Chapter 80: Abby freaking Ratchford

They stopped for a break on a floe the size of a parking lot, with thick ice and bright steady light underneath. Odell’s crew sat on their packs and passed around a canteen. Corwin’s crew stood off to one side, arguing in low voices about something.

Rain sat on an upturned crate and opened the Sell function. He needed to know what they were worth.

[Shellback Core (Rank D): Valuation 110 Synthesis Credits]

[Sell? Y/N]

He let out a slow breath through his nose.

[Items in Storage: Shellback Core (Rank D) x11]

Eleven. Twelve hundred and ten. Plus three twenty-seven.

It wasn’t enough. He closed the window.

Peter sat down next to him, wrapped his arms around his knees, and shivered. Abby took the crate on Rain’s other side. She wasn’t breathing hard. She hadn’t been all night. She’d carried two crates across the ice for over an hour, knelt and pried cores and stood back up a dozen times, and the only sign of any of it was the frost in her eyelashes.

"You’re bored," Rain said quietly.

"I’m carrying boxes," Abby said, just as quietly. "Of course I’m bored."

"They’re good," Rain said, nodding toward Corwin’s crew.

"They’re very good." She tilted her head. "The lash one telegraphs off his shoulder. Watch next time. It rolls about half a second before every crack."

Rain watched Corwin gesture at Dax, and sure enough, his right shoulder dipped before his hand moved.

"The big one doesn’t need to be good," Abby went on. "He’s got the passive. And the barrier one..." She stopped.

"The barrier one?"

"Is the best of the three," Abby said. "Nobody’s noticed. He’s been covering the holes before they open. Every time. He’s reading the light under the ice and getting there first."

"How do you know?"

"Because I’ve been reading it too."

Peter turned to look at her. "You can tell where they’re going to come up?"

"Mostly. The light goes dark about two seconds before. But it starts dimming before that, a little, at the edges." She shrugged. "You just have to look."

"I’ve been looking," Peter said. "I’ve just been looking at it and being scared."

"That’s also looking."

Peter made a sound halfway between a laugh and a whimper.

Rain looked at her sideways. "Is this what Class A is like? You just sit there taking everybody apart?"

"Pretty much." She smiled. "You’d love it."

Corwin crossed the floe toward them. He stopped in front of Rain and kicked lightly at the notched crate by Rain’s boot.

"Odell says there’s a big nest at the far edge," he said under his breath. "Bigger cores. Last fight of the night. Those go in this crate. Then we head back to the gate, and at the last break, Petrov brings you the fake. You swap. Got it?"

"Got it."

"You’d better." His eyes slid to Abby. "And she stays out of it."

"She stays out of it," Rain said.

Corwin walked away.

---

The far edge of the lake was where the floes got big.

They came out onto a single sheet of ice so wide Rain couldn’t see where it ended. The light underneath was brighter here, almost white, and in the middle of the sheet, a hundred meters out, a mound of broken ice and grey shells rose up like a hill. The nest. Shellbacks crawled over it, larger than the ones they’d fought so far, twice the size, and Rain counted nine before he stopped counting.

Odell let out a low whistle. "There it is."

"We push in from this side," Corwin said, already moving forward. "Ring formation. Carriers inside the ring. Petrov covers the holes. Dax and Toller take the front. Me, Sasha, and Odell on the flanks. We wait for them to come to us, and we break them on the ring."

Odell nodded slowly. "That’ll work."

"It won’t," Abby said.

Everyone turned around.

She was standing with a crate in each hand, looking past them at the ice around the nest. Her voice had been quiet. Now that everyone was looking at her, she didn’t make it any louder.

Corwin stared at her. "What?"

"They’re not going to come to the ring," Abby said. "Look at the light. Around the nest. All the way around."

Rain looked.

The ice around the nest wasn’t dark the way it went dark before an attack. It was dark in a line. A thin ring of shadow ran all the way around the mound, maybe forty meters out, and as Rain watched, a second line started to darken outside the first one.

"They’re cutting the ice," Abby said. "Underneath. They’re making a circle. If we walk into the middle and stand in a ring, they finish the cut and drop the whole sheet out from under us."

There was a short, tight silence.

"Carriers don’t talk," Corwin said.

"Then don’t listen," Abby said. "But don’t walk into the middle either."

Dax laughed. "Who is this?"

"She’s a carrier," Corwin said, his voice going hard. "And she’s done talking. We go in on the ring. Now."

"Wait," Odell said. He was looking at the ice too, now. His face changed. "Wait, she’s..."

A long crack ran across the sheet under their feet. The sound was a deep, groaning snap that Rain felt through the soles of his boots.

The second line of darkness had come all the way around. It wasn’t around the nest anymore. It was around them.

"Back," Odell shouted. "Back, back..."

The ice behind them split. The line they’d walked in across turned into black water three meters wide, and it was getting wider. Shellbacks came up out of it, one after another, big ones, shells streaming, between the party and the way back.

The sheet under them tilted.

Peter went down on his hands and knees. Rain grabbed him by the back of his jacket. Somewhere to his right, Petrov was throwing panes down onto the ice as fast as he could, trying to pin the sheet in place. They cracked as soon as they landed. Corwin’s lash snapped, and a Shellback flipped back into the water, but four more were already climbing out behind it.

The nest was moving now too. All nine of the big ones were coming off the mound toward them, across ice that hadn’t broken, because they knew exactly which ice was safe.

"Ring!" Corwin was shouting. "Ring, hold the..."

Abby set her crates down.

She did it carefully, the way someone sets down something fragile. Then she pulled the knit cap off her head and dropped it on top of them. Her blonde hair came loose around her shoulders.

Rain looked at her.

She looked back at him for half a second. She wasn’t smiling now.

"Watch," she said.

She stepped forward and stamped her heel down onto the ice.

The ice under her foot exploded.

It wasn’t the crack of something breaking. It was a boom, a deep hammer of sound Rain felt in his teeth, and a flash of orange light shot out sideways from under her heel. The blast threw Abby forward off the ground, and she went across the ice low and flat like something fired out of a gun, ten meters in a heartbeat, straight at the first big Shellback coming off the nest.

She hit it with her fist.

BOOM.

The Shellback came apart. Its whole front plate blew out sideways in a spray of grey fragments and steam, and the rest of it skidded backward across the ice and stopped moving.

Abby was already gone. She planted a foot on the ice and it went off under her, BOOM, and she was across to the next one before the first one had stopped sliding. She hit it with an elbow on the way past. BOOM. It went over. She landed, spun, and kicked the third one in the side. BOOM. It left the ice entirely and came down in the water three meters away.

Nobody else was moving.

Corwin’s lash hung forgotten at his side. Dax stood with his mouth open. Odell had stopped halfway through turning around. Sasha said something that might have been a swear word, very quietly.

Abby went through the nest pack the way Rain had once seen a fire go through dry grass. Every step she took was a detonation. Every time she touched something, it broke. She launched herself across a seam three meters wide with a blast from her back foot and came down on a Shellback’s back with both heels, and the boom of it rolled across the lake and came back as an echo. She used the bodies as stepping stones. She used the ice. She used the air, once, punching straight down at nothing and riding the blast up and over a Shellback that had reared up to meet her, landing behind it, and hitting it from the back.

Rain had never heard anything so loud in his life.

He realized he was still holding Peter by the jacket. Peter had stopped struggling. He was kneeling on the ice, staring.

"Is that..." Peter said. "Is she..."

"Yeah," Rain said.

The last of the nest pack turned to run. Abby let it get halfway to the water. Then she was there, BOOM, and it wasn’t running anymore.

She stood alone in the middle of the ice, surrounded by broken shells and steam, her hair blown wild around her face, her chest rising and falling. The blue light glowed up through the cracked ice around her feet.

She looked down at her right hand and flexed the fingers once. Then she turned around and looked back at the rest of them.

The Shellbacks by the water had stopped coming. The ones already out on the ice were backing away, toward the seam, clicking.

Nobody said anything.

Corwin was staring at her with his face drained of color. Dax had taken a step back without seeming to notice. Petrov’s hands were still raised with nothing in front of them. Odell’s mouth was open.

Rain looked at her across the ice, and he stopped breathing for a moment.

He’d wanted to know where he stood.

’Now I know,’ he thought.

Abby pushed her hair back off her face and walked back toward them across the broken ice, her boots crunching on the fragments of shell. She stopped in front of Corwin. He was a full head taller than her, and he took half a step back.

"The ring," she said, "wasn’t going to work."