“I’ll be here,” Alex said, and it felt more like a prayer than it usually did.
He refreshed the tactical map just to see that it hadn’t changed, turned on some music and turned it off again. According to the last data they’d gotten before the repeaters shut off, the first of the incoming ships should already have been there. That they weren’t meant that the situation outside the ring space had changed, and he didn’t get to know what it had changed into. When he’d been a young man back on Mars, even before he’d joined up with the navy, one of his cousins had talked him into joining a martial arts school for a few weeks. One of the exercises the teacher had given them was to put a sack over their head and try to anticipate where the more advanced students were going to attack them from. The mixture of vulnerability, attention, and sickeningly acute anticipation wasn’t that different from what he was carrying now. He refreshed the tactical map again.
Naomi came back to the ops deck below him. The sweetness of chamomile and the soft, metallic sound of strapping into a crash couch announced her. A few seconds later, Elvi’s voice, pressed thin and tinny by the comms, floated up. She was too quiet for Alex to make out the words, but her tone was tense, her words staccato.
“Understood,” Naomi said. “I’m a little shorthanded right now, though. Send someone over, and I’ll set the permissions for them.”
Alex waited a few seconds to be sure he wasn’t interrupting, then shouted down, “Everything all right with the Falcon?”
“They’re a little short on some supplies for the stay-out-of-my-head drugs. Elvi wanted to raid our med bay.”
“Look at it like that, it’s kind of a good sign,” Alex said.
“Not following you.”
“Well, if Duarte wasn’t worried that there was something we could do, he’d just wait for us to run out of our meds, wouldn’t he? This whole moving ships around and shutting down repeaters and all? He’s only doing that because he thinks it’s worth doing. So we must be a threat, somehow.”
“I wonder if he’d tell us how. I mean if we asked really nicely,” Naomi said. Her voice was a harmony of despair and grim humor.
“We’ll figure it out,” Alex said. “Hey, once Elvi’s got what she needs from the med bay, should I pull the bridge? We’re going to be more maneuverable in a fight if we don’t have to match to the Falcon.”
“No,” Naomi said. “The Roci’s the flagship of the underground, the Falcon’s the flagship for Laconia, and all those other ships out there are watching us. I don’t want anything that will make it seem like maybe we’re two independent fleets. Besides which, we’re the back line. If the fighting gets to us, it’ll be because a lot of other shit has gone wrong.”
“Or because the Whirlwind gets here,” Alex said.
“In which case, it doesn’t matter.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, and then more quietly and to himself, “Yeah. But at least we got the fuckers spooked.”
As if in answer, a wave of presence washed over him, and there were people with him. A wave of impressions—an older woman in an apartment on Luna, a younger man who had something wrong with his right foot, a child in an unpaved street kicking a worn ball. A vast sense of humanity—masculine and feminine and both and neither, exhausted and exultant and enraged, young and old—washed through him like someone had turned on a fire hose. He felt the idea of Alex Kamal eroding and bit his lip to bring him back to his own body, his own self.
It’s all right to let go, a voice said with the complexity and depth of a choir. If angels had voices, they’d have sounded like this. It’s all right to let go. Holding on is only pain and weariness. Let us carry you, and you can rest. You can let go now. It was almost persuasive. It was almost enough.
The wave passed, but it didn’t go entirely away. It persisted, a little pressure like a hand resting on the back of his head. A small touch that was invitation and threat. He trembled a little as he took the peach-colored tab out of his pocket. He chewed it, breaking it into powder in his mouth to get the drugs into his bloodstream faster. It was as bitter as sin.
“Did y’all feel that too?” he asked on the ship comm.
“I did,” Amos said. “Can’t say I liked it.”
Naomi said, “It felt more focused than before. I think it’s trying to soften us up. Get anyone that’s a borderliner over to its side.”
“I don’t think so, Boss,” Amos said. “I got more the sense of surrender-or-die.”
Alex’s tactical map threw an alert up, bright red dots at a tight cluster of gates. The Roci pulled up a flash analysis from the old data and the silhouettes and drive signatures. Based on what ships had been on approach before and what they saw now, there were six ships—one Laconian gunship, three pirate hunters, and two private freighters with aftermarket torpedo racks—coming in fast through a tight cluster of gates all within about a twenty-degree sweep of the ring space.
“I think the rail gun’s looking fine,” Amos said. “I’m going to head for engineering, get the patch kits ready in case someone starts poking holes in us.”
Over the comms, another voice came, broadcast to all ships. “This is Captain Botton of the Derecho. We have the enemy in sight. We are moving to engage.”
“Belay that,” Naomi shouted from the ops deck. “All ships, evade and defend, but stay in position.”
On the tactical map, the Derecho shifted toward the incoming ships, but the rest of Naomi’s fleet held steady. Fifty-odd flecks of blue diffused through the ring space and half a dozen red clustered like a knife driving toward the station at its center. Diving toward the Roci and the Falcon and Jim. If the dots seemed to move slowly, it was only because the distances were so huge.
“What are you looking at?” Alex called.
“Not sure yet,” Naomi shouted back, and six more dots appeared on the tactical map, falling in from gates on the opposite side of the ring space. “That. I was waiting for that.”
The comms chirped out an error, and Naomi cursed. Alex pulled up a mirror of her screen, just to see what the issue was. Broad-spectrum jamming coming from all the enemy ships. The whole broadcast spectrum shimmered with noise and false requests stacked one on another until the Roci gave up and rebooted the antennas. Alex had been in a lot of fights, and he’d never seen anything this comprehensive outside a pirate attack.
“Alex, can you get me tightbeam locks?”
“Tell me who you want to talk to, and I’ll get them up.”
A list appeared on his screen, and he started queuing. Getting the lock, sending the orders, and moving to the next ship didn’t take that much longer than broadcast would have, but the invisible hand on the back of his head weighed a little heavier. Coordinating Naomi’s forces without broadcast meant building an ad hoc network that kept track of where all the other ships were and bounced between them, trading data back and forth as quickly as the lasers could carry them. In theory, it was entirely possible. In practice, it was more complicated. Any ship that had a buffer fail would mean slowing down the whole system. Any laser that lost alignment meant lost orders, the doubling up of retransmission requests, the opportunity for confusion and corruption and mistakes.
The enemy were outnumbered five to one, and the enemy ships burned in weird, spiraling paths, drawing Naomi’s fleet toward them and then spinning away before they got in range. Tempting Naomi’s forces to overreach, but never engaging. Alex wasn’t sure this was even a real attack so much as a feint to see how Naomi would react until the Derecho came inside firing range of the first group of ships.