Babylon's Ashes

Amos waved at her and pointed forward, toward the shifting pillar of the rail gun. She switched to a private connection with him.

“What about the power source?” he said. “These rail guns take a lot of energy to drive them and more to cool them off. And they’ve been going nonstop since we came through the gate. They’ve got to have a fusion reactor somewhere supplying the power. Maybe something salvaged off a ship. Maybe a couple truck-backs.”

“Where would I find it?” Bobbie asked.

“If it was me, I’d put it right under whichever one of those surrogate cocks they figured was least likely to get shot at. Or they could all have their own.”

She switched back to the Rocinante.

“What’s going on?” Holden said. “Is Amos okay?”

“We’ve got something. I’ll report back,” Bobbie said, and dropped the connection. She waved the soldiers forward, switched to the group channel. “Hold this ground. Keep their eyes and attention here.”

“Sa sa,” one of them said. She didn’t know which. “How long we need to keep it?”

“Until I get back,” she said. Or for the rest of our lives, she added silently as she burned back toward the fallen boat.

The door had been blown completely off, and the hull was dinged to shit where they’d slammed it into the station. But she didn’t need it to be pretty. She just needed it to fly, and it could still do that, at least for a little while. When she lifted away from the surface of the station, a few of the enemy took shots at her. Pointless with normal arms. The hulls might be cheap-ass crap, but they were cheap-ass crap meant to live through micrometeor strikes. The roar of the engine was just a vibration in her suit. She was leaving her people behind, and it killed her a little bit to do it. But it was the right call. There wasn’t time to hesitate.

The station curve was so tight, she had to work to stay tucked in close to it. The rail guns knew about her now. If she poked her head up, they’d chop it off. She thumbed on the full sensor array as she sped, touring the station as quickly as she could. They’d circled the station like three belts around a basketball, a rail gun placed wherever the steel bands intersected. It wasn’t hard to find them. Each of them was radiating heat as quickly as it could, maxing out the IR sensors in a way she’d never seen. But one—the one opposite the Sol gate—looked a bit hotter. If there was a single main reactor, that was her best bet. She set the little boat’s course, overrode the proximity shutoff, and as soon as she felt it duck down in its final kamikaze burst, she undid her straps and jumped for the airlock.

If it had been a real drive, the plume would have killed her. Instead, every temperature alarm on her armor went off at once. Her faceplate went opaque. A seal in her arm popped, sucking the skin around her elbow painfully until the secondary inflated and pressed down. For one terrifying second, she drifted above the station, blind and vulnerable. When vision returned, she could see the white bubble of the enemy bunker, and the twinkle of their muzzles as they fired. Bobbie painted the bunker with her targeting laser and launched the rocket on her back while at the same time firing her suit’s thrusters toward the surface as fast as they’d take her. She hit the surface of the station harder than she’d meant to, jarring her teeth hard enough she tasted blood. There was one bright flash as the rocket detonated, but it was quickly overwhelmed by the second flash of their landing boat slamming into the rail gun’s reactor.

Her faceplate went opaque again, but instead of the midnight black she’d suffered in the fire of the drive plume, it glowed a mottled brown. The radiation monitor flashed a red trefoil alert at her. But what fed her raw, animal panic was the wind. A thin, fast whistle of gas rushed past her, pushed her off from the surface.

When, seconds later, the faceplate cleared, a glowing cloud was expanding out from just beyond the horizon, a nebula slowly going dark. The surface of the station wasn’t blue, but an angry acid green.

Oh, Bobbie thought as the station began to strobe green to white to black to green again. This might have been a really, really bad idea.

To her left and right, the steel bands around the station were wrong. At first, she wasn’t sure how, but then she made out the gap between the steel and the surface, like a ring a size too large for the finger it was on. She switched to magnetic and IR, but they’d both burned out in the backsplash from the reactor failure. The station shifted slowly back toward blue. She had the irrational sense that it was aware of her. That she’d annoyed it, and had its attention. She used the suit’s thruster and the thin microgravity drift to pull herself back down to the surface, half expecting it to grab her and haul her inside to be punished, but it didn’t.