The Giambattista’s main drive fired, the plume dwarfing the ship, and Alex crowed in celebration.
“About time,” Naomi said. “I’m matching course. We’ll be through in twenty minutes.”
Holden opened a connection to Bobbie. The seconds stretched out long enough that he started to feel his gut tighten. The connection came through, dropped, then reestablished just as Naomi said, “One of them’s burning to pass through the gate with us.” He’d get right back to that.
“We’re looking at twenty minutes to get through the gate. Where do you stand?”
The weird interference of the gates made her reply thick and creepy. She was breathing hard, and until there were words with it, he was picturing her gut-shot and on the float. Or drifting down onto the surface of the alien station. He was reaching to switch over to Amos when she spoke.
“Amos’s holding position against the enemy,” she said. “I’m almost back to them. Suit ran out of propellant mass, so I’m hoofing it with the mag boots.”
“You’re running back to the fight?”
“Well, call it a fast shuffle,” Bobbie said between breaths, “but it’s fine. They put in. A big metal road. Goes right to ’em.”
“Okay. We’ll get some backup to you as soon as we can. Just don’t get killed before we get there.”
“No promises, sir,” Bobbie said, and he would have sworn from her voice she was smiling when she said it. A blast of static, and the connection dropped.
“Okay,” Holden said. “What have we got?”
“They’re both shooting at us,” Naomi said.
“You sound calm about that.”
She looked over at him. Her smile was sudden and bright and made his heart ache a little bit. “It’s all Hail Mary bullshit. It’s not even an attack so much as an opportunity to let us screw up.”
“Okay. So, not worried about that. What are we worried about?”
Naomi flipped the drive analysis of their pursuers over to his monitor. The nearer of the ships had altered its path, and the projected curve put them through the ring and into the slow zone five minutes after the Roci and Giambattista made the transit. They weren’t breaking off. That was too bad.
“Do we have a plan for dealing with that?”
Alex answered over the ship comm. “I’d vote for shooting them.” And a moment later, Clarissa, “Seconded.”
Holden nodded to himself. It still felt weird hearing her. Maybe it always would.
“Okay, let’s lay in a targeting solution.”
“Did it while you were talking to Bobbie,” Naomi said.
The PDCs chattered for a moment, then went silent. Cleaning up the Hail Mary attacks. Holden rubbed his hands on his thighs. Tapped his fingers together. Pulled up the tactical to see the ring and the alien station, Medina and the fast-attack ships.
“We’ll have enough to defend everything even if both ships follow us in, right?”
“Hush,” Naomi said.
Looking through the exterior cameras, the ring seemed to wipe away the stars as they passed through it. Alex did a short, hard braking burn, turning their nose toward the gate and the narrowing circle of stars beyond it. The Giambattista twisted and burned and twisted again, its remaining hatches opening. Pinpoint drive plumes streaked out from it, less than fireflies compared with the wide, glowing burst of the hauler’s Epstein drive. Holden watched as a handful, and then a dozen, and then a hundred poured down toward Medina. The OPA coming to finish the job. The remaining landing boats spread out, a wide, diffuse target. At this distance, Medina’s PDCs were useless, and the Roci could probably take out any torpedoes. But even if they did fire, they’d only take out a handful of soldiers and leave an army still behind.
He tried opening a tightbeam to the incoming attack ship, but the interference from the ring was too thick, so he switched to broadcast. “Attention incoming attack ship,” he said. Naomi looked over at him, a question in her eyes. Not concern or worry, though. She trusted him. “This is James Holden of the Rocinante. Please break off your approach. We don’t have to do it this way.”
He waited. The tactical display was thinner than it had been. All they knew of what was happening in the solar system was what leaked through the gate. The Free Navy’s attack ship didn’t answer, but dove toward them.
“He ain’t thinking this through, Hoss,” Alex shouted down. “What do you want me to do?”
“Give them a chance,” Holden said.
“And if they don’t take it?”
“Then they don’t,” Holden said.
The ring grew smaller as they fell away from it, like looking up at the circle of a well from down in the water. The attack ship was braking hard toward the ring. Just as the first of the Giambattista’s second-wave ships were about to reach Medina and the alien station, the attack ship passed through the ring, launched a half dozen torpedoes, and exploded in a star-bright failure of their drive’s magnetic bottle when Alex fired the Roci’s rail gun through it. Holden watched in silence as the expanding cloud of gas that had been a ship full of men and women spread out and began to fade.
He tried to feel some sense of victory in it, but mostly it just seemed absurd. The slow zone, the gates, even the merely human ships that had carried them out so far. They were miracles. The universe was filled with mysteries and beauty and awe, and all that they could manage to do with it was this. Chase each other down and see who was the faster draw.
Everything in the slow zone—the Giambattista, its cloud of attack boats, Medina Station, the Rocinante—seemed to pause for a moment. A connection request from Bobbie interrupted him, and he accepted it.
“We’re secure down here,” Bobbie said. She was still breathing hard. “Enemy has surrendered.”
“We took them alive?”
“Some of them,” Amos said.
“They put up a hell of a fight, even after it was hopeless,” Bobbie said. “We lost some too.”
“I’m sorry,” Holden said, and was a little surprised to notice how much that was true. Not just something you said at times like this. “I wish there’d been another way.”
“Yes, sir,” Bobbie said. “I’m going to oversee putting the prisoners in a transport. But there’s something you should know.”
“Yes?”
“These aren’t Free Navy down here. The people defending the rail gun network were Martian.”
Holden let that sink in. “The ones from the coup? Duarte’s people?”
“They’re not saying anything, but that’s my assumption. This could be important.”
“See they’re kept safe and treated well,” Holden said.
“Already on it,” Bobbie said and dropped the connection.
Holden shifted his monitor to the exterior cameras and shifted the view until he could see the Giambattista, the alien station, and—far enough away that it hardly seemed like more than a shaving of metal, invisible without the Roci enhancing it—Medina Station. He folded a hand over his mouth, turned on identification markers for all the landing skiffs and jerry-rigged boats, watched the display vanish under the cloud of pale green text, turned them off again and stared into the blackness. His eyes felt gritty. It was like all the anxiety and tension that he’d built up during the burn out to the ring had collapsed. Turned into something else.
“You all right?” Naomi asked.
“I was thinking about Fred,” he said. “This? It’s what he did. Lead armies. Take stations. This is what his life was like.”
“This is what he retired from,” Naomi said. “When he decided to start trying to get people to talk things out instead of shooting people, this is what he left behind.”