“Give me a second, Bobbie. I’ll get you what you need.”
She closed her eyes. Her consciousness was swimming. It was only force of will that made her turn toward the payload. The four little spheres of magnetism, vacuum, and hellfire. The proximity sensor. Neither of them looked damaged. She checked her tactical display. She was still in the blind spot. She rotated the ship and eased back on the maneuvering thrusters. If she was going to fall off course, she could at least fall in the right direction. The Tempest’s drive plume swept past, framed in the airlock doors like a comet.
“Alex?” she said. “Give me something.”
And as if in answer, the White Crow went on the float. Bobbie rose up, then clamped mag boots against the deck. The Tempest’s drive plume was gone. Her blood shifted and the nausea came and went again as she unhooked the warhead and the proximity sensor. The White Crow was spent. The torpedo was scrap. She wasn’t done. There was still a way. She took up the warhead, cradling it to her chest, and stepped out the airlock. She didn’t pause as she launched.
Bobbie fired up the thrusters on her Laconian armor and burned toward the Tempest. It was an asteroid, a strangely shaped rock curving through a complex orbit around the small and distant sun. She was close enough to see it without enhancement. Much closer than she’d intended. Maybe a hundred klicks away. Maybe less. A machine that had brought the solar system to its knees. The unkillable dreadnought of Laconia. And somewhere beyond it, away to her left, the Storm. Her ship. They weren’t really stationary. Nothing in the universe was. It was only that their vectors matched for the moment. Stillness was an illusion.
Something flashed and was gone. A torpedo taken out by the Tempest’s PDCs. Against the constant and unwavering starlight, the little glimmer of motion stood out. She saw another. A handful more. And the arcing brightness of the Tempest’s torpedoes heading out. The distances were so vast, they almost looked slow.
“Hold on,” she said, but she didn’t turn her comms on. It wasn’t a message so much as a prayer.
Bobbie checked her tactical display. She was still linked to the White Crow, but the comms on the little ship weren’t the best. It took almost a second for the full layout to repopulate.
Going ballistic was hard. The warhead in her arms was a dart, and she was trying to drop it a kilometer and land it in a coffee cup. She checked her suit, and the thrusters were good, even if they were running through her fuel way too fast. The Tempest was a little larger now. She killed the burn and turned, centering it between her feet. Falling toward her enemy from a great height. She held the warhead against her belly, checked the connections and readouts one last time. Was the power cut off engaged? Yes. Was the backup battery disconnected? Yes. Was the proximity sensor set so that the ship would trigger it? It was.
Bobbie took a deep breath. Another. That rib popped back into place with a deep and painful snap, and she grinned. The Tempest was visibly larger now. Her velocity toward it was recklessly fast, even though she could hardly feel it. She eyeballed her path, adjusted, had the suit double-check her. An augmented line from her armored toes down to the Tempest. She took a solid hold on the warhead, one hand on either side, and then carefully let go. Even a tiny variance, amplified over the quickly falling distance, would be a disaster. She waited for a long moment, and it floated in place, almost touching her. No drift. Perfect.
Gently, she tapped her suit thrusters, drifting away centimeter by centimeter, careful that the little plumes didn’t touch the warhead. When she was four or five meters away, she started a braking burn, and the warhead seemed to leap away. Her breath sounded very loud in her ears. Very close. Her suit was running warm, the radiators doing their best to shed waste heat. The vacuum of space was only cold after you were dead.
It was too late for her. Some part of her had known that from the moment she’d seen the white mark on the torpedo, but now that it was done, she could think about it. If things had gone right, she and Rini and the White Crow would have been burning hard as hell away from the Tempest the moment they dropped their missile, trying to outrun the blast. And that had assumed the Storm was still leading the enemy away, which wasn’t happening either. So this was it.
She twisted at the hips, stretching. The stars of the galactic disk spread against the horizonless sky. Some of that light had been traveling for centuries. Millennia. Longer. Many of those stars would have died long before she was born. What a weird fate for a photon to be spat out of a nuclear fireball, speed through the vast emptiness between stars, and land on a Martian Marine’s retina while she decided whether she still feared death, or if she was ready. She’d done this a dozen times before.
The Tempest was getting larger. She hadn’t killed all her velocity toward it. She wondered whether the Storm would make it. In a straight battle, it was doomed. Jillian and Alex and the rest were doing the tactical equivalent of taking a ship like the Rocinante and picking a fight with a Donnager-class. As long as the Tempest didn’t fire up its drive, it would be worth it. Pyrrhic victories were still victories, and this was about to cost the enemy way more than it would her.
She thought about making a connection back to the Storm. Saying goodbye. They didn’t need the distraction. If anything, she should try to divide the enemy’s attention, not her allies’. Anything else was self-indulgence. She’d taken her shot, but she wasn’t done.
She checked the ammunition levels in the suit. She was topped up. The thrusters still had some juice in them, and her oxygen was good for another thirty minutes, even if she didn’t start running it thin. She engaged the weapons, shifted her HUD to local/tactical, and grinned. 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?
“Thanks for everything,” she said to the universe, as if it had been the host of a particularly good party that was just winding down. She turned toward the Tempest. Another sparkle of light. Another volley of torpedoes speeding out into the darkness. Another threat to her ship and her people. “All right, motherfucker. You want to dance? Let’s dance.”
She locked her targeting system onto the Laconian battleship, shifted her suit to live fire, and started her burn. Fifty-seven seconds later, she passed out of the Tempest’s blind spot.
Chapter Thirty-Three: Alex
Status?” Bobbie said. Her voice on the command deck only made Alex feel her absence more. All around, the others were at their stations. The tension in the air was thick. Every glance, every breath, every nervous chuckle meant the same thing: Holy shit, we’re actually going to do this.
“At your order,” Jillian said, tugging the collar of her uniform open another centimeter. Alex remembered being young enough to care what he looked like going into a battle.
Caspar was tapping the side of his crash couch. Jillian leaned forward on hers, pulling the restraints tight against her shoulders. Alex sort of wished he’d hit the head. Everyone dealt with the anticipation and dread differently.
They’d been preparing for hours, towing the Storm out from its hidden mine, making the cabins and workshops secure, running every system through its diagnostics. Now the only thing between the Gathering Storm and open space was a set of old bay doors, and Bobbie’s go order.
“Take her out, Storm.”
“Done,” Jillian said, and cut the connection. “Kamal. Take us out.”
Alex tapped the release and watched on his monitor as the doors above them opened. Maneuvering thrusters gently pushed them off the moon’s surface. And as soon as the Storm cleared the dock, he lit the Epstein up. He fell hard into the crash couch gel, feeling the coolness as it crept up around his ribs and neck. Callisto fell away behind them, the surface glowing orange and gold where the drive plume had heated it.
“All systems inside tolerance,” Caspar said, even though no one had asked. The kid had to do something. “We are . . . Okay. I’m getting a connection request from Callisto traffic control?”
“Let ’em wonder,” Jillian said. “Do we have the Tempest?”
“Got him,” Alex said.
“Show me.”