The plan was simple. The Azure Dragon wasn’t a gunship, but a geological surveyor. The protection she had was that space was vast, the ship was small, and her orbit kept her far enough away from Earth and Luna that she could burn hard back out to the Belt or the Jovian moons if anyone started coming for her. All of her active systems—transponder, radar, ladar, radio—were shut down to keep her from announcing herself. She couldn’t stop the light from bouncing off her hull, and she couldn’t hide her waste heat, but she could run as quietly as possible. It limited her to passive sensors and tightbeam. Enough for her to do the work of coordinating the stones thrown at Earth, but still half-blind.
And that was what Bobbie was counting on.
They’d laid in a course that would put them close to the Azure Dragon, then arranged for a shifting of the combined fleet that would hide the flare of their burn. It was a balance of getting to the enemy quickly but not being able to make the classic halfway-point flip-and-burn. They only built up enough velocity that they could shed it when they got close, and then the Roci went dark and drifted. With no active sensors, the Azure Dragon would have to see them visually—a tiny point in the vastness—and identify them as a threat without radar or ladar.
And they would, eventually. But by then, if it all went the way Bobbie intended, it wouldn’t make a difference.
It was a slower approach than Holden remembered making to anything in all the time they’d had the Roci, and it left him antsy and impatient.
The voices came from the lift: Bobbie serious, sharp, and professional; Amos cheerful and amiable. They floated up into the deck, first Bobbie and then Amos. Bobbie grabbed a handhold and pulled herself to a stop. Amos tapped the deck with his ankle as he passed it and killed his own momentum by planting his feet on the ceiling and absorbing it with his knees. He floated upside down. The Roci usually ran at less than full g to conserve reaction mass and for Naomi’s benefit, but they almost always had a consistent down. Going totally on the float was weird.
“How’s it going?” Bobbie asked.
Holden gestured at his screen. “Nothing new. It doesn’t look like they’ve noticed us yet.”
“Their reactors are still down?”
“The heat signature’s just sitting there.”
Bobbie pressed her lips together and nodded. “That’s not going to last much longer.”
“We could shoot ’em,” Amos said. “It ain’t my call, but in my experience the guy that throws the first punch usually wins.”
“Show me the estimated range,” Bobbie said. Holden pulled up the passive sensor array. At roughly five million klicks out, the Azure Dragon was about ten times as far from them as Luna was from Earth. It probably wouldn’t crew more than a dozen people. In the infinite star field, it would have been invisible to the naked eye. Even if the enemy had been on a full burn, the exhaust plume would have only been one point of light among billions. “How accurate is that?”
“I’m not sure,” Holden said. “Normally we’d be using ladar.”
“Give it ten percent either way,” Naomi said. “At this range and scale, passive sampling errors expand pretty fast.”
“But with the ladar?” Bobbie asked.
“Within a meter,” Naomi said.
“You ever think about how much ammo’s flying around out there?” Amos said, reaching up to brush the floor with outstretched fingers. The contact started him drifting almost imperceptibly toward the ceiling and at the same time rotating back toward consensus upright. “Figure all those PDC rounds that didn’t actually hit something; most of the rail-gun rounds, whether they went through a ship or not. All out there someplace going at the same speed as when they left the barrel.”
“If we shoot them, they’ll still look for who did it,” Naomi said.
“Might not,” Amos said.
Naomi looked at Bobbie. “We’re going to have to start a braking burn soon or we’ll skin right past them.”
“How long?” Bobbie asked.
“Three hours,” Naomi said. “Anything more than that, and we’ll need to go on the juice or risk the deceleration g popping a bunch of blood vessels we’d rather keep whole.”
Bobbie tapped the tips of her right middle finger and thumb together in a rapid stutter. When she nodded, it was more to herself than to them. “Screw this. I’m tired of waiting. I’ll go wake Alex up. Let’s get it over with.”
“All right, boys and girls,” Alex drawled. “Everybody strapped in and ready?”
“Check,” Holden said on the open channel, and then listened as the others reported in. Including Clarissa Mao. It was an illusion built from anticipation, but Holden felt like the lights were a little brighter, as if after weeks in dock, the Roci was excited to be doing something important too.
“Reactor’s good,” Amos reported from the machine deck.
Alex cleared his throat. “All right. We’re good to go in ten … nine …”
“She’s seen us,” Naomi said. “I’ve got action from her maneuvering thrusters.”
“Fine, then. Three-two-one,” Alex said, and Holden fell back into his crash couch hard. The gel pressed in around him, and the ship rumbled the deep bass of the drive as it spilled off speed. To the Azure Dragon, it would be like a bright new star had appeared. A supernova light-years away. Or something less dangerous but much, much closer.
“Ladar’s up,” Naomi said. “And … I’ve got lock.”
“Is their reactor up?” Holden asked, at the same time that Bobbie said, “Give me fire control.”
Naomi answered both. “Their drive’s cycling up. We probably have half a minute. You have control, Bobbie.”
“Holden,” Bobbie snapped, “please ring the doorbell. Alex, surrender maneuvering to fire control.”
“Done,” Alex said.
Holden switched on the tightbeam. The Roci found a lock at once. “Azure Dragon, this is the Rocinante. You may have heard of us. We are on approach. Surrender—”
Thrust gravity cut out and their crash couches hissed as the ship spun on two axes.
“Surrender at once and prepare for boarding.”
Naomi’s voice was calm and focused. “Enemy reactor is coming up.”
The ship seemed to trip, throwing Holden and Naomi up against their straps. The keel-mounted rail gun pushed the whole ship backward in a solid mathematical relationship to the mass of the two-kilo tungsten round moving at a measurable fraction of c. Newton’s third law expressed as violence. Holden’s gut knotted and he tried to lean forward. The long seconds dragged.
Naomi made a small, satisfied sound in the back of her throat. “Okay, their reactor’s shutting down. They’re dumping core. We’re not seeing nitrogen in the plume. I don’t think they’ve lost air.”
“Nice shooting,” Amos said on the open channel.
“God damn,” Bobbie said as the Roci shifted back. “I have missed the hell out of this.”
Thrust gravity returned, pushing Holden back as they slowed toward the drifting science ship. It was harder now—a solid two g he could feel in his jaw and the base of his skull.
“Please respond, Azure Dragon, or we’ll shoot you some more,” he said.