She remembered the young Marine she’d flirted with when the Laconians had first taken the station. She wondered if he was on one of the patrols walking above her now, the soles of his feet unknowingly against her own. Your turn now, my turn later, she thought. The seconds stretched. The temptation to shift her arms so she could look at the screen was almost irresistible.
The station hit the bottoms of her feet like a hammer. Her legs slammed into her chest, blowing the air out of her. One mag boot threw an error, but only for a second. Then it was done. She turned, walking fast toward the net. It wasn’t a low blister anymore. It was a hemisphere of debris and cables. Bent plating, shredded foam, and at the heart of it, trapped like two fish hauled out of a tank, human figures. Above her, the debris small enough to escape the net seemed to fly away from her, though it was really her spinning away from it.
“Hurry,” Katria said. “They’ll already be on their way.”
“I know,” Bobbie said.
At the net, they undid one of the pitons, opening it like the mouth of a tent. The gaping hole that led up into the station leaked water and coolant out, flying down past them as they hung. The nearer of the two bodies had taken the worst of the explosion. A crack along the collar and chest assembly. The inside of the helmet was a soup of blood. Bobbie wrestled the corpse closer, holding the arms and waist in a rescue hold while Katria fastened grips to the Laconian suit.
“Hold still,” Katria said. The low-power radio made her voice seem farther away than she was.
“I’m doing my best,” Bobbie said through clenched teeth.
“All right. He’s solid.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive,” Katria said, and disengaged the primary piton. The net pulled free and fell away below them into nothing. Bobbie turned, forcing herself back to the airlock. Her muscles were burning from the effort. Twenty years ago, they wouldn’t have been. The spin of the station made it feel like the dead Marine was pulling her down toward the depths, or else up into the emptiest sky in the universe. The power-armor helmet knocked against the back of hers. The dead arms and legs hung loose. Blood leaked from the crack in the chest plate.
“I hope this suit’s not too fucked up,” Bobbie said.
“Hope later,” Katria said. “Walk now.”
At the platform, Bobbie shifted her weight and the dead Marine’s with a cry of effort loud enough that Katria turned off her radio. She hung from her safety tether and motioned Bobbie up. There wasn’t room on the platform for all three of them. Bobbie didn’t even nod, just turned the controls, and the platform rose. While the air cycled in, she sat across from the armor. Her heart was pounding. Her muscles ached. She’d just killed two of the enemy. There would always be a little something—that tug on her humanity that came from doing violence. There was a satisfaction too. It didn’t mean she was a good woman or a bad one. It meant she was a Marine.
Somewhere in the station right now, security forces and maintenance techs were scrambling to figure out whether the hole in the station or the possibility of rushing into more bombs was the greater threat. By the time they came to a decision, she needed to be as far away from here as possible.
The inner airlock door cycled open, and she hauled the corpse up into the locker room before she cycled the airlock again for Katria to use. When she popped her helmet seals, the dead man stank of blood and overheated metal and the same kind of lubricant she used on Betsy’s joints.
She pulled the body into the large gray transport box, closed the lid, and triggered the seals. Whatever alerts, whatever alarms the power armor had been sending out were blocked now. Or if Saba was wrong, she and Katria would find out soon enough.
The airlock cycled open while Bobbie was pulling off her environment suit. Her jumpsuit was drenched in sweat. Katria undid the seals of her own helmet and slung it into the locker.
“You get the package to Saba,” Katria said.
“I know the plan. I’m on it,” Bobbie said. “And thank you. I know we didn’t get off on the right foot, your crew and mine.”
“No need for that,” Katria said, popping the seals on her suit with the speed of long habit. “Just get the work done.”
“Copy that.”
“You know, this is the second time we’ve played the same trick. Use the blast to hide what we really meant? The data center. Now the missing power armor they’ll all think is out there in the black?”
“If they think we have it, they’ll change the shut-down code before we can reverse engineer it.”
“I know why,” Katria said. “I’m saying don’t count on doing it again. Patterns get people like you and me killed. This strategy’s played out. If Saba thinks otherwise, he’s a fool.”
Bobbie popped the wheels on the transport cart out, extended the handle. It rolled easily. She wasn’t looking forward to pushing the damned thing through the public areas of the station to Saba’s rendezvous, but she also wanted to get out of here as quickly as she could. She forced herself to take one long, slow look at it before she opened the doors, though. In case there was blood on it.
“There won’t be a third time,” she said.
“You sure of that?” Katria asked.
“Positive,” Bobbie said. “You get your people, and you tell them to be ready. Cracking the code on this suit is the trigger. Two minutes after that happens, we’re all getting the hell off this station.”
Chapter Forty-Five: Drummer
Bright-green dots were blinking out. Not all at once, but enough to notice. A wave of darkness moving through the cloud of attacking ships. Drummer checked the timestamp, but there was no gap. Whatever the Tempest had done at Pallas, it still hadn’t repeated here. So what the hell was going on?
“Is it the Tempest? Is it firing?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the sensors tech said. “The missiles are coming from the Tempest. Yes.”
“How fucking many of them?”
The cloud of green, the orange dot, and now a new form. Red threads blooming out from the enemy, thick and ropey as a capillary map. The ship itself was lost in them. They reached out toward the EMC vessels. The union fighters. The void cities.
“That isn’t possible. That’s wrong,” Drummer said.
The Tempest hadn’t resupplied since it had come through the ring gate. It had been in a major engagement already. There was no way for what she was looking at to be real.
“The data is confirmed,” the sensor tech said. “Guard of Passage is reporting the same thing.”
“Get me Cameron Tur,” she said. “Or Lafflin.” Anyone who might be able to make the incomprehensible make sense.
“Should I continue to fire?” the weapons tech asked.
“Are we still in a fucking fight? Then yes, you should keep firing.”
Vaughn made a small, disapproving sound in his throat, but she was far past caring about the delicacy of his sensibilities. The red threads swam through the void. They only seemed slow on the display because the distances were so vast …
Here and there a thread died, a PDC round or a missile destroying the Tempest’s attack. But there were so many, and when even one slipped past the guard, another green dot blinked out. The green dots shifted, swirling in the display as the ships did in the darkness. A few dove toward the Tempest, moving almost at the same speed as the torpedoes. As gentle as it looked on the display, it was a killing burn. A suicide run for the crews of every ship that did it. More followed suit until dozens of ships were driving down toward the enemy.
It was a tactic of unspeakable bravery and desperation. Drummer didn’t notice that her hands were in fists until the ache caught her attention. She made her fingers open, looked at the little flaps of skin she’d carved off with her nails.
The suicide attack reached its peak. It reminded her of pictures she’d seen of cloudbursts over the deserts of Earth. Huge, angry clouds with numberless tentacles of gray falling from them. A torrent of water racing toward a parched landsca
pe, and evaporating again before a drop could darken the soil.
On the visual display, the bright, dancing veins on the Tempest were fading, and now that she knew to look, Drummer could see tiny openings along the sides of the ship opening and closing like pores. The lights of the missiles’ drive plumes were like blue fireflies.
“How can they do that?” she whispered past the tightness in her throat.
“I have Cameron Tur,” the communications tech said.
The camera made his face even longer than it seemed in person. The light shone in his eyes.
“Where the fuck are you?” Drummer snapped. “Are you seeing this?”
There was almost no lag before he answered. He was close, then. One of the escape ships. “I don’t understand. The number of missiles they’ve fired … that they’re firing. These can’t be normal devices.”
On the display, the last three suicide attackers blinked out. If the Tempest moved to avoid the debris fields, it wasn’t enough to register at this scale. It looked as though the enemy wasn’t even bothering to evade anymore.
“The first battle, we wanted to learn from them,” Tur said, talking fast and not looking directly at the camera. “I mean, we wanted to win. Of course we wanted to win, but we didn’t expect to. The data—how we lost—was as important as stopping them.”
“Tur?”
“Maybe they were learning from us too. Maybe they recalibrated something about the regrowth of the ship. Or the missiles.”
“They survived a direct nuclear strike,” Drummer said. “Are you telling me that’s something they can just do?”
“Apparently?” Tur said. He licked his lips anxiously. “We knew from the moment they stripped the rail guns off the ring station that they are capable of focusing and directing incredible sources of power. Things we’ve only ever seen on celestial levels. Collapsing stars.”
“Collapsing stars? We’re fighting a supernova in the shape of a ship? Why the hell didn’t you see this coming?” She was shouting. Her throat hurt with it.
Tur blinked and his jaw shifted forward. He would have looked like a man spoiling for a fight if it hadn’t been for the tears on his cheeks. She didn’t think those tears had anything to do with her raising her voice. “Ma’am, that ship stripped Pallas Station down to something less than atoms. It shut down consciousness throughout the system in a way that I don’t have the structural language to explain, and it seems pretty fucking unimpressed by the idea of locality. It’s affecting the nature of vacuum through the whole solar system. If you didn’t know we were punching above our weight here, I’m not sure what I could have said to clarify that.”
“There is a way to beat them,” Drummer said, “and we are running out of time. Find me how to win this, and do it now.”
She cut the connection before he had the chance to reply. Silence filled the control room. No one was looking straight at her, but she felt their attention like a weight. All the time she’d spent resisting the pressure to make the Transport Union into a police force—into a military—and here she was anyway.
“Mister Vaughn?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Find me whoever is in command of the EMC wing of the fleet. I need them now.” Whoever’s still alive, she thought, but didn’t say.
“Yes, ma’am.”
The weapons tech’s voice shook. “Should we—”
“Keep firing,” Drummer said.
Drummer felt a heat in her chest. A rage and a certainty. This was the moment that tested everything she’d meant to be. This was what it was to be a leader in a time of crisis. She felt the power of it, the raw will to succeed. To devastate and end the people who would destroy her and the systems she embodied. She rose to her feet, her hands behind her, and she knew that everyone in the control room who looked at her would see nothing beyond her superhuman resolve. Not even Vaughn.
And she knew it for the hollow mask that it was. How fragile.
“Guard of Passage is reporting a missile strike that got past their PDCs,” Vaughn said. “They’re requesting permission to withdraw.”
“We can’t run away,” Drummer said. “If we break now—”
People’s Home shuddered. A sound like the wail of a demon rattled up from the deck, bellied out from the bulkheads, rained from the ceiling. She waited for the wide, low hiss of escaping atmosphere. The fading of screams as the air became too thin to carry them. Instead, Klaxons blared.
She held her voice as steady as she could. “Report?”
“We’re hit,” the sensors tech said. “Something hit us.”
“Do we know what?” Drummer said.
“Rail gun,” Vaughn said. “Appears to have impacted section twelve, just spinward of the medical facilities.”
“How bad’s the damage?”
“I’ll let you know as I have reliable information,” he said. “Still trying to identify the chain of command with the EMC.”
Which meant they were in disorder. She wondered whether the band of suicide ships had been led by some admiral bent on making their last stand count for something. People’s Home bucked again, then twice more.
“Engineering’s been hit,” Vaughn said. “The reactor’s … I can’t tell. Something’s wrong with the reactor.”
If the magnetic bottle failed, it would be like a low-yield nuke going off. Even if it didn’t crack the city open like an egg, the systems that kept them all alive would be melted and fused. And the prospect of aid ships reaching them in the chaos of the battle were low enough to pass for never.
“Drop core,” Drummer said.
Vaughn didn’t reply, but the thrust gravity stopped. Drummer grabbed the edge of her crash couch and dragged herself back into it, strapping down with the ease of a lifetime’s habit. The automated emergency report showed long swaths of the city under lockdown, pressure doors isolating levels and halls. Keeping the air in the city as best they could. If she hadn’t sent away as many nonessential personnel as the ships would hold, it would have been worse. As it was, it still meant deaths. People who’d trusted the union elections to put someone in charge who would protect them. How many of them were dead now who’d been alive an hour ago? And how many more seconds before the next round came? It was like someone else’s thought dropped into her own brain.
A sickly calm washed over her. This was what it felt like to see death. To know that the worst was coming, and there was nothing she could do to turn it aside.
“Keep firing,” she said. If we’re going down, let’s go down swinging.
The weapons tech coughed out something between laughter and despair. “We are dry on rail-gun rounds. We are at six conventional plasma torpedoes, and five percent on PDC.”
Fire anyway, Drummer thought. Throw everything at them. Except that if the Tempest threw a missile at them, there would be no defense. Drummer closed her eyes. The temptation was still there. If it meant that she died—that all the men and women under her command died with her—at least it would be over. She wouldn’t wake up in a wave of dread. She wouldn’t watch the structures she’d sworn to protect be peeled away by a threat she hadn’t considered worth thinking about until the Tempest had flown through Laconia gate.
Come on. There has to be a way. Think of it. Find it.
“Should I maintain fire?” the weapons tech asked.
Drummer didn’t open her eyes. The moment stretched. “No,” she said. “Shift to defensive fire only. We can’t shoot down rail-gun rounds, but we can hold their missiles off.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the weapons tech said. She could hear the relief in his voice. She wondered if he would have thrown away the last scrap of protection on her order. And she wondered whether she’d have done it, in his position. Maybe.
“I have a connection to Colonel Massey,” Vaughn said.
“Who?”
“Commander Fernand Massey. Of the Arcadia Rose, ma’am. He’s in command of the EMC ships.”
“I’ve never heard his name bef
ore,” Drummer said.
“No, ma’am,” Vaughn said. All the admirals were dead. All the people she might have known. As ruined as People’s Home was, the fleet was in tatters. Her tactical display listed the ships disabled or dead. There were so many. A quarter of the combined fleet incapacitated or destroyed. They’d thrown everything at the Tempest. A wall of tungsten and explosives. And the enemy was still under thrust. Still firing.
It had all been a show. She’d known that. The Tempest’s intentionally predictable approach to Earth and Mars. Letting the EMC and union prepare themselves. She’d thought it was just a way to erode their morale, but it was more than that. She saw it now. They’d known that they would win, so they’d invited the enemy to make the strongest showing it could. That way, when victory came, it would be unequivocal.
“Ma’am,” Vaughn said.
“Yes, fuck it. Fine. I’ll talk to him.”
“No, ma’am. There’s a new message for you. A tightbeam from the Tempest. It’s listed as ‘command to command.’”
Something twisted in her gut. Part despair and part relief. If they were sending messages, maybe they weren’t sending nukes. At least not until she’d had the chance to hear what they had to say.
She undid her restraints and launched herself to a wall handhold. Her crash couch hissed and spun on its gimbals. “Route to my office, please,” she said, as if it were a normal message on a normal day and not the dividing line between living under a conquering boot and dying before the end of shift.