Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

“I like it,” Jillian said, then closed her eyes and started mumbling to herself. It looked like she was praying. Bobbie knew she wasn’t. She was running through the mission in her mind, over and over. Two meters through the breached hull to the first junction. Turn left. Twelve meters to the engineering hatch. Breach and clear. Three meters to the right is the master console. The other warrior’s litany.

There are people I love. There are people who have loved me. I fought for what I believed, protected those I could, and stood my ground against the encroaching darkness.

Good enough.

The pod screeched a short-lived collision alarm at them. The Storm had sent her pair of rail-gun shots past the hull close enough that Bobbie could have reached out and swatted them as they went by.

“Brace for impact,” she said, using her sergeant voice. As forceful as it could be without quite being a shout. This was her job now. To seem an immutable fact of nature. The avatar of Olympus Mons come to life and striding through the battlefield. God of war now. Shriveled husk later. Maybe. If she wasn’t lucky.

All around her, her squad of six handpicked strike team members locked and inflated their couches. All of them wore Laconian Marine power armor, though the blue color scheme had been repainted black. They were, as her father would have said, the pick of the litter. Jillian from Freehold and five of the Belters.

The Belters were old-school OPA, grizzled veterans of the endless insurgent war with the inner planets before Laconia came and made that irrelevant. Old men and women well practiced in conflict. Her total force on the Storm numbered forty, and included warriors from nearly every one of the old factions. But for a high-speed snatch-and-grab boarding action, you couldn’t find better fighters than Belters.

“Battle mode,” Bobbie said, and her armor woke up, humming with impatience for the fight. The HUD flashed an ammunition inventory at her, then minimized it into one corner of her field of view. A wireframe layout of the interior of the freighter they were about to board appeared and moved to a different corner. The list of six names and the green dot showing they were alive and undamaged scrolled down the left side of her view and remained. Getting everyone back with a green dot instead of a black one was always a mission priority, even if it was never the top.

A flashing message appeared in the center of her field of view: FREE FIRE AUTHORIZATION.

“Free fire, alpha team, Captain Roberta Draper,” she said.

Through the suit radio she heard the distant clicks as six suits of armor activated their weapons. She’d never needed to do that as a fire team sergeant back in her Martian Marine Corps days. The Corps issued weapons to people and assumed they would use them correctly and according to their training. The Laconians were much more top-down. Winston Duarte had founded Laconia by betraying Mars and looting the navy. It wasn’t a great surprise that distrust of the people in his chain of command was institutional.

The HUD flashed a new diagram at her. The relative position of the breaching pod and the freighter, along with a rapidly decreasing distance to target.

“Ready,” she growled at her team. “Go in five!”

The breaching pod shud

dered as it fired grapples and grabbed the freighter. There was a quick sideways jerk, and then the two ships slammed together. The impact with the freighter was significant, but wrapped as she was in the soft gel interior of her high-tech armor and resting on the inflated padding of her crash couch, it just felt like a sudden pressure on her chest that vanished almost instantly as the pod lost its acceleration and went into free fall. That was a good sign. It meant Alex had hit his target with the rail-gun shots, and the freighter was on the drift.

“Get ready for the burn!” she said, the last word almost lost in the sudden roar of the pod firing its massive braking thrusters to keep the freighter hidden behind Jupiter. Her couch automatically unlocked and swung the other direction, putting her back to the thrust. A new pressure mounted in her chest as the g forces piled on.

When the burn started to ease up, she yelled, “Go go go,” but it wasn’t really necessary. Her fire team was up and out of their couches the second the thrust stopped. Jillian hit the wall panel next to the airlock and extended the breaching sleeve. It made an airtight seal with the freighter, the deck vibrating with the impact. Two seconds later, shaped charges inside the sleeve cut a hole through both hulls of the Transport Union freighter, and the airlock door slid open.

Jillian was inside first, dropping through the glowing red hole into the freighter. She hit the bulkhead at the first corridor she reached and launched herself to the left, heading toward engineering. Hernandez and Orm followed her.

“We’re on board,” Bobbie said on the command channel, back to Alex on the Storm. Their Laconian gear was modulating the signal to match the jamming, which would hopefully let their radio cut through, but Bobbie wasn’t entirely confident in the system. It didn’t really matter yet. Alex would be busy fighting the two frigates no matter what her team was doing. Any messages back and forth before the Storm had secured the freighter’s flightspace were perfunctory.

She followed into the breach, the other three members of the strike team close behind her. When Bobbie hit the corridor wall, she turned right, toward the command deck. The hallway they were in was actually the central lift of the ship, and closed hatches marked each deck they passed. Most of them would lead to cargo space. A few to the crew’s living quarters. One would lead to the ops deck, and that was the only one Bobbie cared about.

Jillian and her team would take control of the drive and life support down in engineering. Bobbie would take the ops deck and cut off communication with the outside world. If the political officer wasn’t in ops when she arrived, it wouldn’t matter. They’d control the ship and search at their leisure. For values of leisure up to maybe five or ten whole minutes.

“Watch those hatches,” she told her team as she skimmed along the bulkhead toward ops. It felt redundant. Their suits were scanning every square centimeter around them for heat, radiation, even the unique electromagnetic signature generated by a beating human heart. It was pretty tough to get the drop on someone wearing Laconian armor. But saying something reminded the team you were there, that you were in charge, and that keeping everyone safe was on your mind.

“Copy that,” Takeshi said. “Most of these aren’t warm. Guessing the cargo is in vacuum.”

“Guy in a vac suit coming at us from behind is low probability,” she agreed, “but low ain’t zero.”

Bobbie’s HUD flashed an overlay over a door one deck ahead. “That one,” she said, and her team fanned out and took positions around it. In the microgravity of the disabled freighter, they stood on bulkheads around the hatch, weapons ready. No matter what the orientation of the ship was under thrust, for purposes of the breach the ops deck was down.

“Remember,” Bobbie said, “there are potential friendlies in there.”

As she said it, a rotating 3-D profile of two women appeared on all their HUDs.

“Protect them first, take prisoners second. Copy?”

There came a rumble of assent. Bobbie slapped the wall panel next to the hatch, and her armor ran the breaching protocol that cut through the electronic security in a fraction of a second. The hatch slid open.

After that, everyone was shooting.