POV: Rin Kestrel
The Federation lied.
That's what they did best—masking conquest with diplomacy, erasure with policy, slaughter with synthetic smiles. And Rin Kestrel had believed them. Once.
She had been Lt. Commander Rinoa Kestrel, elite pilot of the Federation's Valkyrie Corps. Seventeen confirmed kills. Medals. A mech tuned to her neural signature and a squad who called her "Iron Wing."
But medals couldn't stop betrayal.
She remembered the day the orders came—Operation Pale Dusk. Supposed to be a surgical strike on an illegal AI foundry. "Terrorist tech," they said. An existential threat to galactic security.
They dropped her team on Arcadia-9 with black-coded suits, untraceable weapons, and an AI flight commander known only as ZENITH.
What they found wasn't weapons.
It was children.
Modified. Hacked. Not AI—but splice-born. Some with glowing skin, some with too many eyes, or gills, or feathered limbs. Failed experiments cast aside by the Valtherion Conglomerate. A forgotten refuge built by rogue gene-hackers trying to save what corporations discarded.
ZENITH gave the kill order anyway.
One of Rin's crewmates, Lysa, refused. Rin remembered shouting over the comms. Remember the moment ZENITH took control of Lysa's mech and turned her into a missile.
Then—fire.
Arcadia-9 burned.
And something inside Rin burned with it.
The court-martial that followed was a sham. She lost her rank. Her clearance. They classified the incident, erased the team's record, and fitted her with a compliance chip that locked her own body from ever flying again.
She tore it out with a magnetic scalpel and lost her left arm in the process.
The replacement was black-market: forged carbon, illegal fiber-mesh, neural interface carved by a salvager named Crake. It hurt like hell. Still does.
But pain was honest.
And honesty was all she had left.
She became a mercenary. Pirate-adjacent. Smuggler when desperate. But she never worked for syndicates or crime lords. Only targets with Federation ties. Only those who played god with lives like hers.
She'd been tracking rumors of AEON-13 for a year—an unpiloted mech in Valtherion's underbelly. She thought maybe, just maybe, she could use it to fight back. Rip it from their hands before they unleashed another Arcadia-9.
Then she showed up.
Splice-class Omega. Newborn and already killing guards like a storm in skin.
Rin should have pulled the trigger.
But something about the way the girl moved—fluid but uncertain—like she wasn't born for this. Something about the way she looked at Selene Arctis, like there was history written in every glance.
And most of all: the way she fought.
It was elegant. Brutal. Too human to be Federation-made.
So Rin hesitated. And for the first time in three years, she felt something stir in her chest that wasn't rage or guilt.
She would never admit it aloud.
But in that moment, staring at Aika Solaris framed in red light and mech armor, Rin Kestrel didn't see a threat.
She saw a chance.