“We’ve got something. I’ll report back,” Bobbie said, and dropped the connection. She waved the soldiers forward, switched to the group channel. “Hold this ground. Keep their eyes and attention here.”
“Sa sa,” one of them said. She didn’t know which. “How long we need to keep it?”
“Until I get back,” she said. Or for the rest of our lives, she added silently as she burned back toward the fallen boat.
The door had been blown completely off, and the hull was dinged to shit where they’d slammed it into the station. But she didn’t need it to be pretty. She just needed it to fly, and it could still do that, at least for a little while. When she lifted away from the surface of the station, a few of the enemy took shots at her. Pointless with normal arms. The hulls might be cheap-ass crap, but they were cheap-ass crap meant to live through micrometeor strikes. The roar of the engine was just a vibration in her suit. She was leaving her people behind, and it killed her a little bit to do it. But it was the right call. There wasn’t time to hesitate.
The station curve was so tight, she had to work to stay tucked in close to it. The rail guns knew about her now. If she poked her head up, they’d chop it off. She thumbed on the full sensor array as she sped, touring the station as quickly as she could. They’d circled the station like three belts around a basketball, a rail gun placed wherever the steel bands intersected. It wasn’t hard to find them. Each of them was radiating heat as quickly as it could, maxing out the IR sensors in a way she’d never seen. But one—the one opposite the Sol gate—looked a bit hotter. If there was a single main reactor, that was her best bet. She set the little boat’s course, overrode the proximity shutoff, and as soon as she felt it duck down in its final kamikaze burst, she undid her straps and jumped for the airlock.
If it had been a real drive, the plume would have killed her. Instead, every temperature alarm on her armor went off at once. Her faceplate went opaque. A seal in her arm popped, sucking the skin around her elbow painfully until the secondary inflated and pressed down. For one terrifying second, she drifted above the station, blind and vulnerable. When vision returned, she could see the white bubble of the enemy bunker, and the twinkle of their muzzles as they fired. Bobbie painted the bunker with her targeting laser and launched the rocket on her back while at the same time firing her suit’s thrusters toward the surface as fast as they’d take her. She hit the surface of the station harder than she’d meant to, jarring her teeth hard enough she tasted blood. There was one bright flash as the rocket detonated, but it was quickly overwhelmed by the second flash of their landing boat slamming into the rail gun’s reactor.
Her faceplate went opaque again, but instead of the midnight black she’d suffered in the fire of the drive plume, it glowed a mottled brown. The radiation monitor flashed a red trefoil alert at her. But what fed her raw, animal panic was the wind. A thin, fast whistle of gas rushed past her, pushed her off from the surface.
When, seconds later, the faceplate cleared, a glowing cloud was expanding out from just beyond the horizon, a nebula slowly going dark. The surface of the station wasn’t blue, but an angry acid green.
Oh, Bobbie thought as the station began to strobe green to white to black to green again. This might have been a really, really bad idea.
To her left and right, the steel bands around the station were wrong. At first, she wasn’t sure how, but then she made out the gap between the steel and the surface, like a ring a size too large for the finger it was on. She switched to magnetic and IR, but they’d both burned out in the backsplash from the reactor failure. The station shifted slowly back toward blue. She had the irrational sense that it was aware of her. That she’d annoyed it, and had its attention. She used the suit’s thruster and the thin microgravity drift to pull herself back down to the surface, half expecting it to grab her and haul her inside to be punished, but it didn’t.
Her radio was hardened enough to work. “This is Sergeant Draper,” she said. “Is the rail gun still firing?”
“THE FUCK DID YOU DO?” a man’s voice screamed, high and frightened. She cut off all their mics.
“That’s what I’m asking, soldier,” she said, then switched over to private. “Amos?”
“Don’t know what you did, Babs, but it fucked things up in all the best ways. Rail gun looks powered down, the few remaining assholes are pulling back toward assholeville, and I think these metal bands that everything’s stuck to are moving a little.”
“Yeah, I may have popped those loose.”
“Impressive,” Amos said. “Hey, look, I got to go shoot somebody.”
“No problem,” she said, and opened the channel to the Rocinante. “Okay. You guys still out there?”
“Bad guys are getting really, really close,” Holden said. “Tell me you have good news.”
“I have good news,” Bobbie said. “You can come through the ring. In fact, if you could get over here and get us some air support, it would be much appreciated.”
There was a general whooping, made strange and uneasy by the interference of the ring. Was it her imagination that it was louder now?
“You got them?” Holden said, and she could hear the grin on his face. “You took the rail guns? We control them?”
Her suit sensors showed the wall of steel nearest her was starting to shift. Just a few centimeters, but there was definitely movement. It was broken. It was all broken. The rail guns weren’t going to defend anyone anytime soon.
“We don’t,” she said. “But at least no one does.”
Chapter Forty-Six: Holden
“You know what I’d like?” Alex yelled down from the cockpit.
“If we could get out of here?” Holden yelled back.
“If we could get out of here. At this rate we’re going to be sitting here with our jumpsuits around our ankles when the bad guys get back,” Alex said. “There’s a reason they don’t call those things slow-attack ships.”
Even though Naomi was strapped into the couch beside Holden’s, she answered over the headsets so she at least wasn’t shouting about it. “The Giambattista’s a big ship, Alex. You’re just spoiled because you haven’t had to drive a cow like that in years.”
“Shit,” Alex said. “I could have spun the Canterbury around in half the time this is taking.”
Naomi’s sigh was as close as she was going to get to agreeing with them. “Well, you were good at your job.”
On the screen, the Giambattista slid slowly sideways toward the ring gate. The damage from the attack ships’ first run had done something to unbalance the maneuvering thrusters, so a lot of the piloting involved rotating the ship and then waiting until the working thrusters spun into the right position to fire. The plumes of the returning attack ships were already visible. It wouldn’t be long before the torpedo barrage would kick in again, unless the Free Navy was going for a wait-till-you-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes approach. The enemy had split, curving back toward them in an almost hundred-degree spread. It wasn’t quite as bad as it could have been. If they’d taken the time to bring their attacks from opposite directions, defending the Giambattista with the Roci would have been almost impossible. But it would also have taken enough time to play the vectors and get in position that the Giambattista would have cleared the ring gate before they arrived. It was like they were all being forced to find a min/max point in a complex curve of inertia, acceleration, and a lot of dead people.