“Do what?”
The woman’s impatient smile didn’t reach her eyes. “You can’t put data that might help the enemy into an open partition. I know it’s proprietary, but someone leaked it, and we have an active investigation now into who that might have been.”
“But— No, you don’t understand.”
“Dr. Meng,” she snapped. “I know you don’t like us coming in and telling you how to run your lab, but these are delicate times. I’m asking you to take a long, careful look at your lab’s security hygiene so that we don’t have a less pleasant conversation next time. You understand that?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“All right, then,” the woman said with the air of having won an argument. “You can go now.”
Prax didn’t know what to do. He sat quietly for a moment, waiting for clarification he didn’t know how to ask for. The woman checked her hand terminal, looked back at him, annoyance in her expression.
“Dr. Meng? We’re done for now. If we have any further questions, we’ll find you.”
“I should leave?”
“Yes,” she said.
And so he did. Walking through the halls and up to the public carts felt like moving through a dream. His stomach felt empty. He wasn’t hungry, there was just a massive bubble in his gut where something—pain, despair, hope, fear—was supposed to be. He rented a cart, took it to the tube station. The whole incident had been so brief, his shift wasn’t even done. It would be, though, by the time he got back to the lab. So he went home instead.
The newsfeeds on the tube were alive with whatever military action had been on the security woman’s hand terminal. He tried to make sense of it all, but the words seemed to lose their meaning somewhere between the screen and his senses. He caught himself staring emptily at a young man sitting across from him and had to make a conscious effort to look away. All he could think was the dark-skinned woman saying You can go now.
Djuna was home when he got there, sitting on the couch with her head in her hands, her eyes bloodshot and her cheeks blotchy from crying. When he stopped in the entryway from the kitchen and lifted his hand in greeting, she stared at him for a moment, stunned, and then leaped up, ran to him, and wrapped him in her arms. After a long moment, he hugged her back, and they stood in their rooms, the way he never thought they would again.
“Leslie sent me a message,” Djuna said, her voice still thick with tears. “She said they came for you at the office. That the security people took you away. I was trying to find a lawyer who would talk to me. I sent the girls to Dorian’s. I didn’t know what to tell them.”
“All right,” Prax said. “It’s all right.”
Djuna leaned back, searching his eyes like there was something written in them. “What happened?”
“I confessed,” Prax said. “I told them … I told them everything. And then they let me go.”
“They did what?”
“They said I shouldn’t do it again, and that I should leave,” he said. “It wasn’t at all the reaction I expected.”
Chapter Forty-One: Pa
I’ve got fast-movers,” Evans said. “Five, wait … Seven.”
“Coming from?” Michio asked, though she was already certain of the answer. The assaults throughout the Belt had already pulled the Free Navy’s fighters to other conflicts, thinning the defenses at Pallas. She had to give Holden his due. He hadn’t tried to use her and her ships as bullet sponges.
“Pallas Station,” Evans confirmed. “No one’s shooting out in the black.”
“PDCs have them,” Laura said. “Permission to fire?”
“You have permission,” Michio said. “Oksana, evasive maneuvers at will. Let’s show these fuckers we can dance.”
“Yes, Captain,” Oksana said between teeth bared in concentration and joy. A moment later, the Connaught lurched, shifted. Over the system, Josep howled a wordless battle cry.
The Four Horsemen, Foyle called them. The Connaught, the Serrio Mal, the Panshin, and the Solano—the most experienced of Pa’s breakaway fleet. They fell toward Pallas Station from four different directions, spreading the local defenses as thin as they could. If there had been time, maybe Marco would have pulled resources off Pallas too, sabotaged the manufacturing infrastructure, and left anyone who couldn’t escape on their own for Pa to rescue or let starve under her name.
But that assumed there was someplace for the Free Navy to run to.
“Two down,” Laura announced. “Five to go.”
“Sooner’s better than later,” Michio said.
Metal and ceramic creaking and singing from the strain, the Connaught turned and accelerated, then cut power and went on the float, whipping around to give the PDCs a wider field of fire. Laura’s guns buzzed, vibrating the ship and killing three more of the station’s torpedoes even as the Connaught sped in toward them flank-first. The surface of the asteroid glittered ahead of them, her target and her enemy and the home to tens of thousands of the people she’d thrown her safety and career aside to help and protect.
“Keep the rounds from hitting the station if you can.”
“Do my best, Captain,” Laura said, but her subtext was clear—if it gets down to them or us, it’s them. Michio couldn’t disagree.
“Panshin’s taking fire,” Evans said. “Serrio Mal too.”
“Solano?” Michio asked.
The Solano had taken the most damage in the raids and scuffles since she’d broken ranks with Marco. Enough that it was chosen to be the sacrifice ship, emptied of her crew and all useful material. It was the hinge point of her battle plan. Three of her ships to distract and disarm Pallas, to the point that, even if they shot it full of holes, they couldn’t scatter the Solano into a debris field thin enough to keep the docks from crippling damage.
“Still far enough back it’s not being targeted,” Oksana said.
“Four more down,” Laura said. “That last one’s being a booger … Got it!”
“Captain,” Oksana said. “We’re going to need to return to braking burn if we don’t want to get very close and personal with the station.”
“Do it,” Michio said. “I’m taking comms.”
“Understood,” Evans said. “I’ve got another wave of torpedoes coming in. And we are nearing effective PDC range.”
Michio set for broadcast. So close to the station, there’d be no light delay. Everyone listening would hear her almost as she spoke. After so long at high-lag distances, it felt odd. She considered herself in the camera as Oksana spun the ship and punched the deceleration. She started the broadcast.
“This is Captain Michio Pa of the Connaught to all citizens of Pallas Station. Be advised, we are here to remove the false governance of the Free Navy and return control of the station to its citizens. Evacuate the docks immediately. I repeat, evacuate the dock levels immediately for your own safety. We call on the Free Navy administration for immediate and unconditional surrender. If we do not have that confirmed in the next fifteen minutes, it will be too late to save the docks and shipyard. For your own safety, evacuate now.”
The comms display threw up an error alert. Her signal was being jammed. She boosted it as much as the Connaught’s transmitter allowed and set it to loop. She hadn’t had much hope of a peaceful ending, but she’d tried.
The ship lurched again and burned hard, pressing her back into her couch. Laura shouted something obscene, but the ship didn’t detonate. They’d dodged whatever it was.
“Panshin took a hit,” Evans reported. “PDC. They look all right. The Solano’s still not top of the Pallas threat index.” He paused, rechecked his monitor. “It’s working.”
“Thank you,” Michio said. “Let’s start taking out their PDCs.”
“Already on it,” Laura said. “Just as long as I can keep these torpedoes from flying up our …” She trailed off, lost in concentration. Michio didn’t interrupt.
This wasn’t what she wanted. Wasn’t what she’d ever wanted. She’d begun
this whole fallen, fucked-up process because the dream of a Belt for Belters—a life that didn’t depend on being used and exploited by the larger powers in the system—had meant something. And now here she was, fighting alongside Earth and Mars. Against Belters.
Three years, Sanjrani gave them. Three and a half. And then starvation. And she was about to break the docks at a major port so that James Holden could open the way to the colony worlds again and leave them all behind. This was what she’d agreed to do. It was her part in stopping Marco and trying to save the Belt, even if it was the Belt three years from now.
Every step along the way had made sense, except that they ended up here. Everyone she’d allied with her whole life had started by seeming to be good, competent, and loyal. They’d all disappointed. And now, she was going to do the same. She’d changed sides so many times, she didn’t know who she was anymore.
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.
“Esá bent, broken, fucked, flustered, and far from home,” Ezio said, laughing. “Got a couple in the med bay and one in the morgue, but we done the thing, que sí? Pulled a whole station’s teeth and half their eyes too, account son los champions.”
“I think we are,” Michio said. “I’m going to need you to stand guard on this. Pull back far enough that you’re out of range of anything Pallas puts together. Take control of the Solano.”
“Babysit?” Rodriguez said.
“Got your hull pulled back like a condom wrapper, Ezio. I’m not putting you in at Titan.”
God bless the man, he looked disappointed. “Bist bien,” he said. “We’ll hold the line. But you and Foyle take the torpedoes we’ve still got, yeah? Stock up. Anything we do, we can manage con PDCs and my winning smile.”
“Won’t say no to that,” Michio said.
“Que tu trigger?” he asked. “When do I light it up and slag the fuckers?”
“When you know it’s Free Navy you’re burning down. Not if just people. Lose the ship before you hurt civilians. Killing people because they got in the way is inner-planets bullshit. It’s Free Navy bullshit. We’re better than that.”
“Damn right we are,” Rodriguez said and signed off. When he saluted, he had blood on his fingers.
She pointed a tightbeam connection request at one of the less damaged comm arrays, unsure if it would do any good. Even if the equipment was limping along well enough to function, there was no reason for the connection to be accepted. Only it was.
A familiar dark, pebbled face appeared on her monitor. From what she could see behind him, he was in a well-appointed office, brightly lit and probably somewhere deep enough in the station that she couldn’t have reached him without nukes or a reactor set to critical and crashed into the station.
“Captain Pa,” he said. “You seem to be moving from one shitty decision to another.”
“Rosenfeld,” she said.
“When you broke with Inaros, I understood it. Respected it, even. I was disappointed when you turned to Fred Johnson. But this? Playing marionette to Chrisjen Avasarala and Emily Richards. And Holden?” He shook his head. “Something happened to you, Michio. You’ve changed.”
“Context changed,” she said. “I’m still the same. And here’s what happens next. I have a live, warmed-up Epstein drive pointed at the docks. If I see any activity there? I slag them. If I see any shuttles or boats taking off from the surface, I’ll shoot them down and slag the docks. If I see anything that looks like an
attempt to sabotage the Solano, I’ll slag the docks. If any Free Navy ship comes within a hundred thousand klicks of Pallas, I’ll slag the docks. You will find yourself governor of an old, broken station that can’t move supplies in or out.”
“Duly noted,” Rosenfeld said dryly.
There didn’t seem anything more to say, but she didn’t kill the connection. Not yet. And then, “Use this.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re a political animal. Use this opportunity. I’m giving you an excuse to drop out of the fighting. You can tell Marco that I pinned you down. You won’t even be lying. Even if he beats us all, you know he can’t govern the system. And your plan?”
“My plan? What plan?”
“The one where you’re the man behind the throne. The real power while Marco’s the public face and figurehead. That won’t work either. He can’t be controlled. He can barely be predicted. I’m not blaming you. I made the same mistake. I saw what I wanted to see in him. But I was wrong, and you are too.” Rosenfeld’s face was unreadable and still. Michio nodded. “Do you know the magic word?”
“No,” he said, his voice rich with disdain. “What’s the magic word?”
“Oops. You should say oops, Rosenfeld. Own it that you made a mistake. That ship I have with its ass pointed at you? It’s your chance to do something about the fact that you picked the wrong side.”
“You want me to thank you for that?”
“I want you to make sure all the people in there get food and water, and I want you to keep them safe until this is over.”
“And when’s that going to be?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and dropped the connection.
For a long moment, she rested in her couch, held in place by the straps and the familiarity of the voices and sounds around her. Her jaw ached where she’d been clenching it. She had a bruise across her collarbone, and she couldn’t remember which maneuver might have caused it. She closed her eyes, letting it all wash over her. Laura talking through the headset with Bertold about how many PDC rounds they had left. Oksana and Evans laughing over nothing, releasing tension, quietly celebrating that—on some level, by some measure—they’d won. The smell of the portable welding rig burning off the emergency sealant and closing the punctures in the hull. Her home. Her people. She filled her lungs with them all.