The Rocinante shuddered, the vibration of the PDCs made more violent by the high-g burn. On her screen, it looked like a cloud of gold. Thousands of rounds spinning out to kill torpedoes that weren’t there. Too imprecise to hit the Pella at this range, and not in the right place anyway. It looked like a misfire. A malfunction. It looked like nothing. Then the torpedoes launched. Three of them, spitting toward the Pella in tight curves. The obvious danger. Shards of white showing internal strain, vector, guiding themselves toward their target and accelerating toward the Pella’s port side. The Pella’s PDCs opened up, spraying toward the incoming, evasion-drunk torpedoes. For long, terrible minutes, the pieces of her puzzle moved into place.
It wasn’t going to work. They were going to see it. As clear as it was to her, they had to be able to see it too.
The torpedoes sped in, driving toward the Pella’s flank and the withering fire of her PDCs. The Pella dropped three torpedoes of her own. Bobbie’s golden cloud of PDC rounds was almost in position.
Alex killed the engine as he had before. Spun them. The rail gun fired in the split second it came to bear on the Pella, the spine of the ship creaking. Before Bobbie could see what had happened, the Roci completed her arc, her drive returning as it had before. And the Pella—flagship of the Free Navy and private gunship of Marco Inaros—dodged the rail gun round just as it had before. Just as it had before. By sidestepping away from the torpedo battle to its port.
And into the path of the oncoming cloud of PDC rounds.
There was no way to know how many hit, but the Pella veered off course, its main drive still firing full out even as it turned almost orthogonally to the direction of the Rocinante. Alex eased off, and a mere three-g acceleration felt like being light as a balloon. Bobbie checked the stores and noted she’d already fired half her torpedoes, so she fired half of what was left, sending five more after the Pella, one after the other streaming toward the wounded ship’s drive cone. The Pella had lost at least one thruster on her starboard and struggled to bring PDCs to bear.
And then it got hard to see what happened, because the enemy drive plume was pointing straight at them, the Pella retreating up out of the ecliptic and toward the uncaring stars. Alex cut the drive, leaving them on the float. The back of Bobbie’s head was wet. Either she’d been sweating or the tears pulled from her eyes had pooled. Or her skin split and she was in her own blood. No matter what, it felt great.
Alex was staring at her, his eyes wide, shaking his head. Slowly a grin pulled at his lips. He started chuckling, and then she did too. Her ribs hurt. Her throat hurt. When she tried to move her left arm, the elbow protested like it had been dislocated and shoved roughly back into place.
“Holy shit,” Alex said. “I mean just holy fucking shit.”
“I know,” she said.
“That was great!” Alex whooped, and punched the air. “We did it! We kicked their butts!”
“We did,” Bobbie said, closing her eyes and heaving a deep, slow breath. Her sternum popped like a firecracker, and she started laughing again. A thin sound, distant as home, plucked at her awareness. She realized she’d been hearing it for a while, but hadn’t registered it in the heat of battle. Now that she heard it, she recognized it at once.
It was a medical alarm.
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Holden
When Holden left the Earth Navy, he’d had a dishonorable discharge on his record and a sense of relief and righteous anger stiffening his spine. He’d thought at the time that the greatest irony of his newly fallen position in life was that, while his career options were now substantially narrowed and his status in the world dimmed, he felt freer. Looking back at it now, that freedom only earned second place after the subliminal, barely expressed relief that he wouldn’t see any more ship-to-ship fighting.
Since the Rocinante had become his home, he’d tracked down pirates for the OPA. Battled over Io. The slow zone. Ilus. If he’d sucked it up and stayed in the service, he’d have been a thousand times safer. It wasn’t something that had occurred to him before. In all the previous battles, he’d been in charge. Working for so many years with a skeleton crew of only four made frantic action the norm. Between his crew and Fred Johnson’s now, every station had someone in it, and a backup ready to step in besides. Even with the high burn pressing him into the couch so hard he could barely breathe, there was a deeper urge to do something. To take control of some corner of the action. To have an effect.
The truth of the matter was that anything he did now would get in someone else’s way. Watching the tactical map and trying not to pass out were literally all he could usefully manage. Even calling Ceres for help had been someone else’s job. And Fred, in the couch at the far side of the command deck, had done it better than he could have. When a power exchange blew out and switched to the fallback, Amos or Clarissa had flagged it for repair before he could remember how to pull up the damage control schedule. Mfume and Steinberg were at stations amidships, Lombaugh and Droga down in engineering, two teams of pilot and gunner ready to take over if the Free Navy cleaved the cockpit off the ship. So he watched the Shinsakuto falling away to intercept the long-range torpedoes from Ceres and then shifted to the Koto and the Pella—Marco Inaros’ ship—as they raced up at them from below like sharks.
Naomi was in the next couch over, breathing in ragged gasps. He wanted to talk to her, to ask if she was okay, to offer her some sort of comfort. He tried to imagine her response. Something that meant, I appreciate that you care, but the time to talk through my emotional well-being isn’t during a firefight. It was just another way that he could try to control something. Make something better. Anything. She was less than a meter from him, and a million klicks away.
When the drive cut out and the ship spun hard, he knew they were dead. Then thrust slammed him back into his couch. For a few seconds he’d wondered whether it had actually happened, or if he was starting to hallucinate, but then he saw the Koto falling away beneath them. Even then it took a few seconds to understand what had happened, just in time for it to happen again. He heard Naomi cry out as the impact of the couch hit them all again.
He wanted to shout up to Bobbie that she had to stop it. That there were people in the ship—some of them Belters. And anyway no one had grown up in gravity hard enough that they could shrug off eight-g impacts all day, crap-ass third-rate juice or not. But he couldn’t even do that, because if she was doing it, she probably was right to. The best he could do was hate it and endure.
All of which was why, when something finally did arrive that he could do, he was practically giddy with relief.
DISTRACT THEM.
He stared at the words with blurry, aching eyes. Who was Bobbie asking him to distract? The crew? The enemy? He forced his fingers to the controls, managing ??? only with some effort.
The answer came back just the same. DISTRACT THEM.
Holden stared at the words. As much as he wanted to help, there really wasn’t much he could do that the ship wasn’t already doing. The ECM package was spraying radio chatter at the pursuing ship, doing its best to blind the enemy torpedoes. The comm laser was throwing as much high-frequency light into the Pella’s sensors as it could pump out. As far as distractions went, the Roci was already doing her best. He forced another painful breath.
On the other hand, what else was he doing? And thinking about the comm laser gave him an idea.
He grabbed the comm control and put in a tightbeam-connection request to the Pella. Maybe they’d think he was asking for their surrender. Or offering his. Intellectually, he knew there had to be some anxiety in him. This was Marco Inaros. The man who’d killed the Earth. Who’d tried to capture Naomi and kill him. But between the ache of the burn and his juice-regulated heartbeat, he didn’t feel it.