Alex threw the Jovian system onto the main display. Their position, the moons, the curving arc of the gas giant below them. The shipping patterns were complex to an untrained eye, but he could read them like text. The freight traffic in gray, Laconian security in gold. Bobbie and the White Crow in green. And the target—the Tempest—in red as bright as fresh blood.
The shifting gravity of the system made lowest-energy transit lines, and the traffic between the moons followed them like iron filings showing a magnetic field. At these distances, you wouldn’t even need an Epstein drive to ignore them. A decent ship flying teakettle could get anywhere it needed to be. It was only the extra scrip that ships could save that made the pattern what it was. That was always enough.
“Come on,” Jillian said, not to anyone on the bridge. “Grow some balls and come get me, you big bastard.”
“Security alert’s just gone out, open channel,” Caspar said. “They know we’re here. The Tempest is moving. She’s coming after us.”
“Punch it, Kamal,” Jillian said. Her bravado was almost convincing. Alex didn’t think Caspar saw through it.
Alex punched it. On his monitor, the green of the White Crow lined up just where he wanted it to be. The Tempest followed in the way he’d expected it would. His jaw ached from the thrust, and the juice running through his system made him feel like he’d had too much coffee and not enough at the same time. The Tempest was a massive ship, but the drive was powerful enough that inertia didn’t matter much. The Storm was smaller, lighter, and less powerful, and while it was probably more maneuverable, that didn’t help this time. If he was going to get Bobbie through the eye of that particular needle, he had no degrees of freedom.
They still had advantages, though. The main one being that they were ahead and the Tempest was behind. The Storm’s drive plume gave a little cover. The torpedoes that the Tempest fired would have to swing out and around to keep from getting slagged. And it also had catch up to the Storm as it sped away. Anything the Storm launched, the Tempest would rush forward to meet. It gave the Storm’s PDCs that little extra slice of reaction time, the Tempest’s that much less. Bobbie’s flight plan for him had been to ride that gap where the difference put the Tempest in threat and the Storm just outside it. It was great in theory. Practice was more complicated, because they could still be overwhelmed.
Would be.
“Fast movers,” Caspar gasped. “That’s a lot of them.”
Jillian coughed. It sounded painful. Alex half expected her to move to text communication, but she fought through and spoke aloud. “PDCs to auto. Return fire.”
The thrum of the PDCs added itself to the noise and shudder of the pursuit. Like a kid trying to outrun a cop, the Storm slid past the White Crow, and the Tempest boiled up from below her. Alex couldn’t tell if the vibration was engine harmonics coming from the deck or his overloaded bloodstream or both. Bobbie’s little ship hit her burn too, falling into the enemy’s blind spot.
Soon. It would all be over soon. He forced himself to swallow. It hurt.
The Storm shook. “We aren’t hit,” Caspar shouted. “It was close, but we got it.”
“More distance, Kamal,” Jillian said, but he couldn’t do that without prodding the Tempest to match. Bobbie needed the battleship to keep its current course and heading. He was too focused on the reality of the situation to explain why it was a bad order, so he just ignored it. If the Storm had to take a few hits, it would just have to take them.
The incoming fire was like a vast, blooming flower. Lines looped out from the Tempest, curved in toward them, and vanished as the Storm knocked them back. Alex spared a glance at the ammunition levels. They weren’t as low as he’d expected. All his habits had been formed on older technology. The Laconian design for rapid printing of new rounds still wasn’t intuitive.
If they had been doing what they appeared to be doing—running like hell and hoping to get to the gate and out of the system—it would have been a desperation move. The distance between Jupiter and the ring gate was vast, and the Storm was constrained by both its reaction mass and the fragility of the bodies inside her. And the danger of screaming through the slow zone too fast without knowing the state of play on the inside. Alex would have had to make a braking burn before they reached the gate, and the Tempest would have caught them. If Bobbie didn’t come through, it could still go down that way. Alex realized he was already plotting in other plans—dive into the high atmosphere of Jupiter and try to scrape the Tempest off, loop sunward and try to get the enemy to overheat and pull back before they had to—and stopped himself. They weren’t in the last ditch yet.
“New volley coming in,” Caspar shouted. “We’re not going to be able to stop them all.”
“Evasive, Kamal,” Jillian snapped, and Alex bent their flight path away, but only a little. The Tempest couldn’t turn or shift without exposing the White Crow. And where the hell was Bobbie anyway?
“Brace,” Caspar said, and a second later the crash couch bucked under Alex, kicking him like a mule. Even with the gel to pad him, he fought to get his breath back. He’d lost a couple of seconds. They couldn’t afford that again.
“What’s the damage?” Jillian croaked out, but no one answered.
The tightbeam sprang to life. Bobbie was checking in.
“Need good news, Captain,” Jillian said. Her face was shining with sweat. Alex waited with dread and hope.
“Rini’s down. Ship and torpedo are both compromised,” Bobbie said. Her voice was strained, but with the calm professionalism of a woman in her natural environment. She’d have had the same tone if she’d just found the way to destroy her enemy or lost both her legs. “I need you to make the Tempest stop. I can do this, but not at high burn.”
The pause seemed to last forever. Alex plotted in the flip and burn, and waited for Jillian to give the word.
Instead, she said, “How?”
“Give me a second, Bobbie,” Alex said. “I’ll get you what you need.”
The drive cut off, the weight of acceleration vanishing in the time it took to blink. Alex took the comm control from Caspar and turned on the do-not-approach beacon. Tactically, it didn’t make any damned sense. That’s what he was counting on.
“What are you doing, Kamal?” Jillian said. Her tone was halfway between outrage and hope that maybe he knew something.
“Making us look like a mutiny,” he said. “Seeing whether they like the idea of getting their ship back.”
As he’d hoped, the Tempest killed its drive. They sped through the darkness in matching orbits. Callisto was already long gone behind them. Even Jupiter was visibly smaller. It felt like being alone, but every eye in the system would be watching them.
“Leche bao,” Caspar said under his breath. “They’re going to kill us.”
“As long as they do it without starting their drive up,” Jillian said, and Alex felt a little burst of pride for the girl. She was green, but she was learning. For almost a minute, the two ships stood silent, waiting, and tense. A comm request came in from the Tempest. Jillian didn’t accept it. Alex noticed he was holding his breath.
“Fast movers,” Caspar said.
“Shoot down as many as you can and return fire,” Jillian said, “but do not change course, and don’t give them a reason to.”
Alex could only watch as the crew fired back. It would be over already if the command staff of the Tempest had wanted it to be. A single massive strike, and the Storm would be dead. Instead, like a wrestler slowly bending back the opponent’s joint, they were pushing the flow of missiles, a little faster and a little faster until the Storm’s defenses were overwhelmed. They wanted to disable the ship and question the crew. They hadn’t met Bobbie. Or Jillian Houston. If it came to it, they would scuttle the Storm. He knew he was looking at his own death.
Come on, Bobbie, he thought. I’m trusting you on this.
“I think . . . Is that the captain?” Caspar said. “I think that’s the captain.”
He threw the feed from the external sensors onto the main display. The image was a little shaky, the edges too sharp, but there not far from the Tempest was a single figure in power armor falling in toward the ship. Its arms ended in the rapid-fire glitter of muzzle flash, throwing two streams of ineffectual rounds at the mass of the Laconian dreadnought. The sight of a single human-sized figure flying past the battleship gave a dramatic sense of scale to its massive bulk. Next to it, Bobbie looked like an angry insect attacking a whale.
“Keep your eye on the incoming missiles,” Jillian said. “If that’s Draper, she’s doing it for a reason.”
The tiny figure flew a jagged, unpredictable path. Streams of high-speed projectiles chased it as the Tempest’s PDCs tracked it. The flyswatter hunting the fly. It was impossible to imagine that something so small could stand a chance against the vastness and power of the ship, but if it was Bobbie it was also impossible to imagine she wouldn’t.