Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Thirty-Two: Bobbie

Copy copy, White Crow. Flight path amended. You good to go, sa sa?”

“Heard and acknowledged,” Bobbie said. “Thank you, Control.”

The tightbeam to Callisto’s traffic control center dropped, and Bobbie shifted the little skiff, feeling the gentle pressure as the thrusters fired. It wasn’t even enough to move her crash couch, but it bent the trajectory of her ship just enough. The display had a hard lockout that let her overlay the path of the whole plan without fear of anything leaking back. Where the Tempest was, where the Storm would appear, and where she needed to be.

She stretched her hands, and the powered gloves of the Laconian armor shifted with her. Blue showed through gaps in the black paint job. Blue and black were the wrong colors, and always would be for her. Her armor was supposed to be red. She opened an encrypted tightbeam and waited the seconds as it was confirmed. Everything was happening so close in, there was hardly any light delay. This wouldn’t be either strategic or close quarters, but the messy part in between.

“Captain,” Jillian Houston said.

“We have approval from traffic control. Monitor our position and stand by for go.”

“Copy that,” Jillian said, and dropped the line. It was good discipline, not leaving the connection up longer than required. Not that it would have made much difference now. By the time the Laconian forces tracked the signal, it would all be over. Or at least too far along to stop.

The White Crow was a terrible little ship. Even if Bobbie hadn’t been taking it into combat, she’d have wanted a vac suit buttoned up tight. The cloth covering the bulkheads was pale, with lines of white showing where age and radiation had degraded it. The crash couches were lumpy and stiff, and slow to react to changes in the ship’s vector. The handholds on the walls had all been polished by generations of touching, the way stone steps were supposed to be worn away in medieval cathedrals back on Earth. It was a ship that had outlasted its time, but its drive still worked, and Bobbie didn’t need much more than that out of it.

She waited through minutes that felt long as they passed and sudden when they were gone. The outward-pushing, inward-pulling dilation of time before battle. It felt good.

“How are we down there, Rini?” she asked. The response delay from the airlock wasn’t much less than when she’d been talking to Callisto.

“I feel like I’m cupping the devil’s balls,” Rini said. “But … yeah. It all looks good.”

Bobbie had looked over the torpedo before they’d taken off. It was the smallest and fastest that Bobbie could find, black and boxy and hardly longer than her own leg. Rini had stripped the already spare design down to its minimum, taking away the mass of the traditional warhead in order to win a few extra milliseconds when the burn came. Instead of blowing the little fusion core, the proximity sensor would disable the power that kept the antimatter cut off from the rest of the universe, and physics would take it from there. Bobbie just had to get it close.

She checked the flight path. The White Crow was just about where she wanted it to be.

“I’m about to pull the pin,” Bobbie said. “If you need a potty break, now’s the time.”

Rini’s laugh was short and humorless. “I’ve been pissing myself since you told me the plan, Cap. At this point, I’m amazed I don’t have a prolapsed bladder.”

“Only a little longer,” she said, and switched back to the tight-beam. “Status?”

“At your order,” Jillian said.

This was the moment. The last moment. Bobbie could pull back now. Take the White Crow through her planned flight path, tell her crew to scatter to the winds, drop the antimatter down Jupiter’s gravity well and enjoy the fireworks. There hadn’t been a lot of decisive moments in her life that she’d recognized when they were happening. Usually they only came clear after the fact.

“Take her out, Storm,” Bobbie said.

“Done,” Jillian said, the single syllable sharp and hard as a thrown rock.

Bobbie took a deep breath, let it out. Down on Callisto, the Gathering Storm was coming to life, breaking out of its hidden berth and leaping through the thin Callistan atmosphere toward the stars. Her crew were being pressed back into their couches like God had His palm on their chests. All she could do was sit and listen to the open channel and wait for someone to notice a drive plume where there shouldn’t be one.

The emergency alert cut through the chatter of voices. Military orders to make clear. The thickly traveled Jovian system, with its dozens of moons and millions of people all smashed down into a volume smaller than the slow zone, had just become a battlefield. She fired up the White Crow’s drive as if she were going to head for shelter. Her body felt warm and smooth. On her tactical display, the Tempest shifted the way it was supposed to, took the vector she’d anticipated, leaped to the attack. When she switched to visual, it looked like a tiny bone, dark against the brightness of its own drive plume.

The display showed fast movers—torpedoes already in flight from the Storm. And there, tiny pinpricks of light where the Tempest’s PDCs were firing out through holes in its skin-like plating to knock them back. The thin cone of the enemy’s blind spot swept across the tactical display. She’d be in it soon. Very soon …

“Make safe, Rini,” she said. “We’re about to get bumpy.”

“Not soon enough for me.”

The White Crow fell into shadow, and Bobbie spun the ship hard, throwing the drive into a hard burn. The crash couch slammed up into her back. Her armor flashed a medical alert error up as her blood pressure fluttered, then took it down when she stabilized. The tactical screen had more targets than she could track. Jillian Houston was throwing everything the Storm had at the Tempest, and the Tempest was opening up its own volley. But so far no sign of the magnetar field generator, so their dangerous gamble was paying off for now. Bobbie slid the White Crow closer in, trying to narrow the gap between her and her enemy. The burn was hard. Her armor rippled down on her legs and arms in rhythm with her heart, pushing the blood along, keeping it from pooling. Even so, darkness started to creep in at the edges of her vision. She was aware of voices on her radio like they were music coming from another room. She was hiding in the middle of the Tempest’s blind spot. The safest she could be in the middle of a shooting war, and still not particularly safe.

She shifted to the in-ship comms, and the rest of the universe went silent. “Prepare for launch.”

She was pretty certain she heard Rini’s grit-toothed acknowledgment. She checked her drive. Seven gs. She’d done worse than seven gs before. Getting old sucked.

She didn’t just feel the impact, she heard it, transmitted up through the mass of the ship and into her armor. A deep, dull clank like someone hitting a badly made bell.

“I think we took a hit,” she said. “What’s your status?”

Rini didn’t answer. Pushing against the thrust gravity, Bobbie shifted to the network display. Rini’s power armor was still connected, but everything on it was in error states. A sea of red where green should have been. Bobbie shouted the woman’s name again, but she already knew there wouldn’t be a reply.

The airlock was one deck down and then half a dozen meters from the lift shaft. If she cut the drive, the White Crow would fall out of the blind spot and be cut down by the Tempest’s PDCs. If the torpedo had broken …

If it had broken, she’d already be a rapidly expanding cloud of glowing plasma. The antimatter at least was still intact. That meant there was hope. And if there was hope, there wasn’t rest. She slaved the piloting controls to her armor, checked her seals and status—a few medical stats in the yellow, but nothing in the red—and unstrapped from the crash couch. The power armor whined under its own weight as she stood, and she felt her shoulders trying to dislocate. The blood in her veins slammed down into her legs, and the armor clamped against her thighs, pushing it back up. A wave of nausea almost overcame her. She took the first of eight steps to the lift. She could do it. She had to.

A low growling was coming up from the deck. The maneuvering thrusters were firing. That couldn’t be good. She reached the lift, and the slight reduction in g as she went down was like one drop of water to someone dying of thirst. It stopped when the lift did.

The airlock was a mess. Both sets of doors were open, venting the ship into space. The bulkhead was folded where the PDC rounds had hit. Jagged holes gaped where the raw kinetic force had shoved the outer hull into the room. The torpedo was in the far corner where the bulkhead met the floor, and Rini’s body was beside it. Bobbie went to her side and knelt, the artificial muscles running through her power armor straining under the burden.

Death had come fast for Rini. She probably hadn’t even known it happened. The armor was the same mostly black as Bobbie’s, and it was still working hard to preserve the life that was gone. Five holes across her back and arm poured blood too fast, the thrust gravity squeezing it out of the corpse. Bobbie shifted Rini away. There’d be time for mourning later.

Rini had protected the torpedo from the worst of the damage, but the little drive wasn’t unscathed. A white impact showed where a bit of shrapnel had cracked the ceramic around the drive cone. Bobbie tried to lift it and see the extent of the damage, but she couldn’t. Even with the powered armor, the burn was too much. Her spine ached, and the one rib that dislocated when she was under too much thrust had slipped out of place again. It hurt to breathe.

The White Crow threw up a fresh alert. The maneuvering thrusters were at a little under a third of their reaction mass, and requesting permission to start drawing from the reserve. It only took seconds to see the problem. The PDC rounds had sheared off a section of the exterior plating. In a larger ship, it wouldn’t have mattered, but the White Crow was small enough that it had shifted the center of mass. The thrusters were firing to keep her from curving off, and would until they ran dry.

She had the ship open a tightbeam to the Storm.

“Need good news, Captain,” Jillian said, her voice wet and phlegmy from the pressure of their burn.

“Rini’s down. Ship and torpedo are both compromised. I need you to make the Tempest stop. I can do this, but not at high burn.”

There was no response for a second. “How?” Jillian asked, but Alex’s voice cut in on the channel.

“Give me a second, Bobbie. I’ll get you what you need.”

She closed her eyes. Her consciousness was swimming. It was only force of will that made her turn toward the payload. The four little spheres of magnetism, vacuum, and hellfire. The proximity sensor. Neither of them looked damaged. She checked her tactical display. She was still in the blind spot. She rotated the ship and eased back on the maneuvering thrusters. If she was going to fall off course, she could at least fall in the right direction. The Tempest’s drive plume swept past, framed in the airlock doors like a comet.

“Alex?” she said. “Give me something.”

And as if in answer, the White Crow went on the float. Bobbie rose up, then clamped mag boots against the deck. The Tempest’s drive plume was gone. Her blood shifted and the nausea came and went again as she unhooked the warhead and the proximity sensor. The White Crow was spent. The torpedo was scrap. She wasn’t done. There was still a way. She took up the warhead, cradling it to her chest, and stepped out the airlock. She didn’t pause as she launched.

Bobbie fired up the thrusters on her Laconian armor and burned toward the Tempest. It was an asteroid, a strangely shaped rock curving through a complex orbit around the small and distant sun. She was close enough to see it without enhancement. Much closer than she’d intended. Maybe a hundred klicks away. Maybe less. A machine that had brought the solar system to its knees. The unkillable dreadnought of Laconia. And somewhere beyond it, away to her left, the Storm. Her ship. They weren’t really stationary. Nothing in the universe was. It was only that their vectors matched for the moment. Stillness was an illusion.

Something flashed and was gone. A torpedo taken out by the Tempest’s PDCs. Against the constant and unwavering starlight, the little glimmer of motion stood out. She saw another. A handful more. And the arcing brightness of the Tempest’s torpedoes heading out. The distances were so vast, they almost looked slow.

“Hold on,” she said, but she didn’t turn her comms on. It wasn’t a message so much as a prayer.

Bobbie checked her tactical display. She was still linked to the White Crow, but the comms on the little ship weren’t the best. It took almost a second for the full layout to repopulate.

Going ballistic was hard. The warhead in her arms was a dart, and she was trying to drop it a kilometer and land it in a coffee cup. She checked her suit, and the thrusters were good, even if they were running through her fuel way too fast. The Tempest was a little larger now. She killed the burn and turned, centering it between her feet. Falling toward her enemy from a great height. She held the warhead against her belly, checked the connections and readouts one last time. Was the power cut off engaged? Yes. Was the backup battery disconnected? Yes. Was the proximity sensor set so that the ship would trigger it? It was.

Bobbie took a deep breath. Another. That rib popped back into place with a deep and painful snap, and she grinned. The Tempest was visibly larger now. Her velocity toward it was recklessly fast, even though she could hardly feel it. She eyeballed her path, adjusted, had the suit double-check her. An augmented line from her armored toes down to the Tempest. She took a solid hold on the warhead, one hand on either side, and then carefully let go. Even a tiny variance, amplified over the quickly falling distance, would be a disaster. She waited for a long moment, and it floated in place, almost touching her. No drift. Perfect.

Gently, she tapped her suit thrusters, drifting away centimeter by centimeter, careful that the little plumes didn’t touch the warhead. When she was four or five meters away, she started a braking burn, and the warhead seemed to leap away. Her breath sounded very loud in her ears. Very close. Her suit was running warm, the radiators doing their best to shed waste heat. The vacuum of space was only cold after you were dead.

It was too late for her. Some part of her had known that from the moment she’d seen the white mark on the torpedo, but now that it was done, she could think about it. If things had gone right, she and Rini and the White Crow would have been burning hard as hell away from the Tempest the moment they dropped their missile, trying to outrun the blast. And that had assumed the Storm was still leading the enemy away, which wasn’t happening either. So this was it.

She twisted at the hips, stretching. The stars of the galactic disk spread against the horizonless sky. Some of that light had been traveling for centuries. Millennia. Longer. Many of those stars would have died long before she was born. What a weird fate for a photon to be spat out of a nuclear fireball, speed through the vast emptiness between stars, and land on a Martian Marine’s retina while she decided whether she still feared death, or if she was ready. She’d done this a dozen times before.

The Tempest was getting larger. She hadn’t killed all her velocity toward it. She wondered whether the Storm would make it. In a straight battle, it was doomed. Jillian and Alex and the rest were doing the tactical equivalent of taking a ship like the Rocinante and picking a fight with a Donnager-class. As long as the Tempest didn’t fire up its drive, it would be worth it. Pyrrhic victories were still victories, and this was about to cost the enemy way more than it would her.

She thought about making a connection back to the Storm. Saying goodbye. They didn’t need the distraction. If anything, she should try to divide the enemy’s attention, not her allies’. Anything else was self-indulgence. She’d taken her shot, but she wasn’t done.

She checked the ammunition levels in the suit. She was topped up. The thrusters still had some juice in them, and her oxygen was good for another thirty minutes, even if she didn’t start running it thin. She engaged the weapons, shifted her HUD to local/tactical, and grinned. 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?

“Thanks for everything,” she said to the universe, as if it had been the host of a particularly good party that was just winding down. She turned toward the Tempest. Another sparkle of light. Another volley of torpedoes speeding out into the darkness. Another threat to her ship and her people. “All right, motherfucker. You want to dance? Let’s dance.”

She locked her targeting system onto the Laconian battleship, shifted her suit to live fire, and started her burn. Fifty-seven seconds later, she passed out of the Tempest’s blind spot.