NOVEL WEB Chapter 6: Zhao Yuchen
First Lieutenant Zhao Yuchen sat on the bridge of the Yaoguang-21, a space patrol vessel flagged under the People's Republic of China—one boot braced against the titanium spar below her, the other tucked beneath the edge of the communications console.
She had spent most of the past decade in cockpits like this one, ever since joining the People's Liberation Army Space Force at twenty—immersed in the silent whine of the ship's nuclear reactor fields, her skin perpetually stinging from the dry, recycled air that left a bitter, metallic aftertaste clinging to the back of her tongue.
The only things that ever changed were the insignia stitched on her shoulder—and the color of the threat.
Yuchen began as a yìbīng (义兵), or private, fresh from the National Aerospace Academy on Zhukou, the crowded capital of the planet-province of Wǔlín. In those early years, she'd worked her way up the hard way—through long drills, orbital maintenance rotations, and combat in two major anti-smuggling operations that turned the edges of the outer trade lanes into warzones. She earned her way to shàngshì (上士), or staff sergeant, and later zhōngshì (中士), sergeant first class.
Midway through her service, she did the unthinkable for most enlisted: she applied to officer training. It was a brutal selection course—political vetting, physical stress trials, psychological profiling—but she passed, barely, and emerged as a newly minted shàowèi (少尉), or second lieutenant. Just last year, she'd received her first promotion as an officer: zhōngwèi (中尉)—first lieutenant.
All was well. Until it wasn't.
In the final months of her officer rotation on the Dongyang Command Platform, she uncovered irregularities buried in procurement logs—fraudulent resupply dockets, phantom cargo haulers, entire squadrons' worth of maintenance funds siphoned into shell companies linked to her superior, Shàojiàng (少将) or Rear Admiral Liao Jialin. At first, she'd reported it up the chain, believing the system could correct itself. She even received a formal commendation for her "diligence in accounting oversight.
Then, her transfer orders came.
No promotion. No reassignment to fleet command. Just a quiet demotion in all but name—shuffled off to backwater patrol duty in the border sectors, doing the same circuits she had as a private.
Her new overseeing officer didn't even bother to hide it: "Liao's name is carved into the rocks at High Command," he'd muttered over tea. "Be grateful you still wear a uniform."
But her job wasn't just about law enforcement or intercepting contraband. One of her primary responsibilities was monitoring and intercepting vessels attempting to detour off the designated lanes—usually for speed, secrecy, or profit—into the unregulated zone once used by the notorious American mining and defense contractor, Strategic Corporation, for weapons testing and field experiments.
That region, now informally dubbed the Ghost Sector or simply The Triangle, had gained a grim reputation across commercial and personal shipping networks. Ships that ventured in had a habit of vanishing without trace—no mayday, no debris, no pingbacks. Just silence. It was known as the Bermuda Triangle of the Lagrande Belt.
In addition to deterring risky detours, Yuchen was also tasked with a more bureaucratic yet politically sensitive duty: ensuring that all foreign-flagged vessels—especially American ones—registered with the Chinese orbital authority while transiting Highway LG123XY2.
Though most of the highway, especially around Vireos IX lay within the boundaries of the PRC's recognized Exclusive Economic Zone, many American operators refused to acknowledge Chinese oversight.
They insisted the highway was neutral space, and that mandatory registry checks violated their "privacy rights," as defined under now-obsolete American free-navigation doctrines. It was posturing—legacy defiance from a diminished superpower still clinging to old privileges.
On paper, the US had surrendered and recognized Chinese authority in this sector. In practice, it acted as though nothing had changed.
China does not mind lack of registration on the highway, in practice, but it takes deviations from the highway, however, seriously.
The directives Yuchen received instructed her to only intercept and contact American vessels if they were making unapproved detours from the highway.
The cockpit was a pressed-metal coffin, barely wider than Yuchen's shoulders. Every surface was crammed with matte black panels studded with toggle switches, pressure pads, and aging flat-screens with their familiar crisp Chinese logotypes.
On the overhead strut, a wrinkled silk print of Guan Yu's face glared down, eyes fierce, painted beard as blue as summer thunder. She'd taped it there after her first solo run. To ward off the ghosts, she joked.
Now, at hour 38 of her seventy-two-hour shift, her only company was the ship's AI—Sima—and the low static of comms traffic.
She was scanning a routine return manifest, cross-checking with the last customs stop, when the alert pinged.
It was so soft she almost missed it, but the sound always twisted her gut: not an error, not a transmission, but a violation.
A vessel off-course. An American-flagged shuttle, The Odyssey, skimming close to the restricted zone's perimeter.
Yuchen blinked twice, refreshing her screen. The Odyssey's transponder blinked erratically. It was supposed to be carrying students on a standard educational excursionn—probably some joyless tour of the copper mines on Dracaxyl. Instead, it had begun to leave the highway, vectoring directly toward the interior of a meteor cluster, where the magnetic fields and debris made tracking impossible.
She keyed her audio. "Odyssey, this is People's Liberation Army Space Force, patrol ship Yaoguang-21. You are deviating from the interstellar highway and violating the flight plan you filed. Please return immediately." She thumbed the translation overlay, flipping her Mandarin to English with a practiced motion.
Silence.
"PLASF Yaoguang-21 to Odyssey: You are deviating from the interstellar highway and violating your filed flight plan. Return immediately
Nothing.
She allowed herself half a second of exasperation before locking her focus. She'd seen these incidents before—sometimes it was a drunk teacher, sometimes a glitch in the navigation firmware, sometimes something worse
She switched to the comms log. "Sima, record this as a contempt of patrol officer and a highway law violation. Timestamp it and transmit it to New Guangzhou."
"Acknowledged," said the AI, voice as dry as the inside of a reactor. "Do you wish to escalate to pursuit protocol, Lieutenant Zhao?"
"Not yet. Keep monitoring."
The minutes passed. The Odyssey accelerated, heading for the thickest, most dangerous part of the meteor field. On her main screen, the American shuttle was a single blue dot, now flickering as it dipped in and out of sensor coverage. Yuchen felt the tingle of adrenaline rising up the back of her neck.
She tried one last hail. "Odyssey, this is your final warning. Alter trajectory immediately." She waited, holding her breath, for the little blue dot to twitch back onto a safer path.
The speakers crackled to life. "DISTRESS WARNING. DISTRESS WARNING. DISTRESS WARNING." The blue dot turned to red, indicating that the Odyssey had flipped on its SOS beacon.
Yuchen reached for her harness, strapping herself tight. "Sima, initiate pursuit protocol. Log emergency response to civilian vessel in distress."
"Confirmed," said the AI, emotionless.
She fired the drive, feeling the slight tremor through the ship's seat. The Yaoguang-21 cut a perfect arc, skimming the edge of the restricted zone. Her hands flew over the throttle and thrusters.
"Sima, communicate with the ship and ask them what is wrong. Also revise prior report on contempt for patrol officer. Could be because of emergency."
"The ship seems to not receive my messages," Sima responded.
"They've been hit by a meteor shower," Yuchen muttered as she flipped on the afterburners. The force pushed her back as the patrol vessel lurched forward, the Odyessey soon coming into visual.
As she closed on the Odyssey's last location, suddenly her sensors began to fail, readings looping through impossible values. The HUD flashed yellow, then red.
Yuchen felt her pulse hammer against the inside of her throat. She felt dizzy, nauseous and then her world dissolved into light, before settling into darkness.
Yuchen's consciousness snapped back into existence in a world of tumbling metal and sirens. The Yaoguang-21 was deep in the meteor field, every sensor screaming. The cockpit's forward plate strobbed red as the external cams tried to filter the blizzard of stone, dust, and scrap spinning at impossible velocities.
"Proximity alert," Sima said. "Collision vector approaching from starboard, velocity 3.2 kilometers per second. Suggest evasive—"
The meteor appeared on her sensor overlay as a cold blue sphere the size of a city block. In reality, it was invisible against the black, only the math telling her it was there at all.
She rolled the Yaoguang hard to port, gritting her teeth as the g-forces tried to wrench her neck sideways. The thrusters whined and slammed, the whole ship shuddering as it skated a hair's breadth past a wall of spinning rock.
Yuchen saw the Odyessey being hit by a couple of meteors ahead of her before it disappeared before her eyes and the radar. She had no time to think about that as she dodged the rocks.
"Another," Sima warned, but she was already compensating, slaloming between two smaller bodies on instinct and luck.
Another meteor emerged. Yuchen couldn't see it but it did appear on the radar. It was not even a meteor—not really. Not a rock, not even a fragment of ship. The sensors didn't know how to label it, so they painted it in dead white on her screen: anomaly. It was spherical, but it pulsed.
"Brace for impact," Sima intoned.
There was no time to react. The sphere hit the Yaoguang dead center, and for a moment it was as if the entire world had been replaced by light—silver, then blue, then a sickly black as every system in the ship overloaded at once.
The cockpit lights died. Yuchen was thrown against her harness, ribs straining against the straps. Her hands flew to the manual override, punching at the restart sequence, but every display was dead except for a single flickering warning at the edge of her vision: loss of hull integrity, catastrophic
She focused on breathing, on the solidity of her own heartbeat. Then, just as suddenly as it had died, the world flared back to life.
The ship was spinning, tumbling through what should have been empty space, but the view outside was wrong. The stars were smeared into rings of fire, red and blue and every color she didn't have a name for.
Yuchen forced her focus to the controls. Some parts of the ship still worked. The thrusters responded, sluggishly. She compensated for the spin, fighting the ship's momentum, trying to aim for… what? There was nothing to aim for. No Odyssey. No station. No known space at all
She heard her own breathing, harsh and ragged, echoing off the cockpit glass.
"Sima," she gasped. "Status."
"Unable to resolve position. Stars are not in expected configuration."
She tried the comms panel. "Odyssey, this is Yaoguang-21. If you are receiving, respond."
Static.
Yuchen's instincts screamed at her to run, but there was nowhere to run to. Instead, she did what she was trained to do. She strapped in tighter, checked the seals on her flight suit, engaged the emergency beacon, and muttered a brief, desperate prayer to Guan Yu and every ancestor who might still remember her.
The ship's velocity spiked. The world folded. The cockpit shattered into a hundred fragments of sensation—cold, pain, light, the taste of Yuchen's own blood as she bit her tongue hard enough to draw it. Every atom of her body screamed in protest. Her vision inverted, turned inside out, then snapped back into place.
There was a final, violent lurch. Then nothing
Yuchen was unconscious before the alarms even stopped.
Zhao Yuchen woke to a migraine so intense it sounded like a smoke alarm behind her eyes. She blinked until her vision assembled into something usable: fractured cockpit glass, the soft bloom of red LEDs, and a pressure in her chest that made every breath feel like inhaling saltwater.
She was alive, which was a surprise. She took inventory: head, neck, limbs, everything still responding to command. Minor blood loss from her right eyebrow, judging by the warm trickle, but her faceplate had absorbed the worst of the impact. She wiped it with the sleeve of her undersuit, leaving a streak of red that looked almost black under the red emergency lights.
The cockpit was an abattoir of loose wires, sparking consoles, and the faint reek of scorched plastic. Half the screens were dark, the other half flickering through random error codes. The seat's harness had locked up, digging into her ribs, but it had probably saved her life.
She tried to breathe deeply. Cough. Air tasted coppery, with a backbeat of ozone.
She called up Sima. "Status," she croaked.
There was a long delay, then the AI's voice—slower now, as if each word cost it something. "Cabin pressure stable.Navigation: offline. Communications: offline."
She unlocked the harness, staggered out of the seat, and braced herself on the ops console. Yuchen forced her eyes to the forward view. Beyond the ragged edge of the cockpit's armored glass, the world was purple, then red, then black. For a second she thought the color was a hallucination, the aftermath of the rift still dancing on her retinas. But as she focused, she realized it was the sky—clouds smeared in long, sinuous streaks, roiling against a low, angry sun that wasn't any color she'd ever associated with warmth. They were on a planet.
Below, a forest. But not the straight, green lances of Earth's trees—these were monsters: trunks wound tight like thick cables, spiraling upward in sinuous arcs that were part muscle, part bone. Their bark shimmered, iridescent in the alien light, and their canopies pulsed with a ghostly bioluminescence that made the undergrowth seem to breathe in rhythm with the wind.
She stared, brain refusing to process. She had seen a hundred planets in her time, but this was like staring into a painting made by someone who'd never seen a forest, only read about it in a book and then decided to improve on the idea.
She reached for the nav overlay, praying that some part of the system could still get a fix.
"Navigation," she ordered.
A broken, static-drowned map flickered onto her display. The coordinates were… impossible. Stars not in any known registry.
She tried comms. "Open broadcast. Any frequency."
A dull hum, nothing more.
She settled back into the seat. Forced herself to focus on protocol, to let the muscle memory guide her through the panic. "Sima. Assess for landing zones."
The AI's reply was barely a whisper. "Recommend immediate descent."
Yuchen muttered a curse, cycled the external cams. The ship was hovering just above the alien forest, engines whining as they struggled to hold position. Battery power was bleeding away, and without a stable orbit, she'd be at the mercy of gravity and whatever other laws this world obeyed.
She keyed in a slow descent. The hull groaned as the thrusters compensated, but the ship responded. She angled the nose toward what looked like a clearing—a patch of ground free of the winding tree-trunks, maybe two hundred meters across. It wasn't much, but it was flat.
The landing was more like a controlled crash. The gear hit something hard, and the cockpit bounced, the world outside spinning as a leg buckled beneath the ship. Yuchen's teeth clacked together hard enough to spark, but she kept her hands on the controls, guiding the ship down until it settled with a grinding whine.
The moment the noise stopped, Yuchen tried the distress beacon, hoping to get a passing patrol ship or any humans on the planet to help her.
Nothing. Static. Didn't engage. The systems were fried.
She cursed, decided on another tactic. She would plant a mobile beacon on the ground, hope for a better signal. She checked the weapons locker. Still pressurized, still locked. She punched in her code, listened to the hiss as the rack disengaged. Standard issue: one pulse rifle, two spare magazines, a sidearm, a single shock grenade, and a medkit with enough stims to keep a platoon running for a week. She grabbed all of it, suited up, and cinched her helmet. The old, familiar comfort of the armor settled over her bones. At the airlock, she glanced up at the portrait of Guan Yu, still taped to the spar, colors faded but eyes as fierce as ever. "Let's go," she muttered. The door cycled open, and the world hit her like a hammer—smell, sound, color, all of it turned up past maximum. The air was thick, humid, tasting of rust and wet leaves and something like old blood. The sky above was darker now, clouds massing as if to watch her disembark. She stepped onto the surface, boots sinking an inch into loamy, purple dirt. The forest on every side writhed with movement. The external mics, still working, piped in the sound of wind and strange, animal howls. It was not a friendly sound. She barely breathed as she advanced, portable unit in hand, slow and methodical, just as she'd practiced in simulation a thousand times. Each footstep was measured, careful not to trip the unseen roots. The wind was cold, but sweat already slicked her back. Just before she could plant the beacon, she saw them.
At the edge of the clearing, she saw them—shapes moving low in the underbrush, twitching just beyond the reach of her visor's low-light filter. At first glance, they might have been human. They had arms, legs, torsos, and the jerking upright gait of bipeds. But that illusion shattered the moment they stepped into full view.
Their skin was a blotched, ruptured crimson, as if something beneath it had tried to claw its way out and failed. Veins bulged across their limbs like black cables, twitching with unnatural life. Where the skin thinned, it tore—weeping dark fluid that steamed faintly in the cold air.
Their eyes were the worst part—not glowing in reflection, but lit from within, burning with a deep red luminescence that shimmered like coals. The light didn't blink. It pulsed. Alive. Aware. And it followed her as they moved, every flicker of motion triggering a flicker of their predatory attention.
Their fingernails had transformed into claws, jagged and black, curved like surgical hooks. Their mouths stretched too wide, cracked at the corners into jagged, yawning maws filled with needle-like teeth, glistening wetly even without light. She saw one tilt its head toward her and smile—or maybe snarl. The difference didn't matter.
They glided like roaches scattering from a flipped stone.They were too fast, too coordinated.
Yuchen's breath hitched. Her suit's bioscanner flickered, tagged them all as UNKNOWN. She could feel it now—the heat signature clustering. They were surrounding her. Without realizing it, she let go of the beacon and loaded her rifle.
One erupted from the ferns with a hiss, four legs driving it at her like a battering ram. She squeezed the trigger and the pulse rifle kicked, the shot burning a perfect hole through its torso. The creature crashed down, twitching, then lay still.
More emerged from the treeline. Five, then ten, all shapes and sizes, none of them right. Some skittered, some crawled, some walked upright. All of them homed in on her heat signature.
Yuchen ran low and fast through the tangle of violet ferns, every sense screaming. Her rifle had eight rounds left in the mag, two more charged and ready. The terrain was a mess: moss slick as animal fat, roots like tripwires, the ground torn with little impact craters and old burn scars.
She checked the rifle. Seven rounds. Switched it to burst. The magazine was cold against her palms.
Movement to her right.
She turned, weapon up, and saw a figure lurching from the shadows. For a split second, it could have been a human: the posture, the way it dragged its foot, the almost-recognizable curve of a jaw. But its eyes glowed, red and deep, and its mouth was a torn mess of lipless fangs. It had a uniform, but it was shredded, the flesh beneath painted with streaks of wet, pulsing crimson.
"Freeze," Yuchen said, voice amplified and cold. "Do not approach.
The thing hesitated, as if it understood. Then it howled, a keening sound that drilled through the air, and charged.
She fired a burst. The shots took it in the chest, shattering bone and igniting a spray of red mist. The body hit the ground, convulsed, then lay still.
Behind it, more shadows moved. At least six, maybe ten. They sprinted, not walked, each one faster than the last. Yuchen sighted, fired, reloaded, fired again. Each shot dropped a target, but there were always more.
She fell back, using the tree as cover, heart pounding so hard her vision swam. One made it past her shots and closed the gap in a single bound, arms outstretched, hands twisted into claws. Yuchen jammed the rifle into its gut and fired point blank. The heat of the discharge seared her gloves, the recoil snapping her arms back, but the thing fell, splitting open along the seam of its sternum.
Blood sprayed her visor, blinding her. She tore off the helmet, wiped her face with her sleeve, tasted salt and rust. She could see better now, but the air bit into her sinuses, raw and sharp.
The rest of the pack closed in, but she was already moving, sprinting back up the hill toward her ship. She reached the ridge, risked a glance behind—dozens of infected, all shapes and sizes, pouring from the forest below. Some were barely more than skeletons with strips of flesh and muscle, others still looked almost human, their faces stretched with hunger and pain.
They wanted her, and nothing else.
She slammed a fresh mag into the rifle and ran, legs burning, suit heavy with blood and sweat.