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.
She felt like she’d just lowered herself into a warm bath. The anxious gabble of the soldiers might be in the mishmash polyglot of the Belt. She might only be able to follow half of it. She knew what they were saying. Antinausea meds kept the complex spinning of the boat from turning even less pleasant, and their bitter aftertaste was like coming back to a house she’d lived in when she was young. One rich with good memories and familiar places. She liked the Rocinante as much as anyplace she’d ever been since Ganymede. They were good people, and even in a weird way they were her friends now. The soldiers all around her weren’t and would never be that. They were her command, and even if it was only for a moment, she felt like she was exactly where she belonged.
Her suit speakers chirped. Communications were the one active thing she’d decided would be worth the risk. Now it was time to find out if that had been a good call. She accepted the connection with her chin.
A burst of static, followed by a weird fluting sound, like wind blowing across the mouth of a bottle, static again, and then Holden’s anxious voice. “Bobbie? How’s it going in there?”
“Five by five,” she said, checking the exterior cameras to make sure that was true. The blue glow of the alien station rose up from the bottom of her visual field and curved off to the left. A glittering star field of rockets. A glimpse of Medina Station looking smaller than a beer can. The proximity readings had a dual countdown: one for the moment they passed inside the arc of the rail gun, the other for when they’d slam into the station itself. They were both spooling down quickly. “We’ll be on the surface in … three minutes.”
“Are the troops ready?”
Bobbie chuckled and added the group channel in. “Hey. You assholes ready to do this?”
The cheer that came through maxed out the speaker. She slid back to the connection to the Rocinante.
“Good answer,” Holden said, but tightly. The fluting sound again. Distortion from the ring. She hadn’t felt anything moving through it. No discontinuity or sense of vertigo. It did manage to fuck with sensors and comms, though.
“The mission’s on track, sir,” she said. “We’ll get control of the guns and get you in here.”
“Alex is saying the attack ships have vectored past zero. They’re heading back in our direction now.”
“We’ll do it quickly,” Bobbie said.
“I know,” Holden said. “Sorry. Good hunting.”
“Thank you,” Bobbie said, and the connection dropped, the comm indicator going to red. She went back to the exterior cameras, switched to a corrected view. The image was steady this way, the tumble of the boat only showing in three jagged blind spots that sped through it like cartoon bats. There were fewer of the decoy boats now, but not none. And they’d made it in close enough that the station was blocking all but two of the rail guns. As long as those two didn’t decide they were as interesting as the torpedoes and empty landing craft speeding toward Medina, they’d be fine. Except …
She grabbed the image, enlarged it. There at the base of the nearest rail gun emplacement, a dozen meters from the massive sky-pointing gun, a low, gray structure. Round as a coin, and sloped so that no matter what angle debris or outgassing struck it from, it would be pressed more firmly in place. It was a design she knew inside and out. She waited for the fear to come, but all that showed up was a grim kind of determination.
“Amos,” she shouted, sending him a copy of the image. “Take a look at this.”
The big man looked at his hand terminal. “Huh,” he said. “Well, that complicates things.”
She popped the group channel open.
“New information. The intelligence we had that the rail guns weren’t guarded may have been faulty. I’m looking at an MCRN-design troop bunker right now. If there’s one, there may be others.”
A chorus of alarm and regret. Bobbie switched the channel controls, killing all the mics but hers.
“No whining. We knew this was a possibility. If you don’t want to participate, feel free to leave now. Otherwise, check your seals and weapons and be ready for a fight when we hit surface. Our job is to get control of those guns.”
She enabled their mics in time to hear a ragged chorus of yes sirs and one woman’s voice calling her a bitch. If there’d been time for a lesson in discipline, Bobbie might not have ignored it, but hey. It was a high-stress environment and the OPA soldiers weren’t marines. She’d work with what she had.
Following her own advice, she ran a weapons check. Her arm-mounted Gatling gun read a full mag, two thousand rounds of mixed armor piercing and high explosive. A single-use rocket launcher was hooked to a hard point on her back, and slaved to her suit’s targeting laser. Powered armor at full charge. She didn’t doubt that she was the single most dangerous thing on their little landing craft. That meant she’d be taking point.
The boat informed her that they’d passed beneath the rail gun emplacement’s range. The computer started the maneuvering thrusters on their correction burns to stop the tumble and lit the main drive. The braking burn pressed her hard into the gel. Her vision started to tunnel, and she had to remind herself to tense her legs and arms, force the blood out of her muscles and into her brain. They still called it the slow zone, but the only actual speed limit there now was not getting crushed to death by the energy of stopping.