James Corey - Nemesis Games

He wondered if he was still thinking about the Rocinante .

“All right,” he said, unstrapping. “I’m going to get some coffee. You folks try not to break anything, and if you do, let me know.”

The chorus of yessirs was oddly disheartening. He wished they’d known he was joking. Or felt comfortable enough to joke back. Their formality was just another way it didn’t feel like his ship anymore.

He found Fred in the galley, talking into his hand terminal, recording a message that was clearly meant for Anderson Dawes. Holden got his coffee quietly between phrases like lines of communication and profound lack of trust . When Fred finished, he folded his hands and looked over.

“I’d take one of those too. Cream, no sugar.”

“Coming up,” Holden said. “Anything new?”

“Two of the original Martian escort surrendered.”

“Seriously?”

“They were too far from the action to affect the outcome, and they were getting hammered. I don’t like it, but I won’t second-guess their command.”

“Is it just my imagination, or are these people handing us our asses on a plate?” Holden said, bringing the coffee mugs to the table. “Are they really this good, or do we all just suck a lot worse than I thought we did?”

Fred sipped the coffee. “Ever heard of the Battle of Gaugamela?”

“No,” Holden said.

“Darius the third, emperor of Persia, had two hundred thousand soldiers under his command. Bactrians, Arachosians, Scythians. Some Greek mercenaries. On the other side, thirty-five thousand soldiers, and Alexander of Macedon. Alexander the Great. Five Persians to every Macedonian. It should have been a slaughter. But Alexander pulled so much of the enemy out to the flank that a gap opened in the middle of the Persian lines. Alexander called his men to form a wedge, and leading with his own cavalry, he pushed through and headed straight for the emperor. There were vast forces to either side, surrounding him. But it didn’t matter, because he saw how to reach Darius. Alexander saw something no one else had seen.

“These people? This little faction of the OPA? Between Earth and Mars and me, we outnumber them. We outgun them. All this has happened because someone saw an opportunity that no one else did. They had the audacity to strike where no one else would even have considered an attack. That’s the power of audacity, and if a general is lucky and strong-minded, they can take that advantage and keep the enemy on their back foot forever.”

“You think that’s their plan?”

“It would be mine,” Fred said. “This isn’t someone making a play to control the Belt or the Jovian moons. This is someone trying to grab all of it. Everything. It takes a certain kind of mind to succeed in something like that. Charisma, brilliance, discipline. It takes an Alexander.”

“That sounds a little discouraging,” Holden said.

Fred held up the coffee cup. The name TACHI hadn’t quite worn off the side, red and black letters half-erased by use. But not gone. Not yet. “I understand better now how Darius felt,” Fred said. “Having power, position, advantage. Especially when you think you know how wars work. It blinds you to other things. And by the time you see them, there’s a Macedonian cavalry with spears set coming right at you. But that wasn’t how Darius lost.”

“It’s not? Because the story you just told me sounded a lot like that’s how he lost.”

“No. He ran.”

Holden drank. From the crew quarters, the murmur of unfamiliar voices was a reminder that things were wrong. That the patterns of the past were broken, and might never be put right. “He was going to get killed if he didn’t, though. Alexander would have killed him.”

“Maybe. Or maybe Darius would have withstood the charge. Or maybe he would have fallen and his army would have crushed Alexander’s in rage and grief. The end of an emperor isn’t always the end of an empire. I look at Earth and what happened there. I look at Mars. At what happened on Tycho, and what I’m afraid happened on Medina. I’m seeing Alexander’s wedge bursting through the line at me. The same shock as Darius, the same dismay. The fear. But I’m not Darius. And I think Chrisjen Avasarala isn’t either.”

“So you don’t think we’re screwed?”

Fred smiled. “I don’t know what to think yet. I won’t until I know more about the enemy. But looking back through history, there are a lot more men who thought they were Alexander the Great than men who actually were.”

Chapter Thirty-seven: Alex

They burned across the emptiness, and the enemy came hard behind them. Four Martian military ships with target locks on Alex’s drive burned toward him as they all dropped toward the sun. The other two had stayed behind to continue the attack on the main force. More than half the attackers had peeled off to come for him. Alex hoped it was enough to let Captain Choudhary get a toehold. Nothing he could do about that from here, though, but watch and hope.

For the first few hours, it had all been hard burn and dodging. Once he’d opened up some distance between the Razorback and the attackers, the nature of the chase altered. It wasn’t about catching or being caught anymore. Alex had the lead, had seventy-two missiles left flying around him in a cloud, a path to Luna, and reinforcements burning out to join him. If nothing went wrong, he’d be safe in less than two days.

The enemy’s job now was to make something go wrong.

“You’ve got another couple PDC arcs coming in,” Bobbie said.

“That’s cute,” Alex said. “I’m moving to avoid. You want to let the missiles know?”

“Already done.”

The tungsten slugs of the enemy point defense cannons were meant to chew through missiles at close range. At the distances they were holding now, they were something between an invitation for the crew of the Razorback to blunder into them by mistake and an uplifted middle finger. Alex tracked the incoming fire and braced as the maneuvering thrusters pushed them down and to the left to avoid the gently curving arcs of enemy fire, then up and right to correct to the original course. Around him the cloud of missiles parted to let the slugs pass through their flock of exhaust cones and warheads.

“Any enemy missiles following that up?” he asked.

A moment later Bobbie said, “Nope.”

“Keep an eye out. Our friends there are gettin’ antsy.”

“Happens when you’re losing,” Bobbie said. Even without turning, Alex could hear the smile in her voice.

From the cabin in the back, Smith’s voice came in staccato gasps. Even the relatively modest one-g flight was three times what the man was used to. He’d been burning up the tightbeam for hours. Sometimes, Alex caught Chrisjen Avasarala’s recorded voice, other times a man’s warm drawl. Someone on Mars, he figured.

The Razorback had been a toy once, and while the screens were decades out of date, they still had some bells and whistles. He set the wall screens to match external cameras, and the wide starscape bloomed around them. The sun was bigger and brighter here than it would have been on Earth, but constrained by the limits of the screen to a burning whiteness. The curves of the Milky Way glowed all along the plane of the ecliptic, the billions of stars made soft by distance. Being surrounded by missiles was like floating in a cloud of fireflies, and behind them, bright as seven Venuses in an Earth twilight, the drive plumes of the attackers who wanted them dead.

And also Naomi.

Bobbie sighed. “You know, a thousand of those stars out there are ours now. That’s like, what? Three ten-thousandths of a percent of our galaxy? That’s what we’re fighting over.”