James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

“They’re getting between us,” she said. “They got to stop them, they’re getting between us. They’re going to get here. They’re going to board us.”

“No one on them to board us,” Vandercaust said again. “No es ships, those. Fists with engines to push them is all. Rams.”

“We’re still picking them off,” Salis said. “Look, rail guns still firing.”

It was true. The shots were careful, dangerous. They slid past Medina’s drum so close Roberts imagined she heard them hiss on the way past. But the enemy kept dying, exploding into scrap and vapor. The wave of enemy torpedoes was already gone, turned to debris and bad intentions. And the ships, closer and closer but fewer every minute.

“We’re taking hits,” Vandercaust said, glowering into his hand terminal.

Roberts pulled up her own terminal. Pressure loss on the outermost layers of the drum. Not everywhere, but scattered. A hall here, a warehouse there. A water reservoir was holed, throwing mist and ice out in a pinwheel as the drum spun it away. The Mormons had built the outer parts of the drum thick against the hard radiation of space. But no one was dying. Not yet.

“How are they hitting us?”

“Dead scraps,” Salis said. “It’s the debris from the torpedoes. It’s nothing.”

It might have been true that it was only debris, but it wasn’t nothing. As she watched, another alert opened, was flagged, assigned out. Her team wasn’t called yet. Wouldn’t be, she thought, until the bombardment stopped or something important enough to be worth risking all three of their lives took a hit. Around them, the other people cheered, and she looked up to see a spreading sphere in among the fading swarm. They got a big one, and the detonation had been enough to knock out a few of its nearest neighbors.

The thousands of wasps were fewer now. Two, maybe three hundred, and fading by the moment. The ones there were diving hard for Medina, dodging arcs of PDC fire, fleeing from the torpedo strikes, slipping outside their corridor of safety and being ripped apart by the rail guns. As the glittering lights fell to black, Roberts felt something in her gut and her throat. The laughter came out as barely a chuckle, but warm and full as tears, and grew to something deep.

They had come to take Medina, and they were failing. Yes, the station was taking its hits. Yes, they would be bloodied. But they would not fall. Medina was Free Navy now, and it would be Free Navy forever. Salis was grinning too. All around them, cheers started to go up with every rail-gun strike that plucked away another invader. Of them all, only Vandercaust seemed uncertain.

“Que sa?” Roberts asked him. “Visé like you’re trying to rub your asshole with your elbow.”

Vandercaust shook his head. Another flicker from the rail guns, another light gone out.

“Keep drifting, them,” Vandercaust said. “Visé. They’re in the shadow, yeah? Station’s far enough away the rail guns can cover them and us with the same thumbnail. But then they … drift. Get where the rail guns can pick them off. What for they drifting ?”

“Who cares, as long as they all die?” Salis said around a mouthful of grinning.

“Maybe they want to get killed,” Roberts said. Joking. She’d only been joking.

The words hung there, floating over the table like smoke pooling when the luck was about to turn. She shifted her attention back to the screen, her joy and relief gone like they’d never been there. Cold washed her lungs and heart, a totally different fear than the tenseness and anxiety of the run-up. Another ship that should have died under Medina’s PDCs or torpedoes died to a rail gun instead.

“What am I looking at, Vandercaust?” Roberts said, her voice hard but trembling. Vandercaust didn’t answer, but hunched over his hand terminal, working it furiously with his thick, workman’s fingers.

Another ship. Another. Less than a hundred of the enemy left, and they were peeling away like a flower blooming. Not even trying to keep course for Medina. All around, the room erupted in shouts and celebration. Over the cacophony, she barely heard Vandercaust say Shit .

She asked the question with her hand, and he passed the hand terminal to her. Already, the start of the battle looked like something out of history. The thousands of drive plumes flooding through the ring gate. Most—almost all—falling hard toward Medina.

Almost all. But a few failed. Their drives stuttering. Maneuvering thrusters blinking, throwing them into rough, cartwheeling spins. She remembered seeing them, discounting them. The enemy was so many, so cobbled together, so among the thousands, there were a few malfunctions. It only meant a handful they didn’t have to worry about.

Except Vandercaust had flagged one. It glowed blue on his display as the battle proceeded. The rail guns turned toward the torpedoes that threatened Medina. The rounds spitting out. The enemy dying. But not the little green malfunction. It drifted, tumbling and dead.

Until it didn’t.

When its drive burst back into life, it wasn’t flying for Medina or retreating back for the Sol gate. It darted toward the alien sphere. The blue, faintly glowing artifact at the center of the slow zone where all their guns were placed. Roberts was trembling so hard now that the green dot seemed to dance in her hand, leaving bright traces behind it. A jittering afterimage of how they’d been tricked. Thousands of boats and torpedoes arcing through the vacuum like a magician’s gesture meant only to pull the eye. And God damn, but it had worked.

She handed back the hand terminal, plucked up her own, put in an emergency connection request to Jakulski. Every second he didn’t answer felt like another clod of dirt landing on her coffin. When he did appear, he was in the administration offices, outside the drum and on the float. His sated grin told her that even Captain Samuels hadn’t figured it out yet.

“Que hast, Roberts?” Jakulski said, and for a moment, she couldn’t talk. The longing to be in the world Jakulski and all the others around here were in—the world where they’d won—was a lump in her throat. The words wouldn’t fit past it.

And then they did.

“Get a tightbeam to Mondragon,” she said.

“Who?”

“No. Shit. Montemayor. Whatever la coyo la’s name is. Duarte’s people. Warn him. Warn all of them.”

Jakulski’s brow furrowed. He leaned closer to the camera, though where he was there was no pull to lean into. “No savvy me,” he said.

“Consolidated-fleet jodidas just landed on the other station. They were never after Medina. They were coming for the rail guns.”

Chapter Forty-Five: Bobbie

Regret coming along?” Bobbie asked, shouting over the noise of the boat.

Amos, across from her, shrugged and shouted back. “Nah. It’s all right if the cap and Peaches get a little time together. Helps ’em get used to each other. Besides, this is fun too.”

“Only if we win.”

“That is more fun than losing,” he said, and she laughed.

The boat was crap.

Once, it had been a cargo container. Not a real one either, built to standards for a mech or an automated dock to handle along with thousands of others with the same dimensions and handholds and doors. This had been a custom job, cobbled together in the Belt out of equal parts scrap and ingenuity. The second hull was added later, the welds still bright at the corners. The crash couches weren’t actual couches, just thick sheets of gel glued to the walls with straps like climbing harnesses to hold their bodies against it. Add to that the fact that they had no active sensors, that they were on the tumble, that the dozen men and women with them were indifferently trained, that probably more than half of them had been involved in conspiracies against Mars and Earth in the not so distant past, that their weapons were old and their armor a collection from half a dozen different sources. And, of course, that if the enemy rail guns took notice of them, the first warning they’d have was that they were all dead. Bobbie should have been in a panic.