Babylon's Ashes

Her radio was hardened enough to work. “This is Sergeant Draper,” she said. “Is the rail gun still firing?”

“THE FUCK DID YOU DO?” a man’s voice screamed, high and frightened. She cut off all their mics.

“That’s what I’m asking, soldier,” she said, then switched over to private. “Amos?”

“Don’t know what you did, Babs, but it fucked things up in all the best ways. Rail gun looks powered down, the few remaining assholes are pulling back toward assholeville, and I think these metal bands that everything’s stuck to are moving a little.”

“Yeah, I may have popped those loose.”

“Impressive,” Amos said. “Hey, look, I got to go shoot somebody.”

“No problem,” she said, and opened the channel to the Rocinante. “Okay. You guys still out there?”

“Bad guys are getting really, really close,” Holden said. “Tell me you have good news.”

“I have good news,” Bobbie said. “You can come through the ring. In fact, if you could get over here and get us some air support, it would be much appreciated.”

There was a general whooping, made strange and uneasy by the interference of the ring. Was it her imagination that it was louder now?

“You got them?” Holden said, and she could hear the grin on his face. “You took the rail guns? We control them?”

Her suit sensors showed the wall of steel nearest her was starting to shift. Just a few centimeters, but there was definitely movement. It was broken. It was all broken. The rail guns weren’t going to defend anyone anytime soon.

“We don’t,” she said. “But at least no one does.”

Chapter Forty-Six: Holden

“You know what I’d like?” Alex yelled down from the cockpit.

“If we could get out of here?” Holden yelled back.

“If we could get out of here. At this rate we’re going to be sitting here with our jumpsuits around our ankles when the bad guys get back,” Alex said. “There’s a reason they don’t call those things slow-attack ships.”

Even though Naomi was strapped into the couch beside Holden’s, she answered over the headsets so she at least wasn’t shouting about it. “The Giambattista’s a big ship, Alex. You’re just spoiled because you haven’t had to drive a cow like that in years.”

“Shit,” Alex said. “I could have spun the Canterbury around in half the time this is taking.”

Naomi’s sigh was as close as she was going to get to agreeing with them. “Well, you were good at your job.”

On the screen, the Giambattista slid slowly sideways toward the ring gate. The damage from the attack ships’ first run had done something to unbalance the maneuvering thrusters, so a lot of the piloting involved rotating the ship and then waiting until the working thrusters spun into the right position to fire. The plumes of the returning attack ships were already visible. It wouldn’t be long before the torpedo barrage would kick in again, unless the Free Navy was going for a wait-till-you-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes approach. The enemy had split, curving back toward them in an almost hundred-degree spread. It wasn’t quite as bad as it could have been. If they’d taken the time to bring their attacks from opposite directions, defending the Giambattista with the Roci would have been almost impossible. But it would also have taken enough time to play the vectors and get in position that the Giambattista would have cleared the ring gate before they arrived. It was like they were all being forced to find a min/max point in a complex curve of inertia, acceleration, and a lot of dead people.

The Giambattista’s main drive fired, the plume dwarfing the ship, and Alex crowed in celebration.

“About time,” Naomi said. “I’m matching course. We’ll be through in twenty minutes.”

Holden opened a connection to Bobbie. The seconds stretched out long enough that he started to feel his gut tighten. The connection came through, dropped, then reestablished just as Naomi said, “One of them’s burning to pass through the gate with us.” He’d get right back to that.

“We’re looking at twenty minutes to get through the gate. Where do you stand?”

The weird interference of the gates made her reply thick and creepy. She was breathing hard, and until there were words with it, he was picturing her gut-shot and on the float. Or drifting down onto the surface of the alien station. He was reaching to switch over to Amos when she spoke.

“Amos’s holding position against the enemy,” she said. “I’m almost back to them. Suit ran out of propellant mass, so I’m hoofing it with the mag boots.”

“You’re running back to the fight?”

“Well, call it a fast shuffle,” Bobbie said between breaths, “but it’s fine. They put in. A big metal road. Goes right to ’em.”

“Okay. We’ll get some backup to you as soon as we can. Just don’t get killed before we get there.”

“No promises, sir,” Bobbie said, and he would have sworn from her voice she was smiling when she said it. A blast of static, and the connection dropped.

“Okay,” Holden said. “What have we got?”

“They’re both shooting at us,” Naomi said.