“They had vacuum suits,” Holden said. “The ones in your office. They had emergency suits. Turning off the air may not matter.”
Drummer answered from Fred’s hand terminal. “We’ll keep them in place until their bottles run out if that’s what we need to do.”
“Good,” Fred said. “We’re on our way.”
“Don’t stop for beer, sir,” Drummer said, and the background hiss of the connection dropped. Fred made a small, satisfied grunt and pushed himself farther down the hall.
“It’s not going to work,” Holden said. “They’ll figure out what we’re doing and cut through a bulkhead or something.”
“You know the difference between a code and a cipher, Holden?”
“What?”
“A code and a cipher. Cipher, you encrypt text so that no one can tell what the words in the message are. A code, you say the words right out in the o
pen, but you change what they mean. Anyone with a smart computer and a lot of time can break a cipher. No one can break a code.”
Holden launched himself across a wide intersection where three passageways came together. For a moment, the station extended around him on all three axes. Fred and Garret floated close behind him but pushed off faster, so that they reached the far side before him. Fred turned to his left and gestured for them to follow.
“Service deck four’s the other way, sir,” Garret said.
“But the four people on the ambush team are this way,” Fred replied. His words were getting slushy. “Level six, section fourteen, berth eight. Once we’re in position, I’ll try to pull the bad guys out, and we’ll take them in the flank.”
Holden thought for a moment. “You had a whole system set up in case this happened. But what if Drummer had been one of them?”
“I had other systems set up with Oliver, Chu, and Stavros,” Fred said. “Secure, open communications with whoever I had left.”
“Tricky,” Holden said.
“I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while.”
The ambush team was where Fred said it would be: three male Belters and a woman with the thick build of Earth, all in light armor with riot guns and suppression grenades. Fred gave Garret a short-barreled shotgun and a position at the rear where he could be both useful and safe. One tried to tend to Fred’s gunshot wound, but he waved the man away.
Near the bottom of the station, the curve of the corridors was tighter, the horizon close. They were less than ten meters from the doors to auxiliary engineering, and the bent wall offered them cover. When the time came, they’d have to get even closer.
Holden’s hand terminal vibrated in his pocket. Around a red frame, the newsfeed announced a third rock had struck Earth. Holden thumbed it off. If he let himself think about what was happening around the rest of the solar system now, he couldn’t think about what was about to happen in this corridor. Still, his throat felt thick and his hands had a shudder he couldn’t entirely control. His family was on Earth. Amos was on Earth. And Alex was in a tiny ship someplace not too far from the Martian prime minister’s convoy. And Naomi was… somewhere. That he didn’t know where made it worse.
“Be okay,” he murmured. “Just be okay.”
“What?” Fred said.
“Nothing. I’m ready.”
Fred opened a connection. “Drummer. Killing the air is a no-go. We’re going to have to pull in heavy artillery. I have a squad of combat marines I scraped out of a bar. They’re coming to relieve you now.”
“Understood,” Drummer said. Holden thought there was a smile in her voice. “Make it fast, though. We’ve got two down. I’m not sure we can hold much longer.”
“Ten minutes,” Fred said, raising his bloodied left hand in the Belter idiom for Take position. The ambush team steadied their weapons. Holden did too. It took the people holed up in auxiliary engineering almost five minutes to decide they should make a break for it.
The door popped open, and the first half dozen or so of the enemy streamed out of engineering. They were dressed like normal people: security uniforms, technicians’ jumpsuits, the sort of casual clothing Holden would have seen in a bar or in the corridors. They were just people, citizens of Tycho. Of the Belt. They took positions that gave them cover from Drummer’s suppressing fire, unaware at first of the second team. At Fred’s signal, the six of them opened up, though Holden was aware that he wasn’t trying very hard to hit anyone. A second wave tried to get out of engineering as the first one tried to retreat back into it. Drummer’s force moved forward with a barrage of gel rounds and suppression grenades that burst into foam and hardened to stone almost instantly.
In half a minute, the fight was over. Fifteen minutes later, the defense grid was back up, and the attacking torpedo boat was burning hard for someplace in among the Trojan asteroids. It was almost an hour before the real cost became clear.
With the station in relative safety, Fred had allowed himself to be taken to the medical bay. The gentle gravity of the ring was still enough to show how weak he’d become. The expert system inserted four needles, inflating him with artificial blood, and the color began to come back to his face. Holden, sitting at the bedside, watched the readouts without really seeing them. He wanted to check the newsfeeds about Earth, and he also didn’t. The longer he could put it off, the longer he didn’t have to think about it. When Drummer came in with the damage report, it was almost a relief. Another distraction.
“The torpedoes cracked the drive cone,” she said.
“How badly?” Fred asked.