“At your order,” Jillian said, tugging the collar of her uniform open another centimeter. Alex remembered being young enough to care what he looked like going into a battle.
Caspar was tapping the side of his crash couch. Jillian leaned forward on hers, pulling the restraints tight against her shoulders. Alex sort of wished he’d hit the head. Everyone dealt with the anticipation and dread differently.
They’d been preparing for hours, towing the Storm out from its hidden mine, making the cabins and workshops secure, running every system through its diagnostics. Now the only thing between the Gathering Storm and open space was a set of old bay doors, and Bobbie’s go order.
“Take her out, Storm.”
“Done,” Jillian said, and cut the connection. “Kamal. Take us out.”
Alex tapped the release and watched on his monitor as the doors above them opened. Maneuvering thrusters gently pushed them off the moon’s surface. And as soon as the Storm cleared the dock, he lit the Epstein up. He fell hard into the crash couch gel, feeling the coolness as it crept up around his ribs and neck. Callisto fell away behind them, the surface glowing orange and gold where the drive plume had heated it.
“All systems inside tolerance,” Caspar said, even though no one had asked. The kid had to do something. “We are … Okay. I’m getting a connection request from Callisto traffic control?”
“Let ’em wonder,” Jillian said. “Do we have the Tempest?”
“Got him,” Alex said.
“Show me.”
Alex threw the Jovian system onto the main display. Their position, the moons, the curving arc of the gas giant below them. The shipping patterns were complex to an untrained eye, but he could read them like text. The freight traffic in gray, Laconian security in gold. Bobbie and the White Crow in green. And the target—the Tempest—in red as bright as fresh blood.
The shifting gravity of the system made lowest-energy transit lines, and the traffic between the moons followed them like iron filings showing a magnetic field. At these distances, you wouldn’t even need an Epstein drive to ignore them. A decent ship flying teakettle could get anywhere it needed to be. It was only the extra scrip that ships could save that made the pattern what it was. That was always enough.
“Come on,” Jillian said, not to anyone on the bridge. “Grow some balls and come get me, you big bastard.”
“Security alert’s just gone out, open channel,” Caspar said. “They know we’re here. The Tempest is moving. She’s coming after us.”
“Punch it, Kamal,” Jillian said. Her bravado was almost convincing. Alex didn’t think Caspar saw through it.
Alex punched it. On his monitor, the green of the White Crow lined up just where he wanted it to be. The Tempest followed in the way he’d expected it would. His jaw ached from the thrust, and the juice running through his system made him feel like he’d had too much coffee and not enough at the same time. The Tempest was a massive ship, but the drive was powerful enough that inertia didn’t matter much. The Storm was smaller, lighter, and less powerful, and while it was probably more maneuverable, that didn’t help this time. If he was going to get Bobbie through the eye of that particular needle, he had no degrees of freedom.
They still had advantages, though. The main one being that they were ahead and the Tempest was behind. The Storm’s drive plume gave a little cover. The torpedoes that the Tempest fired would have to swing out and around to keep from getting slagged. And it also had catch up to the Storm as it sped away. Anything the Storm launched, the Tempest would rush forward to meet. It gave the Storm’s PDCs that little extra slice of reaction time, the Tempest’s that much less. Bobbie’s flight plan for him had been to ride that gap where the difference put the Tempest in threat and the Storm just outside it. It was great in theory. Practice was more complicated, because they could still be overwhelmed.
Would be.
“Fast movers,” Caspar gasped. “That’s a lot of them.”
Jillian coughed. It sounded painful. Alex half expected her to move to text communication, but she fought through and spoke aloud. “PDCs to auto. Return fire.”
The thrum of the PDCs added itself to the noise and shudder of the pursuit. Like a kid trying to outrun a cop, the Storm slid past the White Crow, and the Tempest boiled up from below her. Alex couldn’t tell if the vibration was engine harmonics coming from the deck or his overloaded bloodstream or both. Bobbie’s little ship hit her burn too, falling into the enemy’s blind spot.
Soon. It would all be over soon. He forced himself to swallow. It hurt.
The Storm shook. “We aren’t hit,” Caspar shouted. “It was close, but we got it.”
“More distance, Kamal,” Jillian said, but he couldn’t do that without prodding the Tempest to match. Bobbie needed the battleship to keep its current course and heading. He was too focused on the reality of the situation to explain why it was a bad order, so he just ignored it. If the Storm had to take a few hits, it would just have to take them.
The incoming fire was like a vast, blooming flower. Lines looped out from the Tempest, curved in toward them, and vanished as the Storm knocked them back. Alex spared a glance at the ammunition levels. They weren’t as low as he’d expected. All his habits had been formed on older technology. The Laconian design for rapid printing of new rounds still wasn’t intuitive.
If they had been doing what they appeared to be doing—running like hell and hoping to get to the gate and out of the system—it would have been a desperation move. The distance between Jupiter and the ring gate was vast, and the Storm was constrained by both its reaction mass and the fragility of the bodies inside her. And the danger of screaming through the slow zone too fast without knowing the state of play on the inside. Alex would have had to make a braking burn before they reached the gate, and the Tempest would have caught them. If Bobbie didn’t come through, it could still go down that way. Alex realized he was already plotting in other plans—dive into the high atmosphere of Jupiter and try to scrape the Tempest off, loop sunward and try to get the enemy to overheat and pull back before they had to—and stopped himself. They weren’t in the last ditch yet.
“New volley coming in,” Caspar shouted. “We’re not going to be able to stop them all.”
“Evasive, Kamal,” Jillian snapped, and Alex bent their flight path away, but only a little. The Tempest couldn’t turn or shift without exposing the White Crow. And where the hell was Bobbie anyway?
“Brace,” Caspar said, and a second later the crash couch bucked under Alex, kicking him like a mule. Even with the gel to pad him, he fought to get his breath back. He’d lost a couple of seconds. They couldn’t afford that again.
“What’s the damage?” Jillian croaked out, but no one answered.
The tightbeam sprang to life. Bobbie was checking in.
“Need good news, Captain,” Jillian said. Her face was shining with sweat. Alex waited with dread and hope.