“Fuck you,” Drummer said to the screen, but not softly enough that Admiral Hu didn’t chuckle. It was only ten seconds before the answer came. God, that’s how close the distant war ships all were to each other. Light-seconds.
Emily Santos-Baca, the ranking board member who lived on Independence. Her hair was pulled back in a tight braid in preparation for null g. Or it had been an hour and twenty-three minutes ago.
“Admiral Trejo,” Santos-Baca said, “on behalf of the Transport Union and the Earth-Mars Coalition, I am informing you that your presence in Sol system is a violation of territorial space and is being considered an act of war. Your ship will brake immediately and return to Laconia until appropriate contracts and diplomatic resolutions are in place.”
They were reports from two competing realities. Drummer wished that Santos-Baca’s sounded more plausible. The icons that marked the EMC ships were like dots drawn on the skin of a balloon, the Tempest moving in like a pin. It couldn’t be long. Couldn’t have been.
“The dispersal,” Hu said. “You see that? The way they’re spread out? That’s based on the Medina data your people sent. The spread of that magnetic whatever-the-hell-it-was. We placed the ships so that no matter which one it aims at, it won’t be able to get two. Good, eh?”
“Excellent,” Drummer said. Her throat was dry, but the smell of the tea was a little nauseating.
“The range of it can’t be good either,” Hu said. “The science wonks say the power curve would be logarithmic. Remaining at range should force the bastards to use any other weapons systems they have. Assuming that the magnetic cannon even works in normal space. Because there’s at least one idea that it’s using special properties that only exist in the ring space. And if that’s the case—”
“Gloria.” The old woman’s voice was like a knife. “You’re doing it again.”
Admiral Hu glanced back at Avasarala. Drummer hadn’t heard her approach, but there she was. Her smile was indulgent and warm and, Drummer had to assume, utterly false.
“Gloria is a good warrior, but she gets chatty when she’s nervous.”
“We’re seeing fire,” one of the analysts said. His voice was as calm and businesslike as a surgeon announcing a bleeder.
The display shifted. The EMC ships and Independence were still there, but backgrounded as the focus changed to swarms of missiles pouring out toward the Tempest. Each one burned hard enough that a human body would have been pulped by the g forces, and they barely seemed to move. The distances they traveled were vast. Even at their speed, three million klicks was a long time. Verbal threats that took seconds at lightspeed followed by punches that would take minutes or hours. Even without the warheads, the kinetic force of the torpedoes would be massive. If they hit. The swarm crept forward, pixel by imperceptible pixel. Drummer waved a steward over and ordered a bulb of ice water and a bowl of hummus with bread. She had to try to eat.
The hummus was half gone and the tea tepid before the first of the missiles started winking out of existence.
“What are we seeing, please?” Hu said.
“It appears to be long-range PDCs,” one of the analysts said. “We’re waiting for the bounce feed so we can get higher resolution.”
Another twenty minutes, and a much sharper image of the Tempest appeared with the timestamp to show it was just after the fleet’s launch. All along the sides of the ship, tiny dark eruptions like the spots on a shark.
“The PDCs’ housings appear to be covered by the hull. Telemetry from the Michael Souther is that the remaining missiles were redirected toward those structures.” Were. An hour and twenty minutes ago.
“They’re not using their magnet beam,” Hu said. “That’s good. If it was cheap for them to fire it, they could use it to knock down missiles. If it’s expensive to use, we may be able to exhaust it.”
Drummer thought that sounded like wishful thinking, but she didn’t say so. She tried to take comfort in Hu’s optimism. The data feeds shifted, more information coming in. The images of the Tempest sharpened. The PDCs came into clearer focus, but it didn’t help Drummer understand them. The openings in the side of the ship looked like little mouths opening and closing. Like the whole side of the ship was singing. There was no mechanism she could see. She shuddered. The cloud of torpedoes was thinning. None of them would reach the body of the enemy ship.
A bloom of glowing gas erupted from the Tempest’s side, flinched, and then dissipated.
“Rail guns,” an analyst said.
The chatter of voices went into a higher gear. Tracking the rail-gun round, examining the spectrum of the plasma that had accompanied it, identifying the particular torpedo that it turned to dust.
“Are their PDCs running low already?” Hu said, to herself as much as anyone.
“It was a warning,” Avasarala answered. “They’re showing us that they have teeth and giving us the chance to back away.”
“Maybe we should,” Drummer said.
No one replied. The markers for the EMC ships shifted like a school of fish moving together, and Independence with them. Their own volley of rail guns, the slugs raining down from all directions. The Tempest had no way to stop them. All it could do was dodge. Drummer counted the minutes, watching the Tempest pull back and corkscrew out of the paths of danger. Mostly.
“I’m seeing contact.”
“Two impacts on the starboard. Waiting for confirmation from Pallas and Luna, but I think we did them some damage.”
The knot in Drummer’s gut eased a little. If they could hurt it, they could kill it. It was just a question of scale and tactics.
“The hull appears to be self-repairing.”
“Matches the Medina battle,” Hu said.
“Show me,” Drummer barked, and the image on her screen shifted again. It was a fresh image, still fuzzy. The bone-pale skin of the Tempest rippled as a round struck it, and then again with a second strike. Waves passed through the ship like the surface of water. Nasty black-and-red welts glowed where the rail-gun rounds had hit, but the plating—or whatever it was—folded over the wound, closing it, then folded again, and the damage was gone as if it had never been there.
Another volley of rail-gun fire from the EMC ships, but as the Tempest flinched back again and spun away again, it erupted in a cloud of plasma, and then emerged from it. Drummer didn’t understand until Hu spoke.
“Holy shit. How many rail guns does that bastard have?”
Now the Tempest shifted and swirled, leaving a trail of glowing gas behind it like an afterimage. It was beautiful in its way, a warrior’s dance—power and intention and technique that were almost balletic. And then the EMC ships began to die.
“The Ontario is hit. Reporting reactor breach and dumping core. We are seeing impacts on the Severin, the Talwar, and the Odachi, but no system confirmation yet. Rounds arrived thirty seconds earlier than the model anticipated.”
“Fuckers,” Avasarala said. “That’s why they took out the missile. Throw a changeup and let us think it was their fastball.”
“Whatever they’re using for predictive algorithms, it’s really good,” Hu said, awe in her voice. “That’s almost a third of our attack group down. And if … Oh.”
For a moment, Drummer didn’t understand what she was seeing. Independence, the second void city to launch, the home to hundreds of thousands, seemed to bloom like a flower. Long petals of carbon lace and titanium peeled back, turning as they did. Something terrible and bright happened in the center of the city, but Drummer couldn’t guess what it was. What she knew, what mattered, was that between one breath and the next, Independence was dead.
“We’re counting eight simultaneous impacts on the void city,” an analyst said from somewhere farther away than the control room. “They seem to have been placed to exploit resonance. We’re seeing some structural breakdown.”
Emily Santos-Baca was on Independence, Drummer thought, and she’d been dead already for over an hour. It didn’t matter how much adrenaline was pumping through Drummer’s veins, how tightly she gripped her bulb of old tea. She could shout the retreat order if she wanted to, but anyone in a position to hear her was dead already, or would be by the time her words could reach them.
The PDCs along the Tempest’s side fluttered again. Another group of EMC torpedoes died, faster this time because it was a smaller attack. The Tempest seemed to pause, floating in the distant nothingness as if inviting the EMC ships to take their best shots. Taunting them.
An hour and twenty-three minutes before, the EMC ships shifted, lit their Epstein drives as hard as they’d go, and turned to whatever vector got them away from the theater of battle as quickly as they could. The Tempest didn’t react. No new blooms from their rail guns. No more torpedoes. Drummer didn’t believe for a second that the enemy’s supplies had been exhausted. Trejo wasn’t killing the other ships because he didn’t need or want to. That was all.