“We did it this way for years before you and Claire joined up. It works better than you expect. Hey … Look, since there’s a chance that someone might be trying to poke holes through Medina Station, would you mind if I kept Holden and Naomi on the ship’s channel? Just in case?”
Bobbie hesitated. Part of her bridled at the prospect of having personnel who weren’t on the operation still be in the communications chain. But it was Holden and Naomi, and cutting them out also felt strange. Alex was waiting for an answer. She made a gesture as if she’d been thinking of something else.
“Of course not,” Bobbie said. “They’re family.” Alex’s faint smile meant he’d known she’d say it, and was glad she’d said it that way. She opened a connection to Amos and Clarissa. “Okay, everyone. Preflight checks. Let’s get ourselves into position.”
The slow zone—gates, Medina Station, and the alien hub station with the rail guns—was only tiny if compared to the vastness of normal space. The whole volume was smaller than the sun, and with the guesses she’d seen about how much energy it took to hold the gates open and stable, probably equally energetic, but controlled by forces they were still struggling to make sense of. And between the gates, a darkness that matter and energy slipped into, but from which nothing ever came back. The not-emptiness past the gates left her feeling a little claustrophobic, with only a sphere a million klicks across to move in.
Even that constrained, Medina Station would have been too small to see on her monitor if it had all been rendered to scale. Instead, she had a window with the full system—gates, stations, the Roci, the Tori Byron, the rail-gun emplacements—on one side of her monitor and three smaller displays showing tactical displays of the Roci in the needle-thin radar shadow of Medina, the Tori Byron, and Laconia gate respectively. A countdown timer marked the minutes and seconds until this Admiral Trejo said he’d be coming through. Her shoulders were tight. She felt like they were in the moment between throwing dice and seeing what numbers had come up. The gambler’s high. She didn’t like how much she liked it.
“Medina’s sensors are getting something,” Clarissa said from the engineering deck.
“Throw me the update, please,” Bobbie said, and the screen with Laconia gate on her monitor shifted to a live feed of the gate itself, enhanced in false color to make the darkness legible. The weird circle of the gate. The wavering stars beyond it, and a looming shadow coming through. Even just watching the stars go out behind it, Bobbie could tell it was a big ship. Maybe it was their Donnager-class battleship. And that in itself would be the Laconians making a statement.
Unless it was something else.
The ship that came through first looked wrong. It was something more than the weirdly organic shape of it. The way the false color struggled to make sense of its surface was like a graphical glitch or something out of a dream. She found herself looking for seams where its plating came together, and there was nothing. Her mind kept trying to see it as a ship, but defaulting to some kind of ancient sea creature from the deep trenches of Earth.
“That ain’t one of ours,” Alex said. “Shit. Where did they get that?”
“I don’t like this,” Clarissa said.
Me neither, little sister, Bobbie thought.
On the traffic-control channel, the captain of the Tori Byron was hailing the Laconian whatever it was, ordering it to come to a full stop. Bobbie nodded at the screen, willing Trejo to respond. To make this a more normal interaction. Instead the strange ship continued on its course, placid and implacable. Another drive plume still showed on the other side of the gate. Much smaller, but a second ship all the same. After a moment, the Tori Byron lit its main drive, moving itself in on an intercept. It was like watching a house cat preparing to face down a lion.
This is your final warning, the Tori Byron announced. Bobbie’s monitor updated. The Tori Byron had hit the big ship with a target lock—
And then it was gone. Where the Tori had been, only a sparkling cloud of matter so strange the Roci’s sensors didn’t know what to make of it.
“What the fuck!” Alex breathed. “Did they shoot something? I didn’t see them shoot anything!”
Bobbie’s stomach felt so heavy, it seemed like it ought to be dragging her down, even on the float. She opened a channel to the rail-gun emplacements before she was consciously aware she’d done it, the certainty growing in her even as she got the lock that it wouldn’t be enough. That nothing would be. But there was a way you did these things. An order to battle, even when the battle was doomed.
“Fire, fire, fire!” she shouted.
On her screen the rail guns spat.
Chapter Twelve: Holden
The Transport Union comptroller’s offices were buried three levels deep in the thick walls of Medina Station’s rotating drum. It made the Coriolis slightly less noticeable than inside the drum, but also meant that they were inside gray metal cubes with desks in them and no screens to even give the illusion of a window. Holden couldn’t say for sure why it felt more depressing than sitting in the metal cubes of a spaceship compartment, but it was. Naomi sat beside him, watching the newsfeeds on her hand terminal, unaffected by the grim locale. The Rocinante was doing a mandatory security contract. The first gig since they’d left. Maybe that was what he was reacting to.
“Form 4011-D transfers your retainer and future contracts to Roberta W. Draper, and states that she is now the legal captain of the Rocinante, and president of Rocicorp, a Ceres-registered corporate entity.”
The Transport Union representative who was processing their paperwork handed Holden an oversized terminal covered in legalese. She had a pinched face, deep frown lines on her forehead and around her mouth, and wore her hair in short spikes dyed flaming red. Holden thought she looked like a disgruntled puffer fish, but recognized his unflattering opinion was at least partly a reaction to the mountain of forms she’d made him fill out.
“You do know,” the puffer fish said, “that this is a temporary change of status, pending the legal change-of-ownership registration?”
“Our next stop is the bank, where we’ll be finalizing the loan to sell the ship.”
“Mmhmm,” Puffer said, making it a sound of deep skepticism.
As Holden filled out the next of the endless forms, he listened to the small voices coming from Naomi’s terminal. He only caught about every third word, but the hot topic of conversation was definitely the approaching Laconian ships.
“Luna,” Naomi said.
“Something happening on Luna?”
“No, I mean, let’s try Luna first. It’ll be easy to find consulting gigs, what with all the work going on down on Earth.”
“I’m not sure I—” Holden started.
“Not you. Me. I could get consulting gigs. I like the gravity there. And you could pop down the well whenever you wanted to visit your parents.”
“True.” His parents were all pushing the centenarian mark, and while he’d been lucky and they were all in pretty good shape, he didn’t want them doing orbital launches to visit him if they could avoid it.
“And it’s all very far from this,” she said, pointing at her screen.
“Not a bad thing,” he agreed, and handed his filled-out screen back to the puffer. “But I did like the idea of living in exuberant decadence on Titan.”
“When we have enough money to do that for another three decades. Two hours,” Naomi said, and Holden didn’t need to ask what she was referring to. Two hours until the first representatives from Laconia to come through their gate in decades would arrive.
“We done here?”
The puffer agreed that they were.
“I could use a drink,” Holden said. “Let’s go get a drink and watch the big arrival on the screens in a bar or something.”
They did.
It didn’t go well.
Holden ran across the open fields of the rotating drum, heading toward the lift up to Medina’s command enter. The adrenaline pumping through his veins only seemed to
make his heart beat faster without speeding him up. It occurred to him, with a sort of surreal detachment, that this was exactly like many nightmares he’d had. He reached the lift station, pressed the call button, and willed the doors to open.
Bobbie was yelling Fire, fire, fire on the Roci’s group channel, her voice coming out of his terminal loud, but not panicky. Commanding. On the screen, Alex was sending him the Roci’s tactical display. Three of the rail guns on the hub station fired at the massive Laconian ship. The shots all hit, tearing holes in the hull, but the breaches closed almost as fast as they were created. It didn’t look like damage-control systems. It looked like it was healing.
Holden had seen that sort of nearly instantaneous repair before. But not on human technologies. It took a really bad situation and made it a nightmare.
“Bobbie,” he yelled back at the terminal. “Keep the ship—”
He didn’t get to finish, because the screen flashed white and died. Medina actually shuddered. The entire station shook and rang like a bell.
“Jim,” Naomi said, and then couldn’t finish because she was still gasping for breath from their run. She made the Belter hand signal for emergency. Should we be looking for a shelter? It was a valid question. If the Laconians started poking holes in Medina, they’d want to be in a sealed emergency compartment with its own air supply.
“Go find one,” he said. “But I need to get up to command.”
“Why?”
Another valid question. Because I’ve fought in three major wars, he thought. Because the Belters running the station are the ones that didn’t join Marco’s Free Navy, so they’ve never been in this kind of fight. They’ll need my experience. All perfectly true and probably valid reasons. But he didn’t say them out loud, because he knew Naomi would see through them instantly to the truth. Because something terrible is happening, and I don’t know how not to be in the middle of it.
The doors finally opened, and the car recognized him as a captain with union clearances and gave him access to the overrides. As they went up, the feeling of gravity slowly turned into a lurching sideways motion and then disappeared. The lift opened onto corridors that Holden remembered fighting through under heavy fire, back when humans first found their way into the ring system. That astonishing moment in human history, passing through a stable wormhole into an alien-created network of interstellar gates, had just led to a whole bunch of people deciding to shoot each other. And now, a group of people who’d been isolated from humanity for decades were rejoining society just as things seemed to be going pretty well. And what did they do? Start shooting.
Holden’s terminal gave a gentle ping and then reconnected to the network. A moment later, Alex’s face appeared.
“You still there, Cap?”
“Yeah, just outside Medina ops. Did that thing hit the station? Not seeing any atmo-loss alerts here.”
“It shot the—” Alex started, then said, “It’s easier to show you. Take a look at this shit.”
“Just a minute.”
Holden slapped the wall panel, and the door slid open. He pulled himself inside the ops center.
The duty officer put up a hand. “You can’t come in here, sir. I mean, Captain Holden. Sir.”
“Who’s in charge right now?”
“Me?”
Holden had met her once before at a Transport Union function. Daphne Kohl. A competent technician. Somebody who’d done an engineering tour on Tycho. Perfect for noncombat ops duty on a station like Medina. Absolutely out of her depth now.
“Holden?” Alex said. “You still there?”
Holden turned his hand terminal so that the duty officer could see it too.
“Go ahead, Alex.”
On his hand-terminal screen, the massive Laconian ship was floating past the ring gate. It had a thick lozenge shape, not quite circular in cross-section, and with a variety of asymmetrical projections jutting out from the sides. More organic than constructed.
It came to a gentle stop just inside the ring gate. The Tori Byron, the Transport Union’s cruiser tasked with defending Medina Station, moved toward it. Holden couldn’t see or hear them, but he imagined the stream of hails and demands the Byron was throwing at the Laconian ship. Then, happening so fast it was like a glitch in the graphic, the Byron turned into a rapidly expanding cloud of superheated gas and metal fragments. In the playback, Bobbie was yelling, Fire, fire, fire, and the rail guns on the hub station opened up.
The image jittered, and the rail guns were ripped away from the hub and sent spinning off, fracturing into a cloud of ceramic shrapnel as they went.
“That’s what you felt,” Alex said. “The second time they fired that weapon, every ship in the zone shook, and half the electronics blew out.”
“What,” Holden said, “the fuck was that?”
Alex didn’t answer. His expression was as eloquent as a shrug.
“Okay, I assume Bobbie’s got you guys hiding in the station’s radar shadow still, since I’m talking to you and you’re not dead.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “She seems pretty strongly in favor of not doing anything to make it mad.”
“Let me see what we can find out here, and I’ll call back.”
“Copy that,” Alex said. “Roci out.”
“It’s … magnetic?” Naomi said, her tone managing to be authoritative and astounded at the same time. This is what it is, but I don’t believe what I’m seeing. She’d floated across the ops center to one of the consoles and was working with the tech there. “It’s reading as an incredibly strong magnetic field focused down to a narrow beam.”
“Is that possible?” the duty officer said, her voice small and tight.
“Only if you define ‘possible’ as things that have already happened,” Naomi said, not turning to look at her.
“So anything made of metal is vulnerable,” another tech said.
“It isn’t just metal,” Holden replied, then pushed off to drift over to Naomi’s station and look at the data she was pulling up.
“Everything has a magnetic field,” Naomi added. “Usually it’s too weak to matter. But at the levels that beam is hitting, it could spaghettify hydrogen atoms. Anything it touches will be ripped apart.”
“There’s no way to defend against something like that,” Holden said, then went limp. In microgravity, it was not as satisfying as collapsing into a chair would have been.
“That’s what shook Medina,” Naomi added. “Just the beam passing near us. The maneuvering thrusters had to fire to hold us still.”
“Holden, this is Draper,” his terminal said.
“Holden here.”
“Looks like that big bastard is ignoring us as long as we stay really still and keep the weapons unpowered.”
“That’s a good sign,” Holden said. “It might mean they’re not looking to kill everyone. Just making a point of destroying anything that’s a threat.”
“Point loudly and clearly made,” Bobbie agreed. “But be aware, there is a second ship. Smaller. And it’s heading for Medina.”
“Tactical assessment?”
“Based on how thoroughly they took out our defenses,” Bobbie said, “I’d bet they do a hard breach, storm ops and the reactor room, and grab full control of the station. If their ground troops have tech like that ship does, it shouldn’t take long.”
“Copy that. I’m going to try to minimize casualties down here. Wait for me to make contact. Holden out.”
“Hard breach?” Naomi asked, though her tone said she already knew the answer.
“They’ll drop fire teams all over the station to take over access points, control centers, power, and environmental support,” Holden replied, more to the room at large than to Naomi. He turned to Daphne Kohl. “I think you should have everyone here start making calls. Get every union and planetary rep in secure locations, but tell their security details to stand down. No visible weapons. Tell them we’re not attempting to repel boarders. That’ll just get people ki
lled, and maybe piss off that monster of a ship.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Are you taking command?”
“No, I’m not. But this is the right thing to do, and we need to do it now. So we should do it. Please.”
Her expression fell a degree. She’d hoped someone in authority had arrived. Someone who knew what to do. He recognized the hope and the disappointment both.
“We’re not going to fight back at all?” Kohl asked.
He gestured toward the screens. The dust that was Tori Byron and the rail-gun emplacements. Kohl looked away. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to say no.
“Not yet,” Holden said. Naomi was already collecting side-arms from the other techs in the ops center and putting them in a duffel bag. Not yet.
The second ship looked to be about destroyer sized, to Holden’s eye. It did a slow flyover of Medina Station, taking out the torpedo racks and PDC emplacements with pinpoint-accurate rail-gun shots, then dropping a dozen Marine landing craft.
As it came, Kohl did as he suggested, passing the word throughout the ship not to resist. Live to fight another day. After the last call, she seemed to sway for a moment, then turned, spat on the deck, and pulled up something that looked like a security interface.
“What are you doing?”
“Purging the security system,” she said. “No census. No biometric records. No deck plans. No records. We can’t stop the fuckers, but we don’t need to make it easy for them.”
“Fou bien,” Naomi said, approving. Holden wondered whether the forces coming in would be able to track the decision back to her. He hoped they wouldn’t.
Each landing craft held a fire team of eight Marines, all wearing power armor of an unusual design—like Bobbie’s but with different articulation at the joints, and all in a vibrant blue that made them seem like something that had hauled itself up from the sea. The Marines were methodical and professional. Where the doors opened for them, they entered without causing damage. Where they found locked doors, they breached with ruthless efficiency, blowing the door seals and hauling the plates back in a single, well-trained motion. When they passed unarmed civilians, they moved on by with nothing more than a warning not to resist. The few times they ran into someone with a hero complex who tried to fight back, they killed whoever presented a threat, but no one else. That it wasn’t a straight-out massacre was the only comfort.