Nemesis Games

Chapter Thirty-one: Alex

“You’re in a good mood,” Bobbie said as Alex sat down across from her. Her breakfast was oatmeal with an egg-like protein crumble, sausages, and hot sauce. Her hair, pulled back in a tight ponytail, was wet with sweat, and her cheeks were flushed from recent exertion. Just looking at her made him feel out of shape. But she was right. He was in a good mood.

“Captain’s bringing my girl to Luna.”

Bobbie frowned. “Your… girl?”

“The Roci.”

“Oh. Right,” she said. “For a second, I just thought… Yeah. It’ll be good to see Holden too. And Avasarala.”

“Be good to be on my own damn ship,” Alex said, tapping pepper onto his plate of reconstituted eggs. “Now if we can just get Amos and Naomi back. Whoa. Did I say something?”

The shadow that had come over Bobbie’s expression vanished again and she shook her head. “Nothing. Just… I don’t know. Envy, I guess. It’s been a while since I had people.”

She stabbed one of the sausages with a fork and glanced around the mess hall as she ate it. Alex’s eggs were chalky and tasted more of yeast than something that came from a chicken, and it brought decades of memory with it. “Being back around active-duty folks making it hard to look forward to civilian life?”

“Sort of.”

“Things change,” Alex said.

“And they don’t change back,” she said, quoting him back to himself.

Alex broke off a piece of toast, popped it in his mouth, and talked around the crust. “We still talking about the service?”

Bobbie smiled. “No, I guess we’re not. I still can’t really get my head around it. Earth’s never going to be Earth again. Not like it was.”

“No, it won’t.”

“Mars either,” Bobbie said. “I think about my nephew. Smart kid. Book smart, I mean. He hasn’t really been in the world except for going through university and then the terraforming project. That’s his whole life. He was one of the first people I knew to really get what off-world colonies meant for everything back here.”

“Yeah. It makes everything different,” Alex said.

“Except how we deal with it,” she said, then racked an imaginary shotgun and fired it off with a popping sound.

“Amazing how much we’ve managed to do, considering how we’re doing it all with jumped-up social primates and evolutionary behaviors from the Pleistocene.”

Bobbie chuckled, and he was glad to hear the sound. There was something about making the people around him feel better that left him feeling lighter himself. Like if the others on his crew could be upbeat, whatever it was couldn’t be that bad. He understood the flaw in that logic: if comforting them comforted him, maybe comforting him comforted them, and they could all drive the ship into a rock while they smiled at each other.

“I heard the relief ships are here,” Alex said.

“Yeah, that may not be as good as we’d hoped,” Bobbie said around a mouthful of sausage. “They were talking about it at training this morning. The relief ships should be getting in operational range right around now, but the scuttlebutt is the crews are all green as hell. Like first-mission green.”

“All of them?” Alex said.

“The good crews are all back at Hungaria covering our six.”

“Well. Better a bunch of teenagers flying with us than just the two frigates,” Alex said. “But you’ll excuse me if I’d hoped the cavalry coming over the hill was a little more experienced.”

“They probably said the same thing about us when we started up.”

“You know they did. First mission I flew solo, I almost dumped core by mistake.”

“Seriously?”

“Got flustered.”

“That’s military-grade flustered, all right,” Bobbie said. “Well, hopefully, this’ll be a milk run to Luna.”

Alex nodded and took a sip of coffee from his bulb. “You think that’ll happen? You really think it’s over?”

Bobbie’s silence was an answer.

They spent the rest of the meal on less fraught subjects: how training for marines and Navy were different and which one was better; Alex’s stories from Ilus and the slow zone; speculation about what exactly Avasarala was going to do once they got the prime minister to Luna. It was all shop talk, and Alex found it easy and pleasant. He hadn’t crewed with her in years, but she was good to talk to, good to be around. In another life, he could imagine shipping with her. Well, in the military anyway. He couldn’t quite place her on a water hauler like the Canterbury, and he wondered what it would have done to have her on the Roci. Part of what made the Rocinante home was that the crew was so small, and had so much shared context. There was an intimacy that living in quarters with the same handful of people for so long gave. Anyone coming in—even someone as competent and smart and easygoing as Bobbie—would have had to contend with that, and there was nothing that screwed up a crew like having one person who felt excluded.

He was still thinking about that, chewing the next-to-last mouthful of so-called eggs and listening to Bobbie tell a story about free-climbing on the Martian surface, when the Klaxons went off.

“All hands to battle stations,” the calm, crisp voice said between whoops of the alarm. “This is not a drill.”

Alex was up and heading toward his crash couch before he fully registered what was going on. Bobbie was beside him. They both threw their breakfast trays and drink bulbs into the recycler on the way out, long training identifying anything that wasn’t bolted down as a potential projectile if the ship’s vector changed too suddenly. The staccato vibration of the PDCs was already ringing in the decks, but Alex couldn’t imagine what could have gotten near enough for that kind of close combat without being noticed. The alarms were still going off when they reached the corridor and one of the marines—Sergeant Park, his name was—gathered them up.

“No time to get you to your quarters. There are some spare couches we can put you up in over here.”

“What’s going on?” Alex said, trotting to keep up.

“The relief ships are firing on us,” Park said.

“What?” Bobbie snapped.

Park didn’t break stride, opening a hatch into an empty meeting room and ushering them in. Alex dropped into the embrace of a crash couch, strapping himself down with an efficiency of long habit and deep training. His mind was tripping over itself.

“Someone faked military transponder codes?” he said.

“Nope, they’re our birds,” Park said, checking Alex’s straps.

“Then how—”

“We hope to beat that answer out of them when the time comes, sir,” Park said. He switched to Bobbie’s chair and checked her straps too while he spoke. “Please remain in your couches until we signal that it’s safe to get out. Not sure what we’re looking at, but I expect this may get—”

The ship lurched hard, snapping the gimbals of the couches forty-five degrees to the deck. Park shifted, bracing just before he hit the wall.

“Park!” Bobbie shouted, reaching for the straps that held her in. “Report!”

“Remain in your couch!” the marine shouted from behind Alex and below him. The press of thrust gravity sank him deep into the gel. A needle slid into his leg, pumping a cocktail of drugs into his bloodstream that would lessen the danger of stroke. Jesus, this was more serious than he thought.

“Park!” Bobbie said again, and then a string of obscenities as the marine stumbled out the door and into the corridor, leaving them behind. “This is fucked. This is so fucked.”

“Can you get anything?” Alex shouted, even though she was only a meter and a half away. “My control panel’s locked out.”

He heard the sound of her breath over the distant vibrations of the PDCs, the deeper tones of missiles launching. “No, Alex. I’m getting the stand-by screen.”

A loud fluting groan passed through the deck, rattling the couches as they shifted again. Whoever was at the helm, they were putting the ship through its paces. Along with the deep, recognizable reports of the ship’s weapons, there were other sounds, less familiar ones. Alex’s mind turned all of them into damage from the enemy, and at least some of the time, he was sure he was right. His throat was tight, and his gut hurt. He kept waiting for a gauss round to pass through the ship, and every second it didn’t happen made it feel more likely that it would.

“You doing all right?” Bobbie said.

“Just wish I could see what was going on. Or do somethin’ about it. Don’t mind fighting, but I hate being spam in a can.”

His stomach lurched, and for a long moment, he mistook the sudden weightlessness for nausea. His crash couch shifted to his left, Bobbie’s to her right, until they could almost see each other.

“Well,” Bobbie said. “They got the drive.”

“Yup. So that thing where you and Avasarala thought maybe someone was appropriating MCRN ships and supplies?”

“Look pretty smart now, don’t we?”

The couches shifted again as maneuvering thrusters on the ship’s skin fought against the massive inertia of steel and ceramic. The throbbing of PDCs and report of missile launches made a rough background music, but it was a quiet that caught Alex’s attention.

“The bad guys,” he said. “They stopped shooting.”

“Huh,” Bobbie said. Then a moment later, “Boarding action, then?”

“What I was thinking.”

“Well. How long do you want to stay in these couches before we go try to scare up some weapons?”

“Five minutes?”

“Works for me,” Bobbie said, taking out her hand terminal. “I’ll set a timer.”

The door of the meeting room cycled open at three minutes, twenty-five seconds. Three marines floated through in light battle armor, bracing against the doorframe and holding assault rifles at their sides. The first one—a thin-faced man with a scar running down the side of his nose—moved forward. It struck Alex that if the bad guys, whoever they were, had Martian warships, they probably also had Martian armor, but the thin-faced man steadied himself against the desk.

“Mister Kamal. Sergeant Draper. My name’s Lieutenant de Haan. The ship’s going to be maneuvering, so we’ll need to be careful, but I need you to come with me now.”

“Roger that, sir,” Bobbie said, popping the straps on her couch loose and shifting to launch for the door. Alex was only a beat behind her.

The marines moved through the weightless halls with practiced efficiency, cover to cover with one always in firing position at the back, another at the front, and Bobbie and Alex in the center of the formation. Twice, the ship lurched with Alex in the middle of a jump from one handhold to the next. The first time, he caught himself on a different support, but the second, he bounced off a bare length of deck, spinning through the air until one of the marines grabbed him and hauled him to safety. The one-sided sounds of battle grew first louder and then more distant. One bulkhead failed to open, reporting vacuum on the other side, and they had to backtrack. Like a restless dream, the journey seemed to go on forever and also be over almost as soon as it had begun.

On the bridge, the captain was strapped into her couch, the prime minister in the couch beside her. All around, the crewmen at their stations were rattling information to one another, and Alex caught bits of it, his mind forming a picture of their situation almost without knowing what exactly he’d heard to inform it. The main drive was down. The comm array was unable to transmit either broadcast or tightbeam. There were hull breaches near engineering, the armory, and aft storage. Missiles could still be fired, but the guidance systems were down. No one mentioned the two frigates that had been flying with the ship since the main escort had been pulled away. Alex figured that meant they were dead.

“We are under attack and being boarded,” the captain said, her voice remarkably calm. “The original escort force is also now under concentrated attack, and will be unable to come to our relief. We have put out a broad distress call, but it seems unlikely in the extreme that anyone could make it here in time to affect the outcome of the conflict. We are preparing to offer a vigorous defense, but if we are unable to assure your safety, it may become necessary for you to evacuate.”

“Into the middle of a firefight?” Alex said.

“It isn’t optimal,” the captain said. “With respect, my first priority has to be the safety of the prime minister.”

“Of course, Skipper,” Bobbie said at the same time that Alex said, “That’s sounding a mite ominous.” The captain ignored both of them.

“We have half a dozen rescue pods prepped. Protocol is to give each of you an armed escort in the pod, and release them all at once, in hopes of distributing enemy attention and giving each of you the best possible chance of being overlooked.”

“That’s a shitty plan,” Alex said to the captain, then turned to the prime minister. “You know that’s a shitty plan, don’t you, sir?”

Smith nodded. His face was flushed, and a thin sheen of sweat danced across his neck and jowls, surface tension adhering it to his skin.

“Yeah,” Bobbie said. “Pods don’t have an Epstein. You’d be dropping us out there to get shot. And we have a racing yacht right here. The Razorback’s built for speed.”

The captain raised her hand, demanding silence. “What I was going to say? We can commandeer the Razorback for the prime minister, give her a pilot and an escort guard, but that means I’m still dropping two civilians into a meat grinder.”

“Why the hell would you do that?” Bobbie interrupted. “We’ve got a pilot and an escort right here. Don’t we? We can put Prime Minister Smith in the bunk and take the couches. Alex has more experience piloting that ship than any of you, and—all respect to Lieutenant de Haan—I can shoot as straight as anyone you’ve got. It’ll be tight, but it’s totally possible.”

“That’s where I was going, yes,” the captain said, her voice buzzing with annoyance. “In addition, the prime minister has made it clear that for political reasons, the presence of Sergeant Draper is required on Luna, so—”

“They said yes, Captain Choudhary,” the prime minister snapped. “Take yes for an answer.”

“Lieutenant?” Bobbie said. “If I’m acting escort on this mission, I’d really like to have a weapon.”

The thin-faced man smiled, his eyes glinting and cold. “I can arrange that, Gunny. Captain?”

The captain nodded sharply, and Lieutenant de Haan launched for the lift, Bobbie close behind him. Alex’s heart was beating double-time, but the fear was tempered by a growing excitement. Yes, he was in danger of losing his life. Yes, an unknown enemy had them surrounded and were likely about to storm the ship itself. But he was going to get to fly in battle again, and some immature, juvenile part of his soul could hardly wait.

“We will use our PDCs to cover you as long as we can,” the captain said, and Alex interrupted her again.

“Not going to be enough. If we’re burnin’ all the way to Earth… we can probably outrun the enemy ships, but their missiles don’t have to worry about keeping anyone inside from getting squished by thrust. And it ain’t like there’s anything out here to hide behind.”

“You’ll have to think of something,” the captain said.

“All right,” Alex said. “Set a bunch of missiles to match the frequency of the Razorback’s comm laser. Launch as many as you can with us when we go, and Bobbie can use our laser to target incoming fire. We’ll outrun their ships and shoot down their missiles. Unless there’s someone between here and Luna or we run out of missiles, we should be fine.”

As long as we don’t get shot the second we launch, he didn’t add.

The captain blinked and shot a glance at the prime minister. There was a question in the politician’s eyes. Captain Choudhary shrugged. “He thought of something.”

“You mean—”

“No,” the captain said, “that might… that might work.”

“Captain!” A voice came from behind them. “We have confirmed enemy contact at decks seven and thirteen. Permission to use heavy weapons?”

“Permission granted,” the captain said, then turned to Alex. “I think that’s your cue to head out, Mister Kamal.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Alex said. “I’ll make this work if I can.”

The prime minister unstrapped and floated up out of his couch until one of the two remaining marines grabbed him and pulled him back into orientation. The prime minister and the captain shook hands as another voice interrupted.

“Captain, we’re getting a message from the attacking force. From the Pella.”

“Their command ship,” the prime minister said to Alex.

“More demands of surrender?” the captain asked.

“No, sir. It’s broadcast, not tightbeam. It’s… well, holy shit.”

“Give it to me, Mister Chou,” the captain said. “From the start.”

An audio feed clicked on. Thick static crackled, vanished, then crackled again. Someone grunted, and it sounded like pain. When the voice finally came, it was focused and serious. And it hit Alex like a kick to the belly.

“If you receive this, please retransmit. This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante…”