She strapped herself into her crash couch, checked the juice. The chances were very slim that People’s Home would go on the burn, but if it did, she’d be ready. The whole sphere of battle was less than three light-seconds across. Eight hundred and fifty thousand kilometers from the two most distant ships in the EMC fleet, a balloon holding three hundred quadrillion cubic kilometers of nothing, with a few hundred ships dotting its skin. If she’d been in a vac suit, the drive plumes of the navy would have been invisible among the stars. It was the most tightly formed major battle in decades—maybe ever—and she wouldn’t have been able to see her nearest ally with her naked eye.
“The enemy’s crossed Leuctra Point,” the weapons tech said, his voice calm.
“Are the EMC ships opening fire?”
“They are, ma’am.”
“Then let’s do too,” she said.
She wanted there to be a throb of rail guns, the chatter of PDC fire, but People’s Home was a huge structure. Even as her display told her that the rail guns were firing, the room was silent. Hundreds of other ships were doing the same thing at the same moment. Tens of thousands of tungsten slugs moving at a nontrivial fraction of c. It would be less than a minute before they converged on the Tempest, staggered and spread to make dodging difficult. But not impossible.
“And the enemy is evading,” the sensor tech reported, her voice sharp.
“Do we have visual?”
In answer, she put up the live feed. A second’s delay. Maybe two. Hardly anything at all. They were so close, they could have spoken in real time. It made her feel uncomfortable to be so near the Tempest. But there it was, its weirdly organic shape bright in the enhanced colors. Jets of reaction mass gouted from one side, pushing the ship to a slightly different course.
“Correcting for new vector,” the weapons station said. “And firing. EMC forces are also launching torpedoes.”
“Do the same,” Drummer said. She checked the time. Three minutes had passed. She took control of the visual display, zooming in on the skin of the enemy ship. It didn’t look like it had plating so much as a single, textured surface. She threw on the tactical overlay, and a dozen points appeared that weren’t visible in reality. The high-value targets, the vulnerable places on the Tempest that didn’t grow back, or at least not quickly. A dozen carefully placed dots that Emily Santos-Baca and Independence had died to find.
“Come on,” she said, willing the missiles to strike.
“The enemy is firing PDCs,” the sensor tech said.
“Show me,” Drummer said, and the Tempest almost vanished in a cloud of tracers. The data field was too rich to comprehend—missiles, streams of PDC fire, the straight-line paths of the rail-gun rounds.
“EMC Battleship Frederick Lewis is reporting damage,” Vaughn said.
“Are you working comms now?” Drummer asked. “Who’s going to get me my coffee?”
“They’re dropping core,” Vaughn said, ignoring her.
A little cheer went up, and it took Drummer half a second to see why. One of the hardpoints on the Tempest was blinking—the system reporting a missile strike that had connected with the target. The cloud of PDC fire grew a degree thinner. Any ship Drummer knew, any station she’d ever heard of, would have been reduced to slivers of metal and flakes of lace by now. The only thing she could think of that would withstand that barrage was a planet. Even then, cities would have been pounded to dust by what had been launched in the last fifteen minutes. Sixteen now. It was so fast. There should have been hours between launch and response. But this wasn’t that kind of battle. There was no finesse to it. Just brutal, constant violence.
The tightness in her throat was the memory of Pallas. The harder they pushed the Tempest, the more Drummer feared the magnetic beam. If the Laconians used it on People’s Home, she wouldn’t live long enough to notice she was being ripped apart. And if the glitch happened again … well, the observatories on Earth and Mars might get more data about how long it took the enemy to recharge the damned thing.
But they hadn’t used it yet. Maybe the time slip had been the fucking thing breaking. The universe owed her a little slice of luck like that.
Another two hits on the Tempest. It shifted, plumes of steam appearing from its thrusters as it evaded incoming fire. Five more of the EMC ships took crippling damage or turned to bright dust, too far away to see. The Tempest veered and danced. Dark streaks marked its sides where the missiles and rail-gun rounds hit, and while most of the marks faded, not all of them did.
“We have expended two-thirds of our rail-gun ammunition,” the weapons tech announced. “Shall I maintain fire?”
“Yes,” Drummer said. “Then start putting chairs in the launcher. We hit that thing until we’re down to pillows and beer.”
“Understood, ma’am,” the weapons tech said. She could hear the smile in his voice. She felt it too—the giddy sense that even if they were winning ugly, they were at least winning.
On the display, the Tempest shifted and dodged like a fish in a tank. The organic curves of its design made it hard not to think of it as an animal. An apex predator surprised to find itself outmatched by its prey. And there was something …
“On the aft. By that third contact point. Is that a gas plume?”
The sensors tech shifted through half a dozen slices of the spectrum in less than a second. “That is correct, ma’am. The Tempest appears to be venting atmosphere.”
“EMC Governor Knight is launching high-yield nuclear torpedoes,” Vaughn said.
Drummer sat back in her crash couch. Anticipation was a tightness in her throat and her hands. The Tempest’s PDCs weren’t all disabled. There was still the chance it might kill the nukes before they got close enough to detonate. Seconds stretched into minutes. Her neck ached from straining toward the display.
The light of the explosion whited out the sensor array. A ragged cheer came from all around the control room.
“One down,” she said to herself. “And fuck you all along with it.”
It wasn’t over. Laconia would send another ship after this one. A fleet, next time. The union and the EMC would have to get much more clever. But they knew more now—about how the enemy ships functioned, how they maneuvered in battle, and most important of all, how they could be killed.
And she had to expect reprisals. By deciding to send her one last, desperate message, she had as good as told the Laconians that she still had allies on Medina. The choice had seemed like the right and obvious thing at the time. She’d pointed at Medina and said, Look for my people here. It might be the thing that killed Saba and his crew.
It was a problem for another day. A tragedy she’d face when she could do something about it, and not before. There was too much that had to be done here and now.
“Send the return signal to all the transport ships and get the docks ready to bring everyone home,” she said. “It’s going to be a long couple weeks, people. We may as well get to it.”
Another cheer, this one louder. They’d all been so hungry for a win, they were drunk with it. She was too.
“Ma’am?” the sensor tech said, the word like a drop of ice in a sauna.
The sensors had finished their reset. The Tempest was still where it had been, not scattered into atoms. An eerie blue mottling danced in lines like veins under the ship’s skin, bright but fading. The EMCs’ nukes might not have made contact before they detonated, but the fireball should have been enough to kill anything. Or at least anything that Drummer knew of.
“It’s firing missiles, ma’am,” the sensor tech said.
They’d known. Laconia had known they’d be facing nuclear torpedoes. And now everyone on all the colony worlds would see that even that wasn’t enough to kill their ships. Maybe that had been the point all along.
“Tactical,” she said. “Get me tactical.”
The display jittered and shifted. The orange dot was now deep in the cup they’d created to destroy it, and it was still not destroyed
. Even with its tactical maneuvering, its course toward the inner planets hadn’t shifted.
All around it, bright-green dots were blinking out.
Chapter Forty-Three: Naomi
The scratch came in the middle of the third shift. If Naomi had been able to sleep, it would have been her midnight, but she was in her bunk, staring into the darkness and waiting for something she knew wouldn’t come. So she heard it—fingernails against the access door that led to the corridor. It was softer than a knock, but it meant the same thing. I’m here. Let me in.
She sat up. Her body ached like she’d worked out too hard, but it was just stress and fatigue. She pulled herself up, opened her door as Bobbie, across from her, opened her own. Bobbie was wearing a tight jumpsuit. The kind you’d put on under a vac suit. Or, she supposed, power armor. She nodded to Naomi, but didn’t speak. They were both being quiet for the others—Amos and Alex and Clarissa. The ones who could sleep, maybe. Someone ought to.
Bobbie opened the door to the public corridor.
Katria wore the uniform of the Medina maintenance crew. Green with a station logo printed on the shoulders and back. A ceramic toolbox rested on the deck by her left foot. Gray where it wasn’t scratched white by long use. Naomi guessed there was enough explosive in it to kill all of them so fast they wouldn’t know they were dead until the funeral. Katria’s nonchalance with it was like a boast. Voltaire Collective had always been like that, even back in ancient days when Earth and Mars had ruled the solar system and no one had ever heard of Protogen. Every revolution needed its mad bombers, apparently.
“Tag,” Katria said to Naomi. Then to Bobbie, “You ready to play a game?”
Bobbie put her hand on Naomi’s shoulder. “Take care of the kids until I get back.”
“I will,” Naomi said. “Good hunting.”
“Thanks,” Bobbie said. Katria stood aside and let the big woman pass. The emptiness on Bobbie’s face could have read as indifference to someone who didn’t know her. To someone who didn’t understand the kinship that Bobbie felt to Mars and its military, and to those who had served once and then been forced by conscience or circumstance to walk away.
“Bobbie,” Naomi said. “I’m sorry.”
Bobbie nodded. That was all. An acknowledgment that they both understood the situation, and would do what needed to be done. Katria plucked the toolbox up, and the two of them walked away down the corridor. Naomi closed the door behind them.
Back in her bunk and sleepless, she wondered what Jim would have done. Something idealistic and impulsive that would lead to more complications, probably. Certainly. And he would have done it in a way that kept that expression off Bobbie’s face if he could. Even if it meant doing something terrible to himself. Like languishing in a Laconian brig. An image came to her mind of Jim being tortured, and she pushed it away. Again. Feeling fear and sorrow would come later, when they were done. When he was back. There’d be time for it then. She didn’t manage actual sleep, but she was able to drift a little before the shift change. It was enough to let her feel rested, but not deeply.
She met Saba at the same public counter where they’d used the freezer, but this time they sat at the front like customers. The girl behind the counter turned up the music playing from her system speakers loud enough that they could barely hear each other, their words drowned in drums and strings and ululating voices. Saba looked as tired as she felt.
“Something happening back in Sol system,” he said. “Looks like the big fight. Not sure how it’s going to play.”
Half a dozen possibilities flashed through her sleep-starved mind ranging from the miraculously good to the catastrophically bad. It didn’t matter. Nothing that happened there changed what they were doing here. But Saba’s wife was there, back in the empty spaces where they’d all lived, once upon a time. She knew too well what that fear felt like.
“You have the list?” she asked.
Saba nodded and pressed a silver memory chip into her hand. “All the ships we could make contact with,” he said.
“How many?”
“Twenty-one.”
Naomi nodded. Twenty-one ships docked on Medina and waiting for their chance to load up and fly. It was more than she’d hoped for. It was also enough to pose some problems. “I don’t like having this many people knowing what’s going on.”
“It’s a risk,” Saba said, as if he were agreeing with something she’d said. “How does it make us for time?”
“If you don’t mind half of them vanishing in transit, we can go pretty fast,” Naomi said, more sharply than she’d intended. She shook her head, apologizing, but Saba ignored both the snappishness and the regret for it.
“Say we don’t. Everyone through the gates safe and sound. What does that look like?”
“I can’t know that until I look at the ship profiles. Mass, drive type, cargo. All of that’s going to make a difference.”
“Ballpark.”
“A hundred minutes. That’s conservative. I can probably find a way to make it less.”
The girl at the counter swung past, pouring fresh tea into their glasses. Tiny bits of mint leaf swirled in the reddish amber. Naomi took a sip while Saba scowled. “That’s a long time for the station’s eyes to stay blind. And a lot to lose if they find a way to put it back together.”
“Truth,” Naomi said.
Saba scratched his chin with the back of his hand. If they ever played poker together, it was a gesture she’d remember. His tell.
“Your technician. The one to break the system?”
“Clarissa.”
“Her, yeah. If she doesn’t do the thing and do it well, everyone on those ships is going to die from trusting me. Not disrespect, but it’s mine to say. Not sure she’s good for it.”
“Clarissa knows what she’s doing,” Naomi said. “She’s smart, she’s studied, and she knows this station. She broke it once already.”
“She’s as thin as wire,” Saba said. “I could blow her over from whistling.”
There was no humor in his face.
“I trust her with my life,” Naomi said. “No hesitation.”
“You’re asking me to trust her with more than that,” Saba said. “I don’t. Not that she doesn’t know, not that she’s unwilling or not to trust. But straight between us, sister. Putting all of us on one girl just this side of hospital? It’s not prudence.”
“I think you’re asking me for something.”
“You go with her,” Saba said. “Leave the prison work to me and mine. We’ll do that. You back up your crew.”
Naomi shook her head. “The prison’s mine,” she said. “Clarissa will do whatever needs doing. She’s got backup already. Jordao. Katria’s man. Unless you don’t trust him?”
“I don’t trust anyone,” Saba said. “Not him, not her, not you. But I work with what I have to work with, and I know you’re not going to run when things go harsh. Maybe Katria’s people will, maybe they won’t. You won’t. And … the sensors are more important than the prisons. We lose the prisons, we only lose the prisoners, savvy sa?”
He was right, and she knew it. Putting the success or failure of the mission in the hands of a medically fragile woman—however competent she was—and then not giving her the backup to deal with an emergent problem was bad practice. But in her imagination, Naomi saw the letters on her list as clearly as if she’d been reading them afresh. SAVE JIM. She shook her head. “Prison’s mine. Sensor arrays are hers. Won’t be a problem.”
Saba sighed as the music shifted key and tempo. A man’s voice growling like a bearing going bad lamented his own failings in a mix of Hindi and Spanish that she could almost follow. She looked Saba in the eyes until he looked away. “Work up a schedule, then. All the ship data’s on there. But do it fast. We have to distribute it by hand before we pull the trigger.”
“Two hours,” Naomi said. “I’ll have it ready.”
An hour later, there was still no word from Bobbie. No way to check in.
They waited in their bunks, the doors open on their little common hallway. Amos stood in the head, leaning against the sink with his arms crossed. Alex sat in the doorway of his cabin. Clarissa stretched out on the deck like a bored teenager waiting for the hours to pass until she could begin living. Her skin was unnaturally smooth and tight. It helped the illusion. Naomi sat on her bunk, hand terminal in her lap, and arranged the flight schedule while they talked.
“I don’t know,” Alex said. “I mean, sure, it’s a risk that there’ll be ships waiting on the other side of the gates. There have got to be some queuing up to get to Medina when they don’t think they’ll get shot at. But if we’re only looking at twenty-one ships?”
“I’m only lookin’ at one,” Amos said.
“So let’s say there’s two hundred ships waiting to come through,” Clarissa said, ignoring him. “High end of plausible, but what the hell, right? That’s eleven hundred gates with no one standing by close enough to get a really good look at whoever came through. That’s still a fifteen percent chance of getting seen.”
“That high?” Alex said. “You sure? I thought it’d be less than that.”
Naomi went through the data Saba had given her. The Old Buncome, a recent-generation transport ship with a high-capacity Epstein drive and a cargo hold full of refined titanium. The Lightbreaker, a three-generation-old yacht salvaged by a semigovernmental courier service. The Rosy Cross, a rehabilitated prospecting ship with five previous owners and a drive that leaked enough radiation to cook with. The Han Yu, a privately owned coyote with authorization to carry settlers to the colony worlds.
Each ship had its own specs, its own limitations. And each one would have an effect on the ring gates that could make the ship leaving after it vanish into wherever ships went when they went dutchman. Naomi knew the curve as well as she knew her name, and the hand terminal—limited as it was—had enough native computing power to lay that in. Writing a program to weigh all the variables, evaluate each ship, and create a best-speed model wasn’t hard, but it took time and focus. Neither of which she had in great supply.