Real clouds to hide in
The sky over the island used to be hung with see-through grey slabs, stacked in little piles like building blocks nobody had put away. Today they're clouds: soft, towering cumulus with flat bottoms and sunlit tops, in every theater and on every screen.
Cumulus at fighting height
The low clouds hang right where the dogfight happens, from about 450 metres up to a kilometre. Each one is a heap of soft, rounded puffs — a flat blue-grey base, bright billowing tops — and they bunch up into clouds big enough to lose a fighter in.
They stand exactly where the old clouds stood. The cloud you ducked into last week to shake a Thunderhead off your tail is still up there, and every pilot in the round sees the same sky — so when you vanish into one, you've vanished for them too.
Dive into one
Fly into a cloud and it closes around you. The puffs thin away as you reach them, and the world goes white — not so white you lose your own wings, but enough that the bandit behind you loses sight of you, and you of them. Pop out the far side and the sky snaps back into focus. Pick your moment: they may be waiting for you there.
Lit by the sky they hang in
The clouds take their light from the round's own sun. At noon they're brilliant white, with blue-grey shade on the side turned away from it. Fly toward the sun and every puff wears a silver lining. At sunset the island goes dusky first, while a cloud a kilometre up still catches the last of the light and glows gold and peach. And after dark they turn slate-grey under the moon.
Every sky
A thin, flat deck floats a couple of kilometres up, well above the fight, where the Skywriter lays out its message on clean blue. The tank crews on the Brick Steppe look up at the same cumulus, and so do the captains on the Brick Sea. And they're on phones and tablets too, not just desktops.
See you in the clouds.