Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

“I’m not a grand strategy girl. That’s for the eggheads. I’m a ground pounder, and I always will be. These people want every planet to be a prison where they get to pick who’s the guard and who’s the inmate.”

“And we’re against that,” Alex said. He heard the exhaustion and agreement in his own voice. “You ever think Naomi’s right? Maybe it’s better to try getting inside the system. Changing it that way?”

“She is right,” Bobbie said, turning back to her inventory. “It’s just I’m right too. Naomi wants there to be one way to fix this, and she wants it to be the one where there’s no blood.”

“But there’s two ways,” Alex said, thinking that he was agreeing.

“There’s no way,” Bobbie said. “There’s just pushing back with everything we’ve got and hoping we can outlast the bastards.”

“You know we’re on the clock here,” Alex said. “I’m thinking about Takeshi.”

“I sent a message to his people,” Bobbie said. “It’s always hard losing someone, and we’d been very lucky up to that point. It couldn’t last.”

“I’m thinking that he was one of your best, and he was damn near sixty. Jillian, Caspar, and a few others aside, our resistance is made up of old Belters. Old OPA.”

“Agreed,” Bobbie said. “And thank God for that. Most of them have a clue what they’re doing.”

“Behind them is a whole new generation who were never in the OPA. Never fought the inner planets for independence. Who grew up fat and rich on Transport Union freighters, with respect and important jobs. Kids like Kit. How are you going to convince them to give up everything they’ve got and join this fight?”

Bobbie stopped and turned to look at him.

“Alex, where is this coming from?”

“I think we have a resistance right now because we have a lot of old guys who grew up resisting an enemy too strong to ever beat. They’ve been inoculated against fear of failure. But when they’re gone, I think we’re done. As a movement. As a force in history. Because we’re not going to convince anyone born after the Transport Union was formed to fight an unwinnable fight. And maybe, in the long run, Naomi’s plan to win politically is all we’ll have

left.”

He saw Bobbie’s eyes go flat. “Unwinnable fight?” she said.

“Well,” Alex said. “Isn’t it?”

Chapter Twelve: Bobbie

An unwinnable fight.

Alex was gone, heading back to the Storm to figure what exactly their evac options looked like. If they had any. What he’d said stayed after him.

The temporary warehouse their OPA friends had found for them smelled like burnt ceramics and old ice. Bobbie had been working in it long enough now that the smell didn’t trigger a gag reflex, so that was sort of a win.

She ticked off an entry on her supply list: twelve crates of Laconian fuel pellets. They’d been intended for the Tempest, but they’d work in the Storm too. And because the Laconian reactors seemed to want to use only their own brand of pellet, it meant her ship would get to keep flying for a while. Unless the Tempest shot them all into atoms. But the Storm didn’t have a lot of storage space. They’d need to make some decisions soon about how much of their stolen loot to carry with them and how much to hide or sell. Fuel, bullets, or food. The hierarchy of needs, wartime edition. And now, with a Magnetar-class dreadnought heading in their direction, the importance of every decision was even greater.

An unwinnable fight.

Bobbie had been at Medina Station when the Tempest came through the Laconia gate for the very first time. She’d watched it use its primary weapon on the rail-gun defenses, and turn them into spaghettified atoms in a single shot. And while she hadn’t been part of the defense of Sol system when the Magnetar-class battle cruiser made its attack, she’d read the reports. The combined might of the Earth-Mars Coalition hadn’t even been able to slow the Tempest down. She had no illusions that their one destroyer stood a chance. Run and hide was their only option now.

Alex had been a navy boy for twenty years before he’d become the pilot of the Rocinante. He’d always been reliable under pressure. But something had happened when they met with Naomi this last time. Or maybe it was the idea of his kid getting married. Or maybe it was that he was a little smarter than she was, or a little less angry, or a little more realistic. Maybe it was that he’d seen a little sooner than she had why the fight was unwinnable. The underground was held together with spit and baling wire even at the best of times. Saba did what he could to help the old OPA fighters keep the Laconians uncomfortable where they could, but the simple truth was that the Storm was their only meaningful asset. The ship, and by extension her strike team, were the resistance’s only real weapon against Laconia. The Transport Union didn’t have gunships, and the void cities had been disarmed as part of the treaty negotiations. The Earth-Mars Coalition fleets couldn’t help even if they wanted to now that they all had Laconian flag officers on them reporting directly to Admiral Trejo.

If Alex was losing heart, Bobbie didn’t believe for a second he was alone. The failure to capture the political officer combined with the looming threat of the battleship might be enough to get her crew wondering why they were still risking their necks fighting an unbeatable foe.

And as much as she disliked it, Alex was right.

The old-guard OPA attitude of resistance for resistance’s sake would only keep them going so long. Part of what she should be doing was training up the next generation of fighters. Only so far, they weren’t waiting in the wings to step in. Duarte and his people were smart. They kept things from getting bad too quickly. They made the right speeches about respect and autonomy. They let people believe that government by a king would never go wrong. And by the time it did, and things got bad enough to inspire a younger resistance, she and Alex and the old-school OPA would be off the board. Then who would be left to fight? Why would they think there was any hope in it?

Recruitment wasn’t her job. It belonged to Saba or Naomi or one of the other secret leaders of the underground, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Alex had opened the issue. Now it itched.

Bobbie finished her check of the fuel cell crates and moved on to something the manifest listed as sensor components. The team had grabbed it off the freighter because any repairs the Storm needed were done in-house and on the fly. Spare parts were always at a premium.

Inside the crate was a sealed gray ceramic box about the size of a toaster with seven input ports on its side. Bobbie used her terminal to look up the serial number on the case. It was listed as an active sensor array control node—the little processing station that coordinated data coming in from the radar and ladar sensors, did first-level analysis, and acted as the hindbrain between the main computer and the sensors themselves. An expert pattern-matching system about as smart as a pigeon. If they were sending a new one to the Tempest, it might mean that they’d lost one in the fight for Sol. It was a nice idea, anyway. That the big dreadnought had taken some damage in the fight it couldn’t just heal for itself. And it made sense. The weird hulls and reactors and engines of the ships might heal like the ship was a living thing, but they were protomolecule technology. The sensors and computers on the Laconian ships were human tech. Anything built by humans had to be hand repaired or replaced. It was one of the few weaknesses of the hybrid ships.