Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Twelve: Bobbie

In unwinnable fight.

Alex was gone, heading back to the Storm to figure what exactly their evac options looked like. If they had any. What he’d said stayed after him.

The temporary warehouse their OPA friends had found for them smelled like burnt ceramics and old ice. Bobbie had been working in it long enough now that the smell didn’t trigger a gag reflex, so that was sort of a win.

She ticked off an entry on her supply list: twelve crates of Laconian fuel pellets. They’d been intended for the Tempest, but they’d work in the Storm too. And because the Laconian reactors seemed to want to use only their own brand of pellet, it meant her ship would get to keep flying for a while. Unless the Tempest shot them all into atoms. But the Storm didn’t have a lot of storage space. They’d need to make some decisions soon about how much of their stolen loot to carry with them and how much to hide or sell. Fuel, bullets, or food. The hierarchy of needs, wartime edition. And now, with a Magnetar-class dreadnought heading in their direction, the importance of every decision was even greater.

An unwinnable fight.

Bobbie had been at Medina Station when the Tempest came through the Laconia gate for the very first time. She’d watched it use its primary weapon on the rail-gun defenses, and turn them into spaghettified atoms in a single shot. And while she hadn’t been part of the defense of Sol system when the Magnetar-class battle cruiser made its attack, she’d read the reports. The combined might of the Earth-Mars Coalition hadn’t even been able to slow the Tempest down. She had no illusions that their one destroyer stood a chance. Run and hide was their only option now.

Alex had been a navy boy for twenty years before he’d become the pilot of the Rocinante. He’d always been reliable under pressure. But something had happened when they met with Naomi this last time. Or maybe it was the idea of his kid getting married. Or maybe it was that he was a little smarter than she was, or a little less angry, or a little more realistic. Maybe it was that he’d seen a little sooner than she had why the fight was unwinnable. The underground was held together with spit and baling wire even at the best of times. Saba did what he could to help the old OPA fighters keep the Laconians uncomfortable where they could, but the simple truth was that the Storm was their only meaningful asset. The ship, and by extension her strike team, were the resistance’s only real weapon against Laconia. The Transport Union didn’t have gunships, and the void cities had been disarmed as part of the treaty negotiations. The Earth-Mars Coalition fleets couldn’t help even if they wanted to now that they all had Laconian flag officers on them reporting directly to Admiral Trejo.

If Alex was losing heart, Bobbie didn’t believe for a second he was alone. The failure to capture the political officer combined with the looming threat of the battleship might be enough to get her crew wondering why they were still risking their necks fighting an unbeatable foe.

And as much as she disliked it, Alex was right.

The old-guard OPA attitude of resistance for resistance’s sake would only keep them going so long. Part of what she should be doing was training up the next generation of fighters. Only so far, they weren’t waiting in the wings to step in. Duarte and his people were smart. They kept things from getting bad too quickly. They made the right speeches about respect and autonomy. They let people believe that government by a king would never go wrong. And by the time it did, and things got bad enough to inspire a younger resistance, she and Alex and the old-school OPA would be off the board. Then who would be left to fight? Why would they think there was any hope in it?

Recruitment wasn’t her job. It belonged to Saba or Naomi or one of the other secret leaders of the underground, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Alex had opened the issue. Now it itched.

Bobbie finished her check of the fuel cell crates and moved on to something the manifest listed as sensor components. The team had grabbed it off the freighter because any repairs the Storm needed were done in-house and on the fly. Spare parts were always at a premium.

Inside the crate was a sealed gray ceramic box about the size of a toaster with seven input ports on its side. Bobbie used her terminal to look up the serial number on the case. It was listed as an active sensor array control node—the little processing station that coordinated data coming in from the radar and ladar sensors, did first-level analysis, and acted as the hindbrain between the main computer and the sensors themselves. An expert pattern-matching system about as smart as a pigeon. If they were sending a new one to the Tempest, it might mean that they’d lost one in the fight for Sol. It was a nice idea, anyway. That the big dreadnought had taken some damage in the fight it couldn’t just heal for itself. And it made sense. The weird hulls and reactors and engines of the ships might heal like the ship was a living thing, but they were protomolecule technology. The sensors and computers on the Laconian ships were human tech. Anything built by humans had to be hand repaired or replaced. It was one of the few weaknesses of the hybrid ships.

And if she had the replacement parts, it might mean there was a hole in the Tempest’s sensor package. If they could figure out where it existed, maybe they could get close to the big ship before detection. They could … fire one meaningless torpedo before the big bastard swung around and ripped them into atoms. Paint something rude on the hull. Pee on it. Jillian’s crack about moral victories was annoying, but that didn’t make her wrong.

Bobbie put the sensor node back into its case and marked the box as one to definitely keep for themselves. An hour later, she’d finished going through the pallet of spare parts and tagged them all as keepers. Her terminal was playing a little three-dimensional game of “fit all the loot.” Every time she marked a crate, the program shuffled everything in the Storm’s storage compartments looking for a place to put it. At some point, they’d have to start storing things in the staterooms and hallways, and that point wasn’t far off.

She opened a crate of protein flavorings for the galley food processor and marked it

DO NOT KEEP

KEEP

It was interesting, though, that the Tempest was coming after them. It felt good to know she’d hit the enemy hard enough to sting. Maybe it was just pride. Admiral Trejo angry that a pirate would dare act in his solar system. Or maybe the political officer had been close enough to someone high in command that this was a personal vendetta now. Or maybe they just really wanted their protein flavoring back. Whatever it was about the raid that made Laconia jump, she hoped they were as bothered and itchy as she was.

She reached the end of her row of pallets, which meant her work was half-done. A few more hours digging through boxes, and she could sneak off to one of those old bars at the port and drink her troubles away. Or at least distill them down to nausea and a hangover. And maybe she’d get a steak. She felt like Saba and the resistance could afford to buy her a steak. Her stomach rumbled at the thought. So maybe she called it a day now, and came back to finish tomorrow.

A small pile of high-impact crates had been set off to the side, away from the main rows of pallets. They had a variety of warning labels on them, so her crew had put some space between them and the rest of the supplies. All right. Go through the dangerous stuff now, then call it a day.

The top crate in the pile had a caustic chemical warning, and was filled with spray cans of degreaser. Not exactly a threat to life and limb. She moved the crate over to the regular supplies. Beneath it was a crate marked

HIGH EXPLOSIVE

Under that was a large metal crate. The label said

MAGNETIC CONTAINMENT EXPLOSIVE DANGER

Curiouser and curiouser.

Nothing on the crate indicated that opening the latches was hazardous, so Bobbie popped them and lifted the lid. It was much heavier than it looked. Lead lined, maybe. Inside, cradled by enough foam to keep a robin’s egg intact during high-g maneuvers, were four metallic spheres about the size of Bobbie’s two fists held together. All four had cables running to a massive power cell that gave off a low hum of high electricity. The power cell’s indicator showed that it was at 83 percent charge. Each sphere had its own indicator where a cable from the power cell connected to it. They all showed 100 percent.

Bobbie very carefully lifted her hands away from the box and took a step back. Nothing in the box itself looked all that dangerous. Just four big metal balls and a high-capacity battery. But every hair on her body was standing straight up. It was all she could do to stop herself from running away.

Bobbie knelt back down next to the crate and very gingerly lifted one of the metal balls out, making sure to keep the cable connected to the power supply. Once it was out of its foam cradle, warning text could be seen.

ENSURE MAGNETIC CONTAINMENT SYSTEM REMAINS CHARGED—DANGER OF EXPLOSION

DO NOT RUN ON INTERNAL POWER SUPPLY FOR MORE THAN TWENTY MINUTES

Bobbie returned the sphere to its place in the foam. And sat back. Something in the spheres exploded when it wasn’t magnetically restrained. Fusion reactors worked that way. The magnetic bottle held the fusion reaction suspended because nothing material could handle the heat of the core. These little spheres weren’t reactors, though. A fusion reactor was huge. It required extensive support mechanisms to inject fuel pellets, compress and fuse those pellets, and turn the fusion reaction into electricity. The Laconians were advanced, but it didn’t seem plausible that they were so advanced that they’d created fusion reactors a little bigger than a softball. And these things were using power, not generating it.

She pulled out her terminal and called Rini Glaudin. She was an old Belter on the Storm. A high-energy physics PhD from way back in the day at Ceres Polytech who’d gotten radicalized in college and spent a couple of decades in a UN prison after she started helping the Voltaire Collective build bombs. Now she was the chief engineer and resident gearhead on the Storm.

“Boss,” Rini said after a couple moments. She sounded sleepy, or drunk.

“Catch you at a bad time?”

“You can leave now,” Rini said, but her voice was muffled, like she’d covered the mic with her hand. A minute later, “What is it?”

“I have a weird question, but if you had company,” Bobbie said.

“He’s gone. He was pretty enough, but postcoital conversation was not his strong suit. What’s going on?”

“I’m going through the loot we pulled off that freighter,” Bobbie said. “And I found this crate of stuff I’m having a hard time identifying. Thought maybe you could help.”

“You’re at that warehouse by the surface? Let me pull on some clothes and I’ll get right down there.”

“No,” Bobbie said. “Don’t do that. I think this might be dangerous and I don’t want anyone in here until I figure it out. Hold on, let me send you some video.”

Bobbie passed her terminal across the crate, giving Rini a good look at the power cell and the spheres. Then she propped the terminal up against the edge so she could use both hands to pick up a sphere and show the warning text to the camera. When she was done, she said, “Any ideas?”

There was a long pause. Bobbie felt the unease rising in her like an illness.

“Fuck me,” Rini said at last.

“What do you think it is?”

“So the big question about the Magnetar-class ships has always been power,” Rini said. There was a lot of background noise as she spoke, drawers opening and closing. Clothes being pulled on. She was dressing in a hurry. “The stars the ships are named after have incredible magnetic fields, but they’re rapidly rotating neutron stars, so how do you get that beam effect the ships have without, you know, spinning up a neutron star?”

“Okay,” Bobbie said. Her knowledge of astrophysics was pretty thin. “How do they?”

“No one knows!” Rini said. “But it would take way more power than a typical fusion reactor puts out. Everyone just sort of assumed that meant the Laconians had much better reactors than us. But we have the Storm, and our reactor is good, but its design is nothing paradigm shifting.”

“I’m sitting right next to this thing while you talk,” Bobbie said, “so go faster maybe.”

“Antimatter results in a one hundred percent conversion of matter into energy. Nothing else even comes close. If the Laconians power their beam with antimatter, that actually makes sense.”

Bobbie laughed. There was only a little mirth in it. “Am I sitting next to four bottles of antimatter, Rini?”

“Maybe? I mean, the only way to contain it would be a magnetic field. If it touched anything, boom. So, sure? Maybe.”

“How much of that stuff do you think is in here?”

“I don’t know. A kilo? A gram of it would be a bomb big enough to level a city. Based on the size of those orbs, you’ve probably got enough there to punch a hole in this moon. I mean, if that’s what’s in there.”

“All right,” Bobbie said. “Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”

“Fuck that, I’m on my way down there,” Rini said, then killed the connection. At least Bobbie understood now why the Tempest was treating this as high priority. Looking at the metal balls in their case was making Bobbie’s scalp crawl.

And then, all at once, it wasn’t.

The fight had just changed. And she knew how to win.