A message appeared on her screen from Alex. TAKE IT TO THEM?
The two ships were bearing down on the Roci, pushing hard to narrow the distance. She didn’t know if that was bold or foolhardy. Probably they didn’t either. Ships full of Belters weren’t known for loving high-g burns, but this was war. You took the risks you had to take. But the third ship had peeled off. And two points, her old sergeant used to say, defined an opportunity. Those bad guys were awfully close to each other.
DONNE, she typed back, and didn’t bother fixing the error.
She routed the five torpedoes between the Pella and the Koto in a starburst. The Free Navy ships were firing PDCs at the Rocinante now, the rounds coming like ropes of pearls on the screen. Alex maneuvered around them easily. Range was too far still for close-quarters battle tactics to apply, but maybe the Belters didn’t know that. Or just meant it as an insult.
She watched the curving arcs of PDC fire shift to find her torpedoes as they burned for the abstract line between the two ships. Two of hers died. Three. Four. But the fifth curved into the space between the Koto and the Pella where their tracking software would recognize that the PDC fire that would stop the torpedo would also riddle the friendly on the other side. The two ships lurched apart, and the Koto dropped a torpedo that took out Bobbie’s attacker just a few seconds before impact.
The maneuver had bought them a few moments, but at the cost of one-quarter of their total torpedo stores. It wasn’t a game she could afford to keep playing when the ante was so high. But by then she’d put in her next firing solution and passed it to Alex.
To his credit, he didn’t question her. In a single instant, the gravity vanished, the Roci’s Epstein dropped to zero. Her couch slammed to the side, the hard spin of the maneuvering thrusters whipped them around. The custom-built keel-mounted rail gun made the ship jump as it fired. It was the one weapon the Roci had that wasn’t standard for a Martian corvette. The rotation continued until they were back on their old course, and then ten gs slammed her back into her couch as the Epstein drive kicked back on and the counterthrusters killed the spin.
A highspeed three-sixty with a precision-timed rail gun shot halfway through the spin wasn’t exactly standard combat tactics for Martian frigates, but she thought her old combat-tactics instructors would have approved.
The sudden crushing weight of thrust brought a wave of nausea, and her heart stuttered in a confusion of fluid dynamics and pressure. She must have blacked out for a moment, because she didn’t see the Koto hit. Only the glowing plume of superheated gas expanding behind it where it had dropped core. Even pressed into the crash couch, she managed a smile. She waited to see if the Pella would break off, go to the aid of her fallen comrade.
It didn’t.
Bobbie fed a new firing solution, passed it to Alex, and they tried again. A weightless, spinning moment, the kick of the rail gun, and slammed back into the couch like an assault. The Pella knew now. At the vast distances between them, even the fraction of a second that it took to spin the Rocinante around was enough for the enemy to anticipate them and dodge. She threw two more torpedoes at the Pella, but they were shot down well before they could do damage.
The Pella launched another round of torpedoes, but without the Shinsakuto and the Koto to box them in, Bobbie wasn’t worried. The complexities of the battle looked to be over. Now it became longer and simpler and worse. Something in her trachea slid where it wasn’t meant to be and she forced out a cough, her head spinning a little when she did.
This was how they’d end now. A long, desperate race to see who ran out of PDC rounds or torpedoes first. Who had allies near enough to complicate the situation. But before any of that, there was the braking threshold. The point of no return at which they wouldn’t have enough reaction mass left to match the thrust they’d already pumped into their vector. They’d be trapped in a desperately long orbit, at the mercy of whoever came for them. That was her hard deadline.
Fighting to move her fingers against the built-in controls, she sent a message to Holden: DISTRACT THEM.
A moment later, a reply arrived: ???
DISTRACT THEM.
Bobbie waited for the inevitable calls for clarification, but was pleasantly surprised when instead the comm array went active. A tightbeam. To the Pella. She saw the connection accepted. Good. She tried to count down from five, but got lost somewhere around three. She breathed through gritted, aching teeth, and re-sent the firing solution. Float, spin, fire, and slam back into the couch, spine shrieking and mind fluttering on the edge of blackness. It hadn’t done any good. The Pella had dodged again.
There had to be a way. She couldn’t let the enemy run them out. She couldn’t let her team down again. There had to be a way. They could fire a fraction of a second earlier … but the keel mount meant the Roci could only fire straight ahead. A tear pressed out of her eyes, slamming to the gel beside her ear like a stone. Were they still at eight gs? She looked at the firing solution through blurred eyes. There had to be something. Some other way to draw a straight line between two points.
She could try again, but the Pella would dodge the way it had before. The rail gun could only draw perfectly straight lines, and now that the Pella knew what their spin meant, its computers would be very good at predicting the slug’s flight path and adjusting.
Something. Something there. The tiny, shining limn of an idea. The Pella would dodge the way it had before.
So how did it dodge before?
Her wrist creaked as she pulled the battle record up, moving back second by second. Twice the Pella had dodged the rail gun. Both times by firing all her port maneuvering thrusters—sidestepping—and then correcting on the starboard. It kept her pointing the same direction, not veering away. But if it was a habit …
She fed the firing solution in again. The moment of sickening spin, the bang of the rail gun, the crack of the couch taking her in. But the Pella did it again. It dodged the same way. It was a pattern, and patterns were gaps in the armor. She could fit a knife in there.
The formaldehyde taste in her mouth was heavy and chemical. They were out of PDC range, but that was only convention. PDC rounds didn’t magically evaporate or slow down. Every tungsten slug that hadn’t hit its target in battle was still out there in the black somewhere, speeding on as fast as the moment it had left the barrel. It was only the overwhelming vastness of space that kept every ship out there from being holed at random.
This wasn’t fucking random, though.
Her fingers ached. Her head ached. She didn’t care. She pulled up the speeds of everything she had—PDC rounds at so many meters per second. Torpedoes started slower, but followed a sharp acceleration curve. Rail-gun rounds … she rechecked the number. Okay. Rail gun rounds went really fast.
It was a puzzle. It was only a puzzle. There was an answer, and she could find it. There would be one chance. She keyed in the new firing solution, everything tied together.
You are mine, you piece of shit. You are mine now.
She passed it over.