Moonstorm, page 17
Bae reacted first to the torrent of fire. Her lancer swerved and ducked behind one of the large chunks of the luckless clanner flagship. She timed the maneuver perfectly, matching her vector to the fragment so she stayed in its shadow.
Hwa Young had lost track of Eun. Seong Su lingered, slow to react, either because he was distracted or because he had frozen in panic. “Avalanche, fighter’s on your nine,” Commander Ye Jun called out.
“Ouch, that’s gonna sting,” Seong Su complained before sucking in his breath. Because of his slower lancer, he wouldn’t be able to dodge in time. The fighter was too close.
“Hang tight.” Eun.
Hwa Young could pick it off, maybe—but she had her orders. Her job was to ensure that the enemy capital ship didn’t call for help.
Seong Su would have to rely on his shields, and perhaps reinforcing fire from Hellion. She couldn’t do anything for him.
Hwa Young drifted into the inner stillness that she had cultivated for the past six years. It was up to her now. If her aim strayed by five meters in any direction, she would miss, and the remaining capital ship would be able to bleat its predicament to any listening reinforcements. The less information the clanners had about the fate of their fleet—and the disposition of the Imperial forces that opposed them—the better.
Scan only showed her target as a blur. She needed better eyes on the target.
Then the blur resolved into a precise point as Hwa Young’s lancer received close-up scan data from Farseer. “I’ve done my part, Winter,” Bae’s haughty voice informed her. “Don’t mess up.”
“Just watch me,” Hwa Young shot back.
Before, she’d worked with the other lancers to take out the clanner flagship. This time, it was just her and her aim. No one to blame but herself if she messed up.
As though in a trance, she focused her will on the lancer’s long-range radiant cannon—and fired.
16
The clanner capital ship’s comm tower exploded in a haze of glowing particles. Winter’s Axiom had the longest range of all the active units, even without the singularity lance, but its radiant cannon required a steady hand and pinpoint targeting with the aid of computer stabilization. She hadn’t been absolutely sure she’d hit the target in live combat, but she’d carried off the feat after all.
Hwa Young expelled her breath all at once, unsteady with relief for a moment, then steady again. The battle wasn’t over.
She didn’t get to luxuriate in her accomplishment for long. Between one blink and the next, a tremendous impact pierced her in the head—no. It had pierced Winter’s Axiom, and she felt the pain through the link.
The next thing she knew, Eun was screaming in her ear, Bae raised her voice in that waspish tone Hwa Young had endured for six years, and even Commander Ye Jun sounded worried. All their words shattered around her like fragments of ice.
Ice. Or snow? Hwa Young stared in abstracted fascination as crystals of ice wafted through the cockpit. More crystals formed when she exhaled. Then she came back into her body enough to mark the creeping cold. Her connection to Winter’s Axiom wavered. She was no longer vast and unconquerable, just a halfway corpse huddled in the freezing dark.
Not just cold, but a breach from somewhere above her. She could feel the hole as though it gaped in her own skull. The projectile had clipped the visor of her helmet. It must have taken a downward trajectory from the top of the lancer. If it had come any closer to her, it would have punctured her head.
“Hwa Young!” Bae’s voice snapped her out of her shocked musings.
That’s not just water, Hwa Young thought, staring at the snow. The deafening alarms made it difficult to concentrate. In the cockpit’s tidal washes of blue and red light, alternating erratically, some—most—of the ice fragments gleamed red-black. Frozen blood.
Her blood.
“Never transmit names,” Commander Ye Jun snapped at Bae. “Even if you’re sure the channel’s secure.” To Hwa Young: “Winter, we can keep the incoming enemy fighters off you for another five minutes, but you’ve got to return to base.”
Hwa Young’s vision swam in and out of focus the way it had six years ago when she’d started to suffer aether sickness while watching the lancers mop up the crashed remnants of her old home. She cursed herself for her weakness. “Understood, Bastard.” She had to say it twice before the words came out audibly.
Cognizant of the storm of frozen blood motes, Hwa Young refocused on the targeting system. Took a potshot at one of the darting mosquito clanner fighters and clipped it, not bad. Her real motivation, however, was the warmth that summered through the cockpit as the radiant cannon vented waste heat. She could have lingered in that warmth, clutching it to her for comfort.
I’m not thinking clearly, am I, Hwa Young noted. Hysteria was setting in now that the battle-calm had ebbed, leaving her shaking with the aftereffects of adrenaline. She reached out for the serene chilly presence of her lancer and met only a staticky emptiness. That worried her more than the physical damage.
The heat wave melted the crystals. Blood rained down on her in a gruesome splatter.
Priorities. She had to seal the cockpit breach now. Wouldn’t it be terrible if she became so delirious with aether sickness that she flew into enemy fire?
The cockpit’s alerts screeched so loudly that Hwa Young considered silencing them so she could think clearly. The only reason she didn’t drift off into bemused contemplation of the starlight and explosions was the cacophony. No, better leave them on, especially since she bet her bad luck wasn’t over.
Hwa Young spent two precious seconds with her eyes squeezed shut, fingers pressed to her temples, to plan. The lancer came with automated repair systems, but automation depended on her now-disrupted bond, which she had no idea how to reestablish. The snowdrift of frozen vapor told her that something was awry and she would have to effect repairs herself.
“Winter,” Commander Ye Jun said, so dead-level calm that she could taste zir concern, “your vitals are erratic. Do you require assistance?”
She bristled, even though the commander hadn’t intended it as a slight. Zie was asking if she wanted to cede control of her lancer to zir, something she knew was a theoretical possibility. They had not yet drilled it because, as Eun had remarked caustically, a rebellious lancer was apt to fry an interloper’s brains. Besides that not-inconsiderable risk, the attempt would distract the commander from the battlefield when the others most needed zir attention.
“I’m fine, sir.” She wondered if she was lying.
Her heartbeat had gone thready. All the more reason to deal with this quickly so she could receive medical attention. For once she appreciated Eun jamming thirty hours of training into every twenty-four-hour period. She discovered that if she relaxed, her body slipped into the lifesaving patterns inculcated by the drills. A few weeks of drills could start a habit, when the learner practiced diligently—and Hwa Young had always been diligent.
Hwa Young overrode the automated repair subsystem, since it wasn’t working anyway, to prevent it from engaging at an unexpected moment and fouling her up. (Eun had told them, with none of his usual sourness, a hair-raising anecdote of a fellow pilot whose face had been burned off by an ill-timed encounter with a laser’s internal optics. Hwa Young was no great beauty, but she liked her face the way it was.)
Still seated, she set up a series of waypoints—not ideal, but better than vectoring straight into an unknown situation now that she no longer had an overview of the battlefield’s status through her lancer. Having to do this manually was the pits, but she was glad Eun had insisted that they learn how, instead of relying on the thought becomes motion immediacy of the normal pilot-lancer bond. The backup navigation computer beeped, warning her that the path would take her perilously close to what it identified as a chunk of engine block. Hwa Young didn’t give a damn what it used to be as long as it didn’t collide with her.
Then, having memorized the path, she reached forward and unfastened her safety harness.
The lancer’s interior maintained half-standard gravity unless the pilot specified otherwise. This saved its gravitic reserves for more interesting things, like combat. Hwa Young had not yet had cause to fiddle with this setting. The accompanying inner hum assured her of Eleventh Fleet’s united will as a buttress. She would not have surrendered that for any trivial reason.
We are winter. She remembered the lancer’s voice, and longed for it with a heart-deep ache that shocked her.
Hwa Young climbed up, glad of the hand- and footholds, and assessed the crack. It looked bad, but even a partial seal would help her, and then she could risk the backup air supply. The repair diagnostics indicated that the projectile, whatever it was, had lodged itself in the armor.
She toggled the lancers’ channel from her suit. “Commander,” she said. “For the next five minutes, I’m going to be unable to adjust my trajectory.” She sent the waypoints to the C2 unit. “I’m attempting repairs.”
“Understood, Winter. We’ve got your back.”
Why am I disappointed? Hwa Young thought when Bae didn’t chime in with some cutting remark.
Shaking her head, Hwa Young retrieved the tool kit. She clipped it to her belt, keeping a tight grip on the handle. It would suck to get caught off guard by some sudden motion or collision and end up knocked out by a wayward wrench. She could imagine Eun’s scorn, or Bae’s, if she allowed that to happen.
This close to the hole, the aetheric currents swirled through the crack in her helmet and over her skin like a corpse’s breath. Hwa Young opened the kit. She unfolded a sheet of flexible foil with adhesive backing. It crackled and clung unpleasantly to her gloved hands. She removed the backing and pressed it into place long enough for the adhesive to set. Messy and impermanent, but it only had to last until she docked and a technician could carry out proper repairs.
“Completed,” she reported thirty seconds later, having made the journey back to her seat. She strapped herself in safely despite the jarring change of vector she’d programmed the lancer to execute.
Hwa Young replaced the tool kit, then fished for the medical kit under her seat. She sprayed skinseal over the wound. It stung, and then a blessed numbness spread through it. The skinseal included stimulants, antibiotics, and analgesics, all of it to stabilize her until she could reach safety or rescue.
Safety. A laughable illusion, when she was surrounded by the fragmented carcass of one ship and the baleful wraith of another. Hwa Young had wished to see her targets up close. Would she live long enough to regret her bloodthirstiness?
Hwa Young checked the tactical display again. Seong Su and Bae operated far forward, the former dodging incoming fire with a boxer’s steadiness. Bae shadowed his moves, allowing him to take the brunt of the fire while she acted as a forward observation platform. She broadcast her scan suite’s data to the rest of the fleet. On tactical, the two seemed impossibly distant, consummately choreographed: the steady copper-brown light of Avalanche, the mercurial silver-violet of Farseer.
Gathering her concentration felt like stitching windblown threads with cold-numbed fingers. Nevertheless, Hwa Young refused to give up and leave the battle. Imagined Bae’s mockery, although her more reasonable inner heart argued that Bae had graduated from such pettiness.
Hwa Young corrected the spin imparted to Winter’s Axiom by the earlier impact. The world gyred around her. No matter how often they’d rehearsed the maneuver in training, she’d grown up first on a moon, then on a planet, places where up and down had fixed meanings. Out here, where the orientation of ships and lancers changed from moment to moment, her inner ear rebelled.
Whether the antiemetic remained effective or the pain overwhelmed any last traitorous urge to puke, Hwa Young overcame her nausea enough to take advantage of the tenuous cover offered by the clanner ship’s remnants. The seeping cold made her miserable, her fingers stiff and clumsy to respond. A juvenile corner of her mind wished for someone to tuck her into bed with an extra-thick quilt and hot citron tea.
That’s odd, Hwa Young thought dreamily as she chased the retreating bulk of the Maehwa. Why is there so much more of that black snow? She gazed at it, entranced by the flurrying patterns it made.
“Winter.” It was Commander Ye Jun. “Your vitals look atrocious. I’m executing command override on Winter’s Axiom. The ride’s gonna get bumpy. Acknowledge.”
“I can handle it.” Her head throbbed with the intense pain of a migraine. Why hadn’t she noticed that before?
Still, it had been a long—She consulted the clock function in her neural implant. Less than thirty minutes had elapsed since they launched. That couldn’t be correct. They must have battled for hours.
“Sorry to be so high-handed,” Commander Ye Jun said, as though they were lingering over nonalcoholic plum wine and dismal fried snacks. “I must not have made myself clear, Winter. They call it an override for a reason. You hang tight and we’ll fly you in as sweetly as a bee to the hive. You don’t have a choice in the matter. I can tell you from long years of practice that choice is overrated, anyway.”
What does this have to do with anything? Hwa Young was in the middle of not-saying when she learned what zie meant by override for a reason.
She had thought her connection to Winter’s Axiom had withered earlier, when the headshot hit it from above and clipped her as well. But there remained a thin murmuration of icicle thought and intent, which she had taken for granted, and which she discovered only when the commander ripped it away with all the gentleness of a power drill to the optic nerve.
Hwa Young screamed, and then stopped screaming. The first was bad enough, that reflexive loss of control. The second was worse, because as bad as screaming was, it was her scream. The not-screaming was the commander’s doing.
A vision flashed into her mind of a middle-aged woman with her long hair half pinned up, a woman with a face very like Commander Ye Jun’s, save for the exhaustion in the wrinkles around her eyes. The Empress? Hwa Young thought in a shock of recognition, but it was hard to think clearly.
The Empress sat at an outdoor table in an autumn garden, brilliant with the red leaves of maple and the golden leaves of gingko. Before her rested a baduk board with a game in progress.
“Listen,” she was saying in a voice like smoke and honey, a voice that made Hwa Young want to trust her, “if I have to spend four hours of this damn ceremony in a hanbok that weighs more than I do, to say nothing of the damn shoes, the least you can do is trim your damn bangs.”
The woman placed a single white stone, and suddenly several amorphous groups of stones coalesced into an overwhelming advantage for white.
The vision ebbed, leaving her scrabbling for any thread of connection—to Winter’s Axiom, to the commander, to anyone. The commander had severed her from her lancer. Had lodged zirself in the crenellations of her soul. The will that moved her hand was not hers.
Commander Ye Jun hadn’t overridden her lancer; zie had overridden her.
Zie’s saving my life, Hwa Young told herself as her body, controlled by the commander, performed actions that she had not chosen, because she was too blurry with shock and pain to understand them.
“I do apologize,” zie said, and this time zie wasn’t speaking over the comm link but directly into her head. “This is the surest way, and we can’t afford to lose you and your unit.”
Hwa Young tried to formulate a response, and fell instead into an infinite echoing darkness.
17
Only the long habit of discretion saved Hwa Young when she regained consciousness.
Instinctively, she reached through the haze of waking for her connection to Winter’s Axiom. The lancer responded to her with only the faintest of presences, like an echo in a vast cavern. Fear gripped her: what if she wouldn’t be able to reestablish the close bond that she had already come to rely on?
She was in a crowded tent with a definite downward gravitational pull, extraordinary and pleasing. If she knew one thing, even muddled by pain and blood loss and worry about her lancer, it was that she must never take gravity for granted. The steadiness of the pull reassured her that Imperial rituals were being observed here.
Her head pounded, but it was a distant pounding, with a strange lack of pain. They must have given her painkillers. She couldn’t think in straight lines; couldn’t focus. For a time she concentrated on breathing in and out as though each exhalation were a test.
Someone had bundled her not in a quilt but in a military-issue blanket like the ones that covered their bunks on the Maehwa. For several stuttering moments, Hwa Young ran her fingers disbelievingly over the rough, unlovely fibers: warm, though not comforting. She could have sworn she’d been sleeping under one of Mother Aera’s quilts, the jasu embroidery of satin-stitched flowers lovingly handsewn. She’d almost called for Mother Aera as though she were ten years old and the past six years had evaporated.
No one here, in this makeshift sick bay, would recognize Mother Aera’s name. No one would understand the significance and shout that she was a filthy clanner. No one would hustle her to the brig or stuff her into a gimchi jar.
Besides, she thought wretchedly, she’d just participated in the destruction of clanner ships.
But anxiety still gripped her heart.
Hwa Young sat up, grimacing at the renewed throbbing in her temples. She reached up: someone had bandaged her head. Thirst scratched at her throat, sudden and unwelcome.
She looked around. The tent accommodated about twenty people on pallets. A single impressively muscled medic attended the wounded. Zie was cursing in an unbroken venomous stream as zie manhandled a thrashing patient as though they were an uncooperative dumbbell.
