In order to get there, they’d crawled out from the elevator shaft that ran the length of the station from the command and control at the bow down to engineering at the stern. They’d moved quickly, skimming along centimeters above the station. The others had been laughing until Bobbie reminded them that low-power radio wasn’t radio silence and politely suggested they all shut the fuck up instead of getting the team killed. After that, she’d been alone with the sound of her own breath, the smells of old rubber and someone else’s sweat. Alex had been on her right, Amos on her left, and the dock spiked with ships a quarter of a klick before them. Past that, just the blackness of the slow zone, and the killing nothingness beyond the gates.
The drum had spun beneath them. The scars and damage from the brief battle with the Storm still showed in blackened streaks and bright patch foam. Medina had taken more than her fair share of licks in her life, and today wasn’t going to be any better.
They’d pulled out every trick that any of Saba’s underground had up their sleeves. Stealing the welding rigs, uncrating the hidden caches of weapons, compromising the access shaft that let them through. Ever since the Laconians had come through the gate, smart people familiar with the station had been planning for this moment. Maybe since before that, if some o
f them were smugglers.
As they passed over the last of the drum, Alex split off. He had to make his way almost a third of the way anti-spinward from the Storm to reach the Rocinante. She told herself it wasn’t the last time she’d see him as if she knew it were true. Then with a flick of her fist, she’d directed the insertion team toward the dark, looming form of the destroyer.
The plan was to lure the Gathering Storm off the station. As soon as its docking clamps were off and no new soldiers could get on, Bobbie and Amos would breach the hull and lead an insertion and take the Storm off the playing field. Whether they did that by blowing its reactor, sabotaging its controls, or steering it out toward the nothingness between the gates was going to be a game-day call once she was inside. Without better knowledge of the ship’s internal workings, improvising was a better option than pretending she could make a solid plan.
The secondary objective was to get her people off the Storm and safely picked up by one of the fleeing ships. The tertiary objective was to get away herself.
Alex reached zero, and Bobbie thought she felt a little tremor through the Storm as the Roci blew her clamps and spun out away from the docks using the body of Medina as cover. Two of her magnetic locks flickered amber, and then safely back to red.
It was a day with a lot of ways to die packed in it. Like Alex, she couldn’t keep from grinning. Maybe it was a Martian thing. She stayed braced, her feet against the hull, knees bent. The minutes stretched. The blower in her helmet felt cold against her forehead. That meant she was starting to sweat.
“How you holding together there, Babs?” Amos asked. The radio made it sound like he was half a klick away and whispering.
“I’ll be fine once they get this ship out of dock.”
“Yeah. Not really leaping into action, are they?”
“We were hoping to catch them flat-footed.”
“That’s true,” Amos said. “Still.”
“Maybe they didn’t notice,” one of the others said.
Or maybe they’re waiting for more troops to get on board, Bobbie thought, and the Gathering Storm surged out to the black, snapping the nylon bands taut.
They were on maneuvering thrusters. Fifteen meters down from them, a blast of superheated steam vented, pushing the destroyer into a fast rotation. It didn’t seem to come from anyplace, as if the thruster were hidden under the weird not-metal of the hull until they wanted it. Good thing they hadn’t set up their camp there or at least one of them would probably have been blasted off the ship and cooked to death already.
The Storm lurched. The rumble of the thrusters translated itself up her legs. Medina fell away like someone had dropped it. The drive plume of the Storm’s main drive flared, and the ship jumped forward. Only about a quarter of a g. They weren’t going to risk melting Medina to slag. Still, it was a little eerie seeing her shadow stretched long ahead of her on the body of the ship. A reminder that if she fell, she’d die in fire.
“Amos,” she said. “Make us a hole.”
“I see you coming after me,” Alex shout-sang. “You ain’t catching the Roci, friend. We’re just too damned pretty for you.”
“Alex, get off this channel,” she yelled, then remembered that her signal was intentionally too weak to carry. She shook her head and hoped he wouldn’t be too distracting.
Amos had the welding kit out, power supply strapped to his side. With two broken ribs, she figured the rig had to hurt like hell, but nothing about his movement betrayed the pain. Her own cracked tailbone wasn’t making it any more comfortable either. They’d done themselves a lot of damage getting this far. She had to make sure it didn’t make a difference. Pain was just her body telling her something. She could choose to ignore it. Amos held the torch to the hull, and everything went bright. Sparks seemed to stream away behind them, curving down and vanishing against the hull like gravity was pulling them and not just the turning of the ship.
“Weapons ready,” she barked, and the others acknowledged. If the destroyer had the double-hulled design that all Martian ships had, cutting their way through here would only be the first step. But it was a critical one. There was damage they could do there, but it was also difficult to defend, and with none of the Storm’s crew there, tactics like flooding it with hydrogen and oxygen could take out her whole team without risk to the enemy. Tempting as it was, she had to get into the ship proper, and—
“Ah, Babs? This is weird as shit.”
Amos stood braced. The cut from the welding torch was a line of brightness in the hull half a meter long. Half a meter long and shrinking fast.
“What have we got?”
“Remember how it looked like the hull could repair itself? It’s doing it now too.”
“That going to be a problem?”
“Yeah,” Amos said. “I’d say that’ll make this hard.”
The Storm lurched under them. The drive plume brightened below them, and the Storm gathered speed. The acceleration pulled the straps taut as the thrust gravity made the nuclear-powered flames of the plume more definitively down. The bow-most of Bobbie’s magnetic locks flickered amber and slid a few centimeters before it went red again and stopped. The little moment of give shot adrenaline through her body. Her heart was thudding in her ears. Her voice was so calm it sounded like someone else.