Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Thirty-Three: Alex

Status?” Bobbie said. Her voice on the command deck only made Alex feel her absence more. All around, the others were at their stations. The tension in the air was thick. Every glance, every breath, every nervous chuckle meant the same thing: Holy shit, we’re actually going to do this.

“At your order,” Jillian said, tugging the collar of her uniform open another centimeter. Alex remembered being young enough to care what he looked like going into a battle.

Caspar was tapping the side of his crash couch. Jillian leaned forward on hers, pulling the restraints tight against her shoulders. Alex sort of wished he’d hit the head. Everyone dealt with the anticipation and dread differently.

They’d been preparing for hours, towing the Storm out from its hidden mine, making the cabins and workshops secure, running every system through its diagnostics. Now the only thing between the Gathering Storm and open space was a set of old bay doors, and Bobbie’s go order.

“Take her out, Storm.”

“Done,” Jillian said, and cut the connection. “Kamal. Take us out.”

Alex tapped the release and watched on his monitor as the doors above them opened. Maneuvering thrusters gently pushed them off the moon’s surface. And as soon as the Storm cleared the dock, he lit the Epstein up. He fell hard into the crash couch gel, feeling the coolness as it crept up around his ribs and neck. Callisto fell away behind them, the surface glowing orange and gold where the drive plume had heated it.

“All systems inside tolerance,” Caspar said, even though no one had asked. The kid had to do something. “We are … Okay. I’m getting a connection request from Callisto traffic control?”

“Let ’em wonder,” Jillian said. “Do we have the Tempest?”

“Got him,” Alex said.

“Show me.”

Alex threw the Jovian system onto the main display. Their position, the moons, the curving arc of the gas giant below them. The shipping patterns were complex to an untrained eye, but he could read them like text. The freight traffic in gray, Laconian security in gold. Bobbie and the White Crow in green. And the target—the Tempest—in red as bright as fresh blood.

The shifting gravity of the system made lowest-energy transit lines, and the traffic between the moons followed them like iron filings showing a magnetic field. At these distances, you wouldn’t even need an Epstein drive to ignore them. A decent ship flying teakettle could get anywhere it needed to be. It was only the extra scrip that ships could save that made the pattern what it was. That was always enough.

“Come on,” Jillian said, not to anyone on the bridge. “Grow some balls and come get me, you big bastard.”

“Security alert’s just gone out, open channel,” Caspar said. “They know we’re here. The Tempest is moving. She’s coming after us.”

“Punch it, Kamal,” Jillian said. Her bravado was almost convincing. Alex didn’t think Caspar saw through it.

Alex punched it. On his monitor, the green of the White Crow lined up just where he wanted it to be. The Tempest followed in the way he’d expected it would. His jaw ached from the thrust, and the juice running through his system made him feel like he’d had too much coffee and not enough at the same time. The Tempest was a massive ship, but the drive was powerful enough that inertia didn’t matter much. The Storm was smaller, lighter, and less powerful, and while it was probably more maneuverable, that didn’t help this time. If he was going to get Bobbie through the eye of that particular needle, he had no degrees of freedom.

They still had advantages, though. The main one being that they were ahead and the Tempest was behind. The Storm’s drive plume gave a little cover. The torpedoes that the Tempest fired would have to swing out and around to keep from getting slagged. And it also had catch up to the Storm as it sped away. Anything the Storm launched, the Tempest would rush forward to meet. It gave the Storm’s PDCs that little extra slice of reaction time, the Tempest’s that much less. Bobbie’s flight plan for him had been to ride that gap where the difference put the Tempest in threat and the Storm just outside it. It was great in theory. Practice was more complicated, because they could still be overwhelmed.

Would be.

“Fast movers,” Caspar gasped. “That’s a lot of them.”

Jillian coughed. It sounded painful. Alex half expected her to move to text communication, but she fought through and spoke aloud. “PDCs to auto. Return fire.”

The thrum of the PDCs added itself to the noise and shudder of the pursuit. Like a kid trying to outrun a cop, the Storm slid past the White Crow, and the Tempest boiled up from below her. Alex couldn’t tell if the vibration was engine harmonics coming from the deck or his overloaded bloodstream or both. Bobbie’s little ship hit her burn too, falling into the enemy’s blind spot.

Soon. It would all be over soon. He forced himself to swallow. It hurt.

The Storm shook. “We aren’t hit,” Caspar shouted. “It was close, but we got it.”

“More distance, Kamal,” Jillian said, but he couldn’t do that without prodding the Tempest to match. Bobbie needed the battleship to keep its current course and heading. He was too focused on the reality of the situation to explain why it was a bad order, so he just ignored it. If the Storm had to take a few hits, it would just have to take them.

The incoming fire was like a vast, blooming flower. Lines looped out from the Tempest, curved in toward them, and vanished as the Storm knocked them back. Alex spared a glance at the ammunition levels. They weren’t as low as he’d expected. All his habits had been formed on older technology. The Laconian design for rapid printing of new rounds still wasn’t intuitive.

If they had been doing what they appeared to be doing—running like hell and hoping to get to the gate and out of the system—it would have been a desperation move. The distance between Jupiter and the ring gate was vast, and the Storm was constrained by both its reaction mass and the fragility of the bodies inside her. And the danger of screaming through the slow zone too fast without knowing the state of play on the inside. Alex would have had to make a braking burn before they reached the gate, and the Tempest would have caught them. If Bobbie didn’t come through, it could still go down that way. Alex realized he was already plotting in other plans—dive into the high atmosphere of Jupiter and try to scrape the Tempest off, loop sunward and try to get the enemy to overheat and pull back before they had to—and stopped himself. They weren’t in the last ditch yet.

“New volley coming in,” Caspar shouted. “We’re not going to be able to stop them all.”

“Evasive, Kamal,” Jillian snapped, and Alex bent their flight path away, but only a little. The Tempest couldn’t turn or shift without exposing the White Crow. And where the hell was Bobbie anyway?

“Brace,” Caspar said, and a second later the crash couch bucked under Alex, kicking him like a mule. Even with the gel to pad him, he fought to get his breath back. He’d lost a couple of seconds. They couldn’t afford that again.

“What’s the damage?” Jillian croaked out, but no one answered.

The tightbeam sprang to life. Bobbie was checking in.

“Need good news, Captain,” Jillian said. Her face was shining with sweat. Alex waited with dread and hope.

“Rini’s down. Ship and torpedo are both compromised,” Bobbie said. Her voice was strained, but with the calm professionalism of a woman in her natural environment. She’d have had the same tone if she’d just found the way to destroy her enemy or lost both her legs. “I need you to make the Tempest stop. I can do this, but not at high burn.”

The pause seemed to last forever. Alex plotted in the flip and burn, and waited for Jillian to give the word.

Instead, she said, “How?”

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

The drive cut off, the weight of acceleration vanishing in the time it took to blink. Alex took the comm control from Caspar and turned on the do-not-approach beacon. Tactically, it didn’t make any damned sense. That’s what he was counting on.

“What are you doing, Kamal?” Jillian said. Her tone was halfway between outrage and hope that maybe he knew something.

“Making us look like a mutiny,” he said. “Seeing whether they like the idea of getting their ship back.”

As he’d hoped, the Tempest killed its drive. They sped through the darkness in matching orbits. Callisto was already long gone behind them. Even Jupiter was visibly smaller. It felt like being alone, but every eye in the system would be watching them.

“Leche bao,” Caspar said under his breath. “They’re going to kill us.”

“As long as they do it without starting their drive up,” Jillian said, and Alex felt a little burst of pride for the girl. She was green, but she was learning. For almost a minute, the two ships stood silent, waiting, and tense. A comm request came in from the Tempest. Jillian didn’t accept it. Alex noticed he was holding his breath.

“Fast movers,” Caspar said.

“Shoot down as many as you can and return fire,” Jillian said, “but do not change course, and don’t give them a reason to.”

Alex could only watch as the crew fired back. It would be over already if the command staff of the Tempest had wanted it to be. A single massive strike, and the Storm would be dead. Instead, like a wrestler slowly bending back the opponent’s joint, they were pushing the flow of missiles, a little faster and a little faster until the Storm’s defenses were overwhelmed. They wanted to disable the ship and question the crew. They hadn’t met Bobbie. Or Jillian Houston. If it came to it, they would scuttle the Storm. He knew he was looking at his own death.

Come on, Bobbie, he thought. I’m trusting you on this.

“I think … Is that the captain?” Caspar said. “I think that’s the captain.”

He threw the feed from the external sensors onto the main display. The image was a little shaky, the edges too sharp, but there not far from the Tempest was a single figure in power armor falling in toward the ship. Its arms ended in the rapid-fire glitter of muzzle flash, throwing two streams of ineffectual rounds at the mass of the Laconian dreadnought. The sight of a single human-sized figure flying past the battleship gave a dramatic sense of scale to its massive bulk. Next to it, Bobbie looked like an angry insect attacking a whale.

“Keep your eye on the incoming missiles,” Jillian said. “If that’s Draper, she’s doing it for a reason.”

The tiny figure flew a jagged, unpredictable path. Streams of high-speed projectiles chased it as the Tempest’s PDCs tracked it. The flyswatter hunting the fly. It was impossible to imagine that something so small could stand a chance against the vastness and power of the ship, but if it was Bobbie it was also impossible to imagine she wouldn’t.

Alex started laying in a burn solution. “I can get to her,” he said. “It’s going to mean getting damned close to that thing, but …”

The figure twitched. Something bloomed out from its back. On the display, it looked so small. The arms rose up, the legs bent. Vapor sprayed from the figure. Atmosphere. Blood.

“She caught a PDC round,” Jillian said. “She’s gone.”

Alex didn’t hear her. He heard her, but he wouldn’t understand. Grief like an electrical shock ran through his body, humming and violent and damaging.

“I can get to her,” Alex said, turning back to his controls. Something was wrong with the juice on his couch. He couldn’t catch his breath. “It’s going to be a hell of a ride, but we can … we can …”

His controls flickered as Jillian locked him out.

“Give me the fucking controls,” he shouted. “We have to get her!”

“Alex,” Caspar said, and his gentleness was unbearable. The suit of powered armor drifted. It was still heading toward the Tempest. Inertia carrying her toward her destination even after it didn’t matter. Even after she was gone. He tapped at the controls the same way, like there was a way to roll time back just a little.

“Fuck. Fuck,” Alex shouted. The lemony taste of vomit hit the back of his throat. He swallowed hard, forcing it back down. The plan had failed.

Bobbie was gone.

“What do we do?” Caspar said, and there was panic in his voice. Before Alex could answer, the sensor feed died with an audible click and the radiation alarms started screaming.

The Heart of the Tempest had stood alone against the combined forces of Earth, Mars, and the Belt and won. It had put all humanity under Laconia’s yoke. It was the living symbol of why all resistance against High Consul Duarte would always be in vain.

When their sensors finished their override reset, it was gone.

Without the protection of the Storm’s eerie skin, the burst of X-rays and gamma radiation would have killed them all. As it was, half the crew was too sick to get out of their crash couches. The medical bay was filled with people sloughing off the lining of their gastrointestinal tracts. The ship’s supply of antiradiation pharmaceuticals was already down to nothing, and if the cancer rate followed the models, their oncocidals would be going down next.

The ship itself was injured too. Not even broken. Injured. The regenerative plating that covered the Storm had started developing blisters and thickening like the first stages of skin cancer. The vacuum channels that routed power failed sometimes for no clear reason, becoming so unreliable that the repair crews started putting in copper wire backup circuits, the metal taped to the inside of the corridors. The drive still burned, even if it ran a little dirty.

They’d won. It hadn’t been possible, but they’d done it. Coming out unscarred would have been too much to ask.

Alex cycled between numbness and grief with the regularity of a clock. When he could stand it, he watched the newsfeeds from around the system replaying the explosion he hadn’t been able to see because he was too close when it happened. The best one was from Earth. A handheld camera filming a child’s kite competition was pointing at the right section of sky when the light reached there, and the brightness against the blue had been like a small, brief sun, even at that distance.

Everyone in the system was tracking the Storm as it made its way toward the ring gate. No one had the nerve to follow it. The newsfeeds were thick with analysis. The attack had been in retaliation for the crackdown on Ceres. It had been an inside job, and stood as evidence that the Laconian Navy itself was rife with factions and dissent. It was the first step toward the underground retaking Sol system or the inciting incident that would force the high consul to glass the whole system. Nine times out of ten, the speakers were celebrating Laconia’s defeat. There were other stories: Spontaneous demonstrations on Mars and Rhea calling for Laconian withdrawal. The official announcement from TSL-5 that the Laconian political officer’s position was being held empty until regular communication through the gate network was reestablished. A dozen pirate feeds springing up, accusing the Laconians of taking risks in the dead systems that put the whole human race under threat.

It wasn’t chaos, or if it was, it was no more than usual. It was the blossoming of hope where there had been no hope before. It was everything Bobbie had intended it to be, except for one detail.

For himself, the radiation sickness was bad, but the physical distress at least kept his mind busy. When he felt well enough to work, he threw in with the repair crews. He wasn’t surprised when Jillian Houston—Captain Houston—called him into her office. He’d been expecting it.

The cabin was small and spare. Laconian officers didn’t show off. Another thing they’d inherited from Mars. Alex remembered his own commanders embracing the same austerity, back when he’d been a different man and the universe had made sense. The few decorations and belongings that had been Bobbie’s were on the desk. Jillian looked thinner than before, and paler too. The radiation sickness had hit her harder, but it hadn’t stopped her.

“Alex,” she said. Her voice was gentler than usual. Like now that she’d taken power, she didn’t have to be as aggressive. “I wanted you to … I thought she’d have wanted you to take care of her things.”

“Thank you,” Alex said, reaching for them.

“Please sit.”

He did. Jillian leaned forward, her fingers steepled. “We need repairs. We need to regroup. And we need to go to ground before Laconia gets their shit together and sends ships after us.”

“All right,” Alex said. His heart wasn’t in it. Maybe it was because he was sick. Maybe it was grief. Where one started and the other stopped was difficult if not impossible to locate.

“I’ve decided to take us back to Freehold. We have the support there. And the Storm’s home base facility. We can get her back up to trim. Resupply from the colony. Plan our next moves.”

She looked at him like she expected him to say something. He wasn’t sure what that would be. He considered the things on the table. A tunic. A little glass-and-ceramic commendation she’d gotten from the UN, signed by Chrisjen Avasarala. He was surprised there wasn’t more, and he was a little surprised there was even that much.

“I think that’s a good plan,” he said. “The risky part will be getting through the gates, but with no Medina Station, we don’t have to try to sneak out in a supply ship. That makes it easier.”

When Jillian spoke again, there was a thickness in her voice like passion or sorrow. Or rage. “Draper was a good captain. And a better war leader. She made this ship what it is, and no one on the Storm will ever forget her or the sacrifice she made for us.”

“Thank you,” Alex said.

“I need to make this my ship now. In her tradition and her honor, but my command. I wish it wasn’t like that, but it’s where we are. You understand.”

“I do.”

“Good. Because I need you as my XO.”

Alex looked at her. He knew the answer and what he was going to do as clearly as if he’d actually been thinking about it. All his next steps laid out before him.

“Thank you,” he said. “But no. This is your ship, and that’s the way it should be. I’ve got one of my own.”