“We have fast movers,” Caspar said at the same moment the alerts showed up on Alex’s threat board. The two frigates unloaded their tubes. Alex ignored them, waiting for the missiles to get into PDC range so the Storm could chew them up.
“Let’s go ahead and start shooting back,” Alex said, and a moment later the Storm shuddered as if with pleasure as she fired four torpedoes of her own.
Before the rapidly closing missiles could even pass each other, two of the incoming torpedoes veered off in a wide turn.
“Worry about the two that are still coming at us,” Alex said to Caspar, and then stopped thinking about that. The other two Laconian torpedoes were now winging in a wide arc toward the freighter. And the two frigates had also flipped and started a hard burn back toward their former charge.
They hadn’t been able to draw the Storm away or shoot it down. Their plan B appeared to be scuttling the freighter. Bloodthirsty, but not unexpecte
d. Alex threw the throttle down to catch the swiftly slowing freighter as quickly as possible, shifting from attacking their prey to protecting it. For a moment, everything was falling toward a central point in space defined by the crippled ship. The Storm, eight torpedoes on wide looping courses to find their targets, the two frigates burning back. On the threat board, it looked like the freighter had turned into a black hole, and its gravity was sucking everything, large and small, into its event horizon. In its way, it was beautiful.
Then everyone was shooting.
Caspar’s PDCs cut down all four of the Laconian torpedoes in an instant, even as two of the Storm’s impacted on the nose of one of the frigates and the plasma warheads turned the front half of the ship into glowing slag. The other frigate spun and slewed sideways and shot down the torpedoes chasing it, then continued its rotation and gave the freighter and Bobbie’s attached breaching pod a full broadside from its PDC array. The freighter was riddled with holes, and plumes of escaping atmosphere jetted out, looking a bloody pink in the reddish light coming off Jupiter. Or maybe there was some actual blood mixed in there. As many holes as the freighter had taken, it defied belief that no one on board had been hit.
“Splash that one,” Alex ordered, but Caspar was already saying, “I got that motherfucker.”
The frigate killed its rotation with a massive blast from its maneuvering thrusters, then kicked on its drive. Even though it only slowed down, it seemed to leap straight at the approaching Storm. The two ships passed at high speed, every PDC blazing.
The much smaller frigate was hit by half a dozen of the Storm’s cannons all at once, and seemed to just come apart into a cloud of chaff as it passed by. But it unleashed a barrage of its own before it died that cut along the Storm’s flank.
Suddenly the ship was a cacophony of alarms, sirens, and alerts from the control panel.
“Damage!” Alex yelled over the din. The noise was getting gradually quieter, which meant at least the flight deck was in the process of losing its atmosphere. He grabbed his helmet from under his couch and locked it into place. He could see Caspar doing the same.
“Damage!” he yelled again, but heard only static on his suit’s speakers. He banged his fist on the side of the helmet in frustration, then spun around. Caspar was pointing at his mouth and ears, signaling that his suit radio seemed not to be working either.
Alex flipped through the pages of damage reports popping up on his screen and found the culprit. A PDC round had cut through the computer nexus that controlled all intraship and intership communications, and for whatever reason the backup wasn’t taking over. Maybe it was fucked too. It looked like there were a lot of flashing red lights on the engineering panel.
But the Storm would heal the hull breaches, just like it always did. And damage control teams were already on the move to bring their other systems back online. The Storm would survive, Alex had no doubt.
But the freighter with Bobbie and her strike team on it was tumbling through space, out of control and empty of atmosphere, and with the radio down, there was no way for him to know if anyone on it was still alive.
Chapter Seven: Bobbie
Cap, launching you now. Make sure you come back,” Alex said. The breaching pod shook as the Storm cut it loose. The drive came on a moment later, slamming Bobbie back into her couch and leaving her with nothing to do while the battle raged around her.
The Storm’s breaching pod was a little more high-tech than the Martian version Bobbie had trained on, but there was only so much you could do with something so simple. The basic concept was a small troop carrier with an engine on one end and an airlock that could blow holes into enemy ships on the other. The interior was a close-walled metal box fitted with crash couches. The “flying coffin” joke Marines had been making for centuries would have made perfect sense even to the ancient soldiers who rolled into battle in armored personnel carriers with wheels: If you die before you get to the fight, you’re already boxed up for eternal rest.
People always claimed that waiting for the fight was the hardest part of fighting. Bobbie had said it herself, as a younger woman. When the fight is coming, when it’s inevitable, let’s just fucking get to it. Once the battle starts, things happen too fast to worry about. The fear is all instinctual, not intellectual. Somehow, that used to feel better.
Age had changed that. Bobbie had learned to see the quiet moment before the fight as a blessing. A gift. Very few people who were headed toward death even knew it was happening, much less had time to sit and reflect on their life. What they’d done that mattered. Whether it would be a good death.
Bobbie’s father had already been a legendary Marine in the MMC before she was born. When his family started to grow, he left the front lines and became an even more legendary training sergeant. An entire generation had learned what it meant to be a Martian Marine under Sergeant Major Draper at Hecate base. A giant of a man, with a face that looked like it had been cut from flint, he had always seemed invincible. An immutable fact of nature, like the avatar of Olympus Mons, come to life and walking among the mortals.
When he’d died, he’d been a tiny shriveled husk. Lying in his bed, hooked to the tubes and monitors that only prolonged the inevitable, he’d held her hand and said, “I’m ready. I’ve done this a dozen times before.”
She hadn’t understood at the time, but now she thought he was talking about sitting right where she was now. In the transport, heading toward battle, examining his life as he rushed toward its possible end. Who am I? Did the things I accomplished matter? Will I leave the universe a better place than I found it? If I don’t come back, what are my regrets? What are my victories?
It was a thing maybe only a warrior could understand. Only those who made the choice to run toward the fire, instead of away from it. That made it feel sacred to her. “This far, and no farther,” she whispered. Her litany to the tyrants and bullies and despots. This far, and no farther. If my life means anything after I’m gone, she thought, I hope it meant that.
“What’s that, boss?” Jillian asked. Her number two was strapped into the crash couch directly across the pod from her.
“Just talking to myself,” Bobbie said. Then she started to sing. “Anything you can do I can do better. I can do anything better than you.”
“Never heard that one,” Jillian said, then sang along, trying to catch the tune. “That new? Sounds Belter.”
Bobbie laughed. “No idea. My mother used to sing it. My brothers were older, and I hated losing to them at anything. I’d burst into tears when they’d win, and she’d sing that song to me. Just one of those things you pick up when you’re a kid and never put back down.”