When Katria’s charge went off, it demolished the control panel and ripped a seventeen-centimeter hole in the oxygen storage tank. Bobbie didn’t know the exact size of the tank, but she had a vague memory that liquid oxygen compressed down to about eleven hundred kilograms per cubic meter, and now all of it was trying to become a gas again, all at once.
The initial blast of expanding gas was deafening. The shock wave ripped apart bulkheads and piping. All the liquid oxygen in those pipes joined the explosion as additional expanding gas. From inside the relative safety of their reinforced emergency compartment, it sounded like someone had set off a tactical nuke in the next room.
And then, as was inevitable, something oxidized fast enough to produce a flame, and the initial blast of air became fire.
The entire emergency shelter shuddered, then canted over onto its side. The reinforced and blast-hardened bulkheads didn’t break, but the mounts holding the compartment to the deck were sheared off by the force of the blast. It took seconds that lasted for hours.
The inner walls and the pressure doors at each end of the compartment got hot enough to start smoking. Bobbie shared a look with Amos, then let go of him and they both scrambled to get into the emergency vacuum suits.
When the exterior bulkhead blew out, there wasn’t another deafening explosion, but rather a sudden drop in the sound level. The roar was replaced by the hiss of rushing air, then a high whine, then nothing. The seals on their shelter stayed intact, so afterward all they could hear was their own panicked breathing.
“Okay, we’re getting massive alarms,” Clarissa said, her voice the only calm thing in the universe. “The station’s going into shutdown. I’m pulling out too. I’ll see you back at the place.”
“God damn,” Naomi said.
“Told you,” Katria said. “My shit always works.”
Bobbie finished pulling on her vac suit, and saw Amos was sealing up his own. They traded a look. “We need to get out of here,” she said to him, and he nodded his agreement. Whatever was going to happen between them, it was on hold for now. They’d come back to it, she was certain of that. And it would need to get settled.
If I just killed Holden, this probably ends with one of us dead.
Whatever she’d imagined when she heard the blasts from inside the shelter, the reality was worse.
They opened the door to an entire deck that had been dropped in a blender, then spun up in a centrifuge. Bulkhead panels, control stations, equipment, decking. It had all been torn, twisted, burned, and then thrown out against the outer walls at high speed. A long piece of pipe was embedded in a wall, still quivering like an arrow shot into a tree. Something that looked like a metal desk had been slammed into a support beam so hard that the metal had actually fused. And in one corner, a single boot had been pinned to the ceiling and then melted into a stalactite of rubber. She hoped there wasn’t a foot in it.
They floated silently through the wreckage looking for their exit. It wasn’t hard to find.
A hole gaped in the exterior bulkhead of the drum nearly five meters across. The nearly circular rim of it was all bent outward, like the metal wall had been breached by a giant’s battering ram. Which, Bobbie supposed, it had. Only instead of concrete and steel, it had been oxygen and fire. Outside, she saw the faint twinkle of light on the ejecta as it raced away from the station and toward the curtain of black at the edge of the ring space.
“Exactly where I said it would be,” Katria cackled. “Damn near half a meter from the exact spot I marked as the weak point. I should charge money for this.”
“Do you think anyone survived?” Naomi asked.
“We kept everyone we could out of the affected area,” Bobbie replied. “Only should have been Laconians down here …”
“And anyone who didn’t get our fucking memo,” Amos added.
“Jim would have warned anyone he ran into,” Naomi said. “He wouldn’t be able to stop himself.”
“Yeah, by then it wouldn’t matter much,” Amos agreed. “No time to track the bomb down before it did its business.”
“And fuck any Laconians who were here,” Katria said in a tone that sounded like she’d have spit if she weren’t wearing a helmet. “I hope they fucking saw it coming.”
“Kat,” Bobbie said, “please shut up now.”
“This is going to work,” Naomi said, pointing out the hole toward the docks. “They’re going to think that was our target.”
The Gathering Storm sat a few dozen meters away. The nose of the ship and its port-side flank showed significant hull damage. Debris from the blast had punched holes in the landing clamps and dragged long gouges down its side. A large cluster of objects that looked like a sensor or communication array had nearly been ripped off the side of the ship, floating now at the end of a tether of cables.
It was an eerie ship. The angles of it were like something cut from crystal, and the curves felt like something grown more than built. It was like looking at a venomous snake. She had a hard time pulling her eyes away.
“Too bad we didn’t kill it,” Katria said, ignoring Bobbie’s request.
“Yeah,” Bobbie agreed. “Too bad.”
Amos pulled a magnetic grapple gun out of the gear bag he was carrying and fired a line over to the elevator shaft exterior. They’d need to climb up to a point not far from the maintenance hatch on the outside of the drum she and Clarissa had used earlier. The hard part would be getting a grapple onto the drum, then hanging on while the station tried to hurl them away at a third of a g. After that, it was an easy climb up to their secret entrance back into the station. Up into Medina from the underworld, and mission accomplished.
Unless something else went wrong. The only thing worse than losing Holden would be losing him for no damned reason.
“Laconians are gonna find this hatch,” Amos said. “Shouldn’t plan to use it again after this. No way the crews that come to fix that hole are gonna miss it.”
“Yeah,” Bobbie agreed. “If we thought the sweeps before were bad, they’re about to get a hundred times tighter.”
“Yeah, fuck ’em,” Katria snorted.
“No,” Naomi said. “It’ll be worse than that. We stung their pride before. But today we hurt them. Hurt them bad. And they’re going to try to make it better by hurting us back. Not just us either. Anyone who they think might be like us.”
While Amos hooked his grapple line to the edge of the hole so that they could climb up to the elevator housing, Naomi remained staring at the damaged Laconian ship.
“We killed a lot of people today,” she said. “Some of them just don’t know it yet.”
Chapter Thirty-Four: Drummer
The battle will be here,” Benedito Lafflin said, indicating a space between the curve of the asteroid belt and the orbit of Mars. The place where physics and geometry calculated that the paths of the Tempest and those of the fleets of the EMC and the union would cross. There was nothing there now—no port, no city, no outpost of any civilization. Only a hard vacuum wider than worlds, an emptiness of strategic importance. “We’re calling it Point Leuctra.”
“Luke-tra?”
“The Spartans were decisively defeated there by Thebes,” Lafflin said. “I mean, they call their planet Laconia. Psy ops thought it might speak to their sense of their own invincibility.”
They stared at each other a moment. That’s the best we’ve got? Intimidate them with classical allusions? floated at the back of her throat. Lafflin shrugged uncomfortably.
“All right,” Drummer said. Because what else was there to be said? It wasn’t as though her will was going to change any of the factors involved. The timetable was listed at the side of the display, days and hours as ticks of red and gold.
“The eggheads have a good model of the Tempest,” Lafflin went on, swapping out the map of the system for a schematic of the Tempest. The weird, organic shape of it made her feel like she was looking at a detail from an autopsy. Here is the vertebra where things went wrong. You can see the malformation. She smiled at the absurdity of the thought. Lafflin smiled back reflexively. “The only hard data we have is where the PDCs and torpedoes came out, but we also got a lot of good heat data from the last engagement.”
“The death of Independence,” Drummer said. The death of the first void city and everyone who hadn’t fled their home.