James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

Her radio was hardened enough to work. “This is Sergeant Draper,” she said. “Is the rail gun still firing?”

“THE FUCK DID YOU DO?” a man’s voice screamed, high and frightened. She cut off all their mics.

“That’s what I’m asking, soldier,” she said, then switched over to private. “Amos?”

“Don’t know what you did, Babs, but it fucked things up in all the best ways. Rail gun looks powered down, the few remaining assholes are pulling back toward assholeville, and I think these metal bands that everything’s stuck to are moving a little.”

“Yeah, I may have popped those loose.”

“Impressive,” Amos said. “Hey, look, I got to go shoot somebody.”

“No problem,” she said, and opened the channel to the Rocinante . “Okay. You guys still out there?”

“Bad guys are getting really, really close,” Holden said. “Tell me you have good news.”

“I have good news,” Bobbie said. “You can come through the ring. In fact, if you could get over here and get us some air support, it would be much appreciated.”

There was a general whooping, made strange and uneasy by the interference of the ring. Was it her imagination that it was louder now?

“You got them?” Holden said, and she could hear the grin on his face. “You took the rail guns? We control them?”

Her suit sensors showed the wall of steel nearest her was starting to shift. Just a few centimeters, but there was definitely movement. It was broken. It was all broken. The rail guns weren’t going to defend anyone anytime soon.

“We don’t,” she said. “But at least no one does.”

Chapter Forty-Six: Holden

You know what I’d like?” Alex yelled down from the cockpit.

“If we could get out of here?” Holden yelled back.

“If we could get out of here. At this rate we’re going to be sitting here with our jumpsuits around our ankles when the bad guys get back,” Alex said. “There’s a reason they don’t call those things slow -attack ships.”

Even though Naomi was strapped into the couch beside Holden’s, she answered over the headsets so she at least wasn’t shouting about it. “The Giambattista ’s a big ship, Alex. You’re just spoiled because you haven’t had to drive a cow like that in years.”

“Shit,” Alex said. “I could have spun the Canterbury around in half the time this is taking.”

Naomi’s sigh was as close as she was going to get to agreeing with them. “Well, you were good at your job.”

On the screen, the Giambattista slid slowly sideways toward the ring gate. The damage from the attack ships’ first run had done something to unbalance the maneuvering thrusters, so a lot of the piloting involved rotating the ship and then waiting until the working thrusters spun into the right position to fire. The plumes of the returning attack ships were already visible. It wouldn’t be long before the torpedo barrage would kick in again, unless the Free Navy was going for a wait-till-you-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes approach. The enemy had split, curving back toward them in an almost hundred-degree spread. It wasn’t quite as bad as it could have been. If they’d taken the time to bring their attacks from opposite directions, defending the Giambattista with the Roci would have been almost impossible. But it would also have taken enough time to play the vectors and get in position that the Giambattista would have cleared the ring gate before they arrived. It was like they were all being forced to find a min/max point in a complex curve of inertia, acceleration, and a lot of dead people.

The Giambattista ’s main drive fired, the plume dwarfing the ship, and Alex crowed in celebration.

“About time,” Naomi said. “I’m matching course. We’ll be through in twenty minutes.”

Holden opened a connection to Bobbie. The seconds stretched out long enough that he started to feel his gut tighten. The connection came through, dropped, then reestablished just as Naomi said, “One of them’s burning to pass through the gate with us.” He’d get right back to that.

“We’re looking at twenty minutes to get through the gate. Where do you stand?”

The weird interference of the gates made her reply thick and creepy. She was breathing hard, and until there were words with it, he was picturing her gut-shot and on the float. Or drifting down onto the surface of the alien station. He was reaching to switch over to Amos when she spoke.

“Amos’s holding position against the enemy,” she said. “I’m almost back to them. Suit ran out of propellant mass, so I’m hoofing it with the mag boots.”

“You’re running back to the fight?”

“Well, call it a fast shuffle,” Bobbie said between breaths, “but it’s fine. They put in. A big metal road. Goes right to ’em.”

“Okay. We’ll get some backup to you as soon as we can. Just don’t get killed before we get there.”

“No promises, sir,” Bobbie said, and he would have sworn from her voice she was smiling when she said it. A blast of static, and the connection dropped.

“Okay,” Holden said. “What have we got?”

“They’re both shooting at us,” Naomi said.

“You sound calm about that.”

She looked over at him. Her smile was sudden and bright and made his heart ache a little bit. “It’s all Hail Mary bullshit. It’s not even an attack so much as an opportunity to let us screw up.”

“Okay. So, not worried about that. What are we worried about?”

Naomi flipped the drive analysis of their pursuers over to his monitor. The nearer of the ships had altered its path, and the projected curve put them through the ring and into the slow zone five minutes after the Roci and Giambattista made the transit. They weren’t breaking off. That was too bad.

“Do we have a plan for dealing with that?”

Alex answered over the ship comm. “I’d vote for shooting them.” And a moment later, Clarissa, “Seconded.”

Holden nodded to himself. It still felt weird hearing her. Maybe it always would.

“Okay, let’s lay in a targeting solution.”

“Did it while you were talking to Bobbie,” Naomi said.

The PDCs chattered for a moment, then went silent. Cleaning up the Hail Mary attacks. Holden rubbed his hands on his thighs. Tapped his fingers together. Pulled up the tactical to see the ring and the alien station, Medina and the fast-attack ships.

“We’ll have enough to defend everything even if both ships follow us in, right?”

“Hush,” Naomi said.

Looking through the exterior cameras, the ring seemed to wipe away the stars as they passed through it. Alex did a short, hard braking burn, turning their nose toward the gate and the narrowing circle of stars beyond it. The Giambattista twisted and burned and twisted again, its remaining hatches opening. Pinpoint drive plumes streaked out from it, less than fireflies compared with the wide, glowing burst of the hauler’s Epstein drive. Holden watched as a handful, and then a dozen, and then a hundred poured down toward Medina. The OPA coming to finish the job. The remaining landing boats spread out, a wide, diffuse target. At this distance, Medina’s PDCs were useless, and the Roci could probably take out any torpedoes. But even if they did fire, they’d only take out a handful of soldiers and leave an army still behind.

He tried opening a tightbeam to the incoming attack ship, but the interference from the ring was too thick, so he switched to broadcast. “Attention incoming attack ship,” he said. Naomi looked over at him, a question in her eyes. Not concern or worry, though. She trusted him. “This is James Holden of the Rocinante . Please break off your approach. We don’t have to do it this way.”