Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Forty-Two: Alex

Staging was important, but Alex hated it all the same. They didn’t know what was waiting for them on the other side of Laconia gate. For all they knew, the Whirlwind could be squatting just on the other side, ready to blast them all one by one as they came through. Sure, the intelligence they had showed it keeping close to the main planet, but that wasn’t a promise. The faster they got through Laconia gate, the better off they’d be.

That sounded great until it meant trickling the assembled forces from fifty-three systems into the slow zone, bunching them together before the first one went through to Laconia, and then diving through the enemy gate one after another as quickly as they could without vanishing. Then it got a little nervous-making.

“Was it always like this?” Ian, the new comm tech, asked. He was a Freeholder born and bred. Draper Station was as close as he’d ever been to another system. “Caspar said it used to be different.”

“That’s true,” Alex said. “It used to be different.”

The station at the center of the slow zone was growing darker as the days and weeks passed. It had cooled from a point of sun-bright whiteness to a threatening shade of orange. The surface of the slow zone that had been black and featureless still had the strange aurora look. If anything, that seemed to be getting brighter.

“This is the Deliverance,” a voice said from the open comm channel. “We have completed our transit from Hamshalim.”

“Copy that, Deliverance,” Ian said. “Benedict, you’re clear for transfer.”

A few seconds. “This is the Benedict. Copy that. We are starting our burn.”

Two hundred of the ships had already come through. Like the Roci, they were making their way to the Laconia gate. The others were still stacked outside their gates with Naomi’s transition order. Without Medina control to keep anyone from going dutch-man, they had to rely on her for their script. Which would work as long as not too many other ships came through in the same time frame. And as long as the behavior of the gates hadn’t changed.

That wasn’t the slow zone’s only new risk, though. Alex could still remember coming through the Sol gate the first time. Back then, the slow zone had been a place of mystery and terror, alien artifacts and death. Before Medina, he’d have said that the decades had tamed it. Made the place into something known and understood. That it was capable of changes they didn’t understand tore the scab off that wound every time he thought about it. He kept reaching for the drive control, wanting to edge the ship out through the gate just a little faster, a little earlier. He was heading to a battle with a vastly more powerful enemy, but at least that was known. Being reminded that they’d been building roads through a dragon’s mouth left him jumpy.

That was the thing about hubris. It only became clear in retrospect.

“This is the Benedict. We have completed our transit from Hamshalim.”

“Copy that, Benedict,” Ian said. “Chet Lam, you are cleared for transit.”

Alex reached for the drive controls, pulled back.

“You okay?” Ian asked as Alex unstrapped from his couch.

“I’m going to go get some tea. You want some tea?”

“I’m good,” Ian said, and Alex pushed off for the lift. He wished they were under burn, not only because he wanted to get out of there, but because being on the float made moving through the ship too easy. If he could feel the effort of motion, maybe it would do something for his anxiety. As it was, it was just having an itch he couldn’t scratch.

In the galley, he pulled out his hand terminal. There was one message in his outgoing queue, flagged to hold. He braced with his right hand and foot and spun his terminal slowly in the air like a pinwheel while he thought about it. The display, reading his orientation, flickered to keep up with its own rotation. After a few seconds, it started to annoy him. He grabbed it again and opened the message. His own face appeared on the screen. His voice came from the speaker.

“Kit. I’m about to do something, and it seems like I might not come back. It’s risky anyway. And the last time I did something like this, I thought about you a lot afterward. I know me and your mom didn’t get along there towards the end, and maybe I haven’t been as good a dad to you as I could have been—”

He stopped the playback, looked at it for a long moment, and deleted it without sending. There was this idea that one message could change a lifetime of decisions you’d already made. The truth was, he hadn’t said anything in there that Kit didn’t already know. If Naomi’s plan worked, Alex could go back and say anything that still needed saying in person. If it didn’t, it was probably better for Kit not to have had communications from his rebel pilot father.

Belinda and Jona came in together with the subdued glow of two people who’ve been enjoying each other’s private company. Well, they were in the hours before action. Alex could still remember a time when he’d taken some comfort that way himself. They nodded to him, and he nodded back like he didn’t suspect anything. Truth was, as long as it didn’t affect the ship’s function, a little affection in the crew was probably a good thing. Holden and Naomi’s relationship had been the unstated center of the Roci crew for a long, long time. That was part of why losing Holden had broken everything apart.

Now, here he was, and here was Naomi, back in the ship, doing something dangerous. It almost felt like old times.

His hand terminal chimed. It was Naomi.

“Admiral?” he said.

“Captain is fine.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “Felt weird saying that anyway.”

“So. I’m about to do a thing.”

“A thing?”

“Speechy, rousing-the-troops thing, admiral-of-the-fleet kind of thing.”

“Ironically,” Alex said with a laugh.

“This is serious,” Naomi replied, but there was no scold in her tone. “We’re three transfers away from having the whole fleet in here. I’ve sent my group assignments to the other ships. I thought I should make a statement. Something to the crew. Did Bobbie do that?”

Alex had to think. “Sort of, yeah?”

“I was really hoping you were going to say no.”

“Nervous?”

“I think I prefer being shot at.”

“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 minds 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

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

A few minutes later, Naomi managed a reply.

OR THEY COULDN’T IMAGINE ANYONE BEING THIS DUMB

He would have laughed if he could catch his breath. They’d been at eight gs since they came through. He’d done worse, but he’d been younger when he did it. The Storm, Quinn, Cassius, and Prince of the Face were all behind them, their trajectories making a thin fan pattern. At the gate, the first of the Donnager-class battleships emerged into normal space and angled off on a vector different from their own. The threshold level on Naomi’s model dropped slowly on his screen, measuring mass and energy and safety. The moment it was low enough, the second battleship arrived. The light delay from the ring to Laconia was almost three hours. So everything they were seeing in system was from the past. But it also meant that the closest Laconian ship wouldn’t know the enemy had arrived for a little over an hour and a half, and Laconia proper twice that. Alex didn’t let off the burn. By the time the response came, their fleet needed to be scattered as far through the system as it could be.

If it had been football, Laconia would have had a world-class goalie and a couple of professional strikers against Naomi’s team of four hundred grade school children and three Donnager-class football hooligans. Any head-to-head battle was a win for Duarte. So it was better that there not be any. Not until Naomi could pick them.

Alex switched over to visual telescopes and looked back at the receding gate. It was already tiny, but he could make out the drive plumes of the emerging ships when they came through like new stars being born. And behind them, the real stars and the wide, beautiful smear of the galactic plane. The same, more or less, as it always was.

Three hours later, the enemy destroyers killed their drives. Light delay meant that they’d seen the intrusion into their space and reacted, and the evidence of response was only just arriving. Alex wondered if they’d cut drives when they saw the Roci come through or if it had taken a few unexpected drive plumes lighting up their gate to make them nervous. If he’d cared enough, he could have done the math and figured it. He did enough to know that the news of their appearance hadn’t reached Duarte and the Laconian capital and that it would very, very soon.

In his couch, Ian grunted. For a moment, Alex was afraid it was a medical problem. Some people reacted pretty badly to their first extended high-g burn. But then the message came from Naomi.

DROP THE BURN. WE HAVE A MESSAGE

Alex thumbed the Roci back down to half a g. All around him, he heard the others gasp and sigh. He did a little of the same himself.

“Kefilwe,” Naomi said. “Let’s have that message.”

“Yes, Captain,” Ian said. “To your station?”

“I think we’ll all be interested.”

A woman not much older than Ian appeared on their monitors. She had sharp features, pale lips, and the blue uniform of Laconia, and her forehead was furrowed. Confused. Not alarmed.

“This is Captain Kennedy Wu of the Laconian destroyer Rising Shamal to the unidentified destroyer and its escort. You have made an unauthorized and unscheduled transit into Laconian space. Please cut your drives at once. If you are in need of assistance—”

Someone behind Kennedy cried out in alarm. Alex thought they said It’s the Storm or That’s the Storm. Something along those lines. The Laconian captain’s concern changed to fear and anger in a heartbeat. Alex tried to put himself in her place. The stolen ship that had murdered the pride of her navy, killed the unkillable, and was now showing up where it had no business being. He and Naomi knew all their antimatter supply had gone up with the Tempest, but he watched Captain Kennedy wonder.

“Attention, Gathering Storm. You are to cut engines immediately and surrender control to me. Any attempt to approach Laconia will be treated as hostile and met with immediate and—”

A different voice called out. This time Alex was sure of the words. More contacts. This one’s big. That had probably been one of the Donnager-class ships coming through. Captain Kennedy looked away from the message, checking something on another monitor, and the message ended.

“Well,” Alex said. “I think they noticed us.”

“Got to think High Consul Duarte’s going to be having a distressing day, don’t you?” Ian said.

Naomi pulled up the tactical display. The vastness of Laconia system simplified so much that all their ships pouring through the gate were a single, minuscule yellow dot.

“Orders?” he asked.

“They’re coming for the Storm first,” she said. “Bring us on a slower burn toward the gas giant. And get me a tightbeam to Captain Sellers on the Garcia y Vasquez. We’ll make it look like we’re open for a fight there, and the Neve Avivim can burn like hell to get around like they’re going to make it a pincer. As soon as the destroyers commit to that, we’ll change it.”

“Copy that,” Ian said.

Behind them, another ship came through the gate. Hundreds of drive plumes arced in shallow curves or wide, spreading like dust in a high wind.

The siege of Laconia had begun.