Overstreet answered his connection request at once.
“My fire team is disabled,” he said.
“Yes, sir. I’m seeing the same with all the powered teams. Stay where you are. I am sending a conventional escort to your location.”
“What the hell is going on out there? I need a report!”
Annoyance flickered across Overstreet’s face, gone almost before Singh could register it. “The loss of functioning fire teams has let the situation at the detention cells deteriorate. I have initial reports that something’s happening at the dockmaster’s office. I’m waiting for better intelligence on that, but I am seeing what looks like several ships getting ready for launch. The Storm has engaged with the Rocinante, but not conclusively as yet.”
Now, may I please go do my job instead of talking about it? He didn’t say it, but Singh heard it anyway.
“I will wait for the second escort,” Singh said. “Carry on.”
He dropped the connection. In the mirror, he looked small. Frightened. He stood, straightened his uniform, and composed himself until his reflection looked more like a man confident in his control of the situation. It was important when his people came that he give the right impression. That was all he could do now.
Something thumped deep below him. A strike on the station drum, maybe. A sign of the battle going on all around him while he hid in a public toilet.
The underground had caught him unprepared. To give them their due, he’d underestimated their coordination and their numbers and their will. He had been told that the Belters of the old regime had a culture of violent resistance. After the sabotage of the oxygen tank, he had thought he understood what that meant, but he hadn’t appreciated the depth of it until now.
Their plan was unfolding right now all around the station. All he could hope was that the one place he knew that he was ahead of them would prove decisive. If disabling the sensor arrays was critical to their plan, he could still bring all the rest of it crashing down.
Chapter Forty-Seven: Bobbie
Bobbie’s harness consisted of three magnetic locks about the size of her palm and two bands of woven nylon that looked like they’d been green sometime in their past. Basic safety equipment, standard on any ship, any dock, any station outside a gravity well. Wondering whether they worked was like wondering if her next footstep would sink through the atoms of the deck.
“You think these things are going to hold?” she asked. Her radio was set to a broadcast strength so low a thick T-shirt would have jammed her. Amos, beside her, looked up the long curve of the Gathering Storm’s exterior. His helmet hid his expression, but his tone was fatalistic.
“If it doesn’t, this’ll be a weird day.”
The surface of the ship wasn’t like anything Bobbie had ever seen. Faceted like a gem, without the protrusions of PDC cannons or sensor arrays. The pinks and blues seemed less like the color of the material itself and more like some kind of refraction. Something that it did to light that was much weirder than selective absorption. The darkness of the slow zone was profound. Her helmet had to enhance everything with what it picked up from the glow of the ring station. It even stretched the edges, pulling ultraviolet and infrared into the visible range, just to have more to work with. It was always like this, but waiting—exposed and uncertain—made it seem ominous.
While the surface of the ship looked like crystal, it was soft in a way that she wanted to think of as foam. What it really reminded her of was skin. The magnetic locks bound her to it in a rough, uncomfortable cradle, or would once the ship was under way. Provided that the magnetic locks held on. The red glow that said they were clamped was solid, except that every now and then she thought she caught a flicker of amber. The other ten members of the insertion team besides her and Amos were all using the same equipment. Their suits were all low-level environment suits. None of them had better than welder’s padding as armor. They looked more like a cleaning crew than a crack military force. It worried her how true that might be, but that was for after the locks held. If the Storm pushed off from the dock and left them all floating behind it like a snake’s shed skin, it would be up to Alex to solve the problem of the enemy destroyer. And they’d probably all die. There was no upside.
“Really hope these hold,” Bobbie said.
The encrypted alert came. Bobbie tapped her forearm controls. When Alex’s voice came through, it had the thick Mariner Valley drawl that meant he was scared shitless but also a little euphoric on the fear. “This is Alex Kamal of the Rocinante calling out to my friends and family and all ships at sea. We are about to start this rodeo. Breaking loose from the docking clamps in ten. Nine …”
“Brace,” Bobbie said. “We don’t know how fast this is going to happen.”
She took the nylon cords, tracked them in tight, and waited for the Gathering Storm to leave port.
In order to get there, they’d crawled out from the elevator shaft that ran the length of the station from the command and control at the bow down to engineering at the stern. They’d moved quickly, skimming along centimeters above the station. The others had been laughing until Bobbie reminded them that low-power radio wasn’t radio silence and politely suggested they all shut the fuck up instead of getting the team killed. After that, she’d been alone with the sound of her own breath, the smells of old rubber and someone else’s sweat. Alex had been on her right, Amos on her left, and the dock spiked with ships a quarter of a klick before them. Past that, just the blackness of the slow zone, and the killing nothingness beyond the gates.
The drum had spun beneath them. The scars and damage from the brief battle with the Storm still showed in blackened streaks and bright patch foam. Medina had taken more than her fair share of licks in her life, and today wasn’t going to be any better.
They’d pulled out every trick that any of Saba’s underground had up their sleeves. Stealing the welding rigs, uncrating the hidden caches of weapons, compromising the access shaft that let them through. Ever since the Laconians had come through the gate, smart people familiar with the station had been planning for this moment. Maybe since before that, if some of them were smugglers.
As they passed over the last of the drum, Alex split off. He had to make his way almost a third of the way anti-spinward from the Storm to reach the Rocinante. She told herself it wasn’t the last time she’d see him as if she knew it were true. Then with a flick of her fist, she’d directed the insertion team toward the dark, looming form of the destroyer.
The plan was to lure the Gathering Storm off the station. As soon as its docking clamps were off and no new soldiers could get on, Bobbie and Amos would breach the hull and lead an insertion and take the Storm off the playing field. Whether they did that by blowing its reactor, sabotaging its controls, or steering it out toward the nothingness between the gates was going to be a game-day call once she was inside. Without better knowledge of the ship’s internal workings, improvising was a better option than pretending she could make a solid plan.
The secondary objective was to get her people off the Storm and safely picked up by one of the fleeing ships. The tertiary objective was to get away herself.
Alex reached zero, and Bobbie thought she felt a little tremor through the Storm as the Roci blew her clamps and spun out away from the docks using the body of Medina as cover. Two of her magnetic locks flickered amber, and then safely back to red.