Alex flipped through the pages of damage reports popping up on his screen and found the culprit. A PDC round had cut through the computer nexus that controlled all intraship and intership communications, and for whatever reason the backup wasn’t taking over. Maybe it was fucked too. It looked like there were a lot of flashing red lights on the engineering panel.
But the Storm would heal the hull breaches, just like it always did. And damage control teams were already on the move to bring their other systems back online. The Storm would survive, Alex had no doubt.
But the freighter with Bobbie and her strike team on it was tumbling through space, out of control and empty of atmosphere, and with the radio down, there was no way for him to know if anyone on it was still alive.
Chapter Seven: Bobbie
Cap, launching you now. Make sure you come back,” Alex said. The breaching pod shook as the Storm cut it loose. The drive came on a moment later, slamming Bobbie back into her couch and leaving her with nothing to do while the battle raged around her.
The Storm’s breaching pod was a little more high-tech than the Martian version Bobbie had trained on, but there was only so much you could do with something so simple. The basic concept was a small troop carrier with an engine on one end and an airlock that could blow holes into enemy ships on the other. The interior was a close-walled metal box fitted with crash couches. The “flying coffin” joke Marines had been making for centuries would have made perfect sense even to the ancient soldiers who rolled into battle in armored personnel carriers with wheels: If you die before you get to the fight, you’re already boxed up for eternal rest.
People always claimed that waiting for the fight was the hardest part of fighting. Bobbie had said it herself, as a younger woman. When the fight is coming, when it’s inevitable, let’s just fucking get to it. Once the battle starts, things happen too fast to worry about. The fear is all instinctual, not intellectual. Somehow, that used to feel better.
Age had changed that. Bobbie had learned to see the quiet moment before the fight as a blessing. A gift. Very few people who were headed toward death even knew it was happening, much less had time to sit and reflect on their life. What they’d done that mattered. Whether it would be a good death.
Bobbie’s father had already been a legendary Marine in the MMC before she was born. When his family started to grow, he left the front lines and became an even more legendary training sergeant. An entire generation had learned what it meant to be a Martian Marine under Sergeant Major Draper at Hecate base. A giant of a man, with a face that looked like it had been cut from flint, he had always seemed invincible. An immutable fact of nature, like the avatar of Olympus Mons, come to life and walking among the mortals.
When he’d died, he’d been a tiny shriveled husk. Lying in his bed, hooked to the tubes and monitors that only prolonged the inevitable, he’d held her hand and said, “I’m ready. I’ve done this a dozen times before.”
She hadn’t understood at the time, but now she thought he was talking about sitting right where she was now. In the transport, heading toward battle, examining his life as he rushed toward its possible end. Who am I? Did the things I accomplished matter? Will I leave the universe a better place than I found it? If I don’t come back, what are my regrets? What are my victories?
It was a thing maybe only a warrior could understand. Only those who made the choice to run toward the fire, instead of away from it. That made it feel sacred to her. “This far, and no farther,” she whispered. Her litany to the tyrants and bullies and despots. This far, and no farther. If my life means anything after I’m gone, she thought, I hope it meant that.
“What’s that, boss?” Jillian asked. Her number two was strapped into the crash couch directly across the pod from her.
“Just talking to myself,” Bobbie said. Then she started to sing. “Anything you can do I can do better. I can do anything better than you.”
“Never heard that one,” Jillian said, then sang along, trying to catch the tune. “That new? Sounds Belter.”
Bobbie laughed. “No idea. My mother used to sing it. My brothers were older, and I hated losing to them at anything. I’d burst into tears when they’d win, and she’d sing that song to me. Just one of those things you pick up when you’re a kid and never put back down.”
“I like it,” Jillian said, then closed her eyes and started mumbling to herself. It looked like she was praying. Bobbie knew she wasn’t. She was running through the mission in her mind, over and over. Two meters through the breached hull to the first junction. Turn left. Twelve meters to the engineering hatch. Breach and clear. Three meters to the right is the master console. The other warrior’s litany.
There are people I love. There are people who have loved me. I fought for what I believed, protected those I could, and stood my ground against the encroaching darkness.
Good enough.
The pod screeched a short-lived collision alarm at them. The Storm had sent her pair of rail-gun shots past the hull close enough that Bobbie could have reached out and swatted them as they went by.
“Brace for impact,” she said, using her sergeant voice. As forceful as it could be without quite being a shout. This was her job now. To seem an immutable fact of nature. The avatar of Olympus Mons come to life and striding through the battlefield. God of war now. Shriveled husk later. Maybe. If she wasn’t lucky.
All around her, her squad of six handpicked strike team members locked and inflated their couches. All of them wore Laconian Marine power armor, though the blue color scheme had been repainted black. They were, as her father would have said, the pick of the litter. Jillian from Freehold and five of the Belters.
The Belters were old-school OPA, grizzled veterans of the endless insurgent war with the inner planets before Laconia came and made that irrelevant. Old men and women well practiced in conflict. Her total force on the Storm numbered forty, and included warriors from nearly every one of the old factions. But for a high-speed snatch-and-grab boarding action, you couldn’t find better fighters than Belters.
“Battle mode,” Bobbie said, and her armor woke up, humming with impatience for the fight. The HUD flashed an ammunition inventory at her, then minimized it into one corner of her field of view. A wireframe layout of the interior of the freighter they were about to board appeared and moved to a different corner. The list of six names and the green dot showing they were alive and undamaged scrolled down the left side of her view and remained. Getting everyone back with a green dot instead of a black one was always a mission priority, even if it was never the top.
A flashing message appeared in the center of her field of view: FREE FIRE AUTHORIZATION.
“Free fire, alpha team, Captain Roberta Draper,” she said. Through the suit radio she heard the distant clicks as six suits of armor activated their weapons. She’d never needed to do that as a fire team sergeant back in her Martian Marine Corps days. The Corps issued weapons to people and assumed they would use them correctly and according to their training. The Laconians were much more top-down. Winston Duarte had founded Laconia by betraying Mars and looting the navy. It wasn’t a great surprise that distrust of the people in his chain of command was institutional.
The HUD flashed a new diagram at her. The relative position of the breaching pod and the freighter, along with a rapidly decreasing distance to target.
“Ready,” she growled at her team. “Go in five!”
The breaching pod shuddered as it fired grapples and grabbed the freighter. There was a quick sideways jerk, and then the two ships slammed together. The impact with the freighter was significant, but wrapped as she was in the soft gel interior of her high-tech armor and resting on the inflated padding of her crash couch, it just felt like a sudden pressure on her chest that vanished almost instantly as the pod lost its acceleration and went into free fall. That was a good sign. It meant Alex had hit his target with the rail-gun shots, and the freighter was on the drift.
“Get ready for the burn!” she said, the last word almost lost in the sudden roar of the pod firing its massive braking thrusters to keep the freighter hidden behind Jupiter. Her couch automatically unlocked and swung the other direction, putting her back to the thrust. A new pressure mounted in her chest as the g forces piled on.
When the burn started to ease up, she yelled, “Go go go,” but it wasn’t really necessary. Her fire team was up and out of their couches the second the thrust stopped. Jillian hit the wall panel next to the airlock and extended the breaching sleeve. It made an airtight seal with the freighter, the deck vibrating with the impact. Two seconds later, shaped charges inside the sleeve cut a hole through both hulls of the Transport Union freighter, and the airlock door slid open.