Babylon's Ashes

“You good for this, Gunny?”

“Let’s kill these assholes,” she said.

The Rocinante jumped forward, hitting her in the back like an assault. Her arms slammed into the gel, her fingers against the control barely able to move. The images on the screen went fuzzy, her eyes deforming past her ability to refocus them. She tensed her legs and arms, pushing the blood back to her core. The couch chimed and a fresh blast of cheap juice hit her bloodstream. Her gasps sounded like someone choking. Eight gs, maybe? Maybe more. It had been too fucking long.

An endless time passed, and then a chime told her the first round of torpedoes were in PDC range, and her targeting solution kicked in. Alex bent the Roci’s path, forced the attackers to shift. Gave her an extra fraction of a second between them. The PDCs lit up, going gold on her display as they fired. The deep chattering tapped through the deck with each one like she was playing music. Four torpedoes flamed out at once, but the other six danced away from the streams of metal, then spiraled closer to the ship. Alex banked hard, catching one with the edge of the drive plume, making the other five maneuver. She caught four. The fifth shifted, evaded, streaked close—

Alex tried to yell, but it came out as little more than a high squeak. The ship turned the extra three degrees to bring another PDC arc into play, and the enemy torpedo died, falling behind them in bright shards and melting in their plume.

A message appeared on her screen from Alex. TAKE IT TO THEM?

The two ships were bearing down on the Roci, pushing hard to narrow the distance. She didn’t know if that was bold or foolhardy. Probably they didn’t either. Ships full of Belters weren’t known for loving high-g burns, but this was war. You took the risks you had to take. But the third ship had peeled off. And two points, her old sergeant used to say, defined an opportunity. Those bad guys were awfully close to each other.

DONNE, she typed back, and didn’t bother fixing the error.

She routed the five torpedoes between the Pella and the Koto in a starburst. The Free Navy ships were firing PDCs at the Rocinante now, the rounds coming like ropes of pearls on the screen. Alex maneuvered around them easily. Range was too far still for close-quarters battle tactics to apply, but maybe the Belters didn’t know that. Or just meant it as an insult.

She watched the curving arcs of PDC fire shift to find her torpedoes as they burned for the abstract line between the two ships. Two of hers died. Three. Four. But the fifth curved into the space between the Koto and the Pella where their tracking software would recognize that the PDC fire that would stop the torpedo would also riddle the friendly on the other side. The two ships lurched apart, and the Koto dropped a torpedo that took out Bobbie’s attacker just a few seconds before impact.

The maneuver had bought them a few moments, but at the cost of one-quarter of their total torpedo stores. It wasn’t a game she could afford to keep playing when the ante was so high. But by then she’d put in her next firing solution and passed it to Alex.

To his credit, he didn’t question her. In a single instant, the gravity vanished, the Roci’s Epstein dropped to zero. Her couch slammed to the side, the hard spin of the maneuvering thrusters whipped them around. The custom-built keel-mounted rail gun made the ship jump as it fired. It was the one weapon the Roci had that wasn’t standard for a Martian corvette. The rotation continued until they were back on their old course, and then ten gs slammed her back into her couch as the Epstein drive kicked back on and the counterthrusters killed the spin.

A high-speed three-sixty with a precision-timed rail gun shot halfway through the spin wasn’t exactly standard combat tactics for Martian frigates, but she thought her old combat-tactics instructors would have approved.

The sudden crushing weight of thrust brought a wave of nausea, and her heart stuttered in a confusion of fluid dynamics and pressure. She must have blacked out for a moment, because she didn’t see the Koto hit. Only the glowing plume of superheated gas expanding behind it where it had dropped core. Even pressed into the crash couch, she managed a smile. She waited to see if the Pella would break off, go to the aid of her fallen comrade.

It didn’t.

Bobbie fed a new firing solution, passed it to Alex, and they tried again. A weightless, spinning moment, the kick of the rail gun, and slammed back into the couch like an assault. The Pella knew now. At the vast distances between them, even the fraction of a second that it took to spin the Rocinante around was enough for the enemy to anticipate them and dodge. She threw two more torpedoes at the Pella, but they were shot down well before they could do damage.