The ops deck was dark apart from the backsplash glow of their monitors. Alex was sleeping in his cabin, leaving the monitoring to Holden and Naomi. Last he’d seen them, Bobbie and Amos were touring the ship, testing everything but the comms—PDCs, thrusters, the keel-mounted rail gun, the environmental systems. Ever since the mission had begun, Bobbie had been careful not to make Holden feel like she was taking over the ship, but her deference didn’t extend so far that she wouldn’t refamiliarize herself with every centimeter of the Roci before the fighting started. Even if it was just running through how Amos had rerouted the water feeds to the galley, watching the two of them always felt like listening to a conversation about weapons. The serious, professional talk between people who understood that they were working with equipment that could get people killed. It left him feeling like he’d been a little too casual about the ship up to now.
Clarissa … he didn’t know where Clarissa was. Ever since the last hard burn, he’d only caught fleeting glimpses of her, like she was a spirit they’d picked up that couldn’t bear being seen straight on. Most of what he heard about her—that she was building up her strength, that her black market implants were making her less nauseated, that she’d tracked down the bad coupler that was making the machine shop lights dim—he heard from the others in the crew. He didn’t like it, but at least he didn’t have to talk to her.
The plan was simple. The Azure Dragon wasn’t a gunship, but a geological surveyor. The protection she had was that space was vast, the ship was small, and her orbit kept her far enough away from Earth and Luna that she could burn hard back out to the Belt or the Jovian moons if anyone started coming for her. All of her active systems—transponder, radar, ladar, radio—were shut down to keep her from announcing herself. She couldn’t stop the light from bouncing off her hull, and she couldn’t hide her waste heat, but she could run as quietly as possible. It limited her to passive sensors and tightbeam. Enough for her to do the work of coordinating the stones thrown at Earth, but still half-blind.
And that was what Bobbie was counting on.
They’d laid in a course that would put them close to the Azure Dragon, then arranged for a shifting of the combined fleet that would hide the flare of their burn. It was a balance of getting to the enemy quickly but not being able to make the classic halfway-point flip-and-burn. They only built up enough velocity that they could shed it when they got close, and then the Roci went dark and drifted. With no active sensors, the Azure Dragon would have to see them visually—a tiny point in the vastness—and identify them as a threat without radar or ladar.
And they would, eventually. But by then, if it all went the way Bobbie intended, it wouldn’t make a difference.
It was a slower approach than Holden remembered making to anything in all the time they’d had the Roci, and it left him antsy and impatient.
The voices came from the lift: Bobbie serious, sharp, and professional; Amos cheerful and amiable. They floated up into the deck, first Bobbie and then Amos. Bobbie grabbed a handhold and pulled herself to a stop. Amos tapped the deck with his ankle as he passed it and killed his own momentum by planting his feet on the ceiling and absorbing it with his knees. He floated upside down. The Roci usually ran at less than full g to conserve reaction mass and for Naomi’s benefit, but they almost always had a consistent down. Going totally on the float was weird.
“How’s it going?” Bobbie asked.
Holden gestured at his screen. “Nothing new. It doesn’t look like they’ve noticed us yet.”
“Their reactors are still down?”
“The heat signature’s just sitting there.”
Bobbie pressed her lips together and nodded. “That’s not going to last much longer.”
“We could shoot ’em,” Amos said. “It ain’t my call, but in my experience the guy that throws the first punch usually wins.”
“Show me the estimated range,” Bobbie said. Holden pulled up the passive sensor array. At roughly five million klicks out, the Azure Dragon was about ten times as far from them as Luna was from Earth. It probably wouldn’t crew more than a dozen people. In the infinite star field, it would have been invisible to the naked eye. Even if the enemy had been on a full burn, the exhaust plume would have only been one point of light among billions. “How accurate is that?”
“I’m not sure,” Holden said. “Normally we’d be using ladar.”
“Give it ten percent either way,” Naomi said. “At this range and scale, passive sampling errors expand pretty fast.”
“But with the ladar?” Bobbie asked.
“Within a meter,” Naomi said.
“You ever think about how much ammo’s flying around out there?” Amos said, reaching up to brush the floor with outstretched fingers. The contact started him drifting almost imperceptibly toward the ceiling and at the same time rotating back toward consensus upright. “Figure all those PDC rounds that didn’t actually hit something; most of the rail-gun rounds, whether they went through a ship or not. All out there someplace going at the same speed as when they left the barrel.”
“If we shoot them, they’ll still look for who did it,” Naomi said.
“Might not,” Amos said.
Naomi looked at Bobbie. “We’re going to have to start a braking burn soon or we’ll skin right past them.”
“How long?” Bobbie asked.
“Three hours,” Naomi said. “Anything more than that, and we’ll need to go on the juice or risk the deceleration g popping a bunch of blood vessels we’d rather keep whole.”
Bobbie tapped the tips of her right middle finger and thumb together in a rapid stutter. When she nodded, it was more to herself than to them. “Screw this. I’m tired of waiting. I’ll go wake Alex up. Let’s get it over with.”
“All right, boys and girls,” Alex drawled. “Everybody strapped in and ready?”
“Check,” Holden said on the open channel, and then listened as the others reported in. Including Clarissa Mao. It was an illusion built from anticipation, but Holden felt like the lights were a little brighter, as if after weeks in dock, the Roci was excited to be doing something important too.
“Reactor’s good,” Amos reported from the machine deck.
Alex cleared his throat. “All right. We’re good to go in ten … nine …”