23

“Captain to Bastard.” The captain’s voice came over the PA. “We’re under attack. The clanners are here in force. Like ten times the numbers that we were led to expect. Repeat, we’re under attack.”

Hwa Young shook her head, distracted. She hesitated as she finished pulling on her spacesuit, stomach knotting in guilt. Her attempt at bringing home intel had instead put her squad in danger. If only she’d figured it out earlier—

“Check your damn oxygen,” Eun shouted in her face. “I’m not having you expire because you get another hole punched in your scorching lancer and you run out of air.”

She swallowed a retort. He was correct. She’d skipped two steps of her suit check, a sign of how flustered she was. Bae wouldn’t have forgotten. Hwa Young waited for Bae’s inevitable condescending remark, which never came, and that stung more.

While Hwa Young restarted the check, because she didn’t trust her memory, Eun called Commander Ye Jun. “Commander, we need updated orders. It’s urgent,” he said into the comm link. “Dammit, pick up. Did zie beat us to the docking bay?”

“Commander Ye Jun is not receiving messages right now,” the autoresponder said in a politeness level that was higher than Eun rated.

Eun made the kind of tormented growl that Hwa Young associated with poorly trained dogs. “Why does zie never pick up when I need zir to.” He glared at Hwa Young, Bae, and Seong Su. “Let’s hoof it.”

Eun settled for messaging Commander Ye Jun while they headed toward the docking bay. It was almost comical, except Hwa Young knew from experience that mere seconds could make all the difference.

The commander was present, and Hwa Young felt herself breathe a sigh of relief. Zie stood next to zir lancer, an enormous tactical holo occupying the entire bay. The only reason Hwa Young didn’t perform a double take at the realistic squadron of clanner fighters hovering in midair was that each ship was the size of her fist.

“I got your warning that the crystal is bugged,” Commander Ye Jun said to Eun first thing. Zir serene expression contrasted with Eun’s scowling face and the boiling aggravation in his eyes.

“You could have—”

“Not now, Hellion.” Commander Ye Jun held out the data crystal. “Winter, you take the bug.”

Was this an oblique punishment for the draconic hacking shenanigans? “Sir.”

The commander raised zir voice. “The rest of you, deploy behind this asteroid cluster—” Zie indicated it on the tactical map. “We’ll counterattack, but from cover. Launch as soon as you’re cleared. We’ll be with you shortly.”

Bae and Seong Su sprinted for their lancers. Eun lingered a moment, giving the commander a searching look, then headed off.

Hwa Young wanted to ask why the commander had sent the others away first. Then the transport veered sharply to port, and she almost lost her balance.

“I’ll make this quick,” Commander Ye Jun said, scarcely flinching at the movement. “You’re going to load your lancer with a tracer round. Don’t fire at whatever random target crosses your sights, no matter the provocation.” Zie removed the data crystal from zir pocket and passed it to her.

Aha. “So you want me to remove the tracer inside the round and replace it with the data crystal”—and its bug. “But why go to the trouble, sir?”

The transport captain’s voice interrupted them. “Commander Ye Jun, our point defenses are holding, but they won’t last much longer.” Swear words, then: “It’s like they know exactly where we’re going to be!”

“Not wrong,” the commander murmured. To Hwa Young, zie said, “I’m gambling the clanners got lazy and they’ve tied the guidance systems of their missiles directly into the signal that bug is transmitting. This gives us an opportunity, a short-lived one. We’re only going to get one chance.”

She understood now. “I wait for your signal, then fire the bug into your chosen target.” Until she fired, she would be the missiles’ target. It would take all her cunning to survive.

“Correct. They’ll figure it out, but maybe we can take out their carrier this way. Go.”

It was Hwa Young’s turn to sprint for her lancer, although she was mindful that the attack transport’s sudden maneuvers could send her sprawling. She almost smashed into the deck when the ship flipped abruptly, saved only by her magnetic boots. While the transport had artificial gravity, the captain had turned it off when evasive maneuvers began to save reserves for the lancer units.

She shivered as she lowered herself into the cockpit of Winter’s Axiom—not with dread, but anticipation. You’re back, breathed a voice through the halls of her soul. Winter. The white hunt, the stopped breath, the hollow death. Together we will shatter everything that opposes us.

The voice thrilled her. Even though she had sensed their bond repairing over time, she had still been afraid that command override would separate her from the voice forever, and relief gusted through her now that they were together again. Part of her, the part that was inextricably connected to Winter’s Axiom, wanted to be master of the battlefield, the one meting out destruction. She loved having her need for wartime power understood—and welcomed.

Once she had entered her lancer and its glow of wintry whites and blues and grays, her job had only just begun. Vibrations traveled up from the deck to the cockpit as the others launched. One, two, three, four—that last one must be Commander Ye Jun in zir command-and-control unit.

She heard the others’ comm chatter as they flew out into battle:

“Farseer to Avalanche. Hostile on your six.” Bae, sounding simultaneously crisp and judgy.

“I’ve got you covered, Avalanche.” Eun.

Commander Ye Jun interjected, “Farseer, don’t let them draw you too far out.”

Hwa Young returned her focus to her task. Launch first. Then surgery on the ammo. Hwa Young could do it here, but that would continue to endanger the transport, and she refused to do that. She wished there were some automated way to attach the unwanted bug to the tracer round. But the lancer wasn’t equipped for such work. Once she had launched and found herself a suitable respite, she would have to handle the task manually.

Hwa Young strapped in, trying not to hyperventilate as she remembered the last time she was in this position. Trying not to imagine there was something wrong with the wintry air inside the lancer. Her readouts assured her that everything was fine. She sank further into her connection with the lancer, into the chill of its mental embrace.

The consoles pulsed around her in time with her heartbeat. Don’t waste time, don’t waste time. “Winter to Chamsae. Request clearance to launch.”

“Go, for the love of the Empress and all her consorts,” came the reply.

The bay opened up again. Hwa Young was lucky she had her flight computer patched into the attack transport’s fire control, or she would have flown into the hell-scatter of antimissile fire. She spotted the other lancers only as minute glowing specks, already distant, leaving occluded trails in the aether and its clouds of stellate dust.

The comm chimed. Hwa Young toggled it on as she hugged the trajectory of the attack transport. “Winter here.”

“This is Bastard,” Commander Ye Jun said. “Continue shadowing the transport. We want the clanners to think their bug is still aboard until we’ve lured them into range.”

“They’re hoping to blow up our legs and leave us stranded here?”

“Yes. If anything gets by us, it will be tempting to take it out. But you are to rely on the point defenses. Do not, I repeat, do not shoot until I mark the target for you. Clear?”

“Clear, sir.”

“I knew I could count on you. Bastard out.”

Hwa Young set Winter’s Axiom to autopilot. She mouthed a prayer to the Empress and her crown—futile, considering she was in the midst of battle—and unbuckled herself.

I am winter’s hand and winter’s shield. No one will harm you.

The world tilted dizzyingly around her. She focused on the lancer’s interior, the reassuring solidity of its structure, her connection to its heart of ice. Her weeks of training couldn’t overcome the instinctive desire for a fixed up and down, something even natives of the Moonstorm struggled with.

Think about your feet. Think about your feet. Her feet were down. The rest of her was up. That was all that mattered. Fighting nausea that she hoped wasn’t a sign of an imminent gravitic failure, Hwa Young made her way through the narrow passages to the back of the lancer, where the specialty ammunition was stored.

When she got there, she stared in bewilderment at the unfamiliar box in front of the magazine. What in the world…? Not a small box, either. It could have contained an eight-year-old. Webbing held it in place.

The box had a label: SURPRISE! HAPPY BELATED NEW YEAR! it said in Geum’s cheerful, rounded handwriting. In neon pink.

“Geum,” Hwa Young said aloud, “I am going to kill you.”

She removed the webbing, mindful that she might have to reuse it, and tried to shove the box aside. It rattled alarmingly as she shifted it. Unfortunately, there was no space back here, just enough for her and the box. She couldn’t open the magazine with the box in her way.

Hwa Young cursed Geum, not very creatively, because creativity was for people who didn’t have combat emergencies or friends. What had Geum been thinking? Except she knew what Geum had been thinking. Zie had wanted to leave her a nice care package where she wouldn’t find it until…well.

The comm crackled. Hwa Young opened the line. “Voice only,” she added. She didn’t want Commander Ye Jun to witness her dilemma. She’d get a whole new callsign, like Box Girl or maybe Outboxed.

“Bastard to Winter. Are you in position yet?”

“Yo, Winter,” Seong Su said, “is there a reason your video’s off?”

Hwa Young ground her teeth and didn’t answer.

“Avalanche, focus.” Eun’s voice cracked like a whip.

Bae almost spoke over him. “Hellion, I’m painting a target for you.”

“Acknowledged, Farseer. Get out of there before you’re bombarded too.”

“There’s a complication,” Hwa Young panted as she maneuvered the scorching box out of the back area and into the copilot’s seat.

A slight pause. “Dare I ask for details?”

“I’ll handle it. I’ll notify you when the data crystal is ready.”

“See that you do.” Commander Ye Jun cut the connection.

By then Hwa Young had successfully wedged the box into the copilot’s seat, taking the additional precaution of securing it with the harness so it didn’t come loose and knock her out. The way her luck was going, she wasn’t ruling anything out. Besides, she’d internalized the spacer’s rule that you never left items floating around. It took only one bad move in low gravity for them to become deadly projectiles.

“We’re going to have a talk, Geum,” Hwa Young snarled as she wrenched the magazine open and located the tracer rounds, each slotted into its own place in a complicated feed mechanism. The bugged data crystal in her pocket felt as though it were driving spikes into her skin. “How do I—”

A cool sense of certainty took over. Her hands moved, and the round opened—Winter’s Axiom. It was guiding her. In the back of her mind, she wondered if this signified some new evolution of her connection to the lancer. What else would it show her?

Guided by autopilot, the lancer swerved from a rogue missile. Hwa Young yelped and closed her fist around the circuitry she’d just pried loose. Moments later, beads of blood, almost perfectly spherical, floated free. She’d punctured skin.

She didn’t think the blood would interfere with the bug’s ability to transmit, though, so she retrieved the crystal and jammed it into the round’s hollow interior, then closed it up and replaced the whole affair.

“Weapons system, load tracer one followed by regular bullets,” she said. Then she called in to the commander.

“Winter to Bastard. I’m in position. Repeat, in position.”

Now that she had taken care of the preliminaries, she had time to be scared again, if in a distant way, beneath the numbing cold of her lancer’s presence. She reacquainted herself with the battle before her.

Clanner ships swarmed the area. The pilots looked to be outnumbered four to one, terrible odds even for a lancer platoon. Bae flitted far forward, nimbly dodging barrages of missile fire as she acted as a spotter for Eun. Seong Su maneuvered even closer to the frontal wave of the assault, covering Bae with his robust shields. Eun lurked behind the shadow of an asteroid, using his artillery to attack enemy ships with indirect fire from long range. For zir part, Commander Ye Jun had parked zir lancer in the scan shadow of another asteroid, lurking off to the side, not in danger—yet.

Hwa Young saw, too, what she’d missed while she was wrangling the wretched care package and the doctored tracer round. Through the lancer’s senses, she picked up a haze of fragments and heated dust, the remnants of the missiles that the Chamsae’s point defenses had, so far, successfully shot down. More missiles were incoming from all directions. The aether was thick with them, like a migration of deadly birds.

“Chamsae to Bastard,” the attack transport’s captain said over the comms. “We are down to twenty-seven percent point defense ammunition. Repeat, down to twenty-seven percent of ammo. We can’t keep this up much longer. One of the missiles got through and took out a starboard thruster. Whatever you’re going to do, do it soon.”

There they are. In her mind’s eye she saw the clanner task force as a flock of red motes. There was a swarm of twenty-two unstealthed to attack. One hung far back. She guessed Seong Su had disabled it.

That’s odd. The last time she’d been in battle, her lancer hadn’t had scan range out this far. Had she misunderstood the capabilities of their platoon? Or had their scan improved?

A cold wind blew through the cockpit. It should have frightened her, but what she felt was a wintry exultation.

“Bastard, this is Winter. Your instructions?”

Hwa Young didn’t know what other matter had the commander’s attention. She could only trust that zie hadn’t forgotten her.

“I have your target, Winter,” Commander Ye Jun replied. “Fire at the following coordinates.”

Hwa Young double-checked the coordinates against tactical. “Sir, there’s nothing there, unless it’s stealthed.”

“I’m aware. Signal analysis suggests there’s something hiding there. Do it.”

She emerged from behind the shadow of the Chamsae. Lined up her sights, cross-checked against the tactical display once more. It pained her to fire at an apparently empty region of space based on the commander’s say-so.

Trust the Empress. Move at her will. Act as her hands.

The commander wasn’t the Empress, but zie was her CO. That would have to do.

She fired into empty space.

The recoil on the lancer was minimal given the comparative masses, but she felt a slight shudder despite the shock absorbers.

One second, two seconds, three seconds…nothing.

She could tell when the bullet met its target because the latest salvo of missiles swerved, made a U-turn, and headed back toward the coordinates Commander Ye Jun had given her. Moments later, a tremendous explosion bloomed outward, swallowing twelve of the twenty-two clanner units.

Ten clanners left against five of them. Two to one, much better odds. Hwa Young wanted to cheer, pump her fist, but she kept her emotions in check as she radioed the commander.

“Winter to Bastard, new orders, sir?”

The delay was longer this time. She saw the commander’s face in the holo; saw zir unaccustomed paleness, and that zie had bitten through zir lip. Blood floated in front of zir face.

“Sir, are you all right?”

“Keep your mind on the battle, Winter. Your new task is to defend the Chamsae. Maneuver and fire at will.”

This she could get behind. “Understood, sir.”

“You need any help back there, Winter?” Seong Su asked. He and Bae had withdrawn some distance from the front. He maneuvered his lancer clumsily to avoid smashing into a nearby asteroid.

“I’m clear, Avalanche,” Hwa Young replied.

“Nice to see you do something right,” Bae remarked.

Even the backhanded acknowledgment warmed Hwa Young. Bae was Bae, after all.

The surviving clanners had pulled back to regroup. Hwa Young entertained herself shooting down stray missiles that got too close. There were fewer of them now, but everything she could do to help improved the attack transport’s odds of survival. She suspected another thruster had gone belly-up; the Chamsae’s movements were increasingly erratic.

Then Hwa Young heard it.

“Distress call incoming,” the computer said.

Play it, she thought to Winter’s Axiom. It could be a trick, but she felt obliged to hear it out.

The recorded call began playing. “This is Head Researcher Chung Chi Ja of Abalone Gravitational Observatory. We have spotted a fleet of clanners.” The scientist gave the vector of approach. “We have important information for the authorities. If there is an Imperial fleet in the area, we request your assistance. I repeat, this is Head Researcher Chung Chi Ja…”

Hwa Young felt frozen. That desperation in the head researcher’s voice—it sounded just the way she’d felt all those years ago when her home was under attack.

“Bastard,” Hwa Young said, “this is Winter. I’m forwarding a distress call from the observatory. Your orders?”

The minutes ticked by with no response. Had the others heard it, too? Or were they too preoccupied by their pursuit of the remaining clanners?

Minutes might make all the difference to the researchers—and their intel might be vital to the Empire. A lancer and its pilot had saved her when she was a child, after all. It was her duty to repay that now.

“Bastard, this is Winter. Absent orders otherwise, I’m responding to the distress call.”

Still no response.

She couldn’t wait any longer. While the others battled ahead of her, Hwa Young slipped away alone.