Even that constrained, Medina Station would have been too small to see on her monitor if it had all been rendered to scale. Instead, she had a window with the full system—gates, stations, the Roci, the Tori Byron, the rail-gun emplacements—on one side of her monitor and three smaller displays showing tactical displays of the Roci in the needle-thin radar shadow of Medina, the Tori Byron, and Laconia gate respectively. A countdown timer marked the minutes and seconds until this Admiral Trejo said he’d be coming through. Her shoulders were tight. She felt like they were in the moment between throwing dice and seeing what numbers had come up. The gambler’s high. She didn’t like how much she liked it.
“Medina’s sensors are getting something,” Clarissa said from the engineering deck.
“Throw me the update, please,” Bobbie said, and the screen with Laconia gate on her monitor shifted to a live feed of the gate itself, enhanced in false color to make the darkness legible. The weird circle of the gate. The wavering stars beyond it, and a looming shadow coming through. Even just watching the stars go out behind it, Bobbie could tell it was a big ship. Maybe it was their Donnager-class battleship. And that in itself would be the Laconians making a statement.
Unless it was something else.
The ship that came through first looked wrong. It was something more than the weirdly organic shape of it. The way the false color struggled to make sense of its surface was like a graphical glitch or something out of a dream. She found herself looking for seams where its plating came together, and there was nothing. Her mind kept trying to see it as a ship, but defaulting to some kind of ancient sea creature from the deep trenches of Earth.
“That ain’t one of ours,” Alex said. “Shit. Where did they get that?”
“I don’t like this,” Clarissa said.
Me neither, little sister, Bobbie thought.
On the traffic-control channel, the captain of the Tori Byron was hailing the Laconian whatever it was, ordering it to come to a full stop. Bobbie nodded at the screen, willing Trejo to respond. To make this a more normal interaction. Instead the strange ship continued on its course, placid and implacable. Another drive plume still showed on the other side of the gate. Much smaller, but a second ship all the same. After a moment, the Tori Byron lit its main drive, moving itself in on an intercept. It was like watching a house cat preparing to face down a lion.
This is your final warning, the Tori Byron announced. Bobbie’s monitor updated. The Tori Byron had hit the big ship with a target lock—
And then it was gone. Where the Tori had been, only a sparkling cloud of matter so strange the Roci’s sensors didn’t know what to make of it.
“What the fuck!” Alex breathed. “Did they shoot something? I didn’t see them shoot anything!”
Bobbie’s stomach felt so heavy, it seemed like it ought to be dragging her down, even on the float. She opened a channel to the rail-gun emplacements before she was consciously aware she’d done it, the certainty growing in her even as she got the lock that it wouldn’t be enough. That nothing would be. But there was a way you did these things. An order to battle, even when the battle was doomed.
“Fire, fire, fire!” she shouted.
On her screen the rail guns spat.
Chapter Twelve: Holden
The Transport Union comptroller’s offices were buried three levels deep in the thick walls of Medina Station’s rotating drum. It made the Coriolis slightly less noticeable than inside the drum, but also meant that they were inside gray metal cubes with desks in them and no screens to even give the illusion of a window. Holden couldn’t say for sure why it felt more depressing than sitting in the metal cubes of a spaceship compartment, but it was. Naomi sat beside him, watching the newsfeeds on her hand terminal, unaffected by the grim locale. The Rocinante was doing a mandatory security contract. The first gig since they’d left. Maybe that was what he was reacting to.
“Form 4011-D transfers your retainer and future contracts to Roberta W. Draper, and states that she is now the legal captain of the Rocinante, and president of Rocicorp, a Ceres-registered corporate entity.”
The Transport Union representative who was processing their paperwork handed Holden an oversized terminal covered in legalese. She had a pinched face, deep frown lines on her forehead and around her mouth, and wore her hair in short spikes dyed flaming red. Holden thought she looked like a disgruntled puffer fish, but recognized his unflattering opinion was at least partly a reaction to the mountain of forms she’d made him fill out.
“You do know,” the puffer fish said, “that this is a temporary change of status, pending the legal change-of-ownership registration?”
“Our next stop is the bank, where we’ll be finalizing the loan to sell the ship.”
“Mmhmm,” Puffer said, making it a sound of deep skepticism.
As Holden filled out the next of the endless forms, he listened to the small voices coming from Naomi’s terminal. He only caught about every third word, but the hot topic of conversation was definitely the approaching Laconian ships.
“Luna,” Naomi said.
“Something happening on Luna?”
“No, I mean, let’s try Luna first. It’ll be easy to find consulting gigs, what with all the work going on down on Earth.”
“I’m not sure I—” Holden started.
“Not you. Me. I could get consulting gigs. I like the gravity there. And you could pop down the well whenever you wanted to visit your parents.”
“True.” His parents were all pushing the centenarian mark, and while he’d been lucky and they were all in pretty good shape, he didn’t want them doing orbital launches to visit him if they could avoid it.
“And it’s all very far from this,” she said, pointing at her screen.
“Not a bad thing,” he agreed, and handed his filled-out screen back to the puffer. “But I did like the idea of living in exuberant decadence on Titan.”
“When we have enough money to do that for another three decades. Two hours,” Naomi said, and Holden didn’t need to ask what she was referring to. Two hours until the first representatives from Laconia to come through their gate in decades would arrive.
“We done here?”
The puffer agreed that they were.
“I could use a drink,” Holden said. “Let’s go get a drink and watch the big arrival on the screens in a bar or something.”
They did.
It didn’t go well.
Holden ran across the open fields of the rotating drum, heading toward the lift up to Medina’s command enter. The adrenaline pumping through his veins only seemed to make his heart beat faster without speeding him up. It occurred to him, with a sort of surreal detachment, that this was exactly like many nightmares he’d had. He reached the lift station, pressed the call button, and willed the doors to open.
Bobbie was yelling Fire, fire, fire on the Roci’s group channel, her voice coming out of his terminal loud, but not panicky. Commanding. On the screen, Alex was sending him the Roci’s tactical display. Three of the rail guns on the hub station fired at the massive Laconian ship. The shots all hit, tearing holes in the hull, but the breaches closed almost as fast as they were created. It didn’t look like damage-control systems. It looked like it was healing.