24

What does a gravitational observatory look like anyway? Hwa Young wondered as she sped through the aether, hoping she would arrive in time to rescue the people calling for help—and that she hadn’t fallen prey to a trap.

Here, amid the dust-shirred aether currents, she could imagine herself as an adventurer from the days of old, searching for a destiny written in stars and silver, rather than someone haring off on a reckless mission without her CO’s knowledge. But she wasn’t an adventurer. As much as she’d loved the old stories that her parents had told her, those tales wouldn’t help her now. She needed to rely on her training as a lancer pilot, and the iceberg presence of Winter’s Axiom and its experience.

She slowed her approach, wishing she had Farseer’s scan data to guide her. So far she saw nothing but the shadows of her own misgivings, mysterious dust motes floating in hazy clouds and stirred by the aetheric currents.

The border world of Abalone came into view at first as a pearlescent disc of pale greens and murky blues and luminous violets. Its sun shone in the distance, red-orange like an overripe fruit. The gravitational observatory should have hung in orbit around Abalone. Hwa Young didn’t know why it had to be in space rather than being anchored safely around a planet or moon. What she did know, looking through Winter’s Axiom’s senses at the hell-cloud of debris, was that someone had shattered it like thin ceramic.

Was she too late? Were there any survivors? Her heart thumped painfully against the walls of her chest. If only she’d gotten the message earlier…if only she hadn’t waited for the commander’s response, which had never come anyway…

She forced herself to concentrate as she stared dry-eyed at the floating wreckage. The clanners must have attacked the place while the lancers were distracted by the battle with their secondary forces. But the wreckage didn’t mean the enemy had departed. She had to proceed carefully.

She guided Winter’s Axiom closer to the debris, careful to avoid any fast-moving fragments. One glanced off its armor; she felt it like a sting on her own skin. There weren’t as many fragments as she had feared, though. Without a strong gravitational pull to keep them in orbit, they had either drifted elsewhere or disintegrated.

What am I looking for? Hwa Young thought as she surveyed the catastrophe. Human figures, some scrap of evidence that had survived against the—

Wait.

On first glance, the wreckage had appeared as an overwhelming mass of splinters and dust and irregular debris. It was hard to discern any pattern other than the pattern of obliteration. It would have taken a forensic specialist to put together the clues, unwreck the jigsaw pieces, and figure out what the observatory’s final moments looked like.

Except.

Look.

Hwa Young wasn’t sure whether Winter’s Axiom or she herself saw it first: a series of glints among the debris. Someone, or something, was signaling with their suit light.

Her heartbeat quickened. There it came again. Long flashes and short, in the pattern that said EMERGENCY. REQUEST RESCUE. Over and over, without further detail.

Who knew how long the victim had been out here, hoping—and despairing?

It could still be a trap, but she couldn’t not respond.

Hwa Young took a winding route toward the distress signal. If the individual who’d sent the signal still lived, and wasn’t delusional with aether poisoning, the only way to evacuate them would be to put them in the copilot’s seat. Which meant opening the cockpit and losing some of her precious air, of which she had a limited supply.

She unharnessed herself and wrestled Geum’s care package back to its original position so that the copilot’s seat would be free, cursing her friend yet again. Even if there was no way Geum could have anticipated the situation.

As she moved closer, she saw that it was in fact a person, or something shaped like a person, in a standard Imperial spacesuit almost identical to the one she was wearing. Alive or dead, she couldn’t tell. Hwa Young imagined she saw the convulsive movements of their hand as they flicked the light on and off, on and off.

No attack came.

Of course not, Hwa Young thought grimly. If she were setting an ambush, she would wait until the foolhardy pilot exited the lancer before springing the trap. She would be stupid to fall for it.

At the same time, the survivor—assuming that was what they were—needed rescue. Hwa Young remembered what it was like to be a survivor, what it was like to be powerless and to hope to be saved. She could no more have turned back from the survivor than she could have cut out her own heart.

What options did she have that minimized her odds of being sieved?

She had two assets, herself and Winter’s Axiom. Three if she counted the care package.

What if Geum left me something I could use? After all, zie didn’t consider life worth living without video games. There might be some tech toy that could help her.

Hardly daring to hope, she squeezed into the back where she’d stuffed the box. She used her knife to cut the tape holding the box closed, almost slicing herself in the process because of the cramped space. She suppressed a growl; she was usually better coordinated, but her desperation, and the aftermath of the earlier fight, was making her clumsy.

“Scorch it!” At the bang that came from the box, she flattened herself to the side of the pilot’s seat, not that it offered much cover. She hadn’t thought it was going to be rigged to blow, but that had been unforgivably careless of her. Someone could have blackmailed Geum or forged zir handwriting or—

Hwa Young blinked. Glitter floated in the air. Pastel rainbow glitter. And festive shreds of rainbow crepe paper. All over everything.

The box hadn’t contained a bomb. Good thing, because she would be splattered all over the cockpit if that had been the case. Geum had rigged it with glitter and confetti.

“I don’t have time for this nonsense!” Hwa Young growled. She became aware that blood flowed and beaded oddly in the half gravity in the cockpit. In her haste to reach cover, she’d slashed her thigh through her spacesuit. Which meant she had to seal the hole.

The absurdity of the situation hit Hwa Young. Here she was, trying to rescue someone who might have critical information, and she was thwarted by a cockpit full of the world’s most colorful glitter because…because her friend had wanted to give her a nice surprise. It could be worse. She started to laugh, wheezed, made herself stop.

She quickly sealed the hole in her suit with the repair kit, then returned to the box and brushed aside more glitter to reveal its contents. Taped to the inside lid of the box was an envelope. For my favorite friend, it said, this time in a cheerful orange.

Hwa Young’s eyes misted inconveniently. I don’t deserve you. Even if you have the most rotten timing. She shoved the letter into a pocket to read later. It deserved a moment to itself.

Then she hastily inventoried the box’s contents: a handheld game console, a spare set of batteries, cartridges for several shooter games. (Geum knew her tastes.) The rest of the box was taken up by prepackaged snacks.

“I might forgive you after all,” Hwa Young told her absent friend. That is, if zie could forgive her for what she was about to do to the game console. Hwa Young lacked Geum’s genius for electronics, but zie had shown her the basics. And Eun had made sure everyone knew how to use their computer systems.

She retrieved the tool kit and dug out the console’s guts. She didn’t need to do anything fancy to it, only program the holographic projector to magnify the game graphics. It might not be completely convincing, but any distraction while she was out of her lancer was a good one.

Then Hwa Young fed the gaming console into another altered tracer round and returned to her seat to load it into its kinetic rifle. She could already see the game graphics cycling through demo mode, and—for love of the Empress’s rib cage, why was it playing a collision between an armored personnel carrier and a school bus on loop?

Too late now, Hwa Young thought as a fake explosion flickered at the edge of her vision and a holographic shard of windscreen flew through her arm. Her own recent head injury throbbed sympathetically. She aimed away and triggered the rifle, shooting the console and its holographic projections into space, away from her and her lancer.

Hwa Young opened the cockpit. The air swooshed outward, which she saw rather than heard. Working quickly while her magnetic boots anchored her to the lancer’s outer carapace, she clipped her tether to a clamp. Heart hammering, she unlocked the magnetism on the boots and drifted free, her tether the only thing connecting her to Winter’s Axiom.

She would never enjoy floating through the aether, but it didn’t frighten her. Nothing would be as terrifying as ricocheting between moon-fragments had been as a ten-year-old.

In the distance, she glimpsed the flicker-static of the game console’s hologram as it glanced off a shard and flew in a new direction. She barely had time to register the glowing colors before it blossomed in an effusion of fire. Hwa Young threw her hands in front of her face, shielding herself from the blast, as her heart pounded out of her chest.

Someone had attacked it.

Shit. She had to go dark and pray she could recover the victim before the hostiles lit her and the lancer up. It was only a matter of time before the clanners traced the luckless game console back to her position. Unlike the clanners, she didn’t have stealth.

Hwa Young remotely piloted the lancer to the lee of a particularly large observatory segment that looked like it had belonged to a hydroponics unit. Glittering sprays of ice and disarrayed leaves spun in the aether like necklaces of thwarted spring. Trying to navigate for the lancer and herself at the same time was so disorienting that she overshot and almost slammed into a metal spike.

Sweat slicked her palms and made the entire suit cling unpleasantly to her.

If anything hits me, I’m dead. It didn’t have to be a bullet or a missile. A sufficiently fast particle, too small even for Winter’s Axiom to spot, could penetrate her suit and puncture her heart.

She finally reached the floating—body? Person? Not corpse, not yet, she chanted inwardly, as if saying it would make it true. Hwa Young pressed her helmet against the other person’s so sound would transmit itself to them. “Rescue is here.”

The hands on the flashlight didn’t stop.

“Help is here,” she added, redundantly. She grabbed their waist.

They didn’t kick or struggle. The tinted faceplate made it impossible to see their head.

“I’m here to rescue you!” Hwa Young yelled fruitlessly, pressing her helmet against theirs even harder. They must be afflicted by panic or aether sickness.

The world lit up around them. Not fireworks, but missiles hitting the lancer’s reflexively ignited shields, which wouldn’t hold up to the barrage for long. And as long as the shields were up, she couldn’t return to the cockpit, either.

She was trapped out here.