The following essay was published anonymously online three months after the release of Brett Thompson’s ‘Warriors and the Belkan War’. After gaining notoriety and reaching a worldwide audience, it was pulled from its hosting site. The identity of the author was never confirmed.

In the interests of historical preservation, it has been presented here unedited, and with all spelling and grammar errors intact.

Deciphered

When Brett Thompson released Warriors and the Belkan War it captured the imagination of pilots, generals, politicians, and ordinary citizens alike. They imagined war as he portrayed it: A thing defined by heroic aces beating the odds. Of pilots who could kill armies, pit against superweapons. Off-the-books operations and dramatic jousts that shaped global politics. 

Through his interpretation of Cipher and his interviews with surviving aces, he painted a picture of what the ideal the man who fit that mold, the ideal, iconic ace, not only should be, but already was.

And then Mobius One made the legend real. And, as a result, no-one put together that the original was a crock of shit. That ‘Cipher’ is a myth propagated for the convenience of Ustio and his victims.

The Belkan War

Mobius One and the Continental War have scoured this from recent memory, but the Belkan War was a horrorshow. It was not a knightly play of good versus evil. It was not a simple tale of righteousness persevering against all odds. Of a saintly figure in a plane striking out from the last bastion of good and redeeming the entire continent through strength of arms and miraculous flying skill.

The Belkan War was a slaughterhouse born of rank political cynicism and desperation. A psychotic war of aggression met with butchery beyond compare, so foul and so desperate and so blatant that it birthed the modern militant anarchist movement. Hoffnung, and Frieden, and too many smaller towns to name, burned as both attacker and defender could agree on but a single thing: Everything in those places must be destroyed. The first use of nuclear weapons in anger, and it was to create a radioactive cordon along the mountains so that the horrors would stop somewhere.

That every country involved, including the victors, saw mass defections to coup forces and A World With No Borders was not an accident. That so many pilots looked at victory and decided that they would sacrifice their lives to kill their own heads of state was no accident.

A million lives in four months. And Brett Thompson would have us believe that it created a hero.

To pretend Galm 1 was the true centerpiece of the conflict, was what the entire war revolved around, is an insult to every man, woman, and child who died during it. To make a documentary of the Belkan War and believe you have found a hero is the height of folly.

Let us begin.

Feet of Clay

Brett Thompson’s evidence for his narrative of Cipher is fatally flawed. None of the paperwork he has acquired and published names the Ace, and most of it doesn’t even refer to Galm 1 by callsign, instead referring to Galm Flight or The Demon. The flurry of related leaks that followed the documentary’s release are similarly flawed, with even classified documents referring to a callsign or team rather than a man.

His evidence, then, relies on his interviews. The aces who met, fought, and lost to Galm 1. Who had the dubious honor of having their careers ended by the Demon Lord of the Round Table.

But those interviews are unreliable. Of the interviewees, precisely one had actually met the manl Of the others, none spoke with him on an open channel and few could conclusively say that the Eagle with the blue stripe, rather than a wingman or another pilot entirely, brought them down.

Worse, some of their stories contradict. Did Rot or Indigo encounter Galm on that first sortie into the Round Table? Did Galm escort the Kestrel or clear fortifications at Futuro Canal? Did Sorcerer or Wizard ambush Galm en-route to the Valley of Kings?

They cannot all be true, and in his decisions of which to include, which to exclude, and which narratives not to question, undermine the reality Thompson has constructed.

This would not be a problem save for the utter lack of reliable eyewitnesses. Not one maintenance tech, not one drinking buddy, not one flight school classmate, not even the famed AWACS Eagle Eye, who died in 1998. Brett and his proponents claim conspiracy, misfortune, and secrecy as to the lack of leads.

The simpler answer is this: A myth doesn’t have other contacts. A myth doesn’t have a paper trail. A myth doesn’t have family, or a retirement fund, or mingle with their coworkers. And so these things do not exist for Cipher, not because he was some ghostly legend who deleted all trace of himself before he had any reason to, but because he never existed in the first place.

Mythic Egos

If Cipher is not real and at least some of his victims are lying or mistaken, the question presents itself: Why?

Why claim you were shot down by someone you weren’t. Why opine on their character, what sort of person they had to be? How would you be so certain that you were killed by the Demon Lord of the Round Table when you were not?

And why does not one of these aces admit to being brought down by Solo Wing Pixy or PJ?

The answer is simple: Solo Wing Pixy was a human. Fallible. Mortal. To lose to him meant you lost to a man. It is a blow to the ego, and one difficult to square as you move on with your life. To have been shot down by him, or PJ, or one of the other mercenaries from Valais was to admit that you weren’t as good as one of your peers, or you weren’t paying attention to someone you should have, or that you made a mistake and lost because of it.

But to be shot down, to have your career ended, your love torn asunder, by the Demon Lord of the Round Table? An immortal embodiment of death in the air? A legend that can never speak out, never deny your narrative, never contradict the reality you have decided that you can live with?

That is a different thing entirely. It’s an honor all of its own. No-one is fallible for losing to the Demon King of the Round Table, there was no other way such a fight could have gone. They are merely part of the Belkan War’s great tragedy.

These aces are not necessarily lying. Memory plays its tricks, a decade on. Even if it didn’t, who’s to say who took a fateful shot during a high-g dogfight with multiple combatants. Who’s to say which missile ended your career, and why not pick the culprit easiest to handle?

The Horrors of Ustian Paperwork

The nonspecificity of the paperwork is simultaneously simple and embarrassing.

When it won independence, newborn Ustio wailed in the world, already plagued by an impressive culture of corruption and a bureaucracy that might generously be described as ‘shambling’. To file information required a bribe, to access that filed information required a bribe, and there was no guarantee that the information existed, had been preserved properly, or hadn’t simply been stolen and sold off by someone before the bribes were handed over. 

Which meant that its paperwork trended scattershot and questionable. Every Ustian Order of Battle before the liberation of Directus is guesswork, filled with ghost units that didn’t exist and missing entire formations that had kept fighting after being written off as destroyed. Its mercenaries were no exception-paid under the table in precious metal ingots with the only real oversight being the verification of kill counts before payout. Fake identities and pseudonyms were common-if they officially registered at all.

Cipher's paper trail is no exception. It's marred by missing information, obvious errors, and every indication that some bureaucrat wasn't paid enough to care, or was paid exactly enough to look the other way.  There is no name associated with it, no next of kin, no bank account, no address, no contacts. Even his kill tally isn’t recorded on paper, as squadrons were paid as a whole, then the payment divided internally.

There is merely a list of missions and after action reports.

The Facts

With so much obscured, destroyed, or unreliable, we ought to gather what few facts do exist:

Galm Squadron flew on missions during Offensive 4101 alongside allied mercenaries deploying from Valais Airbase and other allied forces. These deployments are confirmed by flight logs and testimony by allied and hostile pilots. Which part of given operations Galm Squadron took part in is often disputed. Some confirmations can be gained from Eagle Eye’s remaining after action reports.

Declassified documents about the ‘96 coups and World With No Borders insurgency indicate that Galm Squadron was the only intact, loyal squadron at the Valais Airbase after the raid and deployed on several missions against the insurgents, including Operation Point Blank (The now legendary ‘Valley of Kings’).

Payment logs indicate that the Valais Airbase was home to the second-highest paid mercenaries in Ustio (And the highest paid not later indicted for fraud. See Ustio v. Bernard Coup). What records can be verified are not broken down by squadron, but they indicate an impressive total kill list including many unarmed hostile targets. As both Solo Wing Pixy and PJ, the base’s other two identified aces, broadly refrained from engaging such targets it is likely that other pilots, including Galm 1, brought them down.

Additionally, they indicate that the payment for Operation Point Blank was picked up by PJ’s Fiance, rather than a member of Galm Flight.

The only witnesses to the existence of Cipher were in the field. No surviving allied personnel, save Larry Foulke, have credible claims to have met the man. Though both allied and enemy pilots saw him, he never spoke on radio and was identified by the blue stripe on his plane.

None of this is proof of a Mobius One-like figure in the depths of the Belkan War. 

They indicate a skilled pilot, yes, but one deployed on standard missions, with ample support, against a skilled but eminently surmountable enemy. He did not save the war effort on his own. He did not render an entire nation’s airforce impotent.

He may not even have existed, and if he did, there is plenty of reason to believe that he was not one man and that he did not survive the Valley of Kings.

Mercenary Motives

The easiest answer is that he was a very common fraud that was more successful than anyone expected. The Ustian Government offered bonus payments to mercenaries for each target destroyed, but a significant, scaling bonus for Ace pilots based on their perceived value to the war effort. A squadron with two Aces and ten normal pilots would bring in significantly more than a squadron with one Ace and eleven normal pilots. 

These additional earnings could be split between the pilots and made for significant nest eggs for the families of the deceased.

Such a practice is well attested in post-war memoirs of minor mercenary companies.  Ronald Regison’s Blood over Kolwan attests to his unit’s creation of a false ace, inspired by cold war traditions of assigning kills to pilots who died on a sortie to increase the bonus sent to their family. Such schemes were enabled by the Ustian Government’s non-existent oversight of its mercenaries and classification of civilian infrastructure as payable kills.

Here, the squadron simply attributed many of their kills to Galm 1, who split the winnings with the rest. The reputation saw Belkan aces target Galm 1, but with an actual ace and other pilots watching his back, this simply allowed him to fly evasively, others to pick up the kills, and the credit to further enrich the squadron.

With the war so blisteringly short, there simply wasn’t enough time for the ruse to come to light. And with the vast majority of pilots dead after Operation Valkyrie, the rest dead after Point Blank, and Eagle Eye dead before anyone thought to ask questions, there was neither will nor ability to reveal the lie. 

As family and loved ones were unlikely to be clued in to criminal fraud, the proof would be in payment slips, bank accounts, and next-of-kin disbursements. Should some enterprising documentarian prove that the payment passed on to the families of Valais Air Base pilots were impossibly large for their claimed kill counts, it may suffice as proof of this theory.

Twin-Ace Gambit

To the Ustian government, Cipher was a diplomatic convenience before he was a military one. Pushed to the edge of their own territory, reliant on mercenaries, and with a tattered, ravaged army to their name, Ustio needed to prove its worth as part of the alliance to secure a favorable post war settlement. Before Cipher’s emergence, their best leverage was their highest-scoring ace: Solo Wing Pixy.

Additional aces would make the shattered country seem a force to be reckoned with. Earn it respect from its allies and secure larger shares of post war reparations, more generous territorial gains in the carve-up of Belka being negotiated in back channels. But aces are difficult to acquire, and more difficult to make prominent.

The solution, then, was a bluff. They would put talented pilots in a Galm Team, a two man team of Pixy and their illusory ace. Kills would be attributed to Galm 1, and pilots would rotate out of the Galm 1/Cipher position with orders to fly flashy and stay alive. If one of the pilots picked up enough to be a real ace, they won. If not, the inflated reputation (And deeply opaque information environment in the Belkan War) would see enemy aces pursue Galm 1, setting up Pixy to finish them. And, should Galm 1 fall, Pixy would simply have to kill the hostile witnesses and a new Galm 1 would be brought in.

The reputation would grow, and Ustio would get that tiny diplomatic edge it needed to stay relevant post war. To sell the deception, Cipher is never referred to by name, merely by role, callsign, and reputation. He was a strategic asset, not due to his inflated kill count, but because of what he meant for the post-war diplomatic situation.

If this was the plan, then it was so successful that they continued it after Pixy’s defection. The moment a new ace, in the form of Second Lieutenant Patrick Beckett, was identified, he was paired with Galm Team (And then moved into Galm Team) to benefit from the tactic. The attention paid to the Demon Lord of the Round Table allowed PJ to gain experience, kills, and notoriety while minimizing the actual risk to him. 

Then, with the war over, the fake was kept on-payroll as the prestige he offered had yet to decline. 

The problem with this theory, of course, is that it’s unfalsifiable. The turnover of Ustian government officials, the destruction of Valais, the horrific state of governmental paperwork, and the lack of oversight of the mercenaries come together to turn any attempt to find proof into a morass of incomplete leads. 

Perhaps, somewhere, there is an official clued into the scheme. One who, after retirement to somewhere without an extradition treaty, is willing to spill the exact shape of the arrangement.

The Valley of Kings

But now, the final question:

If this is true, if Cipher did not exist, what happened at the Valley of Kings? 

The V2’s wreckage has been confirmed and salvaged.  The coup was real. Enso Order and Grunder Industries have already claimed to be developing successors to the Morgan (Though no-one claims to have gotten its supposed, miraculous ECM system to work). The Avalon Dam run happened. If not Cipher, then who?

And the answer is…anyone.

Twelve pilots flew into Avalon Dam. Patrik “PJ” Bartlett, a confirmed, well attested Ace, and an anonymous Cipher, and the ten best other pilots who could be assembled on short notice. Avalon Dam mounted anti-aircraft weapons inside its superstructure because an internal air strike was a known vulnerability. And the only one who survived, who knows who made that run, who rose out of the dam and faced the Morgan in the Valley of Kings, is Larry Foulke.

The truth is it doesn’t matter who, because in the gaps of Brett Thompson’s work, in the gaps of Larry Foulke’s story, in the sheer weight of the historiography of the Belkan War and the myriad recreations of the Morgan, you can see what happened.

Skilled pilots, on their first unambiguously heroic task since before Hoffnung, rose from Avalon Dam. Tired, low on ammo and fuel, and victorious. And they faced Solo Wing Pixy, the greatest pilot of the Belkan War, in the Morgan, the greatest plane of the Belkan War. 

And they could not measure up.

The simple truth is that the Belkan War did not care for heroes, or righteousness, or whether the reason you fought could hold the test of time, or the strength of your convictions. It cared about your capacity for murder, the sheer might of your machine, and whether you could fly on with the blood on your hands.

And in these metrics, Larry Foulke was unmatched. He killed PJ. He killed Cipher, should Cipher have survived the dam at all. He killed anyone else who made it. And then he stopped the V2 anyways.

We will never truly know why, but my theory is simple: With a friend dead at his hands, with nothing between him and apocalypse, with only himself and perhaps a conversation with his former AWACS, Solo Wing Pixy was faced with a complete and uncontested success, at the cost of millions of innocent civilians.

And, for reasons we will never know, for reasons he will never admit, he decided that this was too high a cost. He cut his guidance, triggered the V2’s failsafe, and ditched the Morgan into the snow. Decided, of his own volition, to never fly a combat aircraft again.

When the documentarian came running, began unearthing old graves, he honored the friends he had killed in the only way he could. He crowned them the undefeated King of the Sky.

To such a man, we can only echo his own words:

Yo buddy. Still alive?