29

Admiral Hong’s defenses were swarmed by clanners on every side, up and down and around, a whirlwind of insects. Hwa Young had misgivings about trusting clanners, even clanners that included her heart-mother, but everything advanced too quickly for her to do anything but move and fire, move and fire, in response to Eun’s staccato instructions guiding them through the battlefield moment by moment.

She had almost reached the burgeoning event horizon, the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, could escape, when Bae’s shouted warning jolted her out of her combat reverie. “Winter, you’re too close! Take this vector out—”

Hwa Young would once have resented Bae’s micromanaging. Now it was faster simply to accede. She willed the lancer to move in the indicated direction—because she trusted Bae.

When did I start trusting her?

When did she decide I was worth saving?

“Winter.”

“Sir, repeat that?” That had been the commander’s voice. Hwa Young had missed zir latest set of orders.

Her tactical display showed a barrage of missiles from First Fleet, as well as fighters swarming to intercept them. Admiral Hong was clearly determined to stop her and her comrades.

“I need you to fire four tracer rounds at the indicated targets,” Commander Ye Jun said. They lit up on her display as the commander sent the information over: one for each of the colony ships, specifically their engines. “Hellion will paint them red with his artillery, and then we’re hauling ass out of here before we’re caught in the blast radius and wiped out when their reactors go critical. Farseer, you’re the one in the most danger with no one to shield you, but you must stay on top of the colony ships so Winter has the best chance of accurate fire.”

Hwa Young closed her eyes for a moment, heard the threnody of lost souls in the halls of nightmare. “Understood, sir.”

She knew the situation, unbearable as it was.

“We’re monsters,” Eun rasped, “but we’re doing this to save lives.”

There is a threat. We are the solution to the threat.

Hwa Young remembered, despite the knotted lump in her throat, that she was bonded to the monster that had killed Bae’s best friend.

How many similarly terrible decisions had Winter’s Axiom guided its pilots through?

She wasn’t sure whether it was the lancer that directed her now, or her own icy heart, but she knew what she needed to do. She had her orders, and the orders had a purpose.

Winter’s Axiom. The season of death. Now she knew the reason for her lancer’s name.

And it had chosen her.

Her face was wet, but she had no time to wonder why.

Hwa Young’s world narrowed to the pinpoint necessity of hitting the targets. There would be no margin for error. There never was.

A flight of clanner fighters burned up intercepting a swarm of missiles converging on her position. She marked them in passing, as though they were a poetry recitation in the language of vectors, and not a sacrifice in the present moment.

She heard Commander Ye Jun and Eun conversing with the ease of long acquaintance, and Bae’s voice too, crisply calling out incoming hostiles. Someone’s missing, she thought as she lined up the first of the targets. A faraway pain started up in her heart when she realized she’d forgotten, even for the span of moments, about Seong Su.

Hwa Young lost awareness of the world around her. Just her and Winter’s Axiom, together targeting the colony ships. She fired once, twice, thrice. Ground her teeth as the lancer’s rifle hiccuped on the reload, but cycling the ammo solved that issue. The fourth shot soared free. The tracers glowed red as they flew to the colony ships: their paths would guide Hellion’s fire, and any clanner blasts, to their targets. Now that she had marked the prey, the following artillery barrage would destroy their engines, triggering a fatal explosion.

Two thousand souls condemned by her hand, damned to fire and darkness.

“Farseer, withdraw now,” Commander Ye Jun said. “Cover her retreat, Winter.”

A sniper unit was not optimal for laying down covering fire, to the extent that “covering fire” meant anything in space. But Eun had the more urgent job of battering the Chollima-class ships into submission. And the commander’s lancer no longer had attack capability.

Bae soared like a swallow, narrowly dodging debris and missiles both. She was always in motion, refusing to take cover any longer than a second. Hwa Young wished she could take her attention off the piloting and shooting long enough to appreciate Bae’s poetry of flight.

Her focus returned to the colony ships. At first she thought Eun’s barrage had failed, that nothing had happened despite the fury of red-orange explosions. Amid the tumult of battle, it was difficult to discern whether the gravitational lensing effect had dissipated.

Then she saw the missiles slamming home, for a fractional moment before the cockpit’s reactive shielding kicked in to save her from losing her vision. Fireballs exploded outward from the points of impact and swallowed all four ships.

“Well done,” Commander Ye Jun said.

Hwa Young saw zir face again on comms, smeared with sweat and dust, bruised around the eyes—too much acceleration dodging a near-hit, perhaps. Was that blood leaking from zir eyes?

“Hate me later, if you must,” the commander added. “It had to be done. The responsibility is mine.”

The responsibility might be yours, Hwa Young thought, but we worked together to do the job.

They’d saved Carnelian—but at what price?

“It had to be done,” she whispered to herself. She’d taken lives to save lives. Maybe she didn’t say it out loud. Maybe Winter’s Axiom said it with her mouth.

If she repeated it enough times, maybe she’d believe it.

She glanced at her tactical display. First Fleet, its plan foiled, had reversed course in a well-organized withdrawal.

Hwa Young wanted to join up with Commander Ye Jun’s lancer, like a child huddling for warmth, but clustering their units served no good purpose. Flying in tight formation was for parades and displays, not the battlefield. She cast a weary eye over the readings, a hell-scatter of alarms and proximity alerts and enough detritus to jigsaw back together into a couple of dreadnoughts.

The lensing effects had indeed been dispelled. She could see clanner ships without the distorted rainbows that heralded an imminent collapse, and beyond the ships, the sweet shivering tide of dust, the waiting gazes of stars and wandering moons, even the curve of Carnelian beneath them, a red hulk that smelled, in her imagination, like drifts of starbloom.

Admiral Mae’s face reappeared.

How did zie—? Had Hwa Young’s comms been hacked? Then she saw the note that Commander Ye Jun had forwarded the call, initially addressed to zir, to all the pilots.

“You are very unlikely to be welcome back among your own people,” Admiral Mae said, in the understatement of the century. “I offer your lancer squad safe harbor and alliance with the Moonstorm, in recognition of the service you have rendered us.”

Service, hell. There had been important selfish reasons for it, too. But Hwa Young wasn’t in a position to quibble.

Commander Ye Jun appeared over video, looking much worse for the wear. Zir eyes were still bleeding from the acceleration of the battle, and zir military uniform sported a rumpled collar and sweat stains. Nevertheless, zir gaze was direct and unsmiling.

“I accept,” Commander Ye Jun said, “on the condition that you spare Eleventh Fleet from further attack.”

“That’s quite a demand, given your position.”

“Take it or leave it.” The commander smiled zir friendliest smile.

“We will spare Eleventh Fleet as long as it refrains from operations against Moonstorm assets.”

It was the best offer the commander could expect. Hwa Young willed zir to agree.

We’re outcasts now.

“Acceptable,” Commander Ye Jun said. “My compliments to your forces, Admiral Mae, and would you let us know where we can dock?”

It’s over, Hwa Young thought in disbelief as the clanner admiral—their admiral, now—patched Commander Ye Jun into zir flagship’s CIC for docking instructions. They were no longer part of Eleventh Fleet.

The Moonstorm fleet was in full retreat now, a show of Admiral Mae’s good faith. The two Imperial fleets were likewise withdrawing behind Carnelian’s shadow while zigzagging through a morass of wreckage.

The battle was over.

“We can afford to fly in tight formation now,” Commander Ye Jun said after zie had finished making arrangements with Admiral Mae. “All units on me.”

Hwa Young followed zir instructions. Even in close formation, she saw zir lancer as an elongated speck. An eternity ago she had seen the lancer for the first time; had seen the emblem painted on the side of the cockpit. The upside-down crown. She’d been the last to unriddle its significance.

The clanner flagship rose before them, a huge cylinder bristling with rows of gun turrets and delicate antennae and fighters swarming like bees around their hive. Hwa Young fought a surge of panic. All her nerves screamed that it wasn’t safe to be this close to an enemy ship.

But they weren’t the enemy anymore, and she would have to adjust to her new circumstances. They all would.

The flagship’s docking bay opened to receive them. Like a mouth. Like the singularity whose gluttony they had narrowly escaped.

The rebels’ bay had not been designed to accommodate lancers. Launch cradles like cocoons held sleek fighters in place. Paintings of winged tigers decorated the bulkheads, strangely festive, in contrast to Maehwa’s lack of décor.

The crew signaled frantically as Commander Ye Jun came in low and slow, impossibly controlled. They guided zir to a spot that had been hastily cleared, judging by the number of crates and shuttles shoved to the side. There was a near-mishap when someone inexplicably walked backward into the commander’s flight path, but zie managed to avoid smashing them.

Bae came in next. No mishaps for her. Her landing looked as though someone had diagrammed it out of a textbook. The resentment Hwa Young would once have felt was replaced, instead, by admiration.

Eun swept in after that, landing precisely at Commander Ye Jun’s side. By then the commander had already climbed out of zir lancer. Hwa Young was afraid that Eun was going to bowl zir over and regret it ever after. But Eun, however worn down by the battle, was a better pilot than that.

Hwa Young landed last. By the time she emerged, the other pilots had drawn together in a tight knot. She joined them, self-conscious.

“Unity is survival,” Commander Ye Jun said in ironic greeting as zie opened a spot in the circle for her. The clanner words, not the Imperial ones.

A woman arrived from the other end of the bay. Hwa Young would have recognized her anywhere in a hundred lives, as though she were painted in lines of nova and ember. “Indeed,” Mother Aera said. “Unity is survival—and now you’re one of us.”