The White Crow was a terrible little ship. Even if Bobbie hadn’t been taking it into combat, she’d have wanted a vac suit buttoned up tight. The cloth covering the bulkheads was pale, with lines of white showing where age and radiation had degraded it. The crash couches were lumpy and stiff, and slow to react to changes in the ship’s vector. The handholds on the walls had all been polished by generations of touching, the way stone steps were supposed to be worn away in medieval cathedrals back on Earth. It was a ship that had outlasted its time, but its drive still worked, and Bobbie didn’t need much more than that out of it.
She waited through minutes that felt long as they passed and sudden when they were gone. The outward-pushing, inward-pulling dilation of time before battle. It felt good.
“How are we down there, Rini?” she asked. The response delay from the airlock wasn’t much less than when she’d been talking to Callisto.
“I feel like I’m cupping the devil’s balls,” Rini said. “But . . . yeah. It all looks good.”
Bobbie had looked over the torpedo before they’d taken off. It was the smallest and fastest that Bobbie could find, black and boxy and hardly longer than her own leg. Rini had stripped the already spare design down to its minimum, taking away the mass of the traditional warhead in order to win a few extra milliseconds when the burn came. Instead of blowing the little fusion core, the proximity sensor would disable the power that kept the antimatter cut off from the rest of the universe, and physics would take it from there. Bobbie just had to get it close.
She checked the flight path. The White Crow was just about where she wanted it to be.
“I’m about to pull the pin,” Bobbie said. “If you need a potty break, now’s the time.”
Rini’s laugh was short and humorless. “I’ve been pissing myself since you told me the plan, Cap. At this point, I’m amazed I don’t have a prolapsed bladder.”
“Only a little longer,” she said, and switched back to the tightbeam. “Status?”
“At your order,” Jillian said.
This was the moment. The last moment. Bobbie could pull back now. Take the White Crow through her planned flight path, tell her crew to scatter to the winds, drop the antimatter down Jupiter’s gravity well and enjoy the fireworks. There hadn’t been a lot of decisive moments in her life that she’d recognized when they were happening. Usually they only came clear after the fact.
“Take her out, Storm,” Bobbie said.
“Done,” Jillian said, the single syllable sharp and hard as a thrown rock.
Bobbie took a deep breath, let it out. Down on Callisto, the Gathering Storm was coming to life, breaking out of its hidden berth and leaping through the thin Callistan atmosphere toward the stars. Her crew were being pressed back into their couches like God had His palm on their chests. All she could do was sit and listen to the open channel and wait for someone to notice a drive plume where there shouldn’t be one.
The emergency alert cut through the chatter of voices. Military orders to make clear. The thickly traveled Jovian system, with its dozens of moons and millions of people all smashed down into a volume smaller than the slow zone, had just become a battlefield. She fired up the White Crow’s drive as if she were going to head for shelter. Her body felt warm and smooth. On her tactical display, the Tempest shifted the way it was supposed to, took the vector she’d anticipated, leaped to the attack. When she switched to visual, it looked like a tiny bone, dark against the brightness of its own drive plume.
The display showed fast movers—torpedoes already in flight from the Storm. And there, tiny pinpricks of light where the Tempest’s PDCs were firing out through holes in its skin-like plating to knock them back. The thin cone of the enemy’s blind spot swept across the tactical display. She’d be in it soon. Very soon . . .
“Make safe, Rini,” she said. “We’re about to get bumpy.”
“Not soon enough for me.”
The White Crow fell into shadow, and Bobbie spun the ship hard, throwing the drive into a hard burn. The crash couch slammed up into her back. Her armor flashed a medical alert error up as her blood pressure fluttered, then took it down when she stabilized. The tactical screen had more targets than she could track. Jillian Houston was throwing everything the Storm had at the Tempest, and the Tempest was opening up its own volley. But so far no sign of the magnetar field generator, so their dangerous gamble was paying off for now. Bobbie slid the White Crow closer in, trying to narrow the gap between her and her enemy. The burn was hard. Her armor rippled down on her legs and arms in rhythm with her heart, pushing the blood along, keeping it from pooling. Even so, darkness started to creep in at the edges of her vision. She was aware of voices on her radio like they were music coming from another room. She was hiding in the middle of the Tempest’s blind spot. The safest she could be in the middle of a shooting war, and still not particularly safe.
She shifted to the in-ship comms, and the rest of the universe went silent. “Prepare for launch.”
She was pretty certain she heard Rini’s grit-toothed acknowledgment. She checked her drive. Seven gs. She’d done worse than seven gs before. Getting old sucked.
She didn’t just feel the impact, she heard it, transmitted up through the mass of the ship and into her armor. A deep, dull clank like someone hitting a badly made bell.
“I think we took a hit,” she said. “What’s your status?”
Rini didn’t answer. Pushing against the thrust gravity, Bobbie shifted to the network display. Rini’s power armor was still connected, but everything on it was in error states. A sea of red where green should have been. Bobbie shouted the woman’s name again, but she already knew there wouldn’t be a reply.
The airlock was one deck down and then half a dozen meters from the lift shaft. If she cut the drive, the White Crow would fall out of the blind spot and be cut down by the Tempest’s PDCs. If the torpedo had broken . . .
If it had broken, she’d already be a rapidly expanding cloud of glowing plasma. The antimatter at least was still intact. That meant there was hope. And if there was hope, there wasn’t rest. She slaved the piloting controls to her armor, checked her seals and status—a few medical stats in the yellow, but nothing in the red—and unstrapped from the crash couch. The power armor whined under its own weight as she stood, and she felt her shoulders trying to dislocate. The blood in her veins slammed down into her legs, and the armor clamped against her thighs, pushing it back up. A wave of nausea almost overcame her. She took the first of eight steps to the lift. She could do it. She had to.
A low growling was coming up from the deck. The maneuvering thrusters were firing. That couldn’t be good. She reached the lift, and the slight reduction in g as she went down was like one drop of water to someone dying of thirst. It stopped when the lift did.
The airlock was a mess. Both sets of doors were open, venting the ship into space. The bulkhead was folded where the PDC rounds had hit. Jagged holes gaped where the raw kinetic force had shoved the outer hull into the room. The torpedo was in the far corner where the bulkhead met the floor, and Rini’s body was beside it. Bobbie went to her side and knelt, the artificial muscles running through her power armor straining under the burden.
Death had come fast for Rini. She probably hadn’t even known it happened. The armor was the same mostly black as Bobbie’s, and it was still working hard to preserve the life that was gone. Five holes across her back and arm poured blood too fast, the thrust gravity squeezing it out of the corpse. Bobbie shifted Rini away. There’d be time for mourning later.
Rini had protected the torpedo from the worst of the damage, but the little drive wasn’t unscathed. A white impact showed where a bit of shrapnel had cracked the ceramic around the drive cone. Bobbie tried to lift it and see the extent of the damage, but she couldn’t. Even with the powered armor, the burn was too much. Her spine ached, and the one rib that dislocated when she was under too much thrust had slipped out of place again. It hurt to breathe.
The White Crow threw up a fresh alert. The maneuvering thrusters were at a little under a third of their reaction mass, and requesting permission to start drawing from the reserve. It only took seconds to see the problem. The PDC rounds had sheared off a section of the exterior plating. In a larger ship, it wouldn’t have mattered, but the White Crow was small enough that it had shifted the center of mass. The thrusters were firing to keep her from curving off, and would until they ran dry.
She had the ship open a tightbeam to the Storm.
“Need good news, Captain,” Jillian said, her voice wet and phlegmy from the pressure of their burn.
“Rini’s down. Ship and torpedo are both compromised. I need you to make the Tempest stop. I can do this, but not at high burn.”
There was no response for a second. “How?” Jillian asked, but Alex’s voice cut in on the channel.