Bobbie didn’t have time to dance with Katria, nor did she want to get herself stitched up from a knife fight, so she straight-kicked the woman in the diaphragm and dropped her to the deck with an explosive oof. She took a second to kick the knife away, then started to turn when something heavy slammed into her cheek.
Through the explosion of stars in her vision, she saw Amos grappling with two men at the same time, choking one with his left arm while he slammed the second man into one of the water tanks over and over again with his right. A third man had climbed onto his back and was attempting a sleeper hold, but couldn’t get his forearm under Amos’ chin to lock it up. The other two OPA goons were flanking Bobbie, and one of them was holding the crowbar he’d just cracked her cheekbone with. In the sort of slow-motion clarity Bobbie always experienced during a fight, she saw skin and blood on the crowbar’s edge.
Oh, she thought, that’s why my face feels wet.
Crowbar was pulling back for another swing, while his partner tried to get behind her. Bobbie decided Crowbar was the more serious threat and lunged at him to get inside the arc of his swing. His arm went around her, and she felt the bar slam into her shoulder blade, which made her right arm go pins-and-needles numb. She threw a throat punch at him with it, and even though she couldn’t feel it, her arm did what she told it to. Crowbar dropped his weapon and clutched his throat with both hands, gagging.
His partner kicked her in the back, twice. One kick hit her kidney, and the other her butt. While the kidney shot might have her pissing blood for a few days, it was the kick to the ass that almost put her on the ground. It felt like someone set off a small bomb in her lower back, and she felt a sharp crack that almost certainly meant he’d snapped her tailbone.
She turned to see him unleashing another kick, and managed to mostly sidestep it, letting it bounce off her hip and forcing him to stumble forward into her. She grabbed hold of his left arm and rotated through the hips to throw him face-first into a pressure-monitoring console a few feet away. He hit it with a thud and a crunch, and started to sag.
Then, just because he’d kicked her in the ass, she snapped his left arm before she let him drop.
Five minutes later, Katria and her five friends sat or lay on the floor, hands tied behind their backs. Amos had an eye that was already starting to swell shut, and four scrapes down his cheek that looked like he’d been clawed by a big cat. Bobbie had carefully avoided looking at her own face in anything reflective. But based on the volume of blood in her shirt, the wound on her face had to be pretty grotesque. There goes my not-needing-stitches plan. The pain in her backside also meant she wasn’t going to enjoy sitting for the next couple of months. That thought made her want to kick the unconscious man with the broken arm again. Or maybe Amos.
“Katria,” Bobbie said, leaning down over the Voltaire Collective cell leader. “Is it okay if I call you Katria?”
If Katria had any objections, she kept them to herself.
“Great. So, look. This could have gone better. We kicked your ass and you’re pissed now, I get that. If you want to be part of the revolution, great, we’d love to have you. But you run all your ops through Saba’s group. That’s nonnegotiable. Anything else, and we’re killing you and hiding your bodies in the fertilizer-recycling system.”
Bobbie grabbed the front of Katria’s shirt and picked her back up to her feet, then kept lifting until they were eye to eye.
“Do we understand each other?”
To her surprise, Katria laughed. There was a brightness in her eyes that looked like fever. “We do indeed,” the woman said. It could have been a sparring partner’s salute or the threat of retribution. Bobbie really wished she could tell the difference.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Drummer
It was easy to forget sometimes that the void cities hadn’t always been there. During the starving years, they’d been something like a dream. A promised land without the land. Homes for the Belt that could move through the gates to whatever system they chose. There had been a magic to them then. A sense of the unprecedented.
Time had worn that shine away. Drummer had spent more time in the last decade on People’s Home and Independence and Guardian than on ships or asteroid stations. They’d become so familiar that they’d bled back in her memory until it felt as though the corridors and chambers had been present since her childhood, even if she hadn’t been on them. Like a city often mentioned, but not visited until adulthood. She had to remind herself that war was always this way. Had always been. Cities had been falling under siege since the time there were cities. Mortars had fallen on schools. Soldiers had stormed hospitals. Bombs had set churches and parks and children on fire. Homes had been lost before now.
The tactical display floating over the table was off by orders of magnitude. If it had been to scale, Independence would have been too small to make out with a microscope. As it was, the identifying code was larger than the ship icon. A smear of light smaller than a crumb of bread that meant a city where two hundred thousand people, more or less, lived and worked, raised children, divorced and married, drank and danced and died. And then burning sunward from it, the evacuation ships—even smaller—that carried as many people as would fit away from the theater of battle. She looked at them and saw all the other times children had been carried away from a disaster that was approaching and that could not be stopped: London, Beijing, Denver. History, she reminded herself, was peppered with moments like this one. It only felt different because this was her city, a void city, and this had never happened before.
She had repurposed the central traffic-control station of People’s Home for this. Military analysts and engineers, some of them union, most of them EMC, sat at the desks where civilians usually were. Feeds to the war rooms on Earth and Mars showed similar rooms with similar people, but considerably less light delay. The screens that usually listed incoming and outgoing ships with approach vectors and expected times were devoted to the incoming signals from all the active telescopy in the Belt. Images of the major observation stations showed when fresh data streams were coming in, where they were coming from, when People’s Home was transmitting. Images from Independence and the dozen EMC ships included flags for time delay—an hour and twenty-three minutes—and a composite of the enemy claimed the central display. Pale as a bone, burning lazily toward the point where the battle would begin. Maybe had begun. Maybe had started and ended in the hour and twenty-three minutes it took light to bring the message to them.
“The, ah, the resolution will get better as we get the signal bounce,” the EMC technician said. She was younger than Drummer had been when she started working on Tycho, with red hair pulled back in a bun and a wide, doughy face. On Earth and Mars, other technicians were probably having the same conversations with the prime minister and secretary-general. “It’s a trade-off, of course, between immediacy of the direct signals and the better information density of delaying a few minutes to get the extra feeds.”
“I just need to know what’s happening,” Drummer said.
Avasarala, who still hadn’t made the passage back to Earth, and Vaughn were at the edge of the room. Admiral Hu was at one of the central control consoles, sitting forward like an overeager schoolgirl at the first lecture of term. She’d come as a forward observer, the military leader of the EMC nearest to the battle without being in it. A bulb of what smelled like green tea rested on a side table Vaughn had brought out so that the admiral wouldn’t risk spilling on the control board. Drummer walked to her less because she wanted to talk than because she had to move.
“Madam President,” Hu said, nodding to her.
“Admiral.”
“Odd being on the same side of a shooting war, isn’t it? I never thought the day would come.”
That says more about you than the reality of things, Drummer thought. The EMC wasn’t its own side any more than Ilus or Surabhi or Neue Ausland were. The dreams of empire faded slowly. It didn’t matter.
“We’ve
got a comm report, Madam President.”
“Play it,” Drummer snapped. The main screen shifted. The Laconian admiral appeared. His voice was patient and calm, but there was a glitter in his eye. An excitement. It made Drummer’s gut ache to see.
“This is Admiral Trejo of the Heart of the Tempest to the approaching warships. I ask that you stand down. Any interference with our ship will be met in kind. Don’t make this worse than it has to be.”
“Fuck you,” Drummer said to the screen, but not softly enough that Admiral Hu didn’t chuckle. It was only ten seconds before the answer came. God, that’s how close the distant war ships all were to each other. Light-seconds.
Emily Santos-Baca, the ranking board member who lived on Independence. Her hair was pulled back in a tight braid in preparation for null g. Or it had been an hour and twenty-three minutes ago.
“Admiral Trejo,” Santos-Baca said, “on behalf of the Transport Union and the Earth-Mars Coalition, I am informing you that your presence in Sol system is a violation of territorial space and is being considered an act of war. Your ship will brake immediately and return to Laconia until appropriate contracts and diplomatic resolutions are in place.”
They were reports from two competing realities. Drummer wished that Santos-Baca’s sounded more plausible. The icons that marked the EMC ships were like dots drawn on the skin of a balloon, the Tempest moving in like a pin. It couldn’t be long. Couldn’t have been.
“The dispersal,” Hu said. “You see that? The way they’re spread out? That’s based on the Medina data your people sent. The spread of that magnetic whatever-the-hell-it-was. We placed the ships so that no matter which one it aims at, it won’t be able to get two. Good, eh?”
“Excellent,” Drummer said. Her throat was dry, but the smell of the tea was a little nauseating.
“The range of it can’t be good either,” Hu said. “The science wonks say the power curve would be logarithmic. Remaining at range should force the bastards to use any other weapons systems they have. Assuming that the magnetic cannon even works in normal space. Because there’s at least one idea that it’s using special properties that only exist in the ring space. And if that’s the case—”
“Gloria.” The old woman’s voice was like a knife. “You’re doing it again.”
Admiral Hu glanced back at Avasarala. Drummer hadn’t heard her approach, but there she was. Her smile was indulgent and warm and, Drummer had to assume, utterly false.
“Gloria is a good warrior, but she gets chatty when she’s nervous.”
“We’re seeing fire,” one of the analysts said. His voice was as calm and businesslike as a surgeon announcing a bleeder.
The display shifted. The EMC ships and Independence were still there, but backgrounded as the focus changed to swarms of missiles pouring out toward the Tempest. Each one burned hard enough that a human body would have been pulped by the g forces, and they barely seemed to move. The distances they traveled were vast. Even at their speed, three million klicks was a long time. Verbal threats that took seconds at lightspeed followed by punches that would take minutes or hours. Even without the warheads, the kinetic force of the torpedoes would be massive. If they hit. The swarm crept forward, pixel by imperceptible pixel. Drummer waved a steward over and ordered a bulb of ice water and a bowl of hummus with bread. She had to try to eat.
The hummus was half gone and the tea tepid before the first of the missiles started winking out of existence.
“What are we seeing, please?” Hu said.
“It appears to be long-range PDCs,” one of the analysts said. “We’re waiting for the bounce feed so we can get higher resolution.”
Another twenty minutes, and a much sharper image of the Tempest appeared with the timestamp to show it was just after the fleet’s launch. All along the sides of the ship, tiny dark eruptions like the spots on a shark.
“The PDCs’ housings appear to be covered by the hull. Telemetry from the Michael Souther is that the remaining missiles were redirected toward those structures.” Were. An hour and twenty minutes ago.
“They’re not using their magnet beam,” Hu said. “That’s good. If it was cheap for them to fire it, they could use it to knock down missiles. If it’s expensive to use, we may be able to exhaust it.”
Drummer thought that sounded like wishful thinking, but she didn’t say so. She tried to take comfort in Hu’s optimism. The data feeds shifted, more information coming in. The images of the Tempest sharpened. The PDCs came into clearer focus, but it didn’t help Drummer understand them. The openings in the side of the ship looked like little mouths opening and closing. Like the whole side of the ship was singing. There was no mechanism she could see. She shuddered. The cloud of torpedoes was thinning. None of them would reach the body of the enemy ship.
A bloom of glowing gas erupted from the Tempest’s side, flinched, and then dissipated.
“Rail guns,” an analyst said.
The chatter of voices went into a higher gear. Tracking the rail-gun round, examining the spectrum of the plasma that had accompanied it, identifying the particular torpedo that it turned to dust.
“Are their PDCs running low already?” Hu said, to herself as much as anyone.
“It was a warning,” Avasarala answered. “They’re showing us that they have teeth and giving us the chance to back away.”
“Maybe we should,” Drummer said.
No one replied. The markers for the EMC ships shifted like a school of fish moving together, and Independence with them. Their own volley of rail guns, the slugs raining down from all directions. The Tempest had no way to stop them. All it could do was dodge. Drummer counted the minutes, watching the Tempest pull back and corkscrew out of the paths of danger. Mostly.
“I’m seeing contact.”
“Two impacts on the starboard. Waiting for confirmation from Pallas and Luna, but I think we did them some damage.”
The knot in Drummer’s gut eased a little. If they could hurt it, they could kill it. It was just a question of scale and tactics.
“The hull appears to be self-repairing.”
“Matches the Medina battle,” Hu said.
“Show me,” Drummer barked, and the image on her screen shifted again. It was a fresh image, still fuzzy. The bone-pale skin of the Tempest rippled as a round struck it, and then again with a second strike. Waves passed through the ship like the surface of water. Nasty black-and-red welts glowed where the rail-gun rounds had hit, but the plating—or whatever it was—folded over the wound, closing it, then folded again, and the damage was gone as if it had never been there.
Another volley of rail-gun fire from the EMC ships, but as the Tempest flinched back again and spun away again, it erupted in a cloud of plasma, and then emerged from it. Drummer didn’t understand until Hu spoke.
“Holy shit. How many rail guns does that bastard have?”
Now the Tempest shifted and swirled, leaving a trail of glowing gas behind it like an afterimage. It was beautiful in its way, a warrior’s dance—power and intention and technique that were almost balletic. And then the EMC ships began to die.
“The Ontario is hit. Reporting reactor breach and dumping core. We are seeing impacts on the Severin, the Talwar, and the Odachi, but no system confirmation yet. Rounds arrived thirty seconds earlier than the model anticipated.”
“Fuckers,” Avasarala said. “That’s why they took out the missile. Throw a changeup and let us think it was their fastball.”
“Whatever they’re using for predictive algorithms, it’s really good,” Hu said, awe in her voice. “That’s almost a third of our attack group down. And if … Oh.”
For a moment, Drummer didn’t understand what she was seeing. Independence, the second void city to launch, the home to hundreds of thousands, seemed to bloom like a flower. Long petals of carbon lace and titanium peeled back, turning as they did. Something terrible and bright happened in the center of the city, but Drummer couldn’t guess what it was. What s
he knew, what mattered, was that between one breath and the next, Independence was dead.
“We’re counting eight simultaneous impacts on the void city,” an analyst said from somewhere farther away than the control room. “They seem to have been placed to exploit resonance. We’re seeing some structural breakdown.”
Emily Santos-Baca was on Independence, Drummer thought, and she’d been dead already for over an hour. It didn’t matter how much adrenaline was pumping through Drummer’s veins, how tightly she gripped her bulb of old tea. She could shout the retreat order if she wanted to, but anyone in a position to hear her was dead already, or would be by the time her words could reach them.
The PDCs along the Tempest’s side fluttered again. Another group of EMC torpedoes died, faster this time because it was a smaller attack. The Tempest seemed to pause, floating in the distant nothingness as if inviting the EMC ships to take their best shots. Taunting them.
An hour and twenty-three minutes before, the EMC ships shifted, lit their Epstein drives as hard as they’d go, and turned to whatever vector got them away from the theater of battle as quickly as they could. The Tempest didn’t react. No new blooms from their rail guns. No more torpedoes. Drummer didn’t believe for a second that the enemy’s supplies had been exhausted. Trejo wasn’t killing the other ships because he didn’t need or want to. That was all.
Drummer put her tea on the little side table next to Hu’s, turned, and walked out. She was aware in a vague, distant way of Vaughn behind her, calling her name. It wasn’t something that mattered enough to attend to.
The decking of People’s Home felt fragile under her feet, as if her footsteps might be enough to break them and spin her and everyone else in the city flying out into the vacuum. She passed her security detail, distantly aware of the men and women assigned to make sure she was safe in any circumstances scrambling to follow her.