Roberts reached across the table, grabbing his hand and squeezing, waiting for the feed to update. For fresh information to come through. There wasn’t any romance in the gesture. Not even a sexual invitation. There just wasn’t a better way to express hope and fear and oh holy shit all at the same moment. Across the bar, three dozen people—maybe more—stared at the thick, confused images bleeding through the gate. If it hadn’t been a live image, it could have gotten cleaned up almost to where the gate’s weirdness didn’t show at all. But jagged and bent right now was better than clear as nothing later on.
A flash of the Rocinante, blooming fire-bright. The whole room took in its breath. Waited. But when the glow faded, the enemy was still there. Salis spat out an obscenity and let her hand go. On the feed, the Free Navy attack ships were already gone, carried off into the black by their own rush to get to the Giambattista and Rocinante before they’d reached the gate. For all the fucking good it had done.
“Es bien, es bien, yeah?” Vandercaust said. “Took a shot, bruised them. Make them rush is the thing. Keep them from going slow, being careful.”
“You don’t know what they’ve got on that ship,” Roberts said. “Could be anything.”
Vandercaust nodded, took a bit of tofu between his finger and thumb and squeezed it until it cracked. “Whatever it is, we’ll put rail gun rounds through it until it’s dust.” He held out his green-powdered thumb like he was demonstrating the idea of dust. She nodded so tight and fast it was more like rocking back and forth.
“Dui,” she said, wanting to believe it. Needing to. On the feed, the looming mass of the ice hauler had come to a relative stop on the far side of the gate and just off to the side where the rail guns couldn’t fire through at it. So they knew that the defenses were there and to keep their heads down. That was too bad.
“What are they doing?” Salis said, not expecting an answer. In the feed, a hundred faint new stars bloomed around the ice hauler, wavering and inconstant. Then a thousand. Then double that. Roberts felt some part of herself step back, shock pulling her away from herself.
“Mé scopar,” she breathed. “Are those drive plumes?”
The dots of light surged, all moving at once. A swarm of bright wasps, swirling, curving, and passing through the ring gate and out into their space. Her space. Here and there, a light flickered and died, one of the thousands sputtering and dying, but most flowed around each other, flight systems taking in the situation—their position, the alien station, Medina, the rings.
There were safe spaces where the rail guns wouldn’t fire. Not behind cover, because apart from Medina itself there was nothing in the slow zone to hide behind. But the rail gun rounds wouldn’t stop once they passed through the tiny attacking ships. Any of the enemy that could put themselves between the end of a rail gun and the ring of a gate or Medina itself would be safe. At least until the PDC and torpedoes of Medina Station could reach it. Like slivers of iron showing a magnetic field, the swarm burned for the lines defined by geometry and tactics. Or, most of them, anyway. The few that had failed spun helplessly in the void, threatening no one. And others …
“Those fast-movers aren’t ships,” Salis said. “Those are torpedoes.”
Roberts’ hand terminal alerted in the same moment as Vandercaust’s and Salis’. She was the first to pull hers from her pocket. The screen was red-bannered. The battle alert. She acknowledged, reporting her position. The assignment put her in a floating damage-control team. Jakulski and the rest of the higher powers in technical were waiting to see where they were needed. Where the damage came. It was worse than a hard assignment because her blood was fizzing with the need to flee or fight, and there was nowhere to go. If she could have run to a post, she’d have been able to pretend that she was doing something. That she could affect the wave of destruction flying toward her.
“Ah!” Vandercaust said. “There we go!”
On the wall screen, the rail guns had opened up. At first, it was only motion, the emplaced barrels—her barrels, the ones she’d put in their housings—quivering. Then the newsfeed overlaid the paths of the rounds, bright lines that vanished as quickly as they appeared, and with each flicker one of the enemy died. Roberts felt her jaw starting to ache from clenching it, but she couldn’t relax. Salis grunted, his expression dismayed.
“Que?” Roberts asked.
“Wish we weren’t doing, that is all,” he said.
“Doing what?”
He gestured to the wall screen with his chin. “Sending stuff out past the gates. To where it goes away.”
She knew what he meant. The starless nothing—not even space—on the other side of the gates was eerie when you thought about it too much. Matter and energy could be converted into each other, but not destroyed. So when something that went out beyond the sphere of the slow zone seemed to vanish, it had to go somewhere or be changed into something. But no one knew what.
“No option,” she said. “Esá coyos making us.”
“Yeah, it’s only …”
Long, terrible minutes stretched. Roberts fell into something half panic and half trance. The lines flashed on the feed. Another dead enemy. Another slug of tungsten accelerated out of reality and into the blackness stranger than space. Now that she saw it through Salis’ eyes, it made her nervous too. It was so easy to forget the profound strangeness all around them. They lived there, it was their home, so of course they had to defend it. But it was also a mystery they lived inside.
The timelessness of her attention and focus broke as a shudder passed through the incoming swarm, and her heart doubled its beat. A swirling motion that went through the drive plumes even as they winked out. The muttering in the room got louder.
“How fast they burning?” Vandercaust said, awe in his voice. He switched his hand terminal from the alert screen to a tracking program, streaming the data into it. “Esá can’t have crew on. Jelly and smash if they were, juice or no juice.”
Medina shuddered. The vibration was small but unmistakable. The first of the enemy were inside effective range. On the feed, the flicker of the rail guns was joined by slower, sweeping arcs of PDC fire, the bright pinpoints of Medina’s own torpedoes. Roberts found herself muttering curses like they were prayer, and didn’t know how long she’d been doing it. The flickers of enemy drive plumes began to thicken and coalesce into a single bright shaft, drawing a line between the alien station and Medina.
“They’re getting between us,” she said. “They got to stop them, they’re getting between us. They’re going to get here. They’re going to board us.”
“No one on them to board us,” Vandercaust said again. “No es ships, those. Fists with engines to push them is all. Rams.”
“We’re still picking them off,” Salis said. “Look, rail guns still firing.”
It was true. The shots were careful, dangerous. They slid past Medina’s drum so close Roberts imagined she heard them hiss on the way past. But the enemy kept dying, exploding into scrap and vapor. The wave of enemy torpedoes was already gone, turned to debris and bad intentions. And the ships, closer and closer but fewer every minute.
“We’re taking hits,” Vandercaust said, glowering into his hand terminal.
Roberts pulled up her own terminal. Pressure loss on the outermost layers of the drum. Not everywhere, but scattered. A hall here, a warehouse there. A water reservoir was holed, throwing mist and ice out in a pinwheel as the drum spun it away. The Mormons had built the outer parts of the drum thick against the hard radiation of space. But no one was dying. Not yet.
“How are they hitting us?”
“Dead scraps,” Salis said. “It’s the debris from the torpedoes. It’s nothing.”