Free White Christmas (novella) by Ros Baxter Page B

out and licked poison onto her lips as she spat it at him.
    The warrior finally tuned in and turned back towards her. “Tabysha?”
    Oh by the Apocalypse, it really was him. And he still sounded exactly the same. Like lazy Sundays, contraband music and wickedness whispered in her ear.
    “If I’d known it was you, I’d have let the Tyverians suck your bones dry.” She threw the empty syringe at his chest and turned on her heel. “You’d better run,” she threw over her shoulder at him as she made for the cliff. “They’re going to be here real soon.”
    It was true. She could feel the ground starting to pulse beneath her feet. Eight minutes, perhaps, before they would rise from the snow like icy vampires and make a meal of him.
    Which was no less than the asshole deserved.
    He caught up to her in seconds. “Why are you here? Are you with the rescue pod?”
    “It’s still a couple of hours’ away,” she said, refusing to turn her head to look at him as mist prickled her eyes. She kept the cliff in focus. “You’d best find some cover and some camouflage.” She reached the base of the cliff and hurled her rappel hook at the cave mouth with vicious accuracy. “And stay cold. Frostbite’s better than being drained.”
    It was a satisfying parting shot as she shimmied up the rope and back to her hole.
    But somehow she knew it wouldn’t be that easy. With Asha, it never was.
    He let her catch her breath before he called out. “Room up there for one more?”
    “No,” she barked back, refusing to smile at his nonchalance. He could have been asking her to hold the elevator doors on Mother Earth 5, not begging for his life as the most efficient predators of Segment 7 licked at his heels.
    But she threw the line down anyway.
    “So,” he said, sitting cross-legged in her cave and watching through her bioscope as the Hunters swarmed his ship. “Some Christmas, huh?”
    He pulled a green vientamite-gel stick from her pack and drove it into the snow to light the little cave. It glowed prettily and he laughed, dark and delicious. “Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree…”
    The tiny light was comforting and Tabi felt a thrill of relief that the Tyverians were blind.
    Asha’s singing voice was beautiful – croaky but sweet, and she remembered he’d been a choirboy back in Sweetheart, Georgia, when the Earth had still been in one piece.
    “We’re not supposed to celebrate Christmas,” she said. “It’s divisive when there are so few of us.”
    “You always loved Christmas,” he said, punching her lightly. “Black market egg nog, remember?”
    “Yup,” she said. “Now I hate it.”
    “Egg nog?” He looked at her with wide brown eyes, all innocence.
    “Christmas,” she spat.
    “Me too,” he said.
    The silence filled up the tiny cave. When he spoke again, the husky timbre made her jump. “You’ve sure become real charming these last ten years.”
    “You wouldn’t know what I’ve become,” she said, turning her back to him and focusing on her breath. She needed to slow it right down to still the advance of the cold. It was a delicate balance,
    giving yourself over to the cold to hide your body pattern from the predators, but slowing your system down so the cold didn’t take you before they did.
    Asha put a hand on her shoulder and twisted her to face him. “I know a few things,” he said, brown gaze settling gently on her face.
    “Really?” She could feel her mouth set in an angry line and forced herself to relax. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
    “Yup,” he said. He hadn’t lived in Georgia for seventeen years, not since he’d been an eleven-year-old boy. But he’d never lost that low, slow, bourbon-sweet drawl.
    “Shoot,” she said, turning fully to him and turning her palms upwards to indicate she was an open book.
    “Well,” he said slowly, wriggling a little closer, and cocking his big, dark head a little. “I know you’re an Explorer.” He flicked a glance at her