Somewhere in the station right now, security forces and maintenance techs were scrambling to figure out whether the hole in the station or the possibility of rushing into more bombs was the greater threat. By the time they came to a decision, she needed to be as far away from here as possible.
The inner airlock door cycled open, and she hauled the corpse up into the locker room before she cycled the airlock again for Katria to use. When she popped her helmet seals, the dead man stank of blood and overheated metal and the same kind of lubricant she used on Betsy’s joints.
She pulled the body into the large gray transport box, closed the lid, and triggered the seals. Whatever alerts, whatever alarms the power armor had been sending out were blocked now. Or if Saba was wrong, she and Katria would find out soon enough.
The airlock cycled open while Bobbie was pulling off her environment suit. Her jumpsuit was drenched in sweat. Katria undid the seals of her own helmet and slung it into the locker.
“You get the package to Saba,” Katria said.
“I know the plan. I’m on it,” Bobbie said. “And thank you. I know we didn’t get off on the right foot, your crew and mine.”
“No need for that,” Katria said, popping the seals on her suit with the speed of long habit. “Just get the work done.”
“Copy that.”
“You know, this is the second time we’ve played the same trick. Use the blast to hide what we really meant? The data center. Now the missing power armor they’ll all think is out there in the black?”
“If they think we have it, they’ll change the shut-down code before we can reverse engineer it.”
“I know why,” Katria said. “I’m saying don’t count on doing it again. Patterns get people like you and me killed. This strategy’s played out. If Saba thinks otherwise, he’s a fool.”
Bobbie popped the wheels on the transport cart out, extended the handle. It rolled easily. She wasn’t looking forward to pushing the damned thing through the public areas of the station to Saba’s rendezvous, but she also wanted to get out of here as quickly as she could. She forced herself to take one long, slow look at it before she opened the doors, though. In case there was blood on it.
“There won’t be a third time,” she said.
“You sure of that?” Katria asked.
“Positive,” Bobbie said. “You get your people, and you tell them to be ready. Cracking the code on this suit is the trigger. Two minutes after that happens, we’re all getting the hell off this station.”
Chapter Forty-Five: Drummer
Bright-green dots were blinking out. Not all at once, but enough to notice. A wave of darkness moving through the cloud of attacking ships. Drummer checked the timestamp, but there was no gap. Whatever the Tempest had done at Pallas, it still hadn’t repeated here. So what the hell was going on?
“Is it the Tempest? Is it firing?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the sensors tech said. “The missiles are coming from the Tempest. Yes.”
“How fucking many of them?”
The cloud of green, the orange dot, and now a new form. Red threads blooming out from the enemy, thick and ropey as a capillary map. The ship itself was lost in them. They reached out toward the EMC vessels. The union fighters. The void cities.
“That isn’t possible. That’s wrong,” Drummer said.
The Tempest hadn’t resupplied since it had come through the ring gate. It had been in a major engagement already. There was no way for what she was looking at to be real.
“The data is confirmed,” the sensor tech said. “Guard of Passage is reporting the same thing.”
“Get me Cameron Tur,” she said. “Or Lafflin.” Anyone who might be able to make the incomprehensible make sense.
“Should I continue to fire?” the weapons tech asked.
“Are we still in a fucking fight? Then yes, you should keep firing.”
Vaughn made a small, disapproving sound in his throat, but she was far past caring about the delicacy of his sensibilities. The red threads swam through the void. They only seemed slow on the display because the distances were so vast …
Here and there a thread died, a PDC round or a missile destroying the Tempest’s attack. But there were so many, and when even one slipped past the guard, another green dot blinked out. The green dots shifted, swirling in the display as the ships did in the darkness. A few dove toward the Tempest, moving almost at the same speed as the torpedoes. As gentle as it looked on the display, it was a killing burn. A suicide run for the crews of every ship that did it. More followed suit until dozens of ships were driving down toward the enemy.
It was a tactic of unspeakable bravery and desperation. Drummer didn’t notice that her hands were in fists until the ache caught her attention. She made her fingers open, looked at the little flaps of skin she’d carved off with her nails.