The weapons of the suit clicked out of safe mode, a sound that also echoed around the room. The guards shot nervous looks at each other.
“Fleet Admiral Trejo,” Jillian Houston said, breaking first, “guaranteed us that if we gave you the girl, all Laconian forces would withdraw from the Freehold system without further attacks. We have his word on it.”
Tanaka chinned the external speakers back on. “I’m not seeing Teresa Duarte. Where is she?”
“Before I hand her over, I need more than vague assurances that you are acting in good faith.”
“Moving the goalposts?” Tanaka said.
“I need more than assurances,” the Houston girl repeated. Apparently they’d gotten to the end of her script.
“Where’s Nagata?”
“Excuse me?”
“The admiral made his offer to Naomi Nagata. You aren’t her. Teresa Duarte’s not here. What’s really going on?”
Houston lifted her chin like Tanaka had accused her of something. “Naomi Nagata is in operational control of the civilian action of the underground. As the commander of the Gathering Storm, military decisions fall to me—”
“Bullshit.”
“I don’t care for your tone of voice.”
This was the moment. Playing it safe hadn’t worked in New Egypt. Life was risk, and the fact that even if it all came down poorly, there could be no consequences for her personally was a little intoxicating.
She wasn’t going to shoot the Duarte girl. They weren’t likely to do it. The only danger was an accident, and even if the girl did take a bullet, there was a percentage of those wounds she could recover from.
And once the shooting started, they might try to evac the prisoner, in which case she had two ships ready to disable the enemy. Flushing Teresa out of the base was probably the safest way for her.
She realized she’d taken a long time responding. Jillian Houston’s heart rate was ticking up with her anxiety.
So this was it. Play nice with the enemy, or do the obvious thing.
“You know, we’ve got some of those suits,” Jillian said, pointing at her armor. “We aren’t wearing them as a sign of good faith.”
“Wouldn’t matter if you were.”
Fuck it.
“All right,” Tanaka said, locking eyes with each of her four guards in turn and using the touchpads in her gloves to target them. “I’ll just go get her myself.”
“No—” Jillian started.
Tanaka said, “Go loud.”
The left and right arms of her suit snapped up into firing position much faster and more accurately than if she’d been driving them manually. The second the weapons were lined up on the outer two guards, they fired a short five-round burst that blew their heads off. Her arms snapped to the second position and fired a second time. The two people standing next to Jillian Houston disappeared from the chin up. The entire process took less than a second and a half.
Smoke filled the room, and the roar of the guns was still bouncing around the space when Jillian Houston spun on her heel and pushed off, flying down the corridor behind her. Tanaka watched her go. She could have turned the woman into a dancing bloody rag doll a hundred times over in the time it took for her to flee.
“Track her,” she told the suit, and Jillian Houston’s rapid heartbeat got a special tag on her HUD. If Houston was in charge of the base, she’d know exactly where the girl was. Teresa Duarte’s value as a hostage was the only thing that might keep any of them alive. In the meantime, Tanaka had other business she could do.
She used the suit’s mag boots to keep her secure to the floor as she casually strolled down the corridor following Houston. All around her the heartbeats of the station’s denizens were running around and speeding up as the panic spread. That was fine. It wasn’t like her plan relied on secrecy. Let the revolutionaries prepare. Let them arm up and dig in. None of it would matter. They could have the courageous last stand all the romantics craved. It would still be a last stand.
She moved into a corridor junction, and her suit blatted an alarm tone at her microseconds before a barrage of gunfire hit her on the left side. The suit marked three targets, all using light automatic weapons and hiding behind improvised cover. Tanaka tapped a pad in her glove and the left arm of the suit snapped around and fired three times. Three shredded bodies drifted out from behind their cover, spraying globes of arterial blood into the air.
The ammo counter for the left gun went down by another fifteen rounds. Tanaka noted this without concern. Full ammo packs on both guns. Plenty for everyone. And if not… Well, the alternative was messier but it had its charms.
“In New Egypt, we could have done this easy,” she said, imagining Nagata and Holden and their crew. “This is what you picked.” She smiled while she said it, the tightness in her wounded cheek pulling it into a lopsided grimace. It didn’t hurt much.
Corridor by corridor, meter by meter, Tanaka moved through the station. She headed toward the large clumps of heartbeats first. Hoping that the center of the largest resistance would be the heroes of the Rocinante, but it never was. The resistance fighters were tenacious and brave, Tanaka would give them that. They came at her with little regard for their own safety, and some of the counterattacks had a real cunning to them. Though, given that her rampage had left little indication surrendering would lead to safety, she’d have been doing exactly the same thing in their situation. And everywhere she went, the seventy-meter range of her heartbeat detector found new pockets of people, hiding or preparing to fight. One by one, she went to them all, offering them amnesty if they put down their guns and turned over the girl. Not that she expected them to. Not that she’d necessarily stop shooting if they did.
Tanaka realized she’d lost track of Houston’s heartbeat. It gave her a moment of pause, but only a moment. She was concentrating on the map layout in her HUD, looking for possible ship docking points, when she rounded the corner into the base’s single largest pressurized room. A massive warehouse space, over a hundred meters on a side and a dozen meters high. The room was filled with racks of supplies and ship parts. The secret treasure trove of the revolutionary underground. All of it stolen from Laconia.
The suit warned her that three people were moving up behind her, and when she glanced at the warning it popped a rear view up on her screen. Three Belters were maneuvering what looked like a tool cart laden down with a massive compressed-gas tank. She was just starting to turn when one of the Belters hit the rear of the tank and it launched at her like a battering ram.
Oh, she thought as it picked her up off her feet, an improvised missile.
She only blacked out for a moment, but when she came to, her suit was blaring half a dozen alarms at her. She was embedded a good half meter into the foam-covered wall of the warehouse. The improvised missile oxygen tank was holding her upright, still pressed against her chest.
The suit warned her that it had lost secondary actuator control for her upper torso, and 30 percent of the reserve battery power before the system had rerouted to stop the leak. She also had four broken ribs and a dislocated left shoulder. She chinned the medical override and had the suit shoot her full of painkillers and amphetamines. She felt a surge that was almost like pride in her opponents. Nice job, little bunnies. Good try.
The three Belters were cautiously approaching. She hadn’t moved since their missile hit, and they were undoubtedly hoping it had finished the job. One of the three had a portable plasma torch in his hand. To cut her out of the suit and make sure, she guessed.
“RPG,” she said, locking her eyes on the middle man. The suit raised the launcher up over her shoulder and took aim. The three Belters only had a moment to register a look of surprise before a twenty-millimeter rocket-propelled grenade struck the man in the center and turned into a cloud of shrapnel that would kill anything within ten meters.
Some of the shrapnel sprayed across her breastplate and visor, with a sound inside the suit like hail hitting a metal roof. A half second later, the shrapnel was followed by a spray of blood and viscera.
“Motherfuckers,” Tanaka said, then used the right arm of her suit to shove the oxygen tank away from her chest. Its mass was significant, but the suit was up to the challenge, and a few moments later she was back on her own two feet, pain-free and jittery from the drug cocktail in her veins.
“I’ll make you a deal,” she yelled out, turning the suit’s speakers up so high that anyone in the warehouse space with her would probably suffer permanent hearing loss. “The person who brings me Teresa Duarte lives. They’re the only one who gets to walk out of this place in one piece. So if you have her, you’d better be the first to show up with the girl in your hands.
“Because everyone else here is going to die.”