BE ADVISED THAT THE TEMPEST HAS BROKEN ORBIT AND IS MOVING TOWARD JUPITER.
“Well,” Alex said to himself. “Shit.”
“My little man’s getting married?” Bobbie said, but she kept looking at the supply crates while she said it. “Girl will be lucky if I don’t swoop in and carry him off first.”
The warehouse was on the edge of the complex. It didn’t use the station’s power grid, and the environmental system was a retrofit from an old rock hopper. It left condensation on the walls and ceilings, water discoloration like leopard spots. The larger gear, like torpedoes, was still on the Storm. But the smaller salvage from the Laconian freighter had been transferred onto four wide rows of pallets and moved to the warehouse. Bobbie had unpacked them, scattering the storage crates through the space as she did her own private inventory. Scorch marks darkened some of the boxes. The chalky smell of ceramic that had been heated until it flaked hung in the air.
“You’re taking the news that the largest battleship in the empire is heading toward us very calmly,” Alex said.
She took a deep breath, and kept her voice patient. “Jillian’s getting word to everyone. The Tempest is days out, and this work needs to be done one way or the other. I’m hoping by the time I’m done with it, I’ll have a plan.”
“How’s that working for you?”
“Nothing so far. I’ll let you know.”
Alex sat on one of the boxes. He felt heavier than the gentle gravity of the moon could explain. “Bobbie, what are we doing here?”
She paused, looked over at him. She had a lot of different expressions, and he’d come to know most of them. He knew when he was talking to his friend and when she was the captain. Right now, she was listening to him as the woman he’d been on the Roci with, back in the day. The one who had known him since before Io.
“Fighting the enemy,” she said. “Degrading their ability to bring force and influence to bear. Denying them the use of resources.”
“Sure,” Alex said. “But to what end? I mean, are we trying to get back to the Transport Union running things? Or are we trying to make it so that every planet is calling its own shots, and then seeing if it all works out?”
Bobbie crossed her arms and leaned against a stack of boxes. The work lights were harsh, and Alex could see all the roughness in her face and arms that decades of hard work and radiation had left. Age looked good on her. It looked right.
“I’m hearing you ask whether authoritarianism is necessarily bad,” she said. “Did I get that right? Because yeah, it is.”
“That’s not what I mean. It’s just … I don’t know what it is. I’m feeling overwhelmed. And maybe a little demoralized.”
“Yes,” Bobbie said. “Yes, we are.”
“You too?”
“We lost the target. That political officer might have given us something that could break these fuckers back to the Stone Age. I mean maybe not, but I’m not going to know now. So yeah, I’m a little grumpy. But I’m guessing that’s not exactly what’s biting you?”
“I don’t know what the win looks like.”
“Well, for me, it looks like dying with the knowledge that humanity’s a little bit better off than it would have been if I’d never been born. A little freer. A little kinder. A little smarter. That the bullies and bastards and sadists got their teeth into a few less people because of me. That’s got to be enough.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, but she kept going.
“I’m not a grand strategy girl. That’s for the eggheads. I’m a ground pounder, and I always will be. These people want every planet to be a prison where they get to pick who’s the guard and who’s the inmate.”
“And we’re against that,” Alex said. He heard the exhaustion and agreement in his own voice. “You ever think Naomi’s right? Maybe it’s better to try getting inside the system. Changing it that way?”
“She is right,” Bobbie said, turning back to her inventory. “It’s just I’m right too. Naomi wants there to be one way to fix this, and she wants it to be the one where there’s no blood.”
“But there’s two ways,” Alex said, thinking that he was agreeing.
“There’s no way,” Bobbie said. “There’s just pushing back with everything we’ve got and hoping we can outlast the bastards.”
“You know we’re on the clock here,” Alex said. “I’m thinking about Takeshi.”
“I sent a message to his people,” Bobbie said. “It’s always hard losing someone, and we’d been very lucky up to that point. It couldn’t last.”
“I’m thinking that he was one of your best, and he was damn near sixty. Jillian, Caspar, and a few others aside, our resistance is made up of old Belters. Old OPA.”
“Agreed,” Bobbie said. “And thank God for that. Most of them have a clue what they’re doing.”
“Behind them is a whole new generation who were never in the OPA. Never fought the inner planets for independence. Who grew up fat and rich on Transport Union freighters, with respect and important jobs. Kids like Kit. How are you going to convince them to give up everything they’ve got and join this fight?”
Bobbie stopped and turned to look at him.
“Alex, where is this coming from?”
“I think we have a resistance right now because we have a lot of old guys who grew up resisting an enemy too strong to ever beat. They’ve been inoculated against fear of failure. But when they’re gone, I think we’re done. As a movement. As a force in history. Because we’re not going to convince anyone born after the Transport Union was formed to fight an unwinnable fight. And maybe, in the long run, Naomi’s plan to win politically is all we’ll have left.”
He saw Bobbie’s eyes go flat. “Unwinnable fight?” she said.
“Well,” Alex said. “Isn’t it?”
Chapter Twelve: Bobbie
In unwinnable fight.
Alex was gone, heading back to the Storm to figure what exactly their evac options looked like. If they had any. What he’d said stayed after him.
The temporary warehouse their OPA friends had found for them smelled like burnt ceramics and old ice. Bobbie had been working in it long enough now that the smell didn’t trigger a gag reflex, so that was sort of a win.
She ticked off an entry on her supply list: twelve crates of Laconian fuel pellets. They’d been intended for the Tempest, but they’d work in the Storm too. And because the Laconian reactors seemed to want to use only their own brand of pellet, it meant her ship would get to keep flying for a while. Unless the Tempest shot them all into atoms. But the Storm didn’t have a lot of storage space. They’d need to make some decisions soon about how much of their stolen loot to carry with them and how much to hide or sell. Fuel, bullets, or food. The hierarchy of needs, wartime edition. And now, with a Magnetar-class dreadnought heading in their direction, the importance of every decision was even greater.
An unwinnable fight.
Bobbie had been at Medina Station when the Tempest came through the Laconia gate for the very first time. She’d watched it use its primary weapon on the rail-gun defenses, and turn them into spaghettified atoms in a single shot. And while she hadn’t been part of the defense of Sol system when the Magnetar-class battle cruiser made its attack, she’d read the reports. The combined might of the Earth-Mars Coalition hadn’t even been able to slow the Tempest down. She had no illusions that their one destroyer stood a chance. Run and hide was their only option now.