Babylon's Ashes

If she changed the plan now, if she backed away…

Fought the oppressor before. Still fighting the oppressor now. Followed your heart then. Still following your heart now. The situation changes; that doesn’t mean you do.

Fuck.

“Evans,” she said. “What’s the status of the Solano?”

“On course, Captain.”

“Do we have control of it?”

Evans looked over at her. His eyes were wide and uncertain. Panicky. “I have telemetry, yeah.”

“Slow it down,” she said, pulling up tightbeam connections to the Panshin and the Serrio Mal. “Give us more time to kill the defenses.”

Captain Foyle accepted the connection first, then a moment later, Rodriguez. In the separate windows of her display, they looked like negative images of each other. His pale skin, her dark, but with the same thinness and close-cropped hair. The images shook under different strains as the Panshin and the Serrio Mal suffered their own separate evasions.

“We have a change of plan,” Michio said. “The Solano isn’t ramming the station. We’re going to park it, ass-end at the ports, inside safety range, warm up the Epstein, and melt anything that comes out to slag. Blockade.”

Foyle’s eyes could have been cast iron for all that her expression changed. She’d be hell at the poker table.

“Con que?” Rodriguez said, his lips narrowing. “Is late à diffe the plan.”

“Late’s better than too late,” Michio said. “The Belters of Pallas aren’t the enemy. I’m not going to make them the enemy. I need slow passes from both of you. Every PDC gets dusted. Every gun and torpedo emplacement, we break. Then sensor arrays. I need this station blind and declawed.”

For a moment neither one of her captains spoke. She could hear all the objections in her own voice. She was tripling the risk of the mission. She was spending an order of magnitude more ammunition—torpedoes and PDC rounds—than a simple escort of the sacrifice ship required. She was putting them, her commanders and their crews and their families, at risk to preserve a station that was actively trying to kill them all.

“I need you to trust me,” she said. A loud pop announced a stray PDC round had holed the Connaught. Oksana shouted something about sealing the deck. Michio didn’t look away from the screen. Let them see these were her risks too.

“Dui,” Foyle said in her whiskey-and-cigar voice. “You say it, bossmang, and we get it done.”

Rodriguez, shaking his head, muttered something obscene, looked into the camera with tired eyes. “Fine.”

She dropped the connection. When she checked in with fire control, Laura had already changed the profile. On the display, every weapon on the face of the station was marked in red, targeted for destruction. But not the docks. Evans was out of his couch and pouring sealant on the hole where the PDC round had punched through the hulls. The slug had passed through the command deck maybe a meter from her head. She could have died. Any of her people could have died. Knowing it was like being two different people at once. One, horrified at the idea that it could have hit Laura or Evans or Oksana. The other, shrugging away what hadn’t happened. This was the work. This was the choice she’d made, and it was the right one.

For two long hours, the Connaught dodged, strained, poured rounds down onto the surface of Pallas. What had originally been a fast, sharp attack turned into a long, bloody bout more about endurance and supplies than clever tactics. The Panshin and the Serrio Mal matched her blow for blow, hammer strikes against an anvil. The jammers were set too deep in the stone for even her torpedoes to reach, and every time the curve of asteroid cut off her line of sight to the other ships, Michio was afraid something would happen. That she wouldn’t see them again. And once, the Panshin emerged from a long pass with a bright scar and section of her hull peeled back.

Slowly, a blindspot appeared around the docks. Parts of space leading to Pallas that had been defended, weren’t. Evans brought the Solano into it kilometer by kilometer, then meter by meter until it had locked to Pallas’ orbit with only an occasional little push from the maneuvering thrusters to keep it stationary.

“They’re going to find a way to kill it, sir,” Oksana said. “May take them days, may take them hours, but this isn’t a blockade that can hold for long.”

“Get me line-of-sight on the Panshin, Oksana.”

“Sir.”

Rodriguez, when he appeared on the screen again, was grinning. So that, at least, was a good sign.

“How’s your ship, Captain Rodriguez?” Michio said, returning his smile despite herself.