“Que?” Roberts asked.
“Wish we weren’t doing, that is all,” he said.
“Doing what?”
He gestured to the wall screen with his chin. “Sending stuff out past the gates. To where it goes away.”
She knew what he meant. The starless nothing—not even space—on the other side of the gates was eerie when you thought about it too much. Matter and energy could be converted into each other, but not destroyed. So when something that went out beyond the sphere of the slow zone seemed to vanish, it had to go somewhere or be changed into something. But no one knew what.
“No option,” she said. “Esá coyos making us.”
“Yeah, it’s only …”
Long, terrible minutes stretched. Roberts fell into something half panic and half trance. The lines flashed on the feed. Another dead enemy. Another slug of tungsten accelerated out of reality and into the blackness stranger than space. Now that she saw it through Salis’ eyes, it made her nervous too. It was so easy to forget the profound strangeness all around them. They lived there, it was their home, so of course they had to defend it. But it was also a mystery they lived inside.
The timelessness of her attention and focus broke as a shudder passed through the incoming swarm, and her heart doubled its beat. A swirling motion that went through the drive plumes even as they winked out. The muttering in the room got louder.
“How fast they burning?” Vandercaust said, awe in his voice. He switched his hand terminal from the alert screen to a tracking program, streaming the data into it. “Esá can’t have crew on. Jelly and smash if they were, juice or no juice.”
Medina shuddered. The vibration was small but unmistakable. The first of the enemy were inside effective range. On the feed, the flicker of the rail guns was joined by slower, sweeping arcs of PDC fire, the bright pinpoints of Medina’s own torpedoes. Roberts found herself muttering curses like they were prayer, and didn’t know how long she’d been doing it. The flickers of enemy drive plumes began to thicken and coalesce into a single bright shaft, drawing a line between the alien station and Medina.
“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.