BATTLE FOR STARS

"After that, I could come and go from your quarters whenever I wanted. I could even lie beside you while you slept," Yudora said, her eyes filled with sweet memories.

"That's right. And two weeks later, you finally got your way. We ended up in bed together, and from then on, I officially became your woman."

Yudora stared at Vivian for a long moment before leaning forward and pressing a deep kiss to her lips.

Only after a long while did they finally separate.

"I only got together with you because I felt sorry for you," Yudora declared arrogantly. "Being with you is basically an act of charity for a helpless fool, got it?"

"I know, I know, darling."

Lying comfortably in Yudora's arms, Vivian answered with a sweet smile.

"So, what do you think of the plan?" Yudora finally steered the conversation back to business.

"It's not bad. Looks like the Kramic Kingdom is willing to pay a heavy price for this one."

"Oh?"

"But even so, at best it'll secure a victory in a limited area. If we're talking about avenging your family, that will still be difficult."

"It doesn't matter," Yudora replied calmly. "Anything that brings pain to the Hill Empire is something I'm willing to do."

"Then let me explain the plan in detail."

"Alright."

The two women lowered their voices and continued discussing the operation in private.

---

Joe Pierre was a Four-Elephant Junior Officer in the Hill Empire.

This was already his third promotion in just two years.

Three years earlier, when he graduated from the military academy and entered active service, he had started as a One-Elephant Junior Officer.

Why could someone become a commissioned officer immediately upon enlistment?

Because he was a fighter pilot.

In fact, One-Elephant Junior Officer was the minimum rank required to command a fighter craft in the Imperial military.

Of course, the official designation wasn't what people usually called the aircraft.

Its formal name was the Falcon-Class All-Weather Attack Fighter.

But among soldiers, it had a much simpler nickname:

The Flying Coffin.

The name wasn't because the fighter resembled a box.

Rather, when a pilot died, the family often received a box containing everything that remained of them.

Identification documents.

Personal belongings.

Mementos.

And if they were lucky, perhaps even a container of ashes.

Unfortunately, that last part was rare.

Ninety-nine out of a hundred pilots who died were destroyed along with their fighters. Nothing recognizable remained of their bodies.

And no one was going to spend resources searching for fragments in the vastness of space.

Carrier-based fighter wings aboard starships—sometimes referred to as aerospace forces—were not independent military branches.

Instead, they belonged to the individual starships that carried them.

Most warships only carried a small number of fighters.

Carriers were the obvious exception.

The vast majority of starfighters were attack craft.

Transport aircraft, reconnaissance aircraft, and similar specialized designs were relatively uncommon.

Most of those functions had already been replaced by small transport ships and Recon Satellites.

Outside of special planetary surface operations, they were rarely needed.

A starship itself was already heavily armored and extraordinarily durable.

Even so, a few direct hits from heavy weapons or missiles could still destroy it.

For fighters, which possessed almost no armor at all, a single hit was usually fatal.

So what purpose did they serve on an interstellar battlefield?

The answer was simple.

A fighter could be viewed as a miniature starship that possessed offensive capabilities but virtually no defense.

Its primary role was to increase the fleet's overall firepower.

How so?

Because, in modern interstellar warfare, victory was largely determined by firepower.

That had become one of the most fundamental principles of war.

Imagine a fleet launching millions of missiles toward an enemy formation.

In reality, most of those missiles would never reach their targets.

The widespread use of quantum computers and high-speed weapon systems had made missile defense incredibly sophisticated.

Lasers, electromagnetic cannons, interceptor missiles, cluster-defense batteries, and countless other systems could destroy incoming missiles before they reached their targets.

But during the most intense phase of an engagement, when both sides were exhausting their defensive capabilities, a wave of fighters could suddenly launch a massive missile barrage of their own.

That was often enough to overwhelm a defensive screen and allow direct strikes against enemy starships.

The weapons carried by fighters were less powerful than those mounted on warships.

However, they compensated with numbers and proximity.

Large quantities could be launched simultaneously from much shorter distances.

That made them far harder to defend against.

Of course, unmanned fighters also existed.

But EMP weapons, electronic jamming systems, and the intense electromagnetic interference created by nuclear detonations made long-range remote control extremely unreliable.

Fully autonomous AI pilots presented another problem.

Their behavior could be predicted by enemy AIs.

There was also the constant fear that enemy forces might crack the control systems and seize control of unmanned craft.

For those reasons, the Hill Empire continued to rely on human pilots.

It was no exaggeration to say that fighter pilots occupied one of the deadliest positions in interstellar warfare.

When a starship was fatally damaged, its crew might still have time to escape in lifeboats or emergency capsules.

Pilots had no such luxury.

They were expected to fly directly into enemy formations again and again until victory was achieved—or until they died trying.

That was why fighter pilots began their careers as Elephant Officers rather than ordinary enlisted personnel.

In a major battle, one-third of the pilot corps might simply cease to exist.

That was also why the Falcon fighter had earned its grim nickname.

No one begrudged Pierre his promotions.

Least of all Pierre himself.

A few years earlier, he had simply been the nineteenth child of his mother, Joe Finkley, working an utterly ordinary job.

In the Hill Empire, a wife could either take her husband's surname after marriage or keep her own.

Pierre's mother had chosen to adopt her husband's family name.

Many nations within the Confederation, however, followed a different custom.

Most people had abandoned surnames altogether, keeping only their given names.

Outside of royal families and a handful of influential bloodlines, few people placed much importance on family names anymore.

Originally, surnames had served to unite relatives in difficult times and strengthen family bonds for survival.

But in an era where average lifespans exceeded three hundred years, those ties had become far less significant.

Especially when your uncle's uncle might actually be decades younger than you.

At that point, family trees became more confusing than useful.

Over the course of her 277 fertile years, Joe Finkley had given birth to twenty-three children.

That worked out to roughly one child every ten years.

Why so few over such a long period?

Because raising children was expensive.

Encouraging population growth had always been one of the Hill Empire's core national policies.

It was one of the key reasons the Empire had grown from a loose coalition of small states into a power capable of standing against multiple major governments at once.

In fact, it had become powerful enough that those governments had been forced to unite against it.

Sometimes quantitative growth led to qualitative change.

That principle applied to many things.

War was one of them.

Naturally, the Empire offered incentives for having children.

The problem was that those incentives had not been adjusted for over a thousand years.

By modern standards, they were nowhere near enough to support a child.

Even within the Empire, women as prolific as Pierre's mother were uncommon.

Child-rearing was hardly an enjoyable task.

According to Imperial law, anyone who gave birth was responsible for raising the child until adulthood.

And that was a burden few people were eager to shoulder.