A single ship, burning hard from Ceres to Tycho.
“Fred Johnson,” Filip said.
“More than that,” Marco said, and the calm in his voice made him sound almost drugged by pleasure. “Look at the drive signature.”
Filip did, blinked. His breath went shallow and tight. It matched the Rocinante. James Holden’s ship. His betrayer of a mother. The clean, clear center of everything he hated, everything they had to overcome. And here it was, delivered to them like a present.
“I’ve been tracking them. They’ve left the effective protection range of Ceres. They’re alone in the void, except for us.” Marco’s smile was beatific, but the expression in his dark eyes changed. Instead of being lost in the gratification of the moment, he was looking at Filip. More than looking at him. Seeing him. Seeing into him.
“Karal,” Marco said. Half strapped into his couch, the big man paused. Marco shifted a degree. “Need you in engineering. Damage control, yeah?”
Karal shrugged, unstrapped. Marco looked back at Filip, then pointed to the crash couch with his chin. It’s your station. Take it. As Karal launched down the lift tube, feet vanishing last, Filip pulled himself into the crash couch. Weapons controls filled the screen. Torpedoes. PDCs. The sword of the Pella was in his hands.
The warning Klaxon seemed to come from a great distance. The Pella, prepa
ring after weeks sleeping on the float. The needle stung when it went into his vein, and the cold, bright flow of military-grade juice lit him from within like he was fire itself, consuming everything he touched.
Two new dots appeared on tactical. New stars in the star-sown blackness, both marked as friendlies. The Koto and the Shinsakuto leaping from their cover, and announcing their attack. The Pella jumped up around Filip, grabbing his crash couch and all the others on the command deck. The gimbals hissed in unison as Bastien brought them around, couches snapping to face the new up and follow it, whichever way the maneuvering thrusters demanded. The rumble of the drive passed through the ship, through Filip’s bones. The crash couch gel flowed up the sides of his body. As if he was watching someone else do it, he keyed in firing solutions. One gunship against three. The Rocinante couldn’t help but die.
“They saw us, them!” Bastien shouted. “We’re getting painted!”
“Filip,” Marco said.
“Sa sa,” Filip said. With a motion, he trained the PDCs toward the distant flicker that was the enemy, ready to chew down any incoming torpedoes. The Pella jumped forward again, the hard burn jumping harder. Filip let his arms sink down to his sides, fingers on the built-in controls. He fought to inhale. Five gs. Six, and the acceleration was still going up. The wolves were loose now. The pack running.
His vision narrowed, shadows crowding his peripherals like the dead from his dream. He had the weird sensation that she was in the room. Naomi Nagata. But that was only an accident of sleep and high-g blood flow. The crash couch chimed, a fresh infusion of juice brightening him. His lips were growing numb and tingling. He couldn’t lift his head from the couch any longer. It was like he was becoming the ship. Or it was becoming him.
He heard his father trying to speak, but the acceleration was affecting him too. The Pella groaned, the superstructure settling and flexing under the acceleration. A high harmonic overtone rang through the air like a struck bell.
On Filip’s monitor, a message appeared. From his father. His captain. Leader of the Free Navy and liberator of the Belt.
FIRE AT WILL.
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Bobbie
Confirm I’ve got four more fast-movers,” Alex said, his voice tense and calm at the same time.
“Got them,” Bobbie said, her jaw aching with the acceleration gravity. The gunner’s control identified the new torpedoes, adding them to the six already on her scopes. Three ships converging on them from different angles were identified as the Pella, the Shinsakuto, and the Koto. Marco Inaros’ personal ship and two gunships for backup, and nothing for the Roci to hide behind but her drive plume. The enemies were a long way off still—millions of klicks—and none on initial vectors that did them any favors. The Roci had already gotten past them. They were like a kid on a football pitch, running the ball with three opposing players sprinting to catch up. Except if the opposing players had guns.
When the Roci hit the mathematical balance point of velocity, mass, and distance that defined the halfway point, there would be some hard choices to make. Either they’d flip and start braking toward Tycho or commit to letting the chase go on indefinitely. If they let the Free Navy spook them out into the empty spaces between bases and stations, the chase turned into an ugly kind of attrition battle. Who ran out of ammunition or reaction mass first. Given how the outer system looked these days, it would make more sense to brake toward Tycho and hope that backup from the station could reach them before the Free Navy pounded them into scrap metal and blood.
Her job and Alex’s were to make sure they lived long enough to have that problem. She tracked the torpedoes. With any luck, they’d all be standard issue. They didn’t show the jittering path of point defense countermeasures yet. When they got in effective range, the Roci would start chewing them to pieces, streams of tiny tungsten rounds ripping the torpedoes to nothing. If there were only six, she’d have been confident they could do it. Ten at once was a little more complicated, but as long as they didn’t all hit at the same time, she was pretty sure they wouldn’t be overwhelmed.
Holden’s voice in her ear sounded anxious. “How long before we can start shooting back?”
“Fast-movers will be in effective PDC range in sixty-eight minutes,” she said. “Do we have any response from Ceres? Because if they could throw a few spare long-range torpedoes at these sonsofbitches, it wouldn’t hurt my feelings.”
Fred Johnson’s voice answered, calm and businesslike. “I’m working on that now.”
“Our new friends are closing,” Alex said. “We may have to get a little less comfortable.”
“Understood,” Holden said.
The Rocinante was already under a three-g burn. Bobbie felt it in her joints and eyes. The crappy juice dribbling into her veins gave her a distant, cloudy sort of headache and a taste like formaldehyde in her mouth. Below her, the rest of the crew—Holden’s and Johnson’s both—were strapped in for battle. She could hear Sandra Ip’s voice bleeding out from Alex’s headset, talking on a private channel. Naomi was talking to someone too, her voice rising from the deck below.
The anxiety and fear in her gut were as familiar as a favorite song. The logic of tactics and violence spread out on the screens, and she found she could see things in them like reading the future. If Ceres fired a barrage of missiles or long-range torpedoes, she knew the Shinsakuto would peel off to stop them. She saw how Alex would curve the Roci’s path to force a few extra seconds between the Free Navy’s incoming torpedoes. The vectors of the enemy ships whispered things in the back of her mind about recklessness and aggression. And she knew that there were other people on each of the incoming ships whose minds were making the same analysis, reaching the same conclusions. Seeing something she didn’t or missing a detail that she picked up. All it took was one critical mistake, and they’d be dead or captured. One oversight from the enemy, and they’d get away.
And along with it all—the shitty juice, the battle fear, the desperate effort of keeping her mind clear while all the blood tried to pool at the back of her skull—there was something else. A warmth. A sense of being where she belonged. Her team was counting on her, and her life depended on all of them doing their jobs with efficiency and professionalism and an unhesitating competence.