Okay, you asked me to take a look at this and so I shall. As always, while I may be harsh in my critique of your work, this is not intended to be a critique of you as a person, so please keep that in mind. In addition, all opinions in here are mine and mine alone; although this may come off as talking in absolutes, a "IMO" tag should be added to all judgments and suggestions that follow.
Let's start off with the story proper, then.
January 7th, 2400.
1359 hrs. EST (Earth Standard)
kilometer-radius around Triton Base 'Starscope'
Four experimental space superiority units, designated XSS-0-'Kamadeva', fly from the R&D Hangar entrenched in Triton's soil to begin testing. Lana, Hal, Sarah and Rena are the designated testers for today's sortie. These units are designed with extreme mobility in mind, have been fitted with approrpiate shock-absorbers and simple, weak test-mode-scale weaponry. On 1400, a wave of harsh sound and lights flare across the hangar, signalling for the test to begin.
Aaaaand stop. This is a
terrible beginning for a story. One, this is a beginning to a screenplay for a TV show with an established show bible, not the beginning of a short story. As a reader, I have no idea what this all means, or how I am to visualize it. Like, is "experimental" good? Bad? What kind of scale is "extreme mobility" measured against? Why are shock absorbers necessary?
What I would recommend here is to not start off with type designations, but with describing to us what these things look like. In much the same way, we do not actually need to know the names of the pilots at this point; they can be introduced when they actually start talking, or once the visual groundwork has been laid.
Around this time, as the four pilots are waking up properly and admittedly enjoying themselves more than a typcial military otufit would be allowed to, only one of the four is clsoe enough to feel a distant fold in the universe, as an Aldebaran scout vessel emerges from Subspace several dozen kilometers nearby.
Holy run-on sentence, Batman! Several problems here. 1: Pilots on a test flight will
never climb into their machines sleepy. There's usually an hour or three of pre-flight briefings and equipment checks before flight suits are climbed into; experimental military hardware testing is a profession that requires precision and alertness, being sleepy doesn't fit in there.
Secondly, you are introducing a pretty far-out concept here: "feel a distant fold in the universe". Is this something humans can just do? What does it feel like? Most importantly though, is this something that happens regularly, or is it an everyday occurrence?
Thirdly, what is an "Aldebaran scout ship"? How is it different from the ships the characters are already familiar with?
Lana is the only one to notice it, Sarah and Rena both teaming up against Hal as he runs a half-dozen orbital loops around Triton. The mood of the entire squadron and base crews is exceptionally jovial.
How? How is she the only one to notice something happening a couple kilometers away in an area of space where active flight testing is happening? Is there noone keeping a sensor watch? Subspace jumps in FS are highly energetic events; there's glowy lights and at least a hint of gravity manipulation there, it's pretty hard to do them stealthily.
Lana abruptly turns her craft from filming her comrades, beelining for the portion of space in which she felt the fluctuation, a nagging feeling overriding all her immediate concerns and objectives. As if there were a clock in her ear, the snowy-haired young woman heard a soft repitious ticking noise, then she blinked and for an eternal moment, entered Subspace without the aid of a drive of any kind.
I'm sorry, what? Are these test pilots, or children? Do they not have protocols in place for calling out weird stuff that's happening? Is there noone watching them and calling them out when they do something not covered by the test flight protocol?
(Small interlude: I have a passionate hatred for the "children/teenagers as soldiers" trope. There are hundreds of anime and mangas using it, and approximately none of them have explained it in a way that made sense to me)
At that exact same moment as Lana entered and emerged from Subspace, Lorna frowned and squinted down at her commander's chair, moving her left wrist aside to check the wing's comparative distance from base and eachother. Three were close, units 1, 2 and 4, still orbiting like macro-scale coments across Triton. Unit three - Lana, was roughly the same distance away, except a couple 0's had been added to her diagnostic.
Oh hey, an adult. Does she do anything about her runaway fighter pilot?
The volume of time Lana spent in Subspace might have been years in a split-second, or something else as undefinitive, but the truth is it is unlikely such a journey could be accurately counted with time. She emerged and immediatly crashed into the nose of the Aldebaran scout, her exit vector impossible to alter as her navigation thrusters had been taken offline whilst she sublimated and temporarily crossed dmeinsional thresholds. She wouldn't want to flee from the bogey, having seen its entire profile and capabilities whilst her eyes were blinded by subspace, her eyes interpreting the space she envisioned as if she and the bogey existed within Sol's core.
...apparently not.
On a technical level, this sentence: "The volume of time Lana spent in Subspace might have been years in a split-second, or something else as undefinitive, but the truth is it is unlikely such a journey could be accurately counted with time." is rather inelegant. It's also filled with logic holes; we know how long a subspace jump takes because we can see both the entry and exit, and can determine the wall-clock time it takes to do it.
Additionally, this sentence: "She wouldn't want to flee from the bogey, having seen its entire profile and capabilities whilst her eyes were blinded by subspace, her eyes interpreting the space she envisioned as if she and the bogey existed within Sol's core." is borderline incoherent. I have no idea what you are trying to convey here.
As soon as Lana's Kamadeva crunched into the scout's nose, denting the unknwon hexagonal-panelling somewhat, it began turning around with no visible maneuvering thrusters burning against the dark void of space. With a singular objective thought of 'Don't let this escape!' and groggy from her exeprience but still thriving off of combat high and instinct two decades old, Lana shot her vessel's emergency evasive options: a handful of cables with grappling hooks on a ring around the cockpit designed to pierce and hook into hull to 'web-swing' its way to safety or home. All hooks Lana launched smacked right into the already-slightly-crumpled hull of the scout's nose and held fast, reeling her in as it turned away from Starscope base, accelerating with speed she presumed could only be attained by a fighter on steroids or engine prototypes. Lana was so clsoe to the alien hull she could slide her cockpit frame out and walk on it, but she had enough sense to know that would be phenominally stupid given the current situation.
Uhhh, combat high? What combat? Is pointing cameras at things suddenly stressful?
I am also rather unclear about the physics of the situation. So these ships collide, one of them starts to turn, and the other.... shoots a bunch of grappling hooks at it? How, in Newton's name, is that an "evasive" option?
By this time, Harbinger as a whole, field ships, commander and base crew had stopped running under the pretense of merely testing and, with a rather literal first contact, the three working units had began flying on full afterburners, primary secondary and tertiary thrusters to accelerate towards and hopefully save their comrade. Despite his unit being the closest to Lana's, Hal's began falling behind after getting within two kilometers of the unknwon and Lana, a testament, Lorna and the rest realized with dawning shock, to the unknown's indeterminable engines.
Does he fall behind because he's out-accelerated? Or because something interferes with his engines?
With Lana's strike craft the only one physically bound to the unknown ship by its few tethers, or perhaps it was due to her odd fluctuation earlier, she was able to comprehend and witness what a Subspace wall emerging from the cosmos looked like: a white-ringed blue circular wall blooming between the stars right in front of her, it grew until it was large enough to swallow them whole, then the alien vessel charged nose-first into it.
Uhh, what? Was a subspace entry some sort of lovecraftian unknowable phenomenon before?
....A planet teeming with life, with occasional chrome-grey splotches of cities dotting its landscape across a handful of continents. Not a blue planet with vast seas, but a larger rock with greener shades of blue to its oceans perched against a shining backdrop of a distant, redder star? Regaining her senses, Lana's limbs fumbled, arms and legs flailing in the pilot's seat, smacking switches in her foggy daze, though the functions these myriad switches pertained to were seemingly defunct as well...
Fun fact: Cities in daytime are almost imperceptible from space.
The green ball loomed in her vision, growing bigger every second... How fast was she flying? Lana tilted her ehad to look at her 3D sensor readout, apparently she'd been thrown clear from that alien ship, for a significant portion of her fighter had been torn clean off, her fighter was missing its entire lower section, all that remained between her feet and open space was about five centimeters of ripped, borken, yet holding hull. Thankfully the upper two engines still functioned, quickly retruning to a blue-white blaze in sync with the pilot - essentially the starfighter's brain, awakening again. "Gre-" Lana croaked, mouth and throat dry for some reason, she cleared her throat a few times, smacked her chest with a closed fist to try and rejuvenate her body. "Great, reentry..? Hmmph, death by blazing fires in less than..." Her squnting eyes looked around for the timer denoting calculated time-to-impact. Her head felt slow, sloth-like, like she'd been tired for weeks and had only just had a dearly-needed 9-hour-sleep "One minute ffity? ****."
I feel like this is mostly OK as a vignette. Same goes for the rest of the piece, that's actually quite serviceable, but it does feel like you just slammed two stories together and said "Now, kiss!"
I may have a few followup thoughts later, but this will have to do for now.
