“Rini’s down. Ship and torpedo are both compromised,” Bobbie said. Her voice was strained, but with the calm professionalism of a woman in her natural environment. She’d have had the same tone if she’d just found the way to destroy her enemy or lost both her legs. “I need you to make the Tempest stop. I can do this, but not at high burn.”
The pause seemed to last forever. Alex plotted in the flip and burn, and waited for Jillian to give the word.
Instead, she said, “How?”
“Give me a second, Bobbie,” Alex said. “I’ll get you what you need.”
The drive cut off, the weight of acceleration vanishing in the time it took to blink. Alex took the comm control from Caspar and turned on the do-not-approach beacon. Tactically, it didn’t make any damned sense. That’s what he was counting on.
“What are you doing, Kamal?” Jillian said. Her tone was halfway between outrage and hope that maybe he knew something.
“Making us look like a mutiny,” he said. “Seeing whether they like the idea of getting their ship back.”
As he’d hoped, the Tempest killed its drive. They sped through the darkness in matching orbits. Callisto was already long gone behind them. Even Jupiter was visibly smaller. It felt like being alone, but every eye in the system would be watching them.
“Leche bao,” Caspar said under his breath. “They’re going to kill us.”
“As long as they do it without starting their drive up,” Jillian said, and Alex felt a little burst of pride for the girl. She was green, but she was learning. For almost a minute, the two ships stood silent, waiting, and tense. A comm request came in from the Tempest. Jillian didn’t accept it. Alex noticed he was holding his breath.
“Fast movers,” Caspar said.
“Shoot down as many as you can and return fire,” Jillian said, “but do not change course, and don’t give them a reason to.”
Alex could only watch as the crew fired back. It would be over already if the command staff of the Tempest had wanted it to be. A single massive strike, and the Storm would be dead. Instead, like a wrestler slowly bending back the opponent’s joint, they were pushing the flow of missiles, a little faster and a little faster until the Storm’s defenses were overwhelmed. They wanted to disable the ship and question the crew. They hadn’t met Bobbie. Or Jillian Houston. If it came to it, they would scuttle the Storm. He knew he was looking at his own death.
Come on, Bobbie, he thought. I’m trusting you on this.
“I think … Is that the captain?” Caspar said. “I think that’s the captain.”
He threw the feed from the external sensors onto the main display. The image was a little shaky, the edges too sharp, but there not far from the Tempest was a single figure in power armor falling in toward the ship. Its arms ended in the rapid-fire glitter of muzzle flash, throwing two streams of ineffectual rounds at the mass of the Laconian dreadnought. The sight of a single human-sized figure flying past the battleship gave a dramatic sense of scale to its massive bulk. Next to it, Bobbie looked like an angry insect attacking a whale.
“Keep your eye on the incoming missiles,” Jillian said. “If that’s Draper, she’s doing it for a reason.”
The tiny figure flew a jagged, unpredictable path. Streams of high-speed projectiles chased it as the Tempest’s PDCs tracked it. The flyswatter hunting the fly. It was impossible to imagine that something so small could stand a chance against the vastness and power of the ship, but if it was Bobbie it was also impossible to imagine she wouldn’t.
Alex started laying in a burn solution. “I can get to her,” he said. “It’s going to mean getting damned close to that thing, but …”
The figure twitched. Something bloomed out from its back. On the display, it looked so small. The arms rose up, the legs bent. Vapor sprayed from the figure. Atmosphere. Blood.
“She caught a PDC round,” Jillian said. “She’s gone.”
Alex didn’t hear her. He heard her, but he wouldn’t understand. Grief like an electrical shock ran through his body, humming and violent and damaging.
“I can get to her,” Alex said, turning back to his controls. Something was wrong with the juice on his couch. He couldn’t catch his breath. “It’s going to be a hell of a ride, but we can … we can …”
His controls flickered as Jillian locked him out.
“Give me the fucking controls,” he shouted. “We have to get her!”
“Alex,” Caspar said, and his gentleness was unbearable. The suit of powered armor drifted. It was still heading toward the Tempest. Inertia carrying her toward her destination even after it didn’t matter. Even after she was gone. He tapped at the controls the same way, like there was a way to roll time back just a little.
“Fuck. Fuck,” Alex shouted. The lemony taste of vomit hit the back of his throat. He swallowed hard, forcing it back down. The plan had failed.
Bobbie was gone.
“What do we do?” Caspar said, and there was panic in his voice. Before Alex could answer, the sensor feed died with an audible click and the radiation alarms started screaming.
The Heart of the Tempest had stood alone against the combined forces of Earth, Mars, and the Belt and won. It had put all humanity under Laconia’s yoke. It was the living symbol of why all resistance against High Consul Duarte would always be in vain.
When their sensors finished their override reset, it was gone.
Without the protection of the Storm’s eerie skin, the burst of X-rays and gamma radiation would have killed them all. As it was, half the crew was too sick to get out of their crash couches. The medical bay was filled with people sloughing off the lining of their gastrointestinal tracts. The ship’s supply of antiradiation pharmaceuticals was already down to nothing, and if the cancer rate followed the models, their oncocidals would be going down next.
The ship itself was injured too. Not even broken. Injured. The regenerative plating that covered the Storm had started developing blisters and thickening like the first stages of skin cancer. The vacuum channels that routed power failed sometimes for no clear reason, becoming so unreliable that the repair crews started putting in copper wire backup circuits, the metal taped to the inside of the corridors. The drive still burned, even if it ran a little dirty.
They’d won. It hadn’t been possible, but they’d done it. Coming out unscarred would have been too much to ask.
Alex cycled between numbness and grief with the regularity of a clock. When he could stand it, he watched the newsfeeds from around the system replaying the explosion he hadn’t been able to see because he was too close when it happened. The best one was from Earth. A handheld camera filming a child’s kite competition was pointing at the right section of sky when the light reached there, and the brightness against the blue had been like a small, brief sun, even at that distance.
Everyone in the system was tracking the Storm as it made its way toward the ring gate. No one had the nerve to follow it. The newsfeeds were thick with analysis. The attack had been in retaliation for the crackdown on Ceres. It had been an inside job, and stood as evidence that the Laconian Navy itself was rife with factions and dissent. It was the first step toward the underground retaking Sol system or the inciting incident that would force the high consul to glass the whole system. Nine times out of ten, the speakers were celebrating Laconia’s defeat. There were other stories: Spontaneous demonstrations on Mars and Rhea calling for Laconian withdrawal. The official announcement from TSL-5 that the Laconian political officer’s position was being held empty until regular communication through the gate network was reestablished. A dozen pirate feeds springing up, accusing the Laconians of taking risks in the dead systems that put the whole human race under threat.