At zero, the second strike came. Filip didn’t see the rock hit. As with the tungsten slugs, it was going much too fast for mere human sight, but he saw the dust cloud jump like someone had surprised it, and then the vast shock wave, blooming out so powerfully that even in the barely-extant atmosphere it was visible.
“Brace,” Filip said, though there was no need. Everyone on the scaffold was already braced. In a thicker atmosphere, it would have been death for all of them. Here, it was little worse than a bad storm. Aaman grunted.
“Problem?” Filip asked.
“Pinché rock holed my foot,” Aaman said. “Hurts.”
Josie answered. “Gratia sa didn’t get your cock, coyo.”
“Not complaining,” Aaman said. “No complaints.”
The scaffold rockets exhausted themselves; the acceleration gravity dropped away. Below them, death had come to the shipyards. There were no lights now. Not even fires burning. Filip turned his gaze to the bright smear of stars, the galactic disk shining on them all. One of those lights wasn’t a star, but the exhaust plume of the
He didn’t mean to speak. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was only a sigh that passed his lips. Miral chuckled.
“No shit, Filipito,” the older man said. And then, a moment later, “Feliz cumpleaños, sabez?”
Filip Inaros lifted his hands in thanks. It was his fifteenth birthday.
Chapter One: Holden
A year after the Callisto attacks, almost three years after he and his crew had headed out for Ilus, and about six days after they’d gotten back, James Holden floated next to his ship and watched a demolition mech cut her apart. Eight taut cables anchored the
The mech finished cutting and pulled off a large section of the outer hull. Beneath lay the skeleton of the ship, sturdy ribs surrounded by a tangled confusion of cabling and conduit, and under that, the second skin of the inner hull.
“Yeah,” Fred Johnson said, floating next to him, “you kind of fucked her up.”
Fred’s words, flattened and distorted by the comm system of their vacuum suits, were still a punch to the gut. That Fred, the nominal leader of the Outer Planets Alliance and one of the three most powerful people in the solar system, was taking a personal interest in his ship’s condition should have been reassuring. Instead, Holden felt like he had a father checking over his homework to make sure he hadn’t screwed anything up too badly.
“Interior mount’s bent,” a third voice said over the comm. A sour-faced man named Sakai, the new chief engineer at Tycho after the death of Samantha Rosenberg at what everyone was now calling the Slow Zone Incident. Sakai was monitoring the repairs from his office nearby through the mech’s suite of cameras and x-ray scanners.
“How did you do that?” Fred pointed at the rail-gun housing along the ship’s keel. The barrel of the gun ran nearly the entire length of the ship, and the support struts that attached it to the frame were visibly buckling in places.
“So,” Holden said, “have I ever told you the one about the time we used the
“Yeah, that’s a good one,” Sakai said without humor. “Some of those struts might be fixable, but I’m betting we’re going to find enough micro-fracturing in the alloy that replacing them all is the better bet.”
Fred whistled. “That won’t be cheap.”
The OPA leader was the
“Lots of badly patched holes in the outer hull,” Sakai continued. “Inner looks okay from here, but we’ll go over it with a fine-toothed comb and make sure it’s sealed.”
Holden started to point out that the trip back from Ilus would have involved a lot more asphyxiation and death if the inner hull hadn’t been airtight, but stopped himself. There was no reason to antagonize the man who was now responsible for keeping his ship flying. Holden thought of Sam’s impish smile and habit of tempering her criticism with silliness, and felt something clench behind his breastbone. It had been years, but the grief could still sneak up on him.
“Thank you,” he said instead.