Moonstorm, page 16
“The lancers,” Commander Ye Jun said in that deceptively amiable tone zie liked so much, “answer to me. If the admiral has opinions as to the lancers’ proper deployment, she can start by talking to me. Until then, I will deploy them as I see fit.”
A pissing match, Hwa Young thought with disgust. I’m going to die in the docking bay without seeing action because my leaders are engaged in a pissing match over who orders whom.
Finally, CIC spoke again, with stony politesse. “You are clear to continue, Bastard. Good hunting.”
Hwa Young couldn’t imagine a more hostile or pissed-off farewell.
“Sir,” Bae’s voice cut in, “I don’t know about the rest of you”—Hwa Young imagined that was directed at her in particular—“but I would like to know what the plan is. Sir.”
“It must be desperate times to drive you to a sir sandwich,” Commander Ye Jun remarked, as though that mattered. “You’re all patched in to CIC’s recon reports?”
“Yes, sir,” Bae said.
Hwa Young’s tactical display projected a schematic directly over her field of vision. It centered the flagship, with the fleet outflung and lighting up the sky with point-defense fire against incoming missiles. Eleventh Fleet showed up in lambent blue, the clanners in hostile ghost-trails of dead gray, like clotted moths. They were already nearby, weaving in and out of Eleventh Fleet’s halo of fighters. Hwa Young wondered how they had gotten so close without the outriders catching wind of them.
Hwa Young wasn’t the only one with that question. “Sir,” Seong Su said, “how did the clanners advance without us spotting anything?”
“They may have improved on the old stealth systems,” Commander Ye Jun said, as though this weren’t a tremendously dismaying piece of intelligence. “Still, the clanners almost certainly believe that Eleventh Fleet is without lancer defenses. This gives us a unique opportunity to surprise them, even if the admiral doesn’t realize it. I’m not going to let the hotheads in CIC blow it for us.”
Hwa Young blinked. “Unique opportunity” wasn’t how she would have described their circumstances. More like “completely screwed.” Still, since orders were orders…“Tell us what to do,” she urged.
It is a season for death. Winter’s Axiom’s voice echoed in her mind again.
She had the feeling her lancer liked prey very much. Before bonding with it, she would have had reservations about its naked bloodthirstiness. Now she felt a bone-deep echo of its hunter’s nature. Wait for the plan, she counseled it, or herself.
I have waited twelve years. I expect excellent prey, it added as an afterthought.
“A quick lesson for you,” Commander Ye Jun said. “Gravity lances act as powerful and focused gravitational waves—which pass through matter. They can go through the Maehwa’s hull. One lance by itself won’t damage the hull so badly that it can’t be repaired. However, four lances, intersecting at a common target, will amplify the effect to a lethal degree. We have a single opportunity to make a strike on the clanner flagship from within the Maehwa.”
For a minute, Hwa Young wasn’t sure she was hearing the commander correctly.
It was a lunatic plan. Like any good Imperial citizen, Hwa Young had grown up watching bulletins that depicted lancers slaughtering enemy fleets and driving back battalions of tanks. She had assumed that most of them were computer-generated fantasias even as her heart longed for them to be pixel-by-pixel truth. In all that time, though, it had never occurred to her that lancers might attack while still cocooned inside their carrier.
There’s probably a good reason this isn’t done more often, she thought uneasily. After all, the commander had acknowledged that the maneuver would affect the Maehwa’s hull.
“This is only possible,” Commander Ye Jun went on, “because we’re at such close range. Gravity lances become weaker at greater distances. Ordinarily we’d have to take the fight to the enemy.”
A gray moth-smudge lit up in red as the commander painted the target. “That’s a probability cloud representing the likeliest locations of the alleged clanner flagship. It’s a big target, but the longer we wait, the hazier our chances of hitting it. We’re going to aim our lances so they intersect inside its engine. Do you understand?”
One by one the confirmations came in.
Commander Ye Jun had the world’s steadiest voice, even if Hwa Young couldn’t keep herself from noticing the flickering of Eleventh Fleet fighters dodging, flying, dying on her tactical display. “All units power up.”
Hwa Young’s awareness flowed out of her body and into the great armor chassis of Winter’s Axiom. Elation flared in every corner of her mind before settling into a predatory intentness. She was her lancer, aware through its senses of every vibration in the deck and every electromagnetic chirrup, aware of the battlefield entire.
Hwa Young’s enhanced senses told her that, to her right, Seong Su’s Avalanche Four had taken an eager step forward.
A grating noise cut through the sounds of engines whirring to life. “Deck Control to Bastard, what the scorch is your lancer unit doing? You are not cleared to stomp around here willy-nilly!”
Hwa Young was tempted to point out that CIC had been begging them to power up and fight moments ago. Ten years from now they were going to find her shriveled remains mummified inside the lancer because they never had an opportunity to fight.
To fight people you would once have called kin, that persistent, unwanted whisper reminded her.
The commander was unfazed. “I’ve got this, Deck Control.” To the squad, zie said, “Aim for the target I’ve marked. The enemy flagship’s engine room should be there. Ignite gravity lances on my mark.”
Hwa Young glared at the red sphere, imagined it exploding. Focused the entirety of her being so that the targeting reticule projected onto her field of vision centered itself correctly.
“Mark.”
Hwa Young exhaled in a puff, fingers twitching with the memory of a rifle’s trigger. For a second she saw nothing. Then the clot on her tactical display collapsed into the shape of a clanner ship, a vast triangular mass with protrusions signifying gun turrets and missile ports and scan arrays. It blossomed outward in an explosion.
Eleventh Fleet protected its fighters behind belatedly activated shields. Two unlucky fighters, caught by the shell boundary, were cut in half and met similar fates as the enemy.
No, Hwa Young thought, what if one of them was Falcon One?
She didn’t like Falcon One. She’d almost gotten in a brawl with the woman and her cronies. All the same, she wanted Falcon One to have survived, even if she knew, rationally, that either way, two fighter pilots had died.
“All right,” Commander Ye Jun said, as controlled as ever, over Seong Su’s whoop of triumph and Eun’s terse congratulations. “Their flagship’s down, but the clanners aren’t disengaging,” zie told them tersely. “There must be a second capital ship. Time to go out there and inflict some more punishment.”
* * *
In the dreams of her early childhood, after the destruction of Carnelian but before being remanded to the Imperial orphanage, Hwa Young had often imagined herself inside a lancer’s cockpit—the same imagery that comforted her in her meditations. She hadn’t known what the interior would really look like other than magnificent: glowing panels, glowing buttons, glowing lights everywhere. The first thing she’d learned about life in New Joseon was its surfeit of light, so she envisioned that carrying over to the lancers’ interiors.
There was a snub-nosed kid at the orphanage who liked to steal her lunch and dump the contents in the recycler. She imagined that she’d use her lancer to smash zir lunch and leave globs of rice on zir shirt. Or the dreary woman who never bothered to remember her name. A smash for the woman, too, and maybe mess up her stupid hairdo. Or the official who’d stopped by to inspect the orphanage and looked down his nose at all the orphans, referring to them as “ratlings.” A smash for his shiny bald head.
These fantasies dwindled as Hwa Young applied herself to becoming the best possible Imperial citizen so she would prove worthy of a lancer of her own. She memorized all the prayers and praises, and recited them diligently at the appointed hours. Even as a child, she knew that fantasies of revenge, while satisfying, would only get her in trouble if she acted on them. She was too smart for that.
One thing Hwa Young had never questioned before the past weeks’ training, however, was the idea that lancer combat involved a lot of smashing. She had always envisioned herself close to the locus of action. She’d imagined the enemy blinking out between one beep and the next, and that she’d be close enough to see it. Hell, in this case “close enough” made no difference given that she couldn’t see through the Maehwa’s hull, instead relying on the lancer’s awareness of scan fed through the flagship’s CIC.
As she prepared to launch, Hwa Young wondered how much of the corpsed clanner flagship’s debris she’d be able to spot. Whether any part of it had survived the conflagration.
Whether anyone aboard had been someone she’d known, or could have known, in a mirror life.
We are together now, Winter’s Axiom reminded her. We share our kills.
The flutter-burn sensation that washed over her skin told her that the Maehwa had performed a shield blink—shutting the shields off for a second, then restoring them in a tighter radius to exclude the fragments.
“That was some spectacle,” Seong Su said.
“You’re not here as a sightseer,” Bae snapped.
Commander Ye Jun disregarded them both. “CIC, Bastard requesting launch clearance for Lancer Platoon One.”
Finally, Hwa Young thought, perking up. Real fighting. She shivered with excitement, vowing to herself that she wouldn’t mess up like she had in training. Not when it mattered.
“Admiral Chin wants to have words with you, Bastard.”
“She can have words with me after the battle,” Commander Ye Jun said, implacable. “I say again, requesting launch clearance for Lancer Pla—”
“Clearance granted,” CIC said. “Enjoy your five minutes of glory while it lasts.”
The commander said, “Launch on my mark—mark.”
They launched in formation. The five lancers flew simultaneously through the open bay and to the launch chutes. The less time they wasted, the less precious atmosphere would bleed off into the aether. While humans could breathe aether for short periods of time, too much of it caused symptoms similar to drunkenness. Hwa Young remembered the weeks she’d spent recuperating after the attack on Carnelian, drifting through hallucinations and suffering from vertigo. The orphanage director had told her with particular glee that if she’d gulped any more aether, she would have rendered herself permanently delirious.
Hwa Young allowed herself a moment—only a moment—to glory in the sensation of acceleration, as Winter’s Axiom and the other lancers flew away from the Maehwa. The faint light of local stars and more ominous flares of explosions illuminated the lancers’ humanoid forms as they spread out so they wouldn’t risk colliding into one another. Currents of aether swirled around them, which she felt like the distant tickling of a breeze against the lancer’s armor.
I’m flying, she thought, elated beneath the unnatural shell of calm. I’m flying!
The fleet spread out in every direction around them. Imperial fighters swooped daringly in and out of their flight corridors, sometimes caught up in hellspark dogfights with opposing fighters. Hwa Young assumed there was a logic to the ships’ positions and maneuvers, but that was Admiral Chin’s concern and not hers.
And beyond that—beyond that was Carnelian.
Hwa Young had always imagined Carnelian beautiful and intact in her waking moments, had always dreamed of it fragmented, like a kaleidoscope of ruined futures. She hadn’t expected the clanners to be able to restore it in her lifetime, or at best, within a couple of decades.
But here it was, a ruddy disc in the distance, like a copper coin smeared with purple-gray wisps of cloud. It was hard to connect that vision with the hills and starbloom winds of her childhood. The hills, the mountains, the valleys, even the courses of rivers—all those would be different, if she walked the moon again.
The clanners had caught them two days’ flight from Carnelian’s last reported location, but apparently the reports were not entirely up-to-date. Carnelian had an “orbit” in Imperial parlance, really a glorified name for its wandering trajectory. Like many moons that were not under Imperial control, its path through the Moonstorm varied depending on the vagaries of its inhabitants.
Commander Ye Jun had made it clear that the moon had been restored. But Hwa Young hadn’t believed it, not in her marrow, until she saw that red disc, beautiful and whole and intact.
And it wasn’t just whole and intact, it was an active clanner base. Hwa Young wondered how this had come about. Had the Empire grown lax on account of Carnelian’s initial disintegration, allowing the clanners to sneak back in? Had the clanners discovered ways to accelerate the painstaking process of moon formation? All questions that the commander hadn’t possessed answers for.
The lancers left the flagship behind them. Ahead, the Maehwa’s shields glimmered like a layer of first frost over the darkness of deep aether. Hwa Young spotted Seong Su’s lancer in the lead. Her tactical system overlaid it with a copper-brown circle: Avalanche.
Tactical informed her that the clanners had gone dark. Eleventh Fleet’s fighters were sweeping the area for other hostiles. The Maehwa, if not the rest of the fleet, was out of immediate danger.
“Shields will go down in a few moments,” Commander Ye Jun said without telling them how zie knew. “When that happens, accelerate to waypoint one. There’s one more clanner capital ship, and we’ve got to take it down before it can scream for help or report to its masters.”
The commander had marked a series of waypoints in the navigation interface to guide them through the chaos of the battlefield. Waypoint one showed up on tactical, blinking brightly orange at the outskirts of the battlefield. Once the shields were down, they’d be free to fire without danger of hitting their own ships. At the same time, with the fighters busy, they would be on their own if the enemy counterattacked.
The ice-flicker vanished. The commander snapped, “Now!”
Hwa Young willed herself forward, and the lancer sprang ahead like a hawk eager for the hunt.
Suddenly they came across the remnants of the clanner flagship. The haze of shards had an inexplicable void at its heart. As though something there had shoved aside the various fragments and pieces. Or was it a natural consequence of the explosion’s outward force?
“The bastards,” Eun breathed, and then said inexplicably, “ ’Scuse. I bet the second capital ship hid inside the shrapnel. Nothing else in their fleet would take up that much space. How’d you see it, sir?”
Hwa Young squinted at the void. No one would think to look in the middle of all that destruction for a second capital ship. She imagined that it had been dangerous for the clanner ship to linger that close to their flagship’s destruction, that they had risked being pummeled by high-speed debris in order to secure their hiding spot.
“Old trick,” the commander said without elaborating. “Our job now is to destroy the second ship before it can call for help or report on this battle. We will only have the narrowest window of opportunity. If the clanners call for reinforcements—well. Let’s just say the complications are not in our favor.
“Avalanche, take point. Farseer, use him as a shield—that’s what he’s for—and scout for us. Hellion, bombard the area with everything you have. Winter”—zie sent her a holo schematic—“the instant Farseer paints the target for you, take out the ship’s comm tower.”
“Time to pummel something!” Seong Su exclaimed with ridiculous enthusiasm.
“It’s not a video game,” Bae said cuttingly.
Hwa Young thought privately that she didn’t care how Seong Su envisioned the battle, as long as he did his job.
The clanners saw them coming and reacted. Hwa Young’s tactical display had updated with the second clanner capital ship, now revealed, and tracked its movements. After the spectacular demise of their flagship, the clanners would have been fools not to expect lancers.
Hwa Young was frustrated that the ships themselves appeared as distant specks, distinguished from the stars only by their rapid movements. Now she understood why Eun had emphasized the need to rely on the tactical display in order to understand what was happening in the battlefield. Space was too big, the distances too great, the maneuvers too quick, for a pilot to rely on the naked eye.
Close your eyes, Winter’s Axiom advised suddenly.
It was madness. But she did so, gripped by a compulsion she couldn’t name.
And this time she did see—through the lancer’s senses, which were receiving data from Farseer’s panopticon-like scan arrays. It was like a map projected into her mind, centered on Winter’s Axiom itself. Now she saw a full clanner squadron of twenty fighters disengaging from an Imperial squadron in the distance and rolling in order to arrow toward Avalanche instead. Winter’s Axiom remained well to the rear, as befitted its role as a sniper.
“That confirms we’re getting close to their family jewels,” Commander Ye Jun remarked. “Evade at will.”
Hwa Young’s pulse went into overdrive. This is it. This is real.
Her stomach rebelled as missiles sprayed toward them. Through her link with Winter’s Axiom, she perceived them as trails of lightning. She wondered what she’d eaten earlier to cause the nausea, then remembered: the clanners were the enemy. Their very presence disrupted local gravity, two antithetical systems battling each other. She grabbed a dose of antiemetics and jabbed them into the side of her neck, wincing at the pain.
This has to work, and fast. She was positive she’d gone green from her eyeballs to the inside of her mouth, and she couldn’t afford to be distracted from her job by mere nausea. The stabbing pain in her neck grounded her, brought her back to the hot immediate hellscape of battle.
