“Are the troops ready?”
Bobbie chuckled and added the group channel in. “Hey. You assholes ready to do this?”
The cheer that came through maxed out the speaker. She slid back to the connection to the Rocinante.
“Good answer,” Holden said, but tightly. The fluting sound again. Distortion from the ring. She hadn’t felt anything moving through it. No discontinuity or sense of vertigo. It did manage to fuck with sensors and comms, though.
“The mission’s on track, sir,” she said. “We’ll get control of the guns and get you in here.”
“Alex is saying the attack ships have vectored past zero. They’re heading back in our direction now.”
“We’ll do it quickly,” Bobbie said.
“I know,” Holden said. “Sorry. Good hunting.”
“Thank you,” Bobbie said, and the connection dropped, the comm indicator going to red. She went back to the exterior cameras, switched to a corrected view. The image was steady this way, the tumble of the boat only showing in three jagged blind spots that sped through it like cartoon bats. There were fewer of the decoy boats now, but not none. And they’d made it in close enough that the station was blocking all but two of the rail guns. As long as those two didn’t decide they were as interesting as the torpedoes and empty landing craft speeding toward Medina, they’d be fine. Except …
She grabbed the image, enlarged it. There at the base of the nearest rail gun emplacement, a dozen meters from the massive sky-pointing gun, a low, gray structure. Round as a coin, and sloped so that no matter what angle debris or outgassing struck it from, it would be pressed more firmly in place. It was a design she knew inside and out. She waited for the fear to come, but all that showed up was a grim kind of determination.
“Amos,” she shouted, sending him a copy of the image. “Take a look at this.”
The big man looked at his hand terminal. “Huh,” he said. “Well, that complicates things.”
She popped the group channel open.
“New information. The intelligence we had that the rail guns weren’t guarded may have been faulty. I’m looking at an MCRN-design troop bunker right now. If there’s one, there may be others.”
A chorus of alarm and regret. Bobbie switched the channel controls, killing all the mics but hers.
“No whining. We knew this was a possibility. If you don’t want to participate, feel free to leave now. Otherwise, check your seals and weapons and be ready for a fight when we hit surface. Our job is to get control of those guns.”
She enabled their mics in time to hear a ragged chorus of yes sirs and one woman’s voice calling her a bitch. If there’d been time for a lesson in discipline, Bobbie might not have ignored it, but hey. It was a high-stress environment and the OPA soldiers weren’t marines. She’d work with what she had.
Following her own advice, she ran a weapons check. Her arm-mounted Gatling gun read a full mag, two thousand rounds of mixed armor piercing and high explosive. A single-use rocket launcher was hooked to a hard point on her back, and slaved to her suit’s targeting laser. Powered armor at full charge. She didn’t doubt that she was the single most dangerous thing on their little landing craft. That meant she’d be taking point.
The boat informed her that they’d passed beneath the rail gun emplacement’s range. The computer started the maneuvering thrusters on their correction burns to stop the tumble and lit the main drive. The braking burn pressed her hard into the gel. Her vision started to tunnel, and she had to remind herself to tense her legs and arms, force the blood out of her muscles and into her brain. They still called it the slow zone, but the only actual speed limit there now was not getting crushed to death by the energy of stopping.
The boat hit hard, bounced, and hit again. Before it had stopped sliding, Bobbie had pulled her straps off and hit the button that blew the door completely off the ship. They wouldn’t be using it to leave, no matter how things turned out. The landscape outside was as surreal as something in a dream. A plain of blue purer than a Terran sky, featureless and glowing. It cast shadows up across the ship, across her soldiers. Everyone’s legs and crotches bright, their faces and shoulders in darkness.
A thick band of metal-and-ceramic almost a meter high stretched out ahead of her like a low wall, disappearing over a much-too-close horizon. The rail gun, its base hidden by the station’s curve, rose up toward an eerie starless sky. She could hear the throb of its firing as static on her radio, feel it like a change in the air pressure or a sickness just coming on.
Bobbie had seen video feeds from the slow zone. She hadn’t been prepared for her own sheer animal rebellion at how uncanny it was. Even in the most designed architectural spaces she’d seen—Epping Cathedral on Mars, the UN building on Earth—there was a sense of nature. The station and the ring gates out beyond it weren’t like that. They were like a ship, but unthinkably huge. It was that combination of size and artificiality that brought the hair up on the back of her neck.
There wasn’t time for it now.
“We’ve got no cover,” she barked. “Spread out. Make it hard for the bastards to get us all. Now! Go!”
They jetted forward in a broken line, their suit thrusters more than enough to defy the barely perceptible gravity of the eerie blue sphere. Good tactics, moving in a hard to predict ragged line like that, even if it came more from a lack of discipline than from a plan. Ahead of them, a dark line on the horizon. A second wall to match the first, converging at the rail gun. Just beyond it would be the low blister of the bunker. She could hope they hadn’t noticed her make landfall. That she could get her engineers to the base of the rail gun and cut into the control systems before the enemy knew she was there …
“Heads up,” Amos called.
The first enemy fire came when they were still twenty meters from the corner where the walls converged. Enemy troops in what looked like Martian light armor crouched low to use the wall as cover, aiming down at them. Bobbie’s heart sank. The enemy knew she was there, and were in position. Charging the walls, getting to the base of the rail gun. They’d be killed before they managed it.
“Fall back,” she snapped, then squeezed off a few hundred rounds along the top of the wall. The faces peering over disappeared. Some dead, some ducking, no way to know how many of each yet. The OPA soldiers followed orders, though. No one tried to stay behind and play the hero. The only cover she could be sure of was the curve of the station itself. Bullets flew past her. Where they struck the station, the blue showed streaks of yellow, bright as sparks that faded slowly back to blue. The rail gun was still spitting.
Once the station’s curve had hidden the far wall, she jetted to a stop near the boat they’d landed in, and floated up until just the very top of the wall was visible above the curve of the station. She zoomed in, setting the optics to a high-contrast false color that would make any movement stand out like neon. Soon enough a shape moved. Someone emboldened to poke their head up for a quick look. She fixed on it, fired. It disappeared. Dead or ducking? No way to tell, that damned wall of metal in the way. The curve of the station protected her, but it also protected them. The other Martians. The ones, she was certain, who’d betrayed their world and armed the Free Navy. Was it so much to ask that one of them would get careless and come close?