Josie lifted a hand in affirmation, his eyes firmly on the monitor. They were only at a single g, but Marco felt a headache beginning at the base of his skull. It didn’t matter. It was only a little pain, after all. There’d be time to take something for it when his enemies weren’t wasting good air. Around him, the command deck of the Pella was tight and bunched. Josie with weapons. Karal at the comms. Miral muttering into his headset to someone down in engineering. They were wolves. A band of predators ready to strike. Al-Dujaili shouted something about vengeance. Something about betraying the Belt in the name of glory.
“Let’s shut this fucker up, then,” Marco said casually. “Fire everything.”
The warning had come to the Jovian system in time for him. Earth, Mars, the traitor Michio Pa, Holden. Naomi. All his enemies had lit their torches and hoisted their pitchforks for him and taken to the road. Marco wasn’t surprised. He’d known to watch for them, and when they came, he was ready. True, he hadn’t expected it to come from everyplace at once the way it had. The consolidated fleet had come boiling out of Ceres, up from Earth and Mars. They’d burned hard and taken some of the nearest of the Free Navy’s forces by surprise. But space and distance were Marco’s natural allies. It took time to burn across the half-billion kilometers from Mars, and the Jovian system was Belters’ land. And Belters meant Free Navy, no matter what yapping little pups like Micah al-Dujaili and Aimee Ostman wanted to pretend. By the time their Earther allies made it to al-Dujaili’s side, the man would be a corpse, and all the ships traveling with him dead at his side.
“Firing now,” Josie said.
The Pella rang with the mechanisms of torpedo and PDC, the vibrations traveling through the hull and making the whole ship chime like a war bell. Marco could taste the sound—ice and copper. It was beautiful.
“Hoy, Captain,” Karal said. “Got messages coming in. Other ships que savvy if they should be firing too?”
“Yes,” Marco said. “Tell them all to open fire.”
“The ones kommt de Ganymede too? Not in effective range, them.”
Marco shifted to stare at Karal. The ache in his brain grew a degree worse. He’d known Karal for decades, trusted him. In his voice now, though, Marco heard doubt. More than doubt. Insolence.
“All. Fire. Let al-Dujaili spend his rounds plucking their torpedoes out of the black. It’ll shut his nattering mouth.”
“Dui,” Karal said, turning back to the comms and speaking in a voice too low and urgent for Marco to bother listening.
It was happening everywhere. Vesta. Pallas. Titan. Hygeia Station. Thisbe Yards. Europa. Large targets and small, the enemy was coming at him thinking they would wash the Free Navy aside like a wave. And there was damage, yes. Pallas blockaded. Vesta fallen. The battle forces burning toward Titan alone might make one of the largest in history, and he couldn’t say how decisive his victory there would be. It almost didn’t matter. The important thing was that he had goaded them into action. Into reaching out in anger and fear. It was a recipe for overreach. After the careful, turtle-meek response of Earth and Mars to this point, it was a relief.
Let them come. Let them win their little victories. The Free Navy would hold what it could, scatter into the dark where that was wiser, and loop back to crush the unguarded targets left behind. It was the mistake he’d known they would make. The inner planets with all their centuries of dominion still dreamed that they could fight a war and win. Marco knew better. War was never won and never lost. Until now—until him—Earth and Mars had thought they were at peace because the violence had all poured out on the Belt and not back at them. Their fault. Their shortsightedness. They’d had their age of victory. It was over now. And this paroxysm, this grand mal seizure of a battle plan, promised a thousand more like it to come.
The Belt would take its hits. But it would never take them passively again. That was his victory.
“First wave’s down,” Josie said. “They got all our torpedoes. No hits. Try again?”
“No,” Marco said. “We wait. Let them think they can handle us. Then crush them.”
“Bien,” Josie said. Karal muttered into the comms, passing the word along. Without the weapons fire, the ship still wasn’t quiet. It only felt that way. Marco stretched his neck, craning it to try to relieve the tension there, but everything in him was straining out toward al-Dujaili. He’d killed Fred Johnson with his own hands already, and now all the OPA factions that had been stupid enough to follow an Earther would see what crop they’d sown.
He pulled up the tactical display. The eight enemy ships led by al-Dujaili’s Torngarsuk were scattered enough to make taking two down with a single torpedo impossible, but near enough that their PDC fire could reinforce each other. For all al-Dujaili’s ranting and venom, he hadn’t lost his temper enough to abandon good sense.
The Pella and the six other Free Navy ships from the Callisto shipyards held a looser formation but a wider surface. Outnumbered for the moment, but with ten Free Navy ships on hard burn from Ganymede, they wouldn’t be for long. Marco grinned.
“Cut to a quarter g,” he said. “Tell the Ganymede ships to coordinate braking burns and watch close. If the enemy waits, we outnumber them. If they attack now, be ready to turn. Draw them out of their formation.”
“Bien,” Josie said. “Aber … They’re firing.”
“Go!” Marco shouted, willing the Pella like it was part of his body. Like he could bend its path with pure force of his intention.
“At a quarter?” Karal yelped, and Mar
co shouted wordlessly and grabbed the pilot’s controls. Under his command, the Pella leapt forward, pushing him back. The hull creaked and groaned, but he saw Josie’s targeting solution feed in, heard the great and glorious rumble of the weapons, watched the arcs of PDC fire still too distant to pose a real threat but near enough to disrupt the enemy and then the spread of torpedoes. And the spreads from the others in his group. And far distant, but drawing close, a woven cluster thick as a rope—torpedo tracks from the Ganymede ships. All converging, all falling in to the enemy. Fire and metal and blood. It was like joy. Like music.
He bent the Pella’s course, firing thrusters at a hundred percent or not at all, feeling the glorious torque of the turn in his blood and the aching pressure of his crash couch trying to hold him. Someone shouted, but Marco was past listening now. This was battle. This was glory and victory and power.
A proximity warning, and the Pella’s PDCs shifted automatically, splashing an enemy torpedo that had been lost among the cloud of converging fire. Marco laughed. His other ships had taken his cue, turning toward the Torngarsuk. One of al-Dujaili’s ships misjudged, took a torpedo from the Ganymede ships in her side, and crumpled, venting air. One of Marco’s ships lost a thruster to a torpedo, and three of the remaining enemy coordinated to mow it down with PDC fire like lions descending on a crippled gazelle. Even in that moment of loss and rage, Marco felt the joy of the fight.
It was ugly, brutal, direct. They were past clever solutions and elegant traps now. This was toe-to-toe throwing punches until someone fell to the ground. This was the urge that had put mankind on the battlefield with stones and lengths of wood, beating each other blood on blood on blood until only one side remained. And that side was Marco’s. The Free Navy, and fuck all the rest.
The Torngarsuk died last, dancing around arcs of PDC fire while al-Dujaili shouted defiance and obscenity over the radio. And then didn’t. The Torngarsuk lost power, drifted, and detonated. Its own tiny, brief sun. Marco fell back into his crash couch, aware for the first time in he couldn’t say how long of the thrust gravity pulling at him. The tactical display showed two of the enemy ships fleeing. He hadn’t noticed when they’d left, but it hadn’t been recent—they were already far outside his effective range. Farther and faster with every breath. He smiled, noticed the taste of blood on his lips. He’d bitten his cheek. He didn’t remember that either.
Slowly, his consciousness seemed to broaden. Not just his monitor and his couch and his body. There was an alert sounding somewhere. A smell of smoke and the bright scent of fire suppressants. His headache had bloomed without him noticing into a throbbing unpleasantness, and his hands felt like his fingers had bent backward and were only just coming back to true. He looked around the deck. Josie and Miral and Karal, all looking back at him. He lifted a fist.
“Victory,” he said, and coughed.