“Naomi?” Alex asked again. “What do we do?”
“Take out the platforms,” she said. And then, “First. We take out the platforms first.”
“If we’re going to land, we have to slow down,” Alex said.
She needed time. She didn’t have it. The Roci shifted hard, then fell away, slamming her against her straps as their rail gun fired.
“Get me options,” she said.
“Coming up,” Alex said, and the thrust alert came on. They were flying into the enemy barrage, and she was slowing them down. “Ian! Tell the others to match my course. We’re putting on the brakes.”
She pulled up the tactical, and the drive came on, pushing her back into her couch and the coolness of the gel. She couldn’t tell if it was the evasive dodging or the changes in acceleration or her own sense of doom that left her feeling nauseated, but it didn’t matter. She pulled up the tactical display, ran it through the Roci’s system, and prayed to nothing in particular that a solution existed.
Their information on the defense grid was pieced together from Transport Union ships that had moved through the system. Five weapon platforms, flat black and resistant to radar. They were in higher orbits than the alien construction platforms, and spaced around the planet in a web that put any approaching ship in the sights of at least two and usually three. They were already firing at Naomi’s little strike force, and whatever technology they were using to compensate for the rounds they fired, it didn’t make a heat or light plume that she could use for targeting.
The construction platforms were closer to the planet, long and articulated, with filaments coming off of them like something in a microscope slide of contaminated water. They shimmered with light. There were five of those too, all of them in near-equatorial orbit.
The plan had been to approach with the ships close together so that they would all be covered by the same defenses and dilute the incoming fire between them. Then, when they were close, the Cassius and the Prince of the Face would split off, wrapping around the spinward side of the planet while the Roci and the Quinn cleaned up anti-spinward. Then they would all burn hard for the ring gate and the hundreds of systems beyond to hide in.
That had been the plan. Now it was the same, but slower. More time in the enemy crosshairs. Less chance of escaping unharmed.
Ian shouted over the din of PDC fire, drive resonance, and thruster burn. “Cassius is requesting permission to break off. They’re ready to make their run.”
“Confirmed,” Naomi shouted. “Let’s do this.”
“With them gone, the bad guys are going to have more guns for us,” Alex said. “We’re about to get real bumpy.”
“What the hell has it been up to now?” Ian asked.
“Walk in the park, kid,” Alex said.
On her tactical display, the Cassius turned, its drive plume leaning in toward the other three as it slid toward the far side of the onrushing planet. A few seconds later, the Prince of the Face did likewise. As they slid away, a new bloom of fast movers jumped up from the Laconian defenses.
“How many of these missiles can we take?” Naomi shouted, and a voice she didn’t know yelled back, PDCs at sixty percent as if that answered her question.
“We can start doing damage of our own in eighty seconds,” Alex said. “Seventy-nine.”
“Lock on the construction platforms,” Naomi said. Her legs felt like they were on the verge of cramping. Her monitor was throwing three low-priority medical alerts. She ignored them. The ship moved hard to port, fighting to get out of a rail gun’s firing arc. They were getting close enough that dodging after the rail gun fired was getting hard.
“Permission to hit their weapons, Captain?”
“No,” Naomi said. “The construction platform goes down first.” She might die. They all might die. Even if they did, they didn’t have to lose.
She fought the temptation to grab weapons control herself. The fear and the tension left her muscles trembling, and the evasive shifting was coming faster and harder. She wanted a sense of control. Of being able to bend the next minutes to her will. Trusting a crew she’d barely met with everything was like flying blind.
“Prince of the Face reporting that the Cassius took a rail-gun hit,” Ian shouted.
“How bad?” Naomi asked, already pulling up the sensor array data to see for herself. By the time Ian spoke, she knew.
“The Cassius is gone.”
The odds shifted in her mind again. If the Prince of the Face was lost too, it would mean looping around Laconia to catch the surviving platforms. She’d only just taken on the risk by slowing down, and she was already paying the price.
She took comms control and opened a connection to the Prince of the Face. As soon as it went through, she started talking.
“This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. Kill your braking burn. Go back to the initial strategy. In fast, kill the construction platforms, and burn for the gate. Do not decelerate further. Do not wait for us.”
“Reconegut, Rocinante,” a voice came back. The accent was pure Ceres Station. “Geh cahn Allah, sa sa?”
On her tactical display, the Prince of the Face’s drive plume died, and the ship seemed to leap ahead, rushing toward its target by burning less.
“We’re almost in range,” Alex said.
“I don’t care how much you have to dance,” Naomi said. “Just get us there.”
“Ten more fast movers coming from the defense platform,” Ian said. “PDCs are at fifty.”
“Alex?”
“Doing what I can,” he said. “Give me thirty more seconds.”
Naomi opened a channel to the Quinn. “Report.”
“We took a few rounds in engineering and our machine shop,” a young man’s voice answered. “We’re okay for now.”
“Rocinante is lining up a shot. Cover us.”
“Copy that,” the Quinn said.
The Roci slammed to port, and then again. Naomi’s crash couch whirled, keeping the impacts against her back no matter what direction they came from.
“I really. Wish. They had fewer rail guns,” Alex said from between clenched teeth.
“At least we can dodge,” Naomi said.
“We can until we can’t,” Alex said, and the Roci stuttered under her as their own rail gun fired. She pulled up the image of the alien platform, still much too far away to see with the naked eye. Even with the Roci’s system stabilizing the image, it jumped and vibrated. Naomi leaned in, willing the shot to hit. At this distance, even a mistiming in the shot, a small unanticipated vibration, could mean they’d failed.
The image whited out for a second as an enemy missile died close enough to their line-of-sight to confuse the sensors. It came back in time for her to see the platform shudder and shift. The complex structure seemed to pull in like it was wrapping itself around an injury. It thrashed once, a widespread spasm. The shimmer of lights danced along its spine and out through the structures of its arms, and then it began to unspool. Like a tight-wound thread dropped into water, it relaxed and spread. The rigid shape softened and collapsed on itself, scattering through the emptiness over a vast Laconian ocean. Bright lines of energy like lightning or dying nerve impulses shot along it as it grew dark and drifted apart. The Roci shook and shuddered as the alien structure gently, gracefully died.
Alex let out a sigh that was part relief and part awe. Naomi knew exactly what he meant. She tried to open a connection to the Prince of the Face, to report the kill and check in, but the body of the planet blocked it, and there weren’t any repeaters she could use. From here on in, she had to go on faith.
Alex turned off the drive. They’d braked. If they’d kept it going, the Roci would have started moving away from the planet again. They were in orbit now. Being on the float should have been a relief. It felt like a threat.
“Where’s the next one?” Naomi asked.
“Coming up,” Alex said. “It’s behind the horizon line now. We’ll have it in eight and half minutes.”
“Let’s start knocking down some of these weapons platforms. See if we can get a little peace.”
The Roci kicked again, and the PDC chatter was joined by the deeper, subtle thrum of the torpedoes launching. Naomi found herself grinning despite the pain.
“What’s that?” Naomi said. On the surface of the planet, near the center of one of the continents, a brightness was lighting the thick clouds from beneath. City lights. The capital. Laconia. And just north of it, a bright and burning light, rising up through the atmosphere in a perfectly straight line of fire and smoke.
“Huh,” Alex said. “That’s surface-based rail guns.”
“Were we expecting those?”
“First I’ve heard of them.”
“That’s going to make landing a lot harder.”
“Yes, it is,” Alex said, and dragged the Roci out of the path of the incoming fire. “Kind of makes you wish the pickup was a little farther from the most guarded part of the planet, really.”