“Well, if this goes well, you’ll get to confirm that. So that’s a plus?”
“Might be.”
“Okay, I’m on my way up.”
Alex took a last long pull from the bulb of tea and tossed the rest into the recycler, then pulled himself back to the central shaft and up toward the flight deck. He felt his anxiety starting to shift, but he wasn’t sure yet what it was becoming. Maybe excitement. Maybe fear.
By the time he got to his couch, Ian wasn’t on the open comms anymore. The kid looked grim, lips pressed thin and fingertips dancing at the edge of the control monitor like they were looking for something to do there. Alex gave a thumbs-up as he strapped in. He didn’t know what he meant by it apart from general emotional support.
Naomi sailed onto the deck. She was in formal blacks that looked like a uniform without quite being one. Against it, her gray-white hair didn’t look old. It looked striking. Her face was serious and hard, her movements fluid and strong. She pulled herself into her crash couch, pulled the tactical readout to her station, and looked over the data there. Her ships. Her fleet. Every eye on the flight deck was pointed toward her. She glanced at Ian.
“Open ship-wide,” she said.
“Yes, Captain,” Ian said.
Naomi cleared her throat. It echoed through the ship.
“This is Naomi Nagata,” she said. “We are about to make our transit into Laconia. We will be going into the heart of enemy territory. We all saw what the Tempest did to the inner planets’ combined fleet. I know that’s in your m
inds now. It’s in mine too.
“But what we’re doing here is different. We were not able to stop the Tempest when it invaded Sol—”
Stopped the shit out of it later, someone shouted a deck or two below. Cheers and hoots followed, but Naomi ignored them.
“We aren’t trying to stop the Whirlwind. We’re trying to move it. How exactly this will play out is going to depend on what we find when get through that gate. The exact tactics, we will be figuring out on the fly. The grand strategy, on the other hand, is set. We’re going to destroy Laconia’s construction platforms. The tool Duarte has used to make the Magnetar ships. To make Storm-class destroyers. To generate antimatter. All of that ends now. And with that, Laconia’s attempt at empire. We are going to do that.
“Every ship in this fleet has a part to play. The most dangerous role is the actual attack on the platforms. With luck, that will be us. Our battle group will be the Storm out of Freehold, the Cassius out of Sigurtá system, and Quinn and Prince of the Face out of Haza. Five ships, but we won’t be alone. Every ship, every battle group, every member of every crew will be at our backs.
“This will be a long fight. It will be hard. But it will be won. So if you need food, eat now. If you need to visit the head, you have five minutes. After that, we’re going through.”
She killed the connection to the sound of cheers. On the float, there was no way to sink back into her couch, but if she could have, Alex was pretty sure she would. He pulled up his controls, selected the course profile he’d already laid in, and typed in a message to her.
THAT WAS GOOD. DID EVERYTHING IT HAD TO.
It popped up on her monitor. She smiled thinly. A few moments later, he got her reply.
I HATE PUBLIC SPEAKING. HATE IT. NEXT TIME, YOU DO THIS PART.
GET ME A NEXT TIME, he typed, AND I WILL.
Her laugh was barely a chuckle. It was a victory, getting her to relax even that much. It was strange seeing her in Bobbie’s role. It was stranger to realize that in his mind, it was Bobbie’s role. Not Holden’s anymore. He wondered what else had changed while he wasn’t watching.
“All right,” Naomi said loud enough for the flight-deck crew to hear. “It’s time. Alex?”
“Aye, aye, Cap,” Alex said. He triggered the acceleration alarm through the whole ship, waited twenty seconds for any stragglers to get into a couch, and the Roci jumped up, eager as he was. The gel of the crash couch pressed back, cool against him, and he felt himself grinning. His HUD marked the pathway to the gate, and he started wondering how bad it might be on the other side. As the fear of staying in the slow zone faded, the fear of leaving it for Laconia ramped up.
Behind him, another ship’s drive bloomed. The Storm. And then the Quinn. The Cassius. They’d timed it all out to the second. He felt the needle and then the surge of the juice. It was a hard burn for him, it was going to be hellish for the Belters. For Naomi.
He kept his eyes on the drive status, on the maneuvering thrusters. They were making the transit much faster than usual, and a misfiring maneuvering thruster at the wrong moment could throw them off course and into the swirling nothingness at the edge of the slow zone. He didn’t know whether that would be a good death or not, and he wasn’t interested in finding out.
Without visual telescopy, the thousand-kilometer circle of the gate wouldn’t have been more than a speck on the monitor before they were already through it. Almost before he could register the passage, the Roci’s thrusters fired. The crash couches didn’t hiss so much as click as they snapped to his right and then sharply back again. Alex’s vision clouded a little at the edges, the blood in his brain stirred by the shifts of inertia.
The first thing was enemies. The Roci’s radar was already sweeping the system, her telescopes looking for the drive plumes and her radio array listening for the transponders of Laconian ships. Already five had lit up, but they were identified as Transport Union ships with legitimate business in the system. There weren’t very many points of interest in Laconia system. It was still too new for the spread of human stations that Sol system had. There were some, though. An ice moon around the system’s single gas giant had a scientific outpost on it. One of the inner, rocky planets had been mining titanium for half a decade. Rumor was that Duarte had set aside one of the Ceres-sized dwarf planets as the site of a massive art project that was underway. The first real enemy the Roci found was almost halfway to the empire’s home. A pair of Storm-class destroyers already burning out toward the gate. And then, behind them, close to the planet, the unmistakable heat and energy signature of a Magnetar-class battleship.
Alex pushed his fingers to the control pad at his side and typed out a message.
NO GUARDS AT THE GATE. THEY DIDN’T SEE US COMING.