Babylon's Ashes

Alex put the Roci just ahead of the Giambattista’s nose, offset enough not to melt her with their exhaust, but close enough to maybe stop the enemy torpedoes before they hit. The two incoming plumes were like stars—fixed and steady. Holden remembered being a boy in Montana, learning to catch a baseball. The way that the ball seemed to float almost motionless when it was coming straight for him. This was the same.

“Status?” Holden said.

“Sixty-three seconds to effective range,” Naomi said. “Roci’s watching them.”

Holden breathed out. The captain of the Giambattista insisted that her ship wouldn’t suffer more than three and a half gs, so that’s what they were at. The enemy was slowing at a little over eight, but still going so fast that they would only spend a fraction of a second in range.

“Forty,” Naomi said, and coughed. A painful sound that made Holden aware of the weight on his own throat. Maybe they should have gone on the juice after all. Behind them, the ring gate would have been visible to the naked eye by now. Even a very low-power scope would be showing the weird, almost organic, moving-but-stationary nonmaterial of its frame. Signal was leaking through the bare thousand kilometers of its diameter, distorted like ocean waves seen from beneath—radio, light, all the electromagnetic spectrum, only warped and made strange. And beyond that, the rail guns waiting to kill them all.

“Starting to think this may not have been a great plan,” he said.

“Five seconds. Four…”

Holden braced. Not that it was going to help, just that he couldn’t keep from doing it. On the external cameras, the enemy drive plumes grew larger, thicker, brighter, and then in a blink, faster than the frame refresh, they were gone and the Rocinante bucked hard around him, slamming him into his crash couch like he’d fallen off a ladder. The ship rang like a struck gong, deafening. For a confused second, he thought they’d been thrown around by the enemy’s wake. That they were going to capsize.

The Roci steadied. An alarm was sounding, brash and demanding.

“What have we got?” Holden shouted.

“I don’t know,” Clarissa shouted. “I haven’t been looking at this any longer than you. Just… All right. Looks like we ate a couple PDC rounds or… No, hold on. That doesn’t make sense.”

The alarm shut off. The silence seemed more ominous. Maybe the shaking hadn’t been the Roci’s maneuvering thrusters getting them out of the way. They’d been hit. They might be spewing out their spare air into vacuum.

“‘Doesn’t make sense’ is not good, Clarissa,” he said, trying to make his panic sound cheerful. “Something that made me feel like we weren’t dying would be really nice.”

“Well, we got a little beat up,” Clarissa said. “I thought it was PDCs, but… No. We took out a torpedo close enough that we caught some debris.”

“They launched four torpedoes at us and two at the Giambattista,” Naomi said from behind him. “We got them all, but there was a little damage to both ships. I’m waiting to get a solid report from Amos.”

In that blink, Holden thought. That moment of shaking had been a whole battle too abrupt for a human mind to follow. He wasn’t sure if that was amazing or terrifying. Maybe there was room for both.

“Not dying, though,” Holden said.

“Not any faster than usual, anyway,” Clarissa said. “I’ll need to swap out some sensor arrays and plug a couple holes on the outer hull when we get a chance.”

“Alex?” Holden said. “What’s it look like up there?”

“I got a bloody nose,” Alex said. He sounded affronted. Like bloody noses were something you got when you were a kid and beneath his dignity now.

“I’m sorry about that, but I was thinking more about the ships that were trying to kill us?”

“Oh. Right,” Alex said, sniffing back the blood. “Like I said, that first window’s closed. Anything they throw at us now, we can knock down easy. And it doesn’t look like they’re changing much about their burn.”

“How long does that give us?”

Alex sniffed again. “We’ll get to a matching point beside the gate in a little less than an hour. If our little friends do a straight-line burn to come back to us and don’t change their burn rate? We’ll have six and a half hours. If they loop around so they can come at us from different directions, a little more.”

“What’s the most?”

“Eight,” Alex said. “Best-case scenario, we’re going to need to get all our folks through that gate and under protection of our shiny new rail gun artillery inside of eight hours. Seven’s more realistic. Six would mean we didn’t have to sweat it.”

“Amos is saying they got knocked around a little, but only lost some plating in the storage decks and maybe half a dozen boats,” Naomi said. “Bobbie’s calling it a win, and they’re scrambling the first wave.”