That's right. The miserable little girl's guess had indeed been spot-on!
Because she'd violated equipment-use regulations and crashed, on top of committing several serious errors that couldn't be made public, Gunboat pilot Gao Lanlan had remained stuck at the rank of second lieutenant. Not only had she failed to earn a medal or receive the promotion her fellow officers had gotten, but all the merit she'd painstakingly accumulated had been wiped away in one stroke.
But her bad luck didn't end there!
On top of losing all the medals and merit she should have earned, she'd also received a major demerit, and her scheduled leave had been canceled.
The base had said that waiting for her new aircraft to come off the production line already counted as leave. So while her fellow officers happily took turns enjoying a brief rest before the coming war, she had no choice but to fly her freshly manufactured Liberator gunship and make several sorties a day, leaving early and returning late.
Speaking of the Liberator gunship, one had to start with the Valkyrie-class escort ship, also known as the Valkyrie aerospace fighter.
The Valkyrie had originally been equipment used by the Earth United Council's forces. It had first appeared in the Koprulu Sector during the Brood War, as a multipurpose craft designed for combat in both the atmosphere and space. Its primary weapon was the HALO cluster rocket, and it could engage both ships and aircraft.
However, despite its seemingly versatile air-and-space combat capabilities, the Valkyrie escort ship lacked the maneuverability expected of a light fighter. It also had to rely on heavy armor to survive in combat. In battle, it often had to withstand heavy enemy fire and counterattack before suffering a failure in its core systems—or before those systems were damaged or