12

For the New Year’s Feast on the Maehwa, Commander Ye Jun accompanied them to mess. Someone had gone to the trouble of decorating the hall with banners in the five traditional colors: black, red, yellow, green, and blue. If anyone from the Empress’s line haunted the Maehwa, ready to receive or give blessings, Hwa Young discerned no sign of them.

The commander smiled benevolently at no one in particular, which Hwa Young was beginning to recognize as one way zie hid what zie was thinking. Eun, on the other hand, drummed his fingers on the table, as if his discontent weren’t already obvious. “I suspect First Fleet gets real rice wine instead of the nonalcoholic plum wine they foist on us,” he said.

Hwa Young bet that wasn’t the last of the luxuries First Fleet, which guarded the crownworld, enjoyed.

Seong Su screwed up his face. “Now that’s no fun.”

“What, tea isn’t strong enough for you?” Bae asked, lip curling.

“My parents served all manner of stuff,” Seong Su said with suspicious enthusiasm. “Mineral water from the holy spring on Nacre bottled right proper, or citron tea from Citrine, even ginseng tea on a lucky—er. Good times, anyway.”

“Merchants,” Bae declared with a sniff.

Hwa Young’s interest had been piqued by a different matter. “The traditions are different from fleet to fleet?”

“That’s right,” Commander Ye Jun said, eyes focusing on her as zie came back from whatever zie’d been contemplating. “First Fleet uses teaware from the Imperial treasury. Fourth Fleet makes offerings to the flagship’s resident ghost, although they don’t, as is rumored, involve human sacrifice. Eighteenth Fleet holds a martial arts contest, and it’s bad luck if the admiral loses, so people connive to make sure he wins. I’m sure we’ll hear all about his ‘victories’ once Eighteenth Fleet catches up to us with those reinforcements. And I’ve never gotten a straight answer as to what Ninth Fleet does, but it involves worship of fox spirits.”

“You’d think they’d enforce the same traditions in every fleet, all the same,” Hwa Young pressed.

The commander laughed. “First Fleet is unlikely to give up its privileges. Most of its officers are related to the Empress herself. It’s not our concern.”

Hwa Young knew zie had deflected her, and zie knew she knew. She wasn’t in a position to push further, so she filed away the question for later pondering.

“And us?” Bae asked, nodding toward the ensign who was passing around the threatened bottle of nonalcoholic plum wine.

“Beyond the choice of beverage?” The commander’s eyes crinkled. “What we do, in the lancer squad, is toast each other. We go around the table, senior to junior, and we tell each other something we’ve never told anyone else.”

Hwa Young could tell she wasn’t the only one who hated this idea.

“Don’t overthink it,” zie added kindly.

The wine arrived. It looked innocent, and it smelled like overripe plums. Respecting this particular tradition, assuming the commander wasn’t pulling one over on them, would have been easier if she could have gotten drunk in truth. Even drunk, Hwa Young was sure she could avoid speaking the unspeakable.

I’m not one of you, yet here I am.

Commander Ye Jun lifted zir cup. It looked the same as the others’, jade-colored porcelain embellished with a motif of stars and clouds. “To the Eleventh Fleet.”

They echoed the toast, cups clinking.

“Me first, I suppose.” The commander tossed the drink back as though it would anesthetize zir misgivings. “I joined the military because I’d broken up with my boyfriend on the crownworld. He’s probably an Imperial advisor by now.”

Eun stirred. “You told the unit that last year, sir. Or did you think I was too drunk to remember?”

“Too drunk?” Bae demanded. “On nonalcoholic wine?”

The commander’s grin was slow and unexpectedly wicked. “That year, Copilot Ji Soo got us some contraband. Cherry liqueur from some forsaken world far from New Joseon. I don’t think even the brigands we ‘liberated’ it from knew where it came from originally.”

Eun shook his head at the reminiscence. “It was best straight from the bottle,” he said, “but Ji Soo insisted on watering it down with this nonalcoholic junk to ‘disguise’ it from the other tables. Impossible, of course. Plum wine is amber and once you added the slightest quantity of liqueur, the whole thing turned bright red.”

“You wouldn’t have gotten drunk if you hadn’t snatched the bottle and insisted on finishing it,” Commander Ye Jun said.

Hwa Young blinked. The commander had almost sounded…catty?

“Well, if you’re going to be that way about it,” Eun shot back, “why did you break up with your boyfriend?”

Hwa Young wondered if that was getting too personal, but the commander only nodded, a glint in zir eye.

“My boyfriend,” the commander said, “who I won’t name, wanted to get physical for the first time.”

“Do I really want to hear this, sir?” Bae asked, eyebrows shooting up, while Seong Su squirmed.

“Oh, nothing happened,” Commander Ye Jun assured them. “Because you see, He Who Will Remain Nameless wanted to lose his virginity in the Empress’s bedroom.”

Hwa Young almost spat out her mouthful of ersatz plum wine. Seong Su pounded on her back, which only made matters worse.

“Her bedroom?” Eun wanted to know, with entirely too much interest for Hwa Young’s taste.

“The Empress has five palaces on the crownworld, and each palace has a bedroom reserved for her use. My boyfriend said it would be ‘safe’ if we picked one at the Autumn Palace, which was under renovation. Said no one would catch us.” The commander shook zir head, mouth twisting wryly.

“So you dumped him,” Bae guessed.

The commander spread zir hands. “Let’s just say I knew who’d be blamed if we got caught, and it wasn’t going to be my ex.” Zie eyed Eun. “Your turn.”

“Sure, make us get personal,” Eun grumbled. He stared into his cup. “I like the spinach here.”

Seong Su picked up a giant glob of sautéed spinach and deposited it on top of Eun’s bowl of rice. “You can have my share, then, sir.”

Eun fidgeted with his chopsticks, then nodded to himself as if he’d come to a decision. “No, that’s not really what I meant to say. I bribed someone to get this assignment.”

Seong Su’s eyes went round. “Shouldn’t you maybe not be confessing that, sir?”

“It’s the Empress’s birthday,” Commander Ye Jun said, “and we’ve toasted each other. These are secrets we’ll keep among ourselves. Go on, Eun.”

“I come from a family that deals in salvage.” Eun’s voice was unemotional, but spots of color formed on Bae’s cheeks at the reminder of her often-voiced contempt toward merchants of any type. “When I enlisted as a lancer candidate, I did well on all the tests except the one on hand-eye coordination. The examiner even told me it was an outdated requirement, that modern equipment can correct for a small hand tremor.”

Hwa Young regarded him with renewed respect. She hadn’t imagined the hand tremor when he ferried her from Serpentine to the Maehwa after all. And it certainly didn’t seem to slow him down.

Eun looked at the banners at the other side of the mess hall, his eyes unfocused. “Salvage is dirty, dangerous work, especially near the Moonstorm border, but it pays well. My mothers and auncle knew my dream. They wanted me to have a shot at piloting a lancer. And the examination board…well, let’s just say that certain Imperial bureaucrats aren’t averse to having their palms greased.”

Bae looked appalled, which Hwa Young thought was hypocritical of her, given that she coasted through life on the strength of her mom’s connections. All the same, Hwa Young didn’t know how she felt about this revelation, either. Would she be so sanguine about this bribe if she’d been denied a place with the candidates, and someone else had taken her spot?

“Hellion chose you,” Commander Ye Jun said. It took a moment for Hwa Young to realize that zie was referring to the lancer, not Eun’s callsign. “That’s all we need to know.”

Seong Su and Hwa Young nodded. Bae, too, after a split second of hesitation.

Bae tossed her head when everyone looked at her. “I’m happier here than I was back home.”

Hwa Young blinked. She wouldn’t have guessed that. She’d always assumed that Bae enjoyed lording it over everyone else.

Bae glanced down—barely a flicker of her eyes—then added, “I hate my mom.” It came out as a fierce whisper. “It didn’t matter how hard I worked, how much I achieved. Nothing was ever enough. Nothing was going to be enough unless I married an Imperial heir.”

The bottom dropped out of Hwa Young’s stomach. She couldn’t help saying, “So it wasn’t personal. Our rivalry.” All that time she’d been trying to overcome Bae’s superiority at everything—and Hwa Young hadn’t even been the reason.

“Personal?” Bae scoffed, but there was an undertone of rue—even humor—in her voice. “You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. ‘Work harder on your sharpshooting,’ Mom would say. ‘She’s just a ward of the state, how can you let her outdo you?’” Bae shook her head. “Not everything is about you, you know.”

The words stung, yet Hwa Young felt light-headed with relief. She doesn’t hate you. It’s not personal. Then she wondered why Bae’s opinion mattered so much to her.

Seong Su jumped in before Hwa Young had worked out what to say. “I used to disassemble my cousin’s game controllers then play innocent when zie looked for who did it. No one figured it out.”

“That’s your great crime?” Eun demanded, but he was smiling. “Well, if anyone disassembles my lancer, I’ll know who to blame.”

“Don’t be like that,” Seong Su protested. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“That’s what you say.”

The others were looking at Hwa Young now. She sipped the plum wine. It tasted better than it looked, lushly sweet. She thought of all the things she could admit to, if she wanted to give up her future. “I sleep with a knife.”

She watched Bae’s face, dreading the other girl’s reaction. Bae merely nodded, as though to say No surprise there.

“Good for killing nightmares, I expect,” Eun said, teasing.

“Leave her alone,” Commander Ye Jun returned, a note of warning in zir voice. “We all have them.”

The somber mood that descended over the table at those words didn’t last long. Soon the food arrived. Judging from the others’ eager smiles, Hwa Young wasn’t the only hungry one.

Back on Carnelian, the clanners had celebrated New Year’s by gathering together at the house of the Eldest and devouring cinnamon punch, rice cakes decorated with succulent edible flowers, roast boar if the hunters had been lucky. In Forsythia City, Hwa Young had visited Geum to give zir the year’s gift—a lancer model kit, a laser multitool, whatever she could afford—then share in the boarding school’s feast: soup with coin-shaped rice cakes to attract prosperity, zucchini fried in seasoned egg batter, rice yaksik made rich and sweet with honey and dried jujubes and pine nuts. They’d dressed in traditional hanbok for the occasion, an embroidered silken jacket with pants or skirt according to preference, and made offerings to the Empress and her line.

Hwa Young couldn’t have borne it if the galley had served the same foods she’d eaten with Mother Aera and the rest of her family back on Carnelian. To her relief, tonight’s meal was better than their usual cardboard (“Low bar,” Bae sniffed): egg pancakes stuffed with some unnamed protein whose chewy texture suggested it had been vat-grown, plus the obligatory rice cakes and vegetables fresh from hydroponics rather than the reconstituted fare she had acclimated to.

She was beginning to relax into the meal when the admiral entered with several people in tow. “The admiral has some civilian advisors in her circle,” Commander Ye Jun said by way of explanation.

Hwa Young told herself not to stare, even if everyone else was. The civilians in their florid clothes stuck out like hoopoes with their fanciful plumage. Some of them wore jewelry, pearls and abalone shell and diamonds amid glittering chains of gold and silver, all of which glinted gaudily amid the more drab uniforms.

Bae said cynically, “So much for Mom’s ambitions. She would have loved to worm her way here. But she never made it off Serpentine, so she probably perished there along with her dreams.”

Hwa Young blinked, taken aback by Bae’s open callousness. “How’d you discover that?” she blurted out.

Bae shrugged with one shoulder. “One of her associates got a message through to me. Wanted me to deal with our holdings on Serpentine, as if that matters anymore.”

Eun looked at her, his lips pursed. “It’s not good to speak ill of the dead.”

“I’m sure the proper rites were performed for her,” Bae said as though speaking of a stranger.

Hwa Young forestalled a spill of pitying words. Bae clearly didn’t regret her mother’s death.

Bae looked neither to the left nor right, and downed the rest of her plum wine, nonalcoholic though it was, in a single long draught.

---

After the repast, Hwa Young had a rare hour’s liberty. Eun and Seong Su headed for the rec room, citing table tennis, which Eun was good at and Seong Su was almost good at. Bae retired to the bunkroom with an air of don’t follow me.

Hwa Young admitted in her deepest heart of hearts that she wondered what Bae planned to do, but that wasn’t a good enough reason to foist her presence on the other girl. Besides, Bae would merely poison the room with thinly disguised contempt and a side of exasperation. So Hwa Young queried the ship’s computer as to Geum’s location.

She found Geum down in one of the clanking rooms that surrounded the greater chamber that housed the engine proper. The atmosphere could not have been more different from the grim stateliness of the admiral’s quarters, or the gaudy cheer of the mess hall she’d just left behind. Here some genius had festooned every spare surface, and some that weren’t, with origami models of improbable spaceships.

The genius was Geum. Hwa Young could have fingered zir origami design sense in an unlit room. Zie liked certain combinations of mountain and valley folds, and the way zie scorned to use a single cut of the scissors in place of complex and frankly eldritch topologies of creases was also pure Geum. The only thing that would have impressed Hwa Young more would have been if zie had figured out some way of constructing the origami figures from sheet metal.

The genius zirself was folding a three-headed crane when Hwa Young entered the room; zie sat between two other people who were probably engineers or engineers twice removed. One of them was singing a song that would have made Hwa Young blush if she’d understood the references, some of which had to do with the Empress’s proclivities. The other was diagramming a circuit, or a labyrinth, or the intestinal crenellations of a dog, in a gelatinous substance with a piece of disreputable wire.

“Yo, your pilot friend’s here,” the first said, breaking off from her song.

Guilt washed over Hwa Young. She had scarcely spared a thought for Geum after forming her connection with Winter’s Axiom. It occurred to her now that zie might resent her for becoming a pilot where zie had failed.

“Hwa Young!” zie cried out, waving so vigorously zie almost upended the other engineer’s gelatinous sculpture-thing. “Finally had a moment for us techs, huh?”

She winced at the reproof in her friend’s voice.

“You can’t just use her name,” the diagrammer hissed. “She’s a pilot!”

“We know each other,” Hwa Young said, awkward with the implications. What, exactly, did protocol require of them? She’d never considered how their relationship would change if she became a pilot and Geum didn’t, yet that was exactly what had happened.

“I expect you pilot types are too busy for mere mortals,” Geum said.

“Later I will be. But not now.” Geum’s passive-aggressiveness stung. Hwa Young attempted a smile. Her face felt stiff. She didn’t want Geum to be mad at her. “I hear there’s a black market, but I didn’t manage to find you a gift.”

“Nonsense.” Abruptly, Geum stood, and the diagrammer scrambled away, scoring a deep, wobbling gouge into her gelatin. “All the flagship’s computers are mine to explore! That’s gift enough for me—”

The two other engineers tackled Geum. The first one clapped a hand over zir mouth, which occasioned a great deal of muffled squawking. “Don’t say things like that!” the first one explained in a hushed voice. “Admiral Chin has as much of a sense of humor as a broken faucet.”

Geum mumbled something that might have been Broken faucets are fun-loving creatures.

Hwa Young bowed politely to the engineers, distracted from her guilt over the fact that access to the flagship’s computers wasn’t something she had arranged for Geum’s benefit. “I’m Pilot Hwa Young.” More like a pilot in training, but they knew that already. “Who are you?”

“Trainee Geum’s new best friend,” the singer said belligerently. It was not an accident, Hwa Young gathered, that she neglected to state her name, although squinting revealed that her badge said ENGINEER HYO SU. “You better have some respect for those of us who fix up lancers after you pilots blow them to hell and gone like what happened at Spinel.”

“Actually,” Hwa Young said, seizing the opportunity to gather some intelligence, “why did the old squad do so badly at the Battle of Spinel? Were they outnumbered?”

She realized as the words left her mouth that, in her eagerness to uncover what had happened, she’d hurt Geum’s feelings. Her heart sank. Geum sat hunched and sullen, zir face averted from her, no trace of zir usual smile.

“Given your busy schedule,” Geum muttered, confirming her fears, “I was hoping we could do something fun together. Not talk about lancers.”

Hyo Su ignored the comment, incidentally letting go of Geum, in favor of answering Hwa Young’s question. “Not outnumbered. Ambushed. The clanners were at a disadvantage in numbers, but they fought smart.”

Geum wriggled out from the other engineer’s grasp—this one was ENGINEER CHAE WON. “Eh, let’s do something fun instead—” Geum began to say.

Chae Won locked eyes with Hwa Young and laughed nastily. The gelatin picked up the vibrations and jiggled in response, which Hwa Young would have preferred not to witness. “Your lancer might have made a difference. Too bad Winter’s Axiom was in mothballs at the time. Admiral Chin may be a hardass, but she doesn’t like taking unnecessary risks. Unlike the bastard.”

Ah, yes. For whatever reason, people called Commander Ye Jun that. Hwa Young wondered if zie had only picked up the nickname after the disastrous Battle of Spinel.

“Tell me more about Spinel,” Hwa Young urged the engineers, unable to help herself.

Geum’s expression fell.

Hyo Su’s voice dropped theatrically as she warmed to her subject. “Battle of Spinel. The last planet we visited before Serpentine. Supposed to be where we finally gave the clanners the what-for. Admiral Chin had it all planned out.

“But the bastard screwed it up. Instead of following the admiral’s orders, zie pulled the entire lancer company out of position. Trying to carry out a raid to win some glory for zirself. The lancers got ambushed for their trouble. Four of them down in the initial ambush, the rest dead covering the retreat. And now the bastard and Hellion are the only ones left from the old company, and we’re down to a bunch of baby pilots. No offense.”

“That’s not what I heard from Eun,” Geum said reluctantly. “He says Commander Ye Jun anticipated a sneak attack. If it hadn’t been for the commander disobeying Admiral Chin’s stupid orders and sacrificing the lancers, the entire Eleventh Fleet would have been wiped out.”

Chae Won jeered and plunged her hands into the gelatin down to the elbows in search of—what? “Everyone in the fleet knows that the senior warrant officer”—her voice dipped mockingly—“has the hots for zir real bad. Please. Like he’s reliable. No, the admiral has the right of it. The commander’s lucky zie hasn’t been cashiered.”

Hwa Young searched her memories and couldn’t make up her mind as to whether this was scurrilous gossip, or scurrilous gossip rooted in cold hard evidence.

“Besides,” Chae Won added, “even if he’s oh so scrupulous about fraternization regs, the commander saved his life that battle. So he’s really not objective.”

“Huh” was all Geum had to say to that, with a slow nod.

Hwa Young looked askance at Geum, unsure of what to make of it herself.

“We were telling Geum here,” Hyo Su said, gesturing expansively around the auxiliary engine room, “that it was the Empress’s blessing that zie ended up with us engineers, instead of you poor doomed lancer jockeys.”

Hwa Young narrowed her eyes at Hyo Su. Waited for some protestation from Geum that the pilots were hardly “doomed.” But zie seemed happy to side with zir new technician friends.

“Mark my words, it’s only a matter of time before the bastard gets you killed while trying to prove that—”

Hwa Young swallowed intense frustration when someone banged on the hatch outside. “You in there,” a low voice growled, “quit gossiping and get back to work!”

“It’s New Year’s,” Hyo Su yelled back, and told whoever-it-was what they could do with their suggestion.

“I wouldn’t have thought,” Hwa Young said, “that New Year’s was an excuse for lack of discipline.”

“See?” Hyo Su said to Geum with the air of someone producing a trigonometry theorem out of thin air. “She’s got that high-and-mighty lancer pilot attitude already. No wonder she came out with weirdo hair. She’ll fit right in.”

Instead of defending her, Geum only laughed.

Hwa Young bristled. “I’d better be going,” she said coolly. “I’m sure we’ll see each other later.” But she was starting to have her doubts.