Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

And if she had the replacement parts, it might mean there was a hole in the Tempest’s sensor package. If they could figure out where it existed, maybe they could get close to the big ship before detection. They could… fire one meaningless torpedo before the big bastard swung around and ripped them into atoms. Paint something rude on the hull. Pee on it. Jillian’s crack about moral victories was annoying, but that didn’t make her wrong.

Bobbie put the sensor node back into its case and marked the box as one to definitely keep for themselves. An hour later, she’d finished going through the pallet of spare parts and tagged them all as keepers. Her terminal was playing a little three-dimensional game of “fit all the loot.” Every time she marked a crate, the program shuffled everything in the Storm’s storage compartments looking for a place to put it. At some point, they’d have to start storing things in the staterooms and hallways, and that point wasn’t far off.

She opened a crate of protein flavorings for the galley food processor and marked it DO NOT KEEP. She started to close it, then sighed and changed it to KEEP. The terminal played its little space-shuffling game. An army marches on its stomach, the ancient saying went, and people who were risking their lives for the cause should probably be able to have a tasty meal every now and then.

It was interesting, though, that the Tempest was coming after them. It felt good to know she’d hit the enemy hard enough to sting. Maybe it was just pride. Admiral Trejo angry that a pirate would dare act in his solar system. Or maybe the political officer had been close enough to someone high in command that this was a personal vendetta now. Or maybe they just really wanted their protein flavoring back. Whatever it was about the raid that made Laconia jump, she hoped they were as bothered and itchy as she was.

She reached the end of her row of pallets, which meant her work was half-done. A few more hours digging through boxes, and she could sneak off to one of those old bars at the port and drink her troubles away. Or at least distill them down to nausea and a hangover. And maybe she’d get a steak. She felt like Saba and the resistance could afford to buy her a steak. Her stomach rumbled at the thought. So maybe she called it a day now, and came back to finish tomorrow.

A small pile of high-impact crates had been set off to the side, away from the main rows of pallets. They had a variety of warning labels on them, so her crew had put some space between them and the rest of the supplies. All right. Go through the dangerous stuff now, then call it a day.

The top crate in the pile had a caustic chemical warning, and was filled with spray cans of degreaser. Not exactly a threat to life and limb. She moved the crate over to the regular supplies. Beneath it was a crate marked HIGH EXPLOSIVE that had reloads for the rocket launchers the Laconian power armor could attach. She marked that one as definitely keep and set it aside.

Under that was a large metal crate. The label said MAGNETIC CONTAINMENT EXPLOSIVE DANGER. That was odd. None of those words seemed to go together in a way that made sense to her. She checked the serial number on the side of the crate with her terminal, and it came back ID not found.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Nothing on the crate indicated that opening the latches was hazardous, so Bobbie popped them and lifted the lid. It was much heavier than it looked. Lead lined, maybe. Inside, cradled by enough foam to keep a robin’s egg intact during high-g maneuvers, were four metallic spheres about the size of Bobbie’s two fists held together. All four had cables running to a massive power cell that gave off a low hum of high electricity. The power cell’s indicator showed that it was at 83 percent charge. Each sphere had its own indicator where a cable from the power cell connected to it. They all showed 100 percent.

Bobbie very carefully lifted her hands away from the box and took a step back. Nothing in the box itself looked all that dangerous. Just four big metal balls and a high-capacity battery. But every hair on her body was standing straight up. It was all she could do to stop herself from running away.

Bobbie knelt back down next to the crate and very gingerly lifted one of the metal balls out, making sure to keep the cable connected to the power supply. Once it was out of its foam cradle, warning text could be seen. ENSURE MAGNETIC CONTAINMENT SYSTEM REMAINS CHARGED—DANGER OF EXPLOSION, it said. Another, smaller warning read, DO NOT RUN ON INTERNAL POWER SUPPLY FOR MORE THAN TWENTY MINUTES. The labels on it were from the Laconian Science Directorate. Not military, except in that everything Laconian was military. Not usual ordnance, anyway. Nothing familiar.

Bobbie returned the sphere to its place in the foam. And sat back. Something in the spheres exploded when it wasn’t magnetically restrained. Fusion reactors worked that way. The magnetic bottle held the fusion reaction suspended because nothing material could handle the heat of the core. These little spheres weren’t reactors, though. A fusion reactor was huge. It required extensive support mechanisms to inject fuel pellets, compress and fuse those pellets, and turn the fusion reaction into electricity. The Laconians were advanced, but it didn’t seem plausible that they were so advanced that they’d created fusion reactors a little bigger than a softball. And these things were using power, not generating it.

She pulled out her terminal and called Rini Glaudin. She was an old Belter on the Storm. A high-energy physics PhD from way back in the day at Ceres Polytech who’d gotten radicalized in college and spent a couple of decades in a UN prison after she started helping the Voltaire Collective build bombs. Now she was the chief engineer and resident gearhead on the Storm.

“Boss,” Rini said after a couple moments. She sounded sleepy, or drunk.

“Catch you at a bad time?”

r /> “You can leave now,” Rini said, but her voice was muffled, like she’d covered the mic with her hand. A minute later, “What is it?”

“I have a weird question, but if you had company,” Bobbie said.

“He’s gone. He was pretty enough, but postcoital conversation was not his strong suit. What’s going on?”

“I’m going through the loot we pulled off that freighter,” Bobbie said. “And I found this crate of stuff I’m having a hard time identifying. Thought maybe you could help.”

“You’re at that warehouse by the surface? Let me pull on some clothes and I’ll get right down there.”

“No,” Bobbie said. “Don’t do that. I think this might be dangerous and I don’t want anyone in here until I figure it out. Hold on, let me send you some video.”

Bobbie passed her terminal across the crate, giving Rini a good look at the power cell and the spheres. Then she propped the terminal up against the edge so she could use both hands to pick up a sphere and show the warning text to the camera. When she was done, she said, “Any ideas?”

There was a long pause. Bobbie felt the unease rising in her like an illness.

“Fuck me,” Rini said at last.

“What do you think it is?”

“So the big question about the Magnetar-class ships has always been power,” Rini said. There was a lot of background noise as she spoke, drawers opening and closing. Clothes being pulled on. She was dressing in a hurry. “The stars the ships are named after have incredible magnetic fields, but they’re rapidly rotating neutron stars, so how do you get that beam effect the ships have without, you know, spinning up a neutron star?”

“Okay,” Bobbie said. Her knowledge of astrophysics was pretty thin. “How do they?”

“No one knows!” Rini said. “But it would take way more power than a typical fusion reactor puts out. Everyone just sort of assumed that meant the Laconians had much better reactors than us. But we have the Storm, and our reactor is good, but its design is nothing paradigm shifting.”

“I’m sitting right next to this thing while you talk,” Bobbie said, “so go faster maybe.”