As Holden shut down the air system, the sounds of the ship faded until Bobbie could hear only her own breathing and the faint hiss of the 1MC channel on her headset.
“Wow,” Amos said over the comm. “Three hits. Small projectiles, probably PDC rounds. Managed to go right through us without hitting anything that mattered.”
“It went through my room,” the scientist, Prax, said.
“Bet that woke you up,” Amos said, his voice a grin.
“I soiled myself,” Prax replied without a hint of humor.
“Quiet,” Holden said, but there was no malice in it. “Stay off the channel, please.”
Bobbie let the rational, thinking part of her mind listen to the back-and-forth. She had no use for that part of her brain right now. The part of her mind that had been trained to acquire targets and fire torpedoes at them worked without her interference. The lizard was driving now.
She didn’t know how many torpedoes she’d fired when there was an enormous flash of light and the camera display blacked out for a second. When it came back, one of the UN destroyers was torn in two, the rapidly separating pieces of hull spinning away from each other, trailing a faint gas cloud and small bits of jetsam. Some of those things flying out of the shattered ship would be UN sailors. Bobbie ignored that. The lizard rejoiced.
The destruction of the first UN ship tipped the scales, and within minutes the other five were heavily damaged or destroyed. A UN captain sent out a distress call and immediately signaled surrender.
Bobbie looked at her display. Three UN ships destroyed. Three heavily damaged. The Martians had lost two destroyers, and one of their cruisers was badly damaged. The Rocinante had three bullet wounds that had let all her air out, but no other damage.
They’d won.
“Holy shit,” Alex said. “Captain, we have got to get one of these.”
It took Bobbie a minute to realize he was talking about her.
“You have the gratitude of the UN government,” Avasarala was saying to the Martian commander. “Or at least the part of the UN government I run. We’re going to Io to blow up some more ships and maybe stop the apocalypse. Want to come with?”
Bobbie opened a private channel to Avasarala.
“We’re all traitors now.”
“Ha!” the old lady said. “Only if we lose.”
Chapter Forty-Four: Holden
From the outside, the damage to the Rocinante was barely noticeable. The three point defense cannon rounds fired by one of the UN destroyers had hit her just forward of the sick bay and, after a short diagonal trip through the ship, exited through the machine shop, two decks below. Along the way, one of them had passed through three cabins in the crew deck.
Holden had expected the little botanist to be a wreck, especially after his crack about soiling himself. But when Holden had checked on him after the battle, he’d been surprised by the nonchalant shrug the scientist had given.
“It was very startling,” was all he’d said.
It would be easy to write it off as shell shock. The kidnapping of his daughter, followed by months of living on Ganymede as the social structure collapsed. Easy to see Prax’s calm as the precursor to a complete mental and emotional breakdown. God knew the man had lost control of himself half a dozen times, and most of them inconvenient. But Holden suspected there was a lot more to Prax than that. There was a relentless forward motion to the man. The universe might knock him down over and over again, but unless he was dead, he’d just keep getting up and shuffling ahead toward his goal. Holden thought he had probably been a very good scientist. Thrilled by small victories, undeterred by setbacks. Plodding along until he got to where he needed to be.
Even now, just hours after nearly being cut in two by a highspeed projectile, Prax was belowdecks with Naomi and Avasarala, patching holes inside the ship. He hadn’t even been asked. He’d just climbed out of his bunk and pitched in.
Holden stood above one of the bullet entry points on the ship’s outer hull. The small projectile had left a perfectly round hole and almost no dimpling. It had passed through five centimeters of high-tensile alloy armor so quickly it hadn’t even dented it.
“Found it,” Holden said. “No light coming out, so it looks like they’ve already patched it on the inside.”
“Coming,” Amos said, then clumped across the hull on magnetic boots, a portable welding torch in his hand. Bobbie followed in her fancy powered armor, carrying big sheets of patch material.