“No, I mean, let’s try Luna first. It’ll be easy to find consulting gigs, what with all the work going on down on Earth.”
“I’m not sure I—” Holden started.
“Not you. Me. I could get consulting gigs. I like the gravity there. And you could pop down the well whenever you wanted to visit your parents.”
“True.” His parents were all pushing the centenarian mark, and while he’d been lucky and they were all in pretty good shape, he didn’t want them doing orbital launches to visit him if they could avoid it.
“And it’s all very far from this,” she said, pointing at her screen.
“Not a bad thing,” he agreed, and handed his filled-out screen back to the puffer. “But I did like the idea of living in exuberant decadence on Titan.”
“When we have enough money to do that for another three decades. Two hours,” Naomi said, and Holden didn’t need to ask what she was referring to. Two hours until the first representatives from Laconia to come through their gate in decades would arrive.
“We done here?”
The puffer agreed that they were.
“I could use a drink,” Holden said. “Let’s go get a drink and watch the big arrival on the screens in a bar or something.”
They did.
It didn’t go well.
Holden ran across the open fields of the rotating drum, heading toward the lift up to Medina’s command enter. The adrenaline pumping through his veins only seemed to make his heart beat faster without speeding him up. It occurred to him, with a sort of surreal detachment, that this was exactly like many nightmares he’d had. He reached the lift station, pressed the call button, and willed the doors to open.
Bobbie was yelling Fire, fire, fire on the Roci’s group channel, her voice coming out of his terminal loud, but not panicky. Commanding. On the screen, Alex was sending him the Roci’s tactical display. Three of the rail guns on the hub station fired at the massive Laconian ship. The shots all hit, tearing holes in the hull, but the breaches closed almost as fast as they were created. It didn’t look like damage-control systems. It looked like it was healing.
Holden had seen that sort of nearly instantaneous repair before. But not on human technologies. It took a really bad situation and made it a nightmare.
“Bobbie,” he yelled back at the terminal. “Keep the ship—”
He didn’t get to finish, because the screen flashed white and died. Medina actually shuddered. The entire station shook and rang like a bell.
“Jim,” Naomi said, and then couldn’t finish because she was still gasping for breath from their run. She made the Belter hand signal for emergency. Should we be looking for a shelter? It was a valid question. If the Laconians started poking holes in Medina, they’d want to be in a sealed emergency compartment with its own air supply.
“Go find one,” he said. “But I need to get up to command.”
“Why?”
Another valid question. Because I’ve fought in three major wars, he thought. Because the Belters running the station are the ones that didn’t join Marco’s Free Navy, so they’ve never been in this kind of fight. They’ll need my experience. All perfectly true and probably valid reasons. But he didn’t say them out loud, because he knew Naomi would see through them instantly to the truth. Because something terrible is happening, and I don’t know how not to be in the middle of it.
The doors finally opened, and the car recognized him as a captain with union clearances and gave him access to the overrides. As they went up, the feeling of gravity slowly turned into a lurching sideways motion and then disappeared. The lift opened onto corridors that Holden remembered fighting through under heavy fire, back when humans first found their way into the ring system. That astonishing moment in human history, passing through a stable wormhole into an alien-created network of interstellar gates, had just led to a whole bunch of people deciding to shoot each other. And now, a group of people who’d been isolated from humanity for decades were rejoining society just as things seemed to be going pretty well. And what did they do? Start shooting.
Holden’s terminal gave a gentle ping and then reconnected to the network. A moment later, Alex’s face appeared.
“You still there, Cap?”
“Yeah, just outside Medina ops. Did that thing hit the station? Not seeing any atmo-loss alerts here.”
“It shot the—” Alex started, then said, “It’s easier to show you. Take a look at this shit.”
“Just a minute.”
Holden slapped the wall panel, and the door slid open. He pulled himself inside the ops center.
The duty officer put up a hand. “You can’t come in here, sir. I mean, Captain Holden. Sir.”
“Who’s in charge right now?”
“Me?”
Holden had met her once before at a Transport Union function. Daphne Kohl. A competent technician. Somebody who’d done an engineering tour on Tycho. Perfect for noncombat ops duty on a station like Medina. Absolutely out of her depth now.
“Holden?” Alex said. “You still there?”
Holden turned his hand terminal so that the duty officer could see it too.
“Go ahead, Alex.”
On his hand-terminal screen, the massive Laconian ship was floating past the ring gate. It had a thick lozenge shape, not quite circular in cross-section, and with a variety of asymmetrical projections jutting out from the sides. More organic than constructed.
It came to a gentle stop just inside the ring gate. The Tori Byron, the Transport Union’s cruiser tasked with defending Medina Station, moved toward it. Holden couldn’t see or hear them, but he imagined the stream of hails and demands the Byron was throwing at the Laconian ship. Then, happening so fast it was like a glitch in the graphic, the Byron turned into a rapidly expanding cloud of superheated gas and metal fragments. In the playback, Bobbie was yelling, Fire, fire, fire, and the rail guns on the hub station opened up.
The image jittered, and the rail guns were ripped away from the hub and sent spinning off, fracturing into a cloud of ceramic shrapnel as they went.
“That’s what you felt,” Alex said. “The second time they fired that weapon, every ship in the zone shook, and half the electronics blew out.”
“What,” Holden said, “the fuck was that?”
Alex didn’t answer. His expression was as eloquent as a shrug.
“Okay, I assume Bobbie’s got you guys hiding in the station’s radar shadow still, since I’m talking to you and you’re not dead.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “She seems pretty strongly in favor of not doing anything to make it mad.”
“Let me see what we can find out here, and I’ll call back.”
“Copy that,” Alex said. “Roci out.”
“It’s … magnetic?” Naomi said, her tone managing to be authoritative and astounded at the same time. This is what it is, but I don’t believe what I’m seeing. She’d floated across the ops center to one of the consoles and was working with the tech there. “It’s reading as an incredibly strong magnetic field focused down to a narrow beam.”
“Is that possible?” the duty officer said, her voice small and tight.
“Only if you define ‘possible’ as things that have already happened,” Naomi said, not turning to look at her.
“So anything made of metal is vulnerable,” another tech said.
“It isn’t just metal,” Holden replied, then pushed off to drift over to Naomi’s station and look at the data she was pulling up.
“Everything has a magnetic field,” Naomi added. “Usually it’s too weak to matter. But at the levels that beam is hitting, it could spaghettify hydrogen atoms. Anything it touches will be ripped apart.”
“There’s no way to defend against something like that,” Holden said, then went limp. In microgravity, it was not as satisfying as collapsing into a chair would have been.
“That’s what shook Medina,” Naomi added. “Just the beam passing near us. The maneuvering thrusters had to fire to hold us still.”
“Holden, this is Draper,” his terminal said.
“Holden here.”
“Looks like that big bastard is ignoring us as long as we stay really still and keep the weapons unpowered.”
“That’s a good sign,” Holden said. “It might mean they’re not looking to kill everyone. Just making a point of destroying anything that’s a threat.”
“Point loudly and clearly made,” Bobbie agreed. “But be aware, there is a second ship. Smaller. And it’s heading for Medina.”
“Tactical assessment?”
“Based on how thoroughly they took out our defenses,” Bobbie said, “I’d bet they do a hard breach, storm ops and the reactor room, and grab full control of the station. If their ground troops have tech like that ship does, it shouldn’t take long.”
“Copy that. I’m going to try to minimize casualties down here. Wait for me to make contact. Holden out.”