Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

She shifted to the in-ship comms, and the rest of the universe went silent. “Prepare for launch.”

She was pretty certain she heard Rini’s grit-toothed acknowledgment. She checked her drive. Seven gs. She’d done worse than seven gs before. Getting old sucked.

She didn’t just feel the impact, she heard it, transmitted up through the mass of the ship and into her armor. A deep, dull clank like someone hitting a badly made bell.

“I think we took a hit,” she said. “What’s your status?”

Rini didn’t answer. Pushing against the thrust gravity, Bobbie shifted to the network display. Rini’s power armor was still connected, but everything on it was in error states. A sea of red where green should have been. Bobbie shouted the woman’s name again, but she already knew there wouldn’t be a reply.

The airlock was one deck down and then half a dozen meters from the lift shaft. If she cut the drive, the White Crow would fall out of the blind spot and be cut down by the Tempest’s PDCs. If the torpedo had broken…

If it had broken, she’d already be a rapidly expanding cloud of glowing plasma. The antimatter at least was still intact. That meant there was hope. And if there was hope, there wasn’t rest. She slaved the piloting controls to her armor, checked her seals and status—a few medical stats in the yellow, but nothing in the red—and unstrapped from the crash couch. The power armor whined under its own weight as she stood, and she felt her shoulders trying to dislocate. The blood in her veins slammed down into her legs, and the armor clamped against her thighs, pushing it back up. A wave of nausea almost overcame her. She took the first of eight steps to the lift. She could do it. She had to.

A low growling was coming up from the deck. The maneuvering thrusters were firing. That couldn’t be good. She reached the lift, and the slight reduction in g as she went down was like one drop of water to someone dying of thirst. It stopped when the lift did.

The airlock was a mess. Both sets of doors were open, venting the ship into space. The bulkhead was folded where the PDC rounds had hit. Jagged holes gaped where the raw kinetic force had shoved the outer hull into the room. The torpedo was in the far corner where the bulkhead met the floor, and Rini’s body was beside it. Bobbie went to her side and knelt, the arti

ficial muscles running through her power armor straining under the burden.

Death had come fast for Rini. She probably hadn’t even known it happened. The armor was the same mostly black as Bobbie’s, and it was still working hard to preserve the life that was gone. Five holes across her back and arm poured blood too fast, the thrust gravity squeezing it out of the corpse. Bobbie shifted Rini away. There’d be time for mourning later.

Rini had protected the torpedo from the worst of the damage, but the little drive wasn’t unscathed. A white impact showed where a bit of shrapnel had cracked the ceramic around the drive cone. Bobbie tried to lift it and see the extent of the damage, but she couldn’t. Even with the powered armor, the burn was too much. Her spine ached, and the one rib that dislocated when she was under too much thrust had slipped out of place again. It hurt to breathe.

The White Crow threw up a fresh alert. The maneuvering thrusters were at a little under a third of their reaction mass, and requesting permission to start drawing from the reserve. It only took seconds to see the problem. The PDC rounds had sheared off a section of the exterior plating. In a larger ship, it wouldn’t have mattered, but the White Crow was small enough that it had shifted the center of mass. The thrusters were firing to keep her from curving off, and would until they ran dry.

She had the ship open a tightbeam to the Storm.

“Need good news, Captain,” Jillian said, her voice wet and phlegmy from the pressure of their burn.

“Rini’s down. Ship and torpedo are both compromised. I need you to make the Tempest stop. I can do this, but not at high burn.”

There was no response for a second. “How?” Jillian asked, but Alex’s voice cut in on the channel.

“Give me a second, Bobbie. I’ll get you what you need.”

She closed her eyes. Her consciousness was swimming. It was only force of will that made her turn toward the payload. The four little spheres of magnetism, vacuum, and hellfire. The proximity sensor. Neither of them looked damaged. She checked her tactical display. She was still in the blind spot. She rotated the ship and eased back on the maneuvering thrusters. If she was going to fall off course, she could at least fall in the right direction. The Tempest’s drive plume swept past, framed in the airlock doors like a comet.

“Alex?” she said. “Give me something.”

And as if in answer, the White Crow went on the float. Bobbie rose up, then clamped mag boots against the deck. The Tempest’s drive plume was gone. Her blood shifted and the nausea came and went again as she unhooked the warhead and the proximity sensor. The White Crow was spent. The torpedo was scrap. She wasn’t done. There was still a way. She took up the warhead, cradling it to her chest, and stepped out the airlock. She didn’t pause as she launched.

Bobbie fired up the thrusters on her Laconian armor and burned toward the Tempest. It was an asteroid, a strangely shaped rock curving through a complex orbit around the small and distant sun. She was close enough to see it without enhancement. Much closer than she’d intended. Maybe a hundred klicks away. Maybe less. A machine that had brought the solar system to its knees. The unkillable dreadnought of Laconia. And somewhere beyond it, away to her left, the Storm. Her ship. They weren’t really stationary. Nothing in the universe was. It was only that their vectors matched for the moment. Stillness was an illusion.

Something flashed and was gone. A torpedo taken out by the Tempest’s PDCs. Against the constant and unwavering starlight, the little glimmer of motion stood out. She saw another. A handful more. And the arcing brightness of the Tempest’s torpedoes heading out. The distances were so vast, they almost looked slow.

“Hold on,” she said, but she didn’t turn her comms on. It wasn’t a message so much as a prayer.

Bobbie checked her tactical display. She was still linked to the White Crow, but the comms on the little ship weren’t the best. It took almost a second for the full layout to repopulate.

Going ballistic was hard. The warhead in her arms was a dart, and she was trying to drop it a kilometer and land it in a coffee cup. She checked her suit, and the thrusters were good, even if they were running through her fuel way too fast. The Tempest was a little larger now. She killed the burn and turned, centering it between her feet. Falling toward her enemy from a great height. She held the warhead against her belly, checked the connections and readouts one last time. Was the power cut off engaged? Yes. Was the backup battery disconnected? Yes. Was the proximity sensor set so that the ship would trigger it? It was.

Bobbie took a deep breath. Another. That rib popped back into place with a deep and painful snap, and she grinned. The Tempest was visibly larger now. Her velocity toward it was recklessly fast, even though she could hardly feel it. She eyeballed her path, adjusted, had the suit double-check her. An augmented line from her armored toes down to the Tempest. She took a solid hold on the warhead, one hand on either side, and then carefully let go. Even a tiny variance, amplified over the quickly falling distance, would be a disaster. She waited for a long moment, and it floated in place, almost touching her. No drift. Perfect.

Gently, she tapped her suit thrusters, drifting away centimeter by centimeter, careful that the little plumes didn’t touch the warhead. When she was four or five meters away, she started a braking burn, and the warhead seemed to leap away. Her breath sounded very loud in her ears. Very close. Her suit was running warm, the radiators doing their best to shed waste heat. The vacuum of space was only cold after you were dead.

It was too late for her. Some part of her had known that from the moment she’d seen the white mark on the torpedo, but now that it was done, she could think about it. If things had gone right, she and Rini and the White Crow would have been burning hard as hell away from the Tempest the moment they dropped their missile, trying to outrun the blast. And that had assumed the Storm was still leading the enemy away, which wasn’t happening either. So this was it.

She twisted at the hips, stretching. The stars of the galactic disk spread against the horizonless sky. Some of that light had been traveling for centuries. Millennia. Longer. Many of those stars would have died long before she was born. What a weird fate for a photon to be spat out of a nuclear fireball, speed through the vast emptiness between stars, and land on a Martian Marine’s retina while she decided whether she still feared death, or if she was ready. She’d done this a dozen times before.