline each sortie. I want to turn around planes after their sorties in half the time. I want to send up groups in a tighter formation—each plane with a gap of three minutes, not six. Speak to your teams. Your mechanics know your planes better than you do. I want every maintenance procedure scrutinized.”

We summoned Renata and Polina to the conversation, who in turn called over a few other mechanics and armorers who had shown considerable skill. We didn’t sleep, relying on coffee to fuel us through the cruel brightness of the winter day. Before the night’s missions and between each subsequent sortie, we began looking at the standard procedures for preparing a plane for flight. Polina scribbled furiously in a notebook as she considered each of the tasks she performed on the aircraft as devoutly as prayer each day.

“You only cut the engine once per sortie, right?” Polina asked, looking down at her notebook instead of up at us.

“Yes,” Taisiya answered, then, arms crossed over her chest, went on staring at the simple engine as though it contained the answer to a complex riddle. “Once we lose the element of surprise, there’s not a lot of use in cutting it again.”

“Don’t charge the starter in between each sortie,” Polina said, scribbling. “You get five starts of each charge. Charge when you have one left. That will shave several minutes off right there.”

“Brilliant,” Sofia said, clapping Polina on the shoulder. “What else?”

“Well, I understand why they want one mechanic per plane—it allows us to learn the plane and all of its quirks—but it would be faster if we worked in teams. Each of us would still be the chief mechanic for her plane, but the others can help refuel and see to basic maintenance in between sorties instead of waiting for their own planes to come back.”

A crowd of mechanics had gathered around, humming in approval as though they’d been thinking this for months and never been bold enough to suggest it.

“That makes good sense,” Sofia agreed. “Though I’m afraid you’ll exhaust yourselves.”

“It’s better to exhaust ourselves working than waiting,” Polina replied, earning approving cheers from the other mechanics.

While Sofia, Taisiya, and Oksana looked over our aircraft with Renata, discussing the most efficient ways to load the bombs and reload the navigators’ sidearms, I pulled Polina aside, forcing her to look up from the leather notebook she gripped like a life preserver. “You’re sure you can do this?” I asked, my tone low. I wouldn’t have her answer colored by pride. “It’ll increase your workload twenty-five times over.”

“Anything is better than waiting for you to come back,” Polina insisted. “You have no idea what it’s like for us wondering which ones might not make it back. If we’re busy, it helps us feel like we’re doing more to help.”

“We couldn’t fly without you,” I said. “You couldn’t possibly be doing anything more, short of flying the planes yourselves. You don’t have to work yourselves sick to do your part.”

“Don’t you worry about us. Just bring your planes back in one piece, and let us do our jobs.”

In four hours we’d dissected the procedures for readying the plane and stripped them down to the barest necessities and decided how the mechanics could work together to make the essential tasks happen as quickly as they could manage. For the pilots and navigators, the plan was simple—stay in the plane. Eat in the plane. Sleep in it if needed.