“What?” Nadia asked.
Michio lifted the hand terminal for Nadia to see. “We’re working with the people we used to be fighting against.”
“We’ll fight them again later,” Nadia said, like she was promising a sweet to a child, but only after she ate her real food. “Are you ready?”
Michio nodded, and Nadia smeared on the first finger-load of ointment. The pain was bright, like she was burning again. She started the message, tried to focus on it.
The old woman appeared, sitting at a desk. It wasn’t the first time Michio had gotten a message directly from her or from the new prime minister of Mars, but more often she’d heard from generals or functionaries. They only seemed to include Michio when they were asking for something big. It very much gave her the sense of being the least important person at their table.
“Captain Pa,” Avasarala said, and if there was an undertone of contempt in the words, it was only to be expected. Nadia moved lower on her back, new pain blooming just as the first swath began to fade. “The situation on Medina has gone pear-shaped. Holden and the OPA forces have succeeded in taking the station, but saw fit to annihilate the rail gun defenses. Which leaves them undefended. The Free Navy has deployed what appears to be every functioning ship they have left—fifteen in all—burning hard for the gate. The good news is that Inaros has essentially retreated from every other port and base in the system. The bad news, of course, is that he’ll get Medina back, his supply lines to Laconia reestablished, and in a defensible position. Unless, of course, we find a way to stop him.”
Avasarala took a deep breath, looked down, and when she looked up again, something had changed in her face. She looked wearier? Older? More determined?
“I am very, very sorry for the loss you suffered. It strikes close to home. I lost a spouse to this war as well. I can’t imagine how devastating it must be to lose two. I would not ask this if it were not critical, but if you have any ships or influence with any factions that can help us to stop or slow Inaros before he reaches the gate, we need your help now.
“Nothing I can offer you will address the sacrifice you have already made, but I hope you will walk this last kilometer with me. And that we can end this together. Please let me know as soon as you can. The Free Navy is already burning.”
The message ended, and the terminal dropped back to her queue. Nadia moved on to her side, and Michio flinched.
“Almost done,” Nadia said.
“This is the second time one of our enemies has called me to pull them out of a fire.”
“Can we do it again?”
“All we did last time was burn ourselves trying.”
She’d known going in that there might be a price for leaving the Panshin behind. Titan was the largest of Saturn’s moons. The Free Navy had its strongest presence outside the Jovian system there, projecting threat toward Enceladus, Rhea, Iapetus, Tethys. The ice buckers in the rings. Controlling the space without occupying it.
The Connaught and the Serrio Mal burned in spinward, looping up out of the ecliptic to come down on the Free Navy’s ships from an unexpected angle. The burn hadn’t been as hard as Michio had hoped. There hadn’t been a chance to add reaction mass, and she’d had the sick fear that they’d end up losing the fight at Titan and not be able to retreat. Fifteen Free Navy ships had been stationed there. For most of her life, that wouldn’t have been a very large number, but after so much war and so many people taking their ships out through the rings to new systems, it was respectable. It was more than the nine that the consolidated fleet threw at it. But then the point of all the attacks wasn’t to win. It was to keep Marco’s eye off the two ships skinning off toward Medina.
The Martian Congressional Republic Navy had taken point in the battle, engaging early and trying to pull the Free Navy’s ships out of position in hopes that her own attack from the side would come unexpectedly. She remembered Oksana getting the tactical display. Fifteen of the enemy, nine friendlies. Oksana made a joke about how every ship in the battle had probably been built in the same shipyard. Evans had laughed, then sobered and said they were getting painted.
After that, Michio’s memory became less reliable. She’d gone over the logs. Things hadn’t turned on her that early, but the strike, when it came, was like a shotgun blast in her life. It took out a massive hole, but stray pellets had traveled forward and back in time, made smaller holes in her experience. She remembered giving the order to retreat, and Josep saying they’d lost core, but she didn’t remember the hit that had made her decide to run. She remembered the smell of her clothing and hair burning. But the long, terrible moments between identifying the torpedo that cracked the Connaught’s back and the actual impact were gone.
What she knew from the logs was that the Serrio Mal and the Connaught had fired down into the heart of the Free Navy formation, drawing the enemy fire and scattering their position to open up corridors and blinds where the enemy PDCs weren’t reinforcing each other. The Martian ships, being closer, had fired a massive barrage of torpedoes that managed to disable two Free Navy ships. She didn’t know if the round that took out her drive was from the Free Navy or from a stray from the MCRN, but an enemy torpedo had managed to thread its way through their defenses and blow hours out of Michio’s consciousness.
She had the strong impression of a broad-shouldered man with a shaved head and dark skin telling her he was going to make the pain stop but she had to put down the knife. She couldn’t place when that had happened. She vividly recalled waking in a hospital room, and then waking there again without any sense of having fallen asleep in between the two.
The beginning of what she thought of as “after” was when she came to and found Bertold sitting at the edge of her bed, massaging her feet and singing a low dirge under his breath. She’d asked about Laura first, which in retrospect made her think she’d known something was wrong with her.
Bertold said Laura had been hurt. Was in a medical coma. They’d need to regrow part of her liver and one of her kidneys, but Laura was the wife of the pirate queen, and the doctors promised she’d be fine, given time.
Then he’d told her about Evans and Oksana, and they’d cried together until she slept.
The quarters they’d assigned this new, smaller version of her family were beautiful. Three bedrooms with wide, soft beds enough like crash couches that they were comfortable and different enough to seem like luxury. A food station with a narrower range of options than they’d had on the Connaught and brighter chrome. What the resort called a “conversation pit” that looked like a long, curved couch that had burrowed into the floor. Skylights opened to the dome, boasting natural light. A soaking bath big enough for two. Bertold, Nadia, and Josep the only ones to share it with her. Everything about it seemed too large and too small at the same time.
She waited until the ointment had soaked deep into her new, artificial skin, then put on what she called her “captain’s uniform.” Nothing really more than a formal shirt and a jacket with a vaguely military cut. She pulled on pants and boots, even though they wouldn’t show in the message she sent back. Her mind was still fuzzy from the pain medications, and she didn’t understand quite why being formal about the message felt so important to her until she sat down, framed herself, and began her recording.
It felt important because it was a surrender.