Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

The moment stretched. For a moment, Teresa was back in the cave. Timothy told her to put her hands over her ears. She was breathing too fast. The world started to sparkle at the edges, so bright it was just like darkness.

Cortázar looked at her. “You can go,” he said. “We’ll do this another time.”

Teresa nodded, turned, and began the walk back toward the museum and her peer class with a sense that something important had just happened. Something dangerous. And she wasn’t sure what it was.

Chapter Thirty-Two: Bobbie

Copy copy, White Crow. Flight path amended. You good to go, sa sa?”

“Heard and acknowledged,” Bobbie said. “Thank you, Control.”

The tightbeam to Callisto’s traffic control center dropped, and Bobbie shifted the little skiff, feeling the gentle pressure as the thrusters fired. It wasn’t even enough to move her crash couch, but it bent the trajectory of her ship just enough. The display had a hard lockout that let her overlay the path of the whole plan without fear of anything leaking back. Where the Tempest was, where the Storm would appear, and where she needed to be.

She stretched her hands, and the powered gloves of the Laconian armor shifted with her. Blue showed through gaps in the black paint job. Blue and black were the wrong colors, and always would be for her. Her armor was supposed to be red. She opened an encrypted tightbeam and waited the seconds as it was confirmed. Everything was happening so close in, there was hardly any light delay. This wouldn’t be either strategic or close quarters, but the messy part in between.

“Captain,” Jillian Houston said.

“We have approval from traffic control. Monitor our position and stand by for go.”

“Copy that,” Jillian said, and dropped the line. It was good discipline, not leaving the connection up longer than required. Not that it would have made much difference now. By the time the Laconian forces tracked the signal, it would all be over. Or at least too far along to stop.

The White Crow was a terrible little ship. Even if Bobbie hadn’t been taking it into combat, she’d have wanted a vac suit buttoned up tight. The cloth covering the bulkheads was pale, with lines of white showing where age and radiation had degraded it. The crash couches were lumpy and stiff, and slow to react to changes in the ship’s vector. The handholds on the walls had all been polished by generations of touching, the way stone steps were supposed to be worn away in medieval cathedrals back on Earth. It was a ship that had outlasted its time, but its drive still worked, and Bobbie didn’t need much more than that out of it.

She waited through minutes that felt long as they passed and sudden when they were gone. The outward-pushing, inward-pulling dilation of time before battle. It felt good.

“How are we down there, Rini?” she asked. The response delay from the airlock wasn’t much less than when she’d been talking to Callisto.

“I feel like I’m cupping the devil’s balls,” Rini said. “But… yeah. It all looks good.”

Bobbie had looked over the torpedo before they’d taken off. It was the smallest and fastest that Bobbie could find, black and boxy and hardly longer than her own leg. Rini had stripped the already spare design down to its minimum, taking away the mass of the traditional warhead in order to win a few extra milliseconds when the burn came. Instead of blowing the little fusion core, the proximity sensor would disable the power that kept the antimatter cut off from the rest of the universe, and physics would take it from there. Bobbie just had to get it close.

She checked the flight path. The White Crow was just about where she wanted it to be.

“I’m about to pull the pin,” Bobbie said. “If you need a potty break, now’s the time.”

Rini’s laugh was short and humorless. “I’ve been pissing myself since you told me the plan, Cap. At this point, I’m amazed I don’t have a prolapsed bladder.”

“Only a little longer,” she said, and switched back to the tightbeam. “Status?”

“At your order,” Jillian said.

This was the moment. The last moment. Bobbie could pull back now. Take the White Crow through her planned flight path, tell her crew to scatter to the winds, drop the antimatter down Jupiter’s gravity well and enjoy the fireworks. There hadn’t been a lot of decisive moments in her life that she’d recognized when they were happening. Usually they only came clear after the fact.

“Take her out, Storm,” Bobbie said.

“Done,” Jillian said, the single syllable sharp and hard as a thrown rock.

Bobbie took a deep breath, let it out. Down on Callisto, the Gathering Storm was coming to life, breaking out of its hidden berth and leaping through the thin Callistan atmosphere toward the stars. Her crew were being pressed back into their couches like God had His palm on their chests. All she could do was sit and listen to the open channel and wait for someone to notice a drive plume where there shouldn’t be one.

The emergency alert cut through the chatter of voices. Military orders to make clear. The thickly traveled Jovian system, with its dozens of moons and millions of people all smashed down into a volume smaller than the slow zone, had just become a battlefield. She fired up the White Crow’s drive as if she were going to head for shelter. Her body felt warm and smooth. On her tactical display, the Tempest shifted the way it was supposed to, took the vector she’d anticipated, leaped to the attack. When she switched to visual, it looked like a tiny bone, dark against the brightness of its own drive plume.

The display showed fast movers—torpedoes already in flight from the Storm. And there, tiny pinpricks of light where the Tempest’s PDCs were firing out through holes in its skin-like plating to knock them back. The thin cone of the enemy’s blind spot swept across the tactical display. She’d be in it soon. Very soon…

“Make safe, Rini,” she said. “We’re about to get bumpy.”

“Not soon enough for me.”

The White Crow fell into shadow, and Bobbie spun the ship hard, throwing the drive into a hard burn. The crash couch slammed up into her back. Her armor flashed a medical alert error up as her blood pressure fluttered, then took it down when she stabilized. The tactical screen had more targets than she could track. Jillian Houston was throwing everything the Storm had at the Tempest, and the Tempest was opening up its own volley. But so far no sign of the magnetar field generator, so their dangerous gamble was paying off for now. Bobbie slid the White Crow closer in, trying to narrow the gap between her and her enemy. The burn was hard. Her armor rippled down on her legs and arms in rhythm with her heart, pushing the blood along, keeping it from pooling. Even so, darkness started to creep in at the edges of her vision. She was aware of voices on her radio like they were music coming from another room. She was hiding in the middle of the Tempest’s blind spot. The safest she could be in the middle of a shooting war, and still not particularly safe.