“She’s just a kid, Holden. Whatever your plan is, she doesn’t have to be part of it.”
“I’m more part of her plan at this point,” he said.
“We have to go!” Teresa said. “We don’t have time for this. Muskrat! Shut up!”
The dog wagged, happily ignoring the order. Footsteps came from behind Elvi. Fayez, stumbling through the snow. A deep, rolling sound came from the north. The earth trembled, and the rail-gun flashes stopped. Without their voices, the night seemed weirdly silent.
“What’s going on?” Fayez said.
“I’m leaving,” Teresa said. “I’m trading their prisoner for a way out, and I’m leaving. His ship is coming for us right now, and we have to get to the rendezvous.”
“He tried to get you killed,” Elvi said. “You can’t trust him.”
“I can’t trust anyone,” Teresa said, and the weariness and bitterness in her voice belonged to a much older woman.
“No,” Holden said. “That wasn’t about Teresa. That was about you. Hey, Fayez.”
“Hey, Holden,” Fayez said, and dropped to his knees at Elvi’s side. Snowflakes landed on his hair and stayed there, unmelting.
“I don’t understand.”
“This has all been about you,” Holden said. “Literally from the minute I found out about the alien rip-in-space thing that showed up on the Tempest, I’ve been trying to get Cortázar out and you in his place. All this?” He gestured at the now-quiet sky. “I don’t know anything about it. I haven’t been in touch with anybody. None of it’s been me.”
Elvi shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“I got you the job,” Holden said. “I’m the one who told Duarte you’d been studying what killed the protomolecule engineers. And yes, I talked Cortázar into getting himself in trouble. And then I tried to rat him out. It was the only thing I could think of that Duarte would care about enough to get rid of his pet mad scientist. And since you were the expert, you’d get the promotion.”
The punch in her chest was betrayal. She felt betrayed. She’d seen Sagale and Travon die because of Holden. She’d almost lost her leg, almost lost her husband, suffered through everything because of him. “Why would you do this to me?”
“I wanted to get someone sane and rational in charge before Duarte did something stupid that we couldn’t take back.” He lifted his hands and then let them fall, a gesture of powerlessness. “I’m not sure it worked, but it was all I could do.”
Teresa stood up. Her black sweater was white with ice. “We can get through. The space is big enough. But the second I’m off the grounds, security’s going to know it. We can’t stop running once we start.”
Holden nodded, but his eyes were on Elvi. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Make up for it. We’re here. Take us with you. And in the other half of her mind, the labs. The pens. The Falcon and all the data she’d acquired with it, still waiting to be sifted through. Was Ochida going to take it up if she left? Would he be better than Cortázar?
Was there anyone, anywhere she’d trust with this more than she trusted herself? And the enemy—the deep enemy—had tried to hurt them already. Was looking for a way. Her leg throbbed like it was reminding her of the black things between the spaces. Was someone else going to stop them?
She looked at Holden’s face. He was one of those men who was going to look boyish until the day he died. Fuck you for putting me in this position, she thought. Fuck you for making this the right thing for me to do.
It wasn’t what she said aloud.
“Go.”
Chapter Forty-Seven: Naomi
Alex?”
“I see it,” he shouted. “What do we do?”
A wave of disorientation washed through her, like she had started floating again without having stopped the first time. The ship jumped and shuddered around her as she pulled up the record of Amos’ mission and cross-checked. It looked real. If it was false, it was convincing.
The plan was to hit the platforms and then burn hard to get away before the enemy forces could get back. She’d given them a wide window for it. Adding in a surface landing and extraction …
But if she didn’t, and Amos really was waiting. Or Jim.
“Naomi?” Alex asked again. “What do we do?”
“Take out the platforms,” she said. And then, “First. We take out the platforms first.”
“If we’re going to land, we have to slow down,” Alex said.
She needed time. She didn’t have it. The Roci shifted hard, then fell away, slamming her against her straps as their rail gun fired.
“Get me options,” she said.
“Coming up,” Alex said, and the thrust alert came on. They were flying into the enemy barrage, and she was slowing them down. “Ian! Tell the others to match my course. We’re putting on the brakes.”
She pulled up the tactical, and the drive came on, pushing her back into her couch and the coolness of the gel. She couldn’t tell if it was the evasive dodging or the changes in acceleration or her own sense of doom that left her feeling nauseated, but it didn’t matter. She pulled up the tactical display, ran it through the Roci’s system, and prayed to nothing in particular that a solution existed.
Their information on the defense grid was pieced together from Transport Union ships that had moved through the system. Five weapon platforms, flat black and resistant to radar. They were in higher orbits than the alien construction platforms, and spaced around the planet in a web that put any approaching ship in the sights of at least two and usually three. They were already firing at Naomi’s little strike force, and whatever technology they were using to compensate for the rounds they fired, it didn’t make a heat or light plume that she could use for targeting.
The construction platforms were closer to the planet, long and articulated, with filaments coming off of them like something in a microscope slide of contaminated water. They shimmered with light. There were five of those too, all of them in near-equatorial orbit.
The plan had been to approach with the ships close together so that they would all be covered by the same defenses and dilute the incoming fire between them. Then, when they were close, the Cassius and the Prince of the Face would split off, wrapping around the spinward side of the planet while the Roci and the Quinn cleaned up anti-spinward. Then they would all burn hard for the ring gate and the hundreds of systems beyond to hide in.
That had been the plan. Now it was the same, but slower. More time in the enemy crosshairs. Less chance of escaping unharmed.
Ian shouted over the din of PDC fire, drive resonance, and thruster burn. “Cassius is requesting permission to break off. They’re ready to make their run.”
“Confirmed,” Naomi shouted. “Let’s do this.”
“With them gone, the bad guys are going to have more guns for us,” Alex said. “We’re about to get real bumpy.”
“What the hell has it been up to now?” Ian asked.
“Walk in the park, kid,” Alex said.
On her tactical display, the Cassius turned, its drive plume leaning in toward the other three as it slid toward the far side of the onrushing planet. A few seconds later, the Prince of the Face did likewise. As they slid away, a new bloom of fast movers jumped up from the Laconian defenses.
“How many of these missiles can we take?” Naomi shouted, and a voice she didn’t know yelled back, PDCs at sixty percent as if that answered her question.