“We’d meant to do this a long time ago,” Naomi said. “It looks like they built up in the meantime.”
She checked her maps. The city was almost beneath them now. This was as close to Jim as she had been in years. If the Prince of the Face was on time and target, there was only one platform left. On her monitor, one of the Laconian weapons platforms blew, taken out by a combination of a rail-gun round from the Quinn and two of the Roci’s remaining torpedoes.
It would be so easy to order the drop. Fall through the rough Laconian air, make the pickup, and kill the last platform on her way out.
If she was sure she’d make it. If she was so convinced that she’d live through it that she could risk wasting everything they’d done until now. And she wasn’t.
“Steady as she goes, Alex,” Naomi said.
A sudden bang like a detonation shook the ship, deafening her. She waited for the hiss of lost air, the silence of the vacuum, and it didn’t come.
“What was that?” she shouted.
“Debris hit,” Ian said. “We’ve got a hole in the outer hull.”
“Watch our pressure. If we start leaking, tell me.”
“You got it.”
“I’ve got the last one,” Alex said.
Fast movers on our back. PDCs at thirty percent. Naomi pulled up the visual tracking. They were so close now, she could see the curve of Laconia in the scopes, the milkiness of its high atmosphere.
A connection request came in. The Prince of the Face had cleared the planet and had line of sight for a tightbeam. She accepted it.
“Give me good news,” she said.
“Clar y muerte,” the Prince of the Face said. “Up to you now, boss.”
“Thank you for that,” Naomi said.
Another rail gun from the surface.
“Another what?” the Prince of the Face asked.
“We’re getting fire from the surface,” Naomi said. “It’s fine. Continue with your flight plan. Get out of here. Do it now.”
“Maybe etwas can can do,” the Prince of the Face said, but before she could ask what they meant, Alex said, “I’ve got lock.”
“Do it,” Naomi said.
The Rocinante bucked again. The rail-gun round left a faintly glowing trail, superheating the almost-absent air that it passed through. Naomi held her breath. The rail-gun round touched the distant platform, and her sensors went dead. She pulled up the ship status. All the sensor arrays had tripped to safe. Overloaded.
“What’s—” she started, and the ship screamed. She grabbed the edge of the crash couch as it whirled crazily. They were tumbling. A shock wave moved through the barely present gas out past the edge of turbopause, still strong enough to send them spinning like a kid’s toy that had been kicked. The lights flickered, died, and came back on again. The bones of the ship creaked, and the roar of maneuvering thrusters filled her ears as Alex fought to bring them back to stability. The sensor arrays were still resetting, and Naomi felt the rail-gun rounds cracking up from the surface unseen. She waited to hear them snap through her ship. Hole the reactor. End them.
When the sensor arrays blinked back, the construction platform was gone. A corona of superheated air danced where it had been, green and gold and red.
“I think they may have been making some more antimatter,” Alex said, dryly. “Not sure that was the best idea.”
Naomi didn’t respond. Something was happening on the surface of the planet. The ground defenses where the rail-gun rounds had originated was reading hot. Nothing was firing. She tried to connect the death of the platform with it, but the pieces wouldn’t fit. Something else had happened.
A connection request came. The Prince of the Face again. Naomi took it. “Did you do something? What did you do?”
“Still had demi-hold á plasma torpedoes, yeah?” the other ship said. “No use for. Dropped them on your rail-gun base, que? Clear your way. Question is what did you do? That a nuke?”
“Nothing so trivial as that,” Naomi said. “Thank you, Prince. We’re good. Now get out.”
“Already gone,” the ship said, and the connection dropped. She sent a tightbeam to the Quinn. It answered immediately.
“We’re seeing all enemy weapons platforms in the hemisphere disabled,” a young man said. “We have a half-hour window before anything cycles to this side of the planet.”
“Go,” Naomi said. “We have a pickup to make on the surface.”
They were silent long enough Naomi thought she might have lost the connection.
“We’re your escort, Rocinante. Do what you need to do, we’ll be here. If we were rated for atmo, we’d go with you.”
“Negative, Quinn,” Naomi said. “Burn for the gates. That’s an order.”
A moment later, the Quinn’s drive plume bloomed out bright and huge, and the Rocinante was left alone in the wide sky over Laconia. Naomi looked around her. There was smoke in the air, but no alarms were going off. Her crash couch had pushed one of her medical alarms back to normal, but the other two showed elevated cortisol and blood pressure. No one was shooting at her, and it felt strange.
“Alex?” she said. “Are we ready to go down?”
“Checking,” he said. “That debris hit fucked up our aerodynamics, but . . . I can make it work. It’ll be choppy as hell.”
“Can’t scare me,” Naomi said. “Get us down. As soon as you can.”
Below them, Laconia was in night. There was a beauty to it. Apart from a faint bioluminescence where the distant sea met the shore, the land was dark. The only light was shrouded by clouds. This was what Earth would have looked like, more or less, before the first electric light. Before the first satellite, the first orbital shuttle. Before Mars. Before Ceres. Before the Belt. It was the heart of a galactic empire, and still as bare as wilderness. Auberon and Bara Gaon had more cities. Earth had more history. Every place had the dream of what it could become.
Dreams were fragile things to build with. Titanium and ceramic lasted longer.
“Captain?”
She looked over at Ian. He was a boy. He was probably older than she’d been when the Canterbury died and she’d first set foot on the Rocinante, and he was just a boy.
“Kefilwe,” she said.
“I was wondering if I could take the comms controls back,” he said. “I . . . It’s my duty. If you . . .”
“Sorry,” Naomi said, shifting them back to his station. “Old habit. That was rude.”
“Just trying to feel useful,” he said through a tentative smile.
“All right,” Alex said. “We’re as close as we’re going to get. And more time won’t help us.”
“Take us down,” Naomi said. The maneuvering thrusters fired, slowing the ship and letting it drop. Alex turned them back toward the cloud-blanketed city already carried hundreds of klicks away by the planet’s rotation, tilted down the nose, and tapped his controls. The maneuvering thrusters roared again.
Less than a minute later, the Rocinante hit air.
Chapter Forty-Eight: Teresa
Teresa pushed through the cold and the darkness of the flood channel, hunched down. A slush of almost frozen water and slime soaked her shoes and the hem of her pants. Clearing the entrance had numbed her hands, and now her fingers were starting to hurt. Not bringing gloves when she left only felt like the most recent in a long line of terrible choices.
Behind her, Muskrat whined.
“I told you to go back,” Teresa said, but the dog ignored her. If anything she stayed closer. And behind Muskrat, the heavy footsteps and rough breath of James Holden.
The slush under her feet grew thicker, more solid. A few more steps, and she was standing on solid ice.
“We’re almost there,” she said. “There?”
“The other side of the flood channel.”
“Is that the pickup?”
“No, we have to get to the mountain.”
“Mountain. Right,” Holden said. “Okay.”
A thin oval of gray the size of her pillow swam out of the darkness ahead. A drift of fallen snow blocked the way out, but not enough to stop her. Teresa stamped forward, pressing the snow down, compacting it, then scrambling forward to do it again. Somewhere in the State Building, an alarm was going off. The security forces alerted to her escape. She hoped that the battle would be distraction enough to lend her time.
“You’re going to get soaked,” Holden said.
“I’m going to get out.”
He was quiet after that.
She scrambled out into the world. The wall of the State Building was behind her, the stretch of the wilds ahead. Holden emerged more slowly, and Muskrat with him. The trees had pulled in all their leaves, and the snow stuck to their trunks like a million featureless masks. Everything was transformed. The same and not the same. For the first time, she felt a prick of uncertainty. This was her place. She knew it and how to navigate it. Or at least she had until now.