“Well,” Bobbie said, clearing her throat. “There are six Martian ships following those UN ships. And the Martian ships outclass them. Both navies are at high alert.”
No one moved or spoke. Avasarala’s curiosity had turned to a frown. “So,” Bobbie continued, “they might be willing to back us up.”
Avasarala’s frown had only gotten deeper. “Why,” she said, “would the Martians give a fuck about protecting me from being killed by my own damn Navy?”
“Would it hurt to ask?”
“No,” Holden said. “I’m thinking no. Is everyone else here thinking it wouldn’t hurt?”
“Who’d make the call?” Avasarala asked. “You? The traitor?”
The words were like a gut punch. But Bobbie realized what the old lady was doing. She was hitting Bobbie with the worst possible Martian response. Gauging her reaction to it.
“Yeah, I’d open the door,” Bobbie said. “But you’re the one that will have to convince them.”
Avasarala stared at her for one very long minute, then said, “Okay.”
“Repeat that, Rocinante,” the Martian commander said. The connection was as clear as if they were standing in the room with the man. It wasn’t the sound quality that was throwing him. Avasarala spoke slowly, enunciating carefully, all the same.
“This is Assistant Undersecretary Chrisjen Avasarala of the United Nations of Earth,” Avasarala said again. “I am about to be attacked by a rogue element of the UN Navy while on my way to a peacekeeping mission in the Jupiter system. Fucking save me! I will reward you by talking my government out of glassing your planet.”
“I’m going to have to send this up the chain,” the commander said. They weren’t using a video link, but the grin was audible in his voice.
“Call whoever you need to call,” Avasarala said. “Just make a decision before these cunts start raining missiles down on me. All right?”
“I’ll do my best, ma’am.”
The skinny one—her name was Naomi—killed the connection and swiveled to look at Bobbie. “Why would they help us, again?”
“Mars doesn’t want a war,” Bobbie replied, hoping she wasn’t talking completely out her ass. “If they find out that the UN’s voice of reason is on a ship that’s about to be killed by rogue UN war hawks, it only makes sense for them to step in.”
“Kind of sounds like you’re talking out your ass there,” Naomi said.
“Also,” Avasarala said, “I just gave them permission to shoot at the UN Navy without political repercussions.”
“Even if they help,” Holden said, “there’s no way they can completely stop the UN ships from taking some shots at us. We’ll need an engagement plan.”
“We just got this damn thing put back together,” Amos said.
“I still say we stick Prax and Naomi on the Razorback,” Holden said.
“I’m starting to think that’s a bad idea,” Avasarala said. She took a sip of coffee and grimaced. The old lady was definitely missing her five cups of tea a day.
“Explain,” Holden said.
“Well, if the Martians decide they’re on our side, that changes the whole landscape for those UN ships. They can’t beat all seven of us, if I understand the math right.”
“Okay,” Holden said.
“That makes it in their interest not to be called a rogue element in the history books. If Nguyen’s cabal fails, everyone on his team gets at minimum a court-martial. The best way to make sure that doesn’t happen is to make sure I don’t survive this fight, no matter who wins.”
“Which means they’ll be shooting at the Roci,” Naomi said. “Not the pinnace.”
“Of course not,” Avasarala said with a laugh. “Because of course I’ll be on the pinnace. You think for a second they’ll believe that you’re desperately trying to protect an escape craft that I’m not on? And I bet the Razorback doesn’t have those PDCs you were talking about. Does it?”
To Bobbie’s surprise, Holden was nodding as Avasarala spoke. She’d sort of pegged him as a know-it-all who fell in love only with his own ideas.
“Yeah,” Holden said. “You’re absolutely right. They’ll fling everything they’ve got at the Razorback as she tries to get away, and she’ll have no defense.”
“Which means we all live or we all die, right here on this ship,” Naomi said with a sigh. “As usual.”
“So, again,” Holden said. “We need an engagement plan.”
“This is a pretty thin crew,” Bobbie said now that the conversation had moved back to her area of expertise. “Where’s everyone usually sit?”
“Operations officer,” Holden said, pointing at Naomi. “She also does electronic warfare and countermeasures. And she’s a savant, considering she’d never worked it before we got this ship.”
“Mechanic—” Holden started, pointing at Amos.
“Grease monkey,” Amos said, cutting him off. “I do my best to keep the ship from falling apart when there’s holes in it.”
“I usually man the combat ops board,” Holden said.
“Who’s the gunner?” Bobbie asked.
“Yo,” said Alex, pointing at himself.
“You fly and do target acquisition?” Bobbie said. “I’m impressed.”
Alex’s already dark skin grew a shade darker. His aw shucks Mariner Valley drawl had started to go from annoying to charming. And the blush was sweet. “Aw, no. The cap’n does acquisition from combat ops, generally. But I have to manage fire control.”
“Well, there you go,” Bobbie said, turning to Holden. “Give me weps.”
“No offense, Sergeant …” Holden said.
“Gunny,” Bobbie replied.
“Gunny,” Holden agreed with a nod. “But are you qualified to operate fire control on a naval vessel?”
Bobbie decided not to be offended and grinned at him instead. “I saw your armor and the weapons you were carrying in the airlock. You found a MAP in the cargo bay, right?”
“Map?” Avasarala asked.
“Mobile assault package. Marine assault gear. Not as good as my Force Recon armor, but full kit for half a dozen ground pounders.”
“Yeah,” Holden said. “That’s where we got it.”
“That’s because this is a multi-role fast-attack ship. Torpedo bomber is just one of them. Boarding party insertion is another. And gunnery sergeant is a rank with a very specific meaning.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Equipment specialist.”
“I’m required to be proficient in all of the weapons systems my platoon or company might need to operate during a typical deployment. Including the weapons systems on an assault boat like this.”
“I see—” Holden started, but Bobbie cut him off with a nod.
“I’m your gunner.”
Like most things in Bobbie’s life, the weapons officer’s chair had been made for someone smaller than her. The five-point harness was digging into her hips and her shoulders. Even at its farthest setting, the fire control console was just a bit too close for her to comfortably rest her arms on the crash couch while using it. All of which would be a problem if they had to do any really high-g maneuvering. Which, of course, they would once the fight started.
She tucked her elbows in as close as she could to keep her arms from wrenching out of their sockets at high g, and fidgeted with the harness. It would have to be good enough.
From his seat behind and above her, Alex said, “This’ll be over quick one way or the other. You probably won’t have time to get too uncomfortable.”
“That’s reassuring.”
Over the 1MC Holden said, “We’re inside the maximum-effective weapon range now. They could fire immediately or twenty hours from now. So stay belted in. Only leave your station in life-threatening emergency and at my direct order. I hope everyone got their catheter on right.”
“Mine’s too tight,” Amos said.
Alex spoke behind her, and it was echoed a split second later over the comm channel. “It’s a c
ondom catheter, partner. It goes on the outside.”
Bobbie couldn’t help laughing and held one hand up behind her until Alex slapped it.
Holden said, “We have greens across the board down here in ops. Everyone check in with go/no-go status.”
“All green at flight control,” Alex said.
“Green at electronic warfare,” Naomi said.
“We’re go down here,” Amos said.
“Weapons are green and hot,” Bobbie said last. Even strapped into a chair two sizes too small for her, on a stolen Martian warship captained by one of the most wanted men in the inner planets, it felt really goddamned good to be there. Bobbie restrained a whoop of joy and instead pulled Holden’s threat display up. He’d already marked the six pursuing UN destroyers. Bobbie tagged the lead ship and let the Rocinante try to come up with a target solution on it. The Roci calculated the odds of a hit at less than .1 percent. She jumped from target to target, getting a feel for the response times and controls. She tapped a button to pull up target info and looked over the UN destroyer specs.
When reading ship specs bored her, she pulled out to the tactical view. One tiny green dot pursued by six slightly larger red dots, which were in turn pursued by six blue dots. That was wrong. The Earth ships should be blue, and the Martians’ red. She told the Roci to swap the color scheme. The Rocinante was oriented toward the pursuing ships. On the map, it looked like they were flying directly at each other. But in reality, the Rocinante was in the middle of a deceleration burn, slowing down to let the UN ships catch up faster. All thirteen of the ships in this particular engagement were hurtling sunward. The Roci was just doing it ass first.
Bobbie glanced at the time and saw that her noodling with the controls had burned less than fifteen minutes. “I hate waiting for a fight.”
“You and me both, sister,” Alex said.
“Got any games on this thing?” Bobbie asked, tapping on her console.
“I spy with my little eye,” Alex replied, “something that begins with D.”
“Destroyer,” Bobbie said. “Six tubes, eight PDCs, and a keel-mounted rapid-fire rail gun.”
“Good guess. Your turn.”
“I fucking hate waiting for a fight.”
When the battle began, it began all at once. Bobbie had expected some early probing shots. A few torpedoes fired from extreme range, just to see if the crew of the Rocinante had full control of all the weapon systems and everything was in working order. Instead, the UN ships had closed the distance, the Roci slamming on the brakes to meet them.
Bobbie watched the six UN ships creep closer and closer to the red line on her threat display. The red line that represented the point at which a full salvo from all six ships would overwhelm the Roci’s point defense network.
Meanwhile, the six Martian ships moved closer to the green line on her display that represented their optimal firing range to engage the UN ships. It was a big game of chicken, and everyone was waiting to see who would flinch first.
Alex was juggling their deceleration thrust to try to make sure the Martians got in range before the Earthers did. When the shooting started, he would put the throttle down and try to move through the active combat zone as quickly as possible. It was why they were going to meet the UN ships in the first place. Running away would just have kept them in range a lot longer.
Then one of the red dots—a Martian fast-attack cruiser—crossed the green line, and alarms started going off all over the ship.
“Fast movers,” Naomi said. “The Martian cruiser has fired eight torpedoes!”
Bobbie could see them. Tiny yellow dots shifting to orange as they took off at high g. The UN ships immediately responded. Half of them spun around to face the pursuing Martian ships and opened up with their rail guns and point defense cannons. The space on the tactical display between the two groups was suddenly filled with yellow-orange dots.
“Incoming!” Naomi yelled. “Six torpedoes on a collision course!”
Half a second later, the torpedoes’ vector and speed information popped up on Bobbie’s PDC control display. Holden had been right. The skinny Belter was good at this. Her reaction times were astonishing. Bobbie flagged all six torpedoes for the PDCs, and the ship began to vibrate as they fired in a rapid staccato.
“Juice coming,” Alex said, and Bobbie felt her couch prick her in half a dozen places. Cold pumped into her veins, quickly becoming white-hot. She shook her head to clear the threatening tunnel vision while Alex said, “Three … two …”
He never said one. The Rocinante smashed into Bobbie from behind, crushing her into her crash couch. She remembered at the last second to keep her elbows lined up, and avoided having her arms broken as every part of her tried to fly backward at ten gravities.
On her threat display, the initial wave of six torpedoes fired at them winked out one by one as the Roci tracked and shot them down. More torpedoes were in the air, but now the entire Martian wing had opened up on the Earthers, and the space around the ships had become a confusion of drive tails and detonations. Bobbie told the Roci to target anything on an approach vector and shoot at it with the point defenses, leaving it up to Martian engineering and the universe’s good graces.
She switched one of the big displays to the forward cameras, turning it into a window on the battle. Ahead of her the sky was filled with bright white flashes of light and expanding clouds of gas as torpedoes detonated. The UN ships had decided that the Martians were the real threat, and all six of them had spun to face the enemy ships head-on. Bobbie tapped a control to throw a threat overlay onto the video image, and suddenly the sky was full of impossibly fast blobs of light as the threat computer put a glowing outline on every torpedo and projectile.
The Rocinante was coming up fast on the UN destroyers, and the thrust dropped to two g. “Here we go,” Alex said.
Bobbie pulled up the torpedo targeting system and targeted the drive cones of two of the ships. “Two away,” she said, releasing her first two fish into the water. Bright drive trails lit the sky as they streaked off. The ready-to-fire indicator went red as the ship reloaded the tubes. Bobbie was already selecting the drive cones of the next two UN ships. The instant the ready indicator went green, she fired them both. She targeted the last two destroyers, then checked on the progress of her first two torpedoes. They were both gone, shot down by the destroyers’ aft PDCs. A wave of fast-moving blobs of light hurtled toward them, and Alex threw the ship sideways, dancing out of the line of fire.
It wasn’t enough. A yellow atmosphere warning light began rotating in the cockpit, and a ditone Klaxon sounded.
“We’re hit,” Holden said, his voice calm. “Dumping the atmosphere. Hope everyone has their hat on tight.”
As Holden shut down the air system, the sounds of the ship faded until Bobbie could hear only her own breathing and the faint hiss of the 1MC channel on her headset.
“Wow,” Amos said over the comm. “Three hits. Small projectiles, probably PDC rounds. Managed to go right through us without hitting anything that mattered.”
“It went through my room,” the scientist, Prax, said.
“Bet that woke you up,” Amos said, his voice a grin.
“I soiled myself,” Prax replied without a hint of humor.
“Quiet,” Holden said, but there was no malice in it. “Stay off the channel, please.”
Bobbie let the rational, thinking part of her mind listen to the back-and-forth. She had no use for that part of her brain right now. The part of her mind that had been trained to acquire targets and fire torpedoes at them worked without her interference. The lizard was driving now.
She didn’t know how many torpedoes she’d fired when there was an enormous flash of light and the camera display blacked out for a second. When it came back, one of the UN destroyers was torn in two, the rapidly separating pieces of hull spinning away from each other, trailing a faint gas cloud and small bits of jetsam. Some of those things flying out of the shattered ship w
ould be UN sailors. Bobbie ignored that. The lizard rejoiced.
The destruction of the first UN ship tipped the scales, and within minutes the other five were heavily damaged or destroyed. A UN captain sent out a distress call and immediately signaled surrender.
Bobbie looked at her display. Three UN ships destroyed. Three heavily damaged. The Martians had lost two destroyers, and one of their cruisers was badly damaged. The Rocinante had three bullet wounds that had let all her air out, but no other damage.
They’d won.
“Holy shit,” Alex said. “Captain, we have got to get one of these.”
It took Bobbie a minute to realize he was talking about her.
“You have the gratitude of the UN government,” Avasarala was saying to the Martian commander. “Or at least the part of the UN government I run. We’re going to Io to blow up some more ships and maybe stop the apocalypse. Want to come with?”
Bobbie opened a private channel to Avasarala.
“We’re all traitors now.”
“Ha!” the old lady said. “Only if we lose.”
Chapter Forty-Four: Holden
From the outside, the damage to the Rocinante was barely noticeable. The three point defense cannon rounds fired by one of the UN destroyers had hit her just forward of the sick bay and, after a short diagonal trip through the ship, exited through the machine shop, two decks below. Along the way, one of them had passed through three cabins in the crew deck.
Holden had expected the little botanist to be a wreck, especially after his crack about soiling himself. But when Holden had checked on him after the battle, he’d been surprised by the nonchalant shrug the scientist had given.
“It was very startling,” was all he’d said.
It would be easy to write it off as shell shock. The kidnapping of his daughter, followed by months of living on Ganymede as the social structure collapsed. Easy to see Prax’s calm as the precursor to a complete mental and emotional breakdown. God knew the man had lost control of himself half a dozen times, and most of them inconvenient. But Holden suspected there was a lot more to Prax than that. There was a relentless forward motion to the man. The universe might knock him down over and over again, but unless he was dead, he’d just keep getting up and shuffling ahead toward his goal. Holden thought he had probably been a very good scientist. Thrilled by small victories, undeterred by setbacks. Plodding along until he got to where he needed to be.
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