It was a fact of the human brain in close quarters combat that while everything was generally happening all at once, the mind insisted on trying to stitch it into a linear narrative when remembering it later.
In the moment, Bobbie threw herself through the hatch and into the ops deck, her team at her back. Incoming bullets lit up her HUD with bright trails so she’d know the direction of fire. Some of the bullets hit her, or her team. The armor thought the odds of taking real damage were trivial, and ignored it. Seven people in the compartment, wearing light protective armor. Her suit tagged one as a friendly. One of the two resistance partisans. Five with guns shooting at her. One doing his best to hide behind a crash couch. The political officer, if she had to guess.
Her arm moved without her thinking about it, and the gun mounted at her wrist spun up briefly, cutting two of the armed crew in half. The other three were turning into red spray and body parts under the barrage of fire from her team. The whole fight couldn’t have lasted more than two seconds, though when she remembered it later and her brain turned it into a narrative, it would seem much longer.
Less than thirty seconds after she’d opened the hatch, two of her strike team were protectively flanking the partisan, and Takeshi had the political officer shoved up against a bulkhead and was zip-tying his hands. Bobbie examined the deck. No hull breaches, her armor assured her. The Laconian antipersonnel rounds for shipboard use were pretty good tech. Lethal against lightly armored opponents, but they just fragmented into powder when they hit bulkheads.
“Ops is ours,” Bobbie said.
“Engineering is ours,” Jillian immediately replied. “We have one of the two spies. You got the other?”
“Copy. Our people are secure, and we have the package.”
“Oh goody,” Jillian said. “Can’t wait to see his face when he realizes his life just went down the recycler.”
“Jillian, escort the friendly up here,” Bobbie said. “Let’s get everyone into emergency suits and prep them for the ride over to the Storm. The rest of you, fan out and get an eyeball inventory. When the Storm arrives we’re going to want to take all the best stuff with us, and we won’t have much time. Get to it.”
“Copy that,” Jillian said.
“I think we win,” Bobbie said to Takeshi. He grinned back at her.
“Easy peas—” he started to say and then blew apart.
Bobbie knew intellectually that they must have taken a raking pass from someone’s PDCs. But from inside the ship it looked like the bulkheads on either side of the compartment decided to explode in several dozen places all at once. The room was full of glowing shrapnel bouncing off walls and panels, and the gray smoke of vaporized metal. Takeshi was a tangle of technology-wrapped body parts floating in a nebula of blood globes.
It didn’t look like anyone else was directly hit, but before Bobbie could even start to issue an order, the air in the room was just gone. Too many holes on both sides. One moment they were in a pressurized cabin, the next they were in vacuum. It happened so fast it barely ruffled the political officer’s Laconian blue suit jacket.
“Get them in suits!” she yelled, but it was already too late. She was a Martian. She’d started doing vacuum drills in grade school. Fifteen seconds and you lose consciousness. Anything that you needed to do had to happen in that first fifteen seconds or it didn’t happen at all. Any vacuum suit that is more than fifteen seconds away is a lifetime away.
All she could do was watch the partisan who’d helped them take the ship gasp out a cloud of mist that was her very last breath ever. The political officer, their whole reason for coming, died a moment later with a look of profound puzzlement on his face. A thousand facts and secrets that could have meant the difference between the underground thriving and all of them dying in a gulag evaporated as the man’s cells gave up.
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Every panel on the ops deck that still worked was flashing red. The ship was dead too.
“Storm, this is strike team,” Bobbie said, opening the command channel. She heard only dead air and the faint hiss of background radiation. “Storm, come in.”
Nothing.
“Shit,” Jillian said. She came into the ops deck dragging their dead ally from the engineering deck with her. “Did we lose the Storm too?”
“Chama,” Bobbie said, pointing at one of her people. “Get outside and see if you can spot the Storm. Maybe line-of-sight comms will work. The rest of you, mission hasn’t changed. Get me that inventory. Get it ready for rapid transfer once we find the ship.”
“Or,” Jillian said, “get ready to fall into Jupiter and die because we’re way under orbital speed now and don’t have an engine.”
“Or that,” Bobbie agreed, surprised at how much she wanted to push across the room and punch Jillian in the face. “But until we do, we’ll stay on mission. Get the fuck out of here and make yourself useful packing cargo.”
On the radio, one of Jillian’s squad mates said, “Lots of stuff here, boss. Ammo, fuel, it’s the mother lode. Primary mission is fucked, but secondary is a win.”
“A moral victory, I guess,” Bobbie sighed.
“You know who talks about moral victories?” Jillian asked as she floated out of the room. “The team that lost.”
Chapter Eight: Naomi
Communication was a problem.
The ring gates created interference that made trading messages across them difficult and tightbeam between systems essentially impossible. Laconia controlled the repeaters on either side of the gates, and Medina Station in the center of everything, the guard at the great crossroads of the empire. They had eyes and ears in every system and pattern-matching algorithms combing through every frequency on the spectrum. Saba had been able to carve out a few holes here and there—tightbeam antennas with outdated or compromised security code that could drop incoming records out of the logs, newsfeeds that could be altered to carry messages hidden in the flux of the image signal. The same old tricks the OPA had been using since before either she or Saba had been born, but updated for the new circumstances. The danger was twofold: first that Laconian forces would intercept and understand their messages, and second that they’d track the signal back to its origin.