Babylon's Ashes (Expanse 6)

DISTRACT THEM.

Bobbie waited for the inevitable calls for clarification, but was pleasantly surprised when instead the comm array went active. A tightbeam. To the Pella. She saw the connection accepted. Good. She tried to count down from five, but got lost somewhere around three. She breathed through gritted, aching teeth, and re-sent the firing solution. Float, spin, fire, and slam back into the couch, spine shrieking and mind fluttering on the edge of blackness. It hadn’t done any good. The Pella had dodged again.

There had to be a way. She couldn’t let the enemy run them out. She couldn’t let her team down again. There had to be a way. They could fire a fraction of a second earlier … but the keel mount meant the Roci could only fire straight ahead. A tear pressed out of her eyes, slamming to the gel beside her ear like a stone. Were they still at eight gs? She looked at the firing solution through blurred eyes. There had to be something. Some other way to draw a straight line between two points.

She could try again, but the Pella would dodge the way it had before. The rail gun could only draw perfectly straight lines, and now that the Pella knew what their spin meant, its computers would be very good at predicting the slug’s flight path and adjusting.

Something. Something there. The tiny, shining limn of an idea. The Pella would dodge the way it had before.

So how did it dodge before?

Her wrist creaked as she pulled the battle record up, moving back second by second. Twice the Pella had dodged the rail gun. Both times by firing all her port maneuvering thrusters—sidestepping—and then correcting on the starboard. It kept her pointing the same direction, not veering away. But if it was a habit …

She fed the firing solution in again. The moment of sickening spin, the bang of the rail gun, the crack of the couch taking her in. But the Pella did it again. It dodged the same way. It was a pattern, and patterns were gaps in the armor. She could fit a knife in there.

The formaldehyde taste in her mouth was heavy and chemical. They were out of PDC range, but that was only convention. PDC rounds didn’t magically evaporate or slow down. Every tungsten slug that hadn’t hit its target in battle was still out there in the black somewhere, speeding on as fast as the moment it had left the barrel. It was only the overwhelming vastness of space that kept every ship out there from being holed at random.

This wasn’t fucking random, though.

Her fingers ached. Her head ached. She didn’t care. She pulled up the speeds of everything she had—PDC rounds at so many meters per second. Torpedoes started slower, but followed a sharp acceleration curve. Rail-gun rounds … she rechecked the number. Okay. Rail gun rounds went really fast.

It was a puzzle. It was only a puzzle. There was an answer, and she could find it. There would be one chance. She keyed in the new firing solution, everything tied together.

You are mine, you piece of shit. You are mine now.

She passed it over.

The Rocinante shuddered, the vibration of the PDCs made more violent by the high-g burn. On her screen, it looked like a cloud of gold. Thousands of rounds spinning out to kill torpedoes that weren’t there. Too imprecise to hit the Pella at this range, and not in the right place anyway. It looked like a misfire. A malfunction. It looked like nothing. Then the torpedoes launched. Three of them, spitting toward the Pella in tight curves. The obvious danger. Shards of white showing internal strain, vector, guiding themselves toward their target and accelerating toward the Pella’s port side. The Pella’s PDCs opened up, spraying toward the incoming, evasion-drunk torpedoes. For long, terrible minutes, the pieces of her puzzle moved into place.

It wasn’t going to work. They were going to see it. As clear as it was to her, they had to be able to see it too.

The torpedoes sped in, driving toward the Pella’s flank and the withering fire of her PDCs. The Pella dropped three torpedoes of her own. Bobbie’s golden cloud of PDC rounds was almost in position.

Alex killed the engine as he had before. Spun them. The rail gun fired in the split second it came to bear on the Pella, the spine of the ship creaking. Before Bobbie could see what had happened, the Roci completed her arc, her drive returning as it had before. And the Pella—flagship of the Free Navy and private gunship of Marco Inaros—dodged the rail gun round just as it had before. Just as it had before. By sidestepping away from the torpedo battle to its port.

And into the path of the oncoming cloud of PDC rounds.

There was no way to know how many hit, but the Pella veere

d off course, its main drive still firing full out even as it turned almost orthogonally to the direction of the Rocinante. Alex eased off, and a mere three-g acceleration felt like being light as a balloon. Bobbie checked the stores and noted she’d already fired half her torpedoes, so she fired half of what was left, sending five more after the Pella, one after the other streaming toward the wounded ship’s drive cone. The Pella had lost at least one thruster on her starboard and struggled to bring PDCs to bear.

And then it got hard to see what happened, because the enemy drive plume was pointing straight at them, the Pella retreating up out of the ecliptic and toward the uncaring stars. Alex cut the drive, leaving them on the float. The back of Bobbie’s head was wet. Either she’d been sweating or the tears pulled from her eyes had pooled. Or her skin split and she was in her own blood. No matter what, it felt great.

Alex was staring at her, his eyes wide, shaking his head. Slowly a grin pulled at his lips. He started chuckling, and then she did too. Her ribs hurt. Her throat hurt. When she tried to move her left arm, the elbow protested like it had been dislocated and shoved roughly back into place.

“Holy shit,” Alex said. “I mean just holy fucking shit.”

“I know,” she said.

“That was great!” Alex whooped, and punched the air. “We did it! We kicked their butts!”

“We did,” Bobbie said, closing her eyes and heaving a deep, slow breath. Her sternum popped like a firecracker, and she started laughing again. A thin sound, distant as home, plucked at her awareness. She realized she’d been hearing it for a while, but hadn’t registered it in the heat of battle. Now that she heard it, she recognized it at once.

It was a medical alarm.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Holden

When Holden left the Earth Navy, he’d had a dishonorable discharge on his record and a sense of relief and righteous anger stiffening his spine. He’d thought at the time that the greatest irony of his newly fallen position in life was that, while his career options were now substantially narrowed and his status in the world dimmed, he felt freer. Looking back at it now, that freedom only earned second place after the subliminal, barely expressed relief that he wouldn’t see any more ship-to-ship fighting.