On the monitor, two people walked down the hall toward the camera. Bobbie couldn’t mistake the Laconian power armor for anything else. The patrol they’d been waiting for. The enemy approaching. Without a word, she swung back, set her feet against the station, and reengaged her mag boots. The spin gravity would try to straighten her legs, but that was exactly the wrong thing. She bent double, put her hands behind her knees, and held herself there. Katria did the same. Bat-brace position. It was hard to relax like that, especially knowing what was coming. She took a deep breath starting in her belly and moving through her whole chest, then let it out. Shook her shoulders to get out the tension. Smooth and loose. That was the way to be.
She remembered the young Marine she’d flirted with when the Laconians had first taken the station. She wondered if he was on one of the patrols walking above her now, the soles of his feet unknowingly against her own. Your turn now, my turn later, she thought. The seconds stretched. The temptation to shift her arms so she could look at the screen was almost irresistible.
The station hit the bottoms of her feet like a hammer. Her legs slammed into her chest, blowing the air out of her. One mag boot threw an error, but only for a second. Then it was done. She turned, walking fast toward the net. It wasn’t a low blister anymore. It was a hemisphere of debris and cables. Bent plating, shredded foam, and at the heart of it, trapped like two fish hauled out of a tank, human figures. Above her, the debris small enough to escape the net seemed to fly away from her, though it was really her spinning away from it.
“Hurry,” Katria said. “They’ll already be on their way.”
“I know,” Bobbie said.
At the net, they undid one of the pitons, opening it like the mouth of a tent. The gaping hole that led up into the station leaked water and coolant out, flying down past them as they hung. The nearer of the two bodies had taken the worst of the explosion. A crack along the collar and chest assembly. The inside of the helmet was a soup of blood. Bobbie wrestled the corpse closer, holding the arms and waist in a rescue hold while Katria fastened grips to the Laconian suit.
“Hold still,” Katria said. The low-power radio made her voice seem farther away than she was.
“I’m doing my best,” Bobbie said through clenched teeth.
“All right. He’s solid.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive,” Katria said, and disengaged the primary piton. The net pulled free and fell away below them into nothing. Bobbie turned, forcing herself back to the airlock. Her muscles were burning from the effort. Twenty years ago, they wouldn’t have been. The spin of the station made it feel like the dead Marine was pulling her down toward the depths, or else up into the emptiest sky in the universe. The power-armor helmet knocked against the back of hers. The dead arms and legs hung loose. Blood leaked from the crack in the chest plate.
“I hope this suit’s not too fucked up,” Bobbie said.
“Hope later,” Katria said. “Walk now.”
At the platform, Bobbie shifted her weight and the dead Marine’s with a cry of effort loud enough that Katria turned off her radio. She hung from her safety tether and motioned Bobbie up. There wasn’t room on the platform for all three of them. Bobbie didn’t even nod, just turned the controls, and the platform rose. While the air cycled in, she sat across from the armor. Her heart was pounding. Her muscles ached. She’d just killed two of the enemy. There would always be a little something—that tug on her humanity that came from doing violence. There was a satisfaction too. It didn’t mean she was a good woman or a bad one. It meant she was a Marine.
Somewhere in the station right now, security forces and maintenance techs were scrambling to figure out whether the hole in the station or the possibility of rushing into more bombs was the greater threat. By the time they came to a decision, she needed to be as far away from here as possible.
The inner airlock door cycled open, and she hauled the corpse up into the locker room before she cycled the airlock again for Katria to use. When she popped her helmet seals, the dead man stank of blood and overheated metal and the same kind of lubricant she used on Betsy’s joints.
She pulled the body into the large gray transport box, closed the lid, and triggered the seals. Whatever alerts, whatever alarms the power armor had been sending out were blocked now. Or if Saba was wrong, she and Katria would find out soon enough.
The airlock cycled open while Bobbie was pulling off her environment suit. Her jumpsuit was drenched in sweat. Katria undid the seals of her own helmet and slung it into the locker.
“You get the package to Saba,” Katria said.
“I know the plan. I’m on it,” Bobbie said. “And thank you. I know we didn’t get off on the right foot, your crew and mine.”
“No need for that,” Katria said, popping the seals on her suit with the speed of long habit. “Just get the work done.”
“Copy that.”
“You know, this is the second time we’ve played the same trick. Use the blast to hide what we really meant? The data center. Now the missing power armor they’ll all think is out there in the black?”
“If they think we have it, they’ll change the shut-down code before we can reverse engineer it.”
“I know why,” Katria said. “I’m saying don’t count on doing it again. Patterns get people like you and me killed. This strategy’s played out. If Saba thinks otherwise, he’s a fool.”
Bobbie popped the wheels on the transport cart out, extended the handle. It rolled easily. She wasn’t looking forward to pushing the damned thing through the public areas of the station to Saba’s rendezvous, but she also wanted to get out of here as quickly as she could. She forced herself to take one long, slow look at it before she opened the doors, though. In case there was blood on it.
“There won’t be a third time,” she said.
“You sure of that?” Katria asked.
“Positive,” Bobbie said. “You get your people, and you tell them to be ready. Cracking the code on this suit is the trigger. Two minutes after that happens, we’re all getting the hell off this station.”
Chapter Forty-Five: Drummer
Bright-green dots were blinking out. Not all at once, but enough to notice. A wave of darkness moving through the cloud of attacking ships. Drummer checked the timestamp, but there was no gap. Whatever the Tempest had done at Pallas, it still hadn’t repeated here. So what the hell was going on?
“Is it the Tempest? Is it firing?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the sensors tech said. “The missiles are coming from the Tempest. Yes.”
“How fucking many of them?”
The cloud of green, the orange dot, and now a new form. Red threads blooming out from the enemy, thick and ropey as a capillary map. The ship itself was lost in them. They reached out toward the EMC vessels. The union fighters. The void cities.
“That isn’t possible. That’s wrong,” Drummer said.
The Tempest hadn’t resupplied since it had come through the ring gate. It had been in a major engagement already. There was no way for what she was looking at to be real.
“The data is confirmed,” the sensor tech said. “Guard of Passage is reporting the same thing.”
“Get me Cameron Tur,” she said. “Or Lafflin.” Anyone who might be able to make the incomprehensible make sense.
“Should I continue to fire?” the weapons tech asked.
“Are we still in a fucking fight? Then yes, you should keep firing.”
Vaughn made a small, disapproving sound in his throat, but she was far past caring about the delicacy of his sensibilities. The red threads swam through the void. They only seemed slow on the display because the distances were so vast …
Here and there a thread died, a PDC round or a missile destroying the Tempest’s attack. But there were so many, and when even one slipped past the guard, another green dot blinked out. The green dots shifted, swirling in the display as the ships did in the darkness. A few dove toward the Tempest, moving almost at the same speed as the torpedoes. As gentle as it looked on the display, it was a killing burn. A suicide run for the crews of every ship that did it. More followed suit until dozens of ships were driving down toward the enemy.
It was a tactic of unspeakable bravery and desperation. Drummer didn’t notice that her hands were in fists until the ache caught her attention. She made her fingers open, looked at the little flaps of skin she’d carved off with her nails.
The suicide attack reached its peak. It reminded her of pictures she’d seen of cloudbursts over the deserts of Earth. Huge, angry clouds with numberless tentacles of gray falling from them. A torrent of water racing toward a parched landscape, and evaporating again before a drop could darken the soil.
On the visual display, the bright, dancing veins on the Tempest were fading, and now that she knew to look, Drummer could see tiny openings along the sides of the ship opening and closing like pores. The lights of the missiles’ drive plumes were like blue fireflies.
“How can they do that?” she whispered past the tightness in her throat.
“I have Cameron Tur,” the communications tech said.
The camera made his face even longer than it seemed in person. The light shone in his eyes.
“Where the fuck are you?” Drummer snapped. “Are you seeing this?”