Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

The Tempest was getting larger. She hadn’t killed all her velocity toward it. She wondered whether the Storm would make it. In a straight battle, it was doomed. Jillian and Alex and the rest were doing the tactical equivalent of taking a ship like the Rocinante and picking a fight with a Donnager-class. As long as the Tempest didn’t fire up its drive, it would be worth it. Pyrrhic victories were still victories, and this was about to cost the enemy way more than it would her.

She thought about making a connection back to the Storm. Saying goodbye. They didn’t need the distraction. If anything, she should try to divide the enemy’s attention, not her allies’. Anything else was self-indulgence. She’d taken her shot, but she wasn’t done.

She checked the ammunition levels in the suit. She was topped up. The thrusters still had some juice in them, and her oxygen was good for another thirty minutes, even if she didn’t start running it thin. She engaged the weapons, shifted her HUD to local/tactical, and grinned. Who am I? Did the things I accomplished matter? Will I leave the universe a better place than I found it? If I don’t come back, what are my regrets? What are my victories?

“Thanks for everything,” she said to the universe, as if it had been the host of a particularly good party that was just winding down. She turned toward the Tempest. Another sparkle of light. Another volley of torpedoes speeding out into the darkness. Another threat to her ship and her people. “All right, motherfucker. You want to dance? Let’s dance.”

She locked her targeting system onto the Laconian battleship, shifted her suit to live fire, and started her burn. Fifty-seven seconds later, she passed ou

t of the Tempest’s blind spot.

Chapter Thirty-Three: Alex

Status?” Bobbie said. Her voice on the command deck only made Alex feel her absence more. All around, the others were at their stations. The tension in the air was thick. Every glance, every breath, every nervous chuckle meant the same thing: Holy shit, we’re actually going to do this.

“At your order,” Jillian said, tugging the collar of her uniform open another centimeter. Alex remembered being young enough to care what he looked like going into a battle.

Caspar was tapping the side of his crash couch. Jillian leaned forward on hers, pulling the restraints tight against her shoulders. Alex sort of wished he’d hit the head. Everyone dealt with the anticipation and dread differently.

They’d been preparing for hours, towing the Storm out from its hidden mine, making the cabins and workshops secure, running every system through its diagnostics. Now the only thing between the Gathering Storm and open space was a set of old bay doors, and Bobbie’s go order.

“Take her out, Storm.”

“Done,” Jillian said, and cut the connection. “Kamal. Take us out.”

Alex tapped the release and watched on his monitor as the doors above them opened. Maneuvering thrusters gently pushed them off the moon’s surface. And as soon as the Storm cleared the dock, he lit the Epstein up. He fell hard into the crash couch gel, feeling the coolness as it crept up around his ribs and neck. Callisto fell away behind them, the surface glowing orange and gold where the drive plume had heated it.

“All systems inside tolerance,” Caspar said, even though no one had asked. The kid had to do something. “We are… Okay. I’m getting a connection request from Callisto traffic control?”

“Let ’em wonder,” Jillian said. “Do we have the Tempest?”

“Got him,” Alex said.

“Show me.”

Alex threw the Jovian system onto the main display. Their position, the moons, the curving arc of the gas giant below them. The shipping patterns were complex to an untrained eye, but he could read them like text. The freight traffic in gray, Laconian security in gold. Bobbie and the White Crow in green. And the target—the Tempest—in red as bright as fresh blood.

The shifting gravity of the system made lowest-energy transit lines, and the traffic between the moons followed them like iron filings showing a magnetic field. At these distances, you wouldn’t even need an Epstein drive to ignore them. A decent ship flying teakettle could get anywhere it needed to be. It was only the extra scrip that ships could save that made the pattern what it was. That was always enough.

“Come on,” Jillian said, not to anyone on the bridge. “Grow some balls and come get me, you big bastard.”

“Security alert’s just gone out, open channel,” Caspar said. “They know we’re here. The Tempest is moving. She’s coming after us.”

“Punch it, Kamal,” Jillian said. Her bravado was almost convincing. Alex didn’t think Caspar saw through it.

Alex punched it. On his monitor, the green of the White Crow lined up just where he wanted it to be. The Tempest followed in the way he’d expected it would. His jaw ached from the thrust, and the juice running through his system made him feel like he’d had too much coffee and not enough at the same time. The Tempest was a massive ship, but the drive was powerful enough that inertia didn’t matter much. The Storm was smaller, lighter, and less powerful, and while it was probably more maneuverable, that didn’t help this time. If he was going to get Bobbie through the eye of that particular needle, he had no degrees of freedom.

They still had advantages, though. The main one being that they were ahead and the Tempest was behind. The Storm’s drive plume gave a little cover. The torpedoes that the Tempest fired would have to swing out and around to keep from getting slagged. And it also had catch up to the Storm as it sped away. Anything the Storm launched, the Tempest would rush forward to meet. It gave the Storm’s PDCs that little extra slice of reaction time, the Tempest’s that much less. Bobbie’s flight plan for him had been to ride that gap where the difference put the Tempest in threat and the Storm just outside it. It was great in theory. Practice was more complicated, because they could still be overwhelmed.

Would be.

“Fast movers,” Caspar gasped. “That’s a lot of them.”

Jillian coughed. It sounded painful. Alex half expected her to move to text communication, but she fought through and spoke aloud. “PDCs to auto. Return fire.”

The thrum of the PDCs added itself to the noise and shudder of the pursuit. Like a kid trying to outrun a cop, the Storm slid past the White Crow, and the Tempest boiled up from below her. Alex couldn’t tell if the vibration was engine harmonics coming from the deck or his overloaded bloodstream or both. Bobbie’s little ship hit her burn too, falling into the enemy’s blind spot.

Soon. It would all be over soon. He forced himself to swallow. It hurt.