Starstrike

1
Hwa Young

Hwa Young, pilot of the lancer Winter’s Axiom, hated navigating by the stars. She’d learned the techniques and calculations as an orphan in the Empire, a ward of the state—­and she’d excelled at them. But she’d been born a clanner on the border, one of the denizens of the unruly Moonstorm, and clanners grew up knowing that their territory featured wandering stars and itinerant moons.

Stars are meant to wander free, Mother Aera whispered to Hwa Young in her earliest memories. Stars are meant to fly. Not stay chained like jewels in the collars the Empress provides her pets.

As a clanner child on the world of Carnelian, Hwa Young had navigated by means other than the stars: familiar trees and boulders, land formations and the give of the ground underfoot, a subtle awareness of characteristic smells and air currents. How the clanners navigated in space, where there was a paucity of trees and boulders and land formations, she didn’t know. But the clanner fleet that she and her lancer squad had defected to, they knew the way. That had to be enough, she thought as they flew toward their current objective—­New Joseon’s Jasper Research Station, located on the largest outpost moon of the world Jasper.

This mission—­this one mattered more than usual.

If the intel she’d retrieved from her friend Geum proved reliable, and if they extracted a critical codebase on lancer-­pilot neural interfaces from Jasper Research Station, Commander Aera—­ Hwa Young’s long-­lost heart-­mother—­might finally allow her to enact her plan to retrieve Geum. Her best friend, a skilled technician, was stuck on the Imperial flagship, where they’d been forced to leave zir behind when Hwa Young and her lancer squad turned against the Empire—­a memory that still crushed Hwa Young. Even worse was the fact that Geum remained imprisoned after helping Hwa Young escape.

Though they’d been covertly communicating ever since, Geum had proven reticent about giving the clanners a lead on real intel, as opposed to what Aera uncharitably termed “random distractions,” code for intel that didn’t advance the clanners’ military aims. Hwa Young told herself that Geum was trapped with the enemy and had good reason to exercise caution. Getting caught collaborating with the clanners was a sure death sentence. But even Aera (commander, not heart-­mother; one of the many adjustments Hwa Young was still making) conceded that the promised codebase would represent a breakthrough in the clanners’ attempts to replicate Imperial lancer technology. It was the one thing they wanted above all else—­the very tech Hwa Young and her fellow lancer pilots possessed—­and the crucial missing piece was the intimate mental link that lancers shared with their pilots.

This hunt has too many hunters, Winter’s Axiom remarked, right on cue. Its voice was drier than usual, like a cold night after the obliteration of ice.

We have our orders, Hwa Young reminded it, trying not to be perturbed by the odd echoes in her skull, as though the lancer spoke with a multitude of voices and not one. It wasn’t the first time she’d experienced peculiar sensory effects through the link. Some of them, like the way it shared its scan data like a map inside her head, were useful. Others—­well. She was still adapting.

At least Commander Aera had done her homework based on the clanners’ dossier on Jasper. Awkward as Hwa Young’s interactions with her heart-­mother had been since their unexpected reunion, she appreciated the woman’s fundamental competence.

“Jasper wasn’t originally Imperial territory, decades ago,” Commander Aera had said during the briefing. She’d met with the lancer pilots in a designated conference room. The crisp holographic maps detailing friendly clanner strongholds and known vs. projected Imperial movements had contrasted sharply with the absurd riot of purple-­green vines and potted flowers growing up the bulkheads, the effervescent fragrance of starblooms and pungent smell of damp earth reminding Hwa Young vaguely of her old clanner moon home. “We didn’t notice we’d lost the world until . . . well. There was a political complication. Border territory has always gone back and forth; it’s one reason border moons often have Hangeul-­speaking communities.

“We’ve intercepted a distress signal regarding raiders, so we’ll offer emergency assistance while our agents secure the codebase. You’ll deal with the raiders, and Falcon Fleet”—­the clanner fleet they belonged to—­“will evacuate Jasper’s personnel to safety. It’s similar to our previous rescue-­and-­goodwill missions, but you’ll be operating within sensor range this time, rather than securing the perimeter. The codebase is our primary goal, rather than rescue and evacuation.”

The other missions they’d executed during the past few weeks had involved border communities with ambivalent loyalties, some of which included people of both clanner and Imperial descent. Falcon Fleet lacked enough supplies to care for that many civilians. They’d made stopovers time and again, transferring their human freight to other clanner fleets that would convey them to resettlement in safe locations: Ekphora Fleet, Canopic Fleet, Stupa Fleet, and others with foreign names she had difficulty pronouncing.

“Commander, aren’t you worried we’ll cause panics?” Hwa Young said, remembering just in time to address Aera with the proper honorifics and formality levels. At times, she felt like a child all over again; had intense flashbacks to But, Heart-­Mother, could I have another cookie? She wouldn’t embarrass them both by regressing.

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Eun side-­eyeing her because of her unusual diffidence. She rarely criticized missions, not when so much was at stake—­for the clanners, for her squad . . . for her relationship with Commander Aera.

Aera’s expression didn’t alter. “Explain, Pilot.”

Hwa Young’s heart sank at Aera’s dispassionate tone. Why was Aera making her spell this out? “A lot of clanners only know of lancers as weapons that can take down a starship. As Imperial weapons. They might not have heard that we’re friendlies—­or they may panic anyway. I just . . . I wanted to be sure there was a plan to deal with any panic so that people don’t get hurt.”

“We have liaisons in Communications dealing with that,” Aera said after a moment. “You needn’t worry.”

Besides, if the mission failed, it would blow Geum’s opportunity to rejoin her. Aera had said time and again that she’d authorize a rescue of Geum once she was able to present evidence of Geum’s usefulness and reliability. Hwa Young hoped a success this time would do the trick.

“So we’re framing this as a goodwill mission, although the primary objective is intel,” Commander Ye Jun said, smoothing over the moment of tension between Hwa Young and Aera. Ye Jun led the lancer squad and was Hwa Young’s immediate superior in the field. Aera, as second-­in-­command for all of Falcon Fleet, outranked zir, but the two addressed each other as equals. Hwa Young kept trying to figure out whether the guarded quality to the interactions between her heart-­mother and Ye Jun was due to mutual caution or genuine courtesy, or she was imagining it entirely.

To say Hwa Young felt ambivalent about the chain of command was an understatement. Her first week with Falcon Fleet, she’d answered an order with Yes, Mother rather than Yes, sir. She was determined to track down every witness who’d guffawed and drown them or, alternately, offer them her lunch money for the rest of her life not to talk about it.

Commander Aera nodded. “We want to present ourselves as a friendly presence. It will make the agents’ job easier. Jasper’s people will be grateful for the intervention, and we’ll have negotiators on standby to keep matters calm. You don’t need to worry about that. We’ll follow up with our auxiliary supply ships, which is standard operating procedure, but we want you to make the initial contact this time.”

“It doubles as cover for the intel-­gathering, too,” Ye Jun noted, and Aera didn’t deny it.

Hwa Young rolled her shoulders, fruitlessly attempting to bleed off her tension. The protective charm in her pocket, a carved wooden starbloom given to her as a welcome gift by a clanner ensign, made her feel off balance, even with its slight weight. So far it hadn’t done much for her luck one way or the other.

There was a dark aching gap at the back of her mind. The squad numbered four, where there should have been five. She did not want to think of the fifth pilot or his death.

Yet an unwanted moment persisted: the taste of the chicken and rice porridge Seong Su had gotten for her, a mediocre prepackaged meal, yet all the more delicious when she was a refugee crammed into a starship’s storage bay. It flooded her mouth. She wasn’t sure whether the gnawing in her stomach was hunger or nausea or the acid residue of grief.

“Research station has entered long-­range visual,” Bae reported now over their comms. She piloted Farseer One, the recon unit. Hwa Young noted the characteristic grace and precision of Farseer’s flying, her eyes lingering a moment longer than necessary over the way it swerved past a stray micrometeorite.

“Understood,” responded Eun, the fourth member of the squad with Hellion. He’d served as a pilot longer than Hwa Young or Bae, as Ye Jun’s second-­in-­command. Here, he sounded bored, with none of his usual acerbic growl. Hwa Young, who had been trained by him, wasn’t fooled.

From a distance, the research station resembled a crumpled piece of chiaroscuro circuitry spread incongruously over the moon’s rugged, dull green surface. Bae, piloting sleek, swift Farseer, hovered just out of the base’s estimated scan range, making sure not to silhouette herself against Jasper’s sun. Farseer’s advanced sensor suite transmitted an updated close-­up view to all the pilots. It would also alert them when the raiders showed up.

Through her neural link to Winter’s Axiom, Hwa Young could see the station and its machinery in her mind’s eye: everything from gun mounts, consisting of simpler pedestal designs with a limited range of motion, to supercooled quantum computer cores; from the pumps and filters of life support to the pulsing glow of the base’s power generators. While the lancer’s cockpit provided displays monitoring everything from navigation to threat analysis, the link was faster and more intuitive.

“We’ve got twelve incoming starships below the plane of the ecliptic,” Bae said over the comms, enunciating with exaggerated clarity.

“Do you have ID?” That was Commander Ye Jun from ­Bastard.

“Not yet,” Bae said, sounding vexed. “I can’t get IFF”—­Identification Friend or Foe—­“on the units at all. Which argues in favor of raiders rather than Imperial forces.”

“What the hell kind of raiders fly in formation?” demanded Eun. Like Hwa Young and Ye Jun, he hung far back. His lancer, Hellion, specialized in artillery. While Hellion had heavier armor than the other three, he did his best work from a distance.

“I imagine any raiders who don’t coordinate their attacks don’t survive,” Ye Jun said dryly.

Hwa Young, whose lancer was the sniper unit, took up a position to the rear, tenuously sheltered by one of the smaller moonlets. More of a glorified asteroid, to the extent that the distinction mattered in the Moonstorm. Her pulse thrummed with mixed eagerness and anxiety. She was safe from immediate danger, and so were Eun and Ye Jun.

But Bae with her scout was vulnerable, which bothered Hwa Young more and more, and the squad no longer had a heavily armored brawler unit to join her up front and protect her from ambush.