When Fred shouted, his voice was strangely high and very far away. The gunfire had left them both almost deaf. “You’re a shitty bodyguard, Holden. Do you know that?”
“No formal training,” Holden shouted back. The words felt louder in his throat than they sounded in his ears. He became aware of another voice shouting, but not from here. From the desk console. Drummer. He stooped over Fred, ignoring her. Blood covered the man’s side, but Holden couldn’t see where the wound was.
“Are you okay?” Holden shouted.
“Just ducky,” Fred growled, hauling himself up. He winced, clenched his teeth, and took his seat. On the monitor, Drummer blanched.
“You’ll have to speak up,” Fred said. “Things got a little loud here. Holden! Secure the goddamn door.”
“Doors and corners,” Holden said, stepping over the bodies. “Always doors and corners.”
Outside, the security office was empty. A light was flashing on the wall. Emergency signal of some kind. Now that he knew to listen for it, he could hear the alarm. Evacuation warning. Someone was evacuating the station ring. That couldn’t be good. He wondered if the good guys had sounded the alert, or if it was just part of the plan. A distraction while something even worse happened. He was having a hard time catching his breath. He had to keep checking to make sure he hadn’t been shot.
He looked at the gun in his fist. I think I just killed someone, he thought. And someone dropped a rock on Earth. And then they tried to kill Fred. It was bad. It was all just bad.
He didn’t notice Fred coming up behind him until he took Holden’s elbow, leaning against him for support and pushing him forward at the same time.
“Look alive, sailor,” Fred said. “We’ve got to go. They’ve fired a torpedo at us, and some ratfucker sabotaged my defense grid.” Fred was cursing more than usual. The stress of combat waking up the long-dormant marine inside of him.
“They’re shooting the ring?” Holden said.
“Yes. And in particular, they’re shooting at my office. I’m starting to get the feeling they don’t like me.”
Together, they struggled forward. In the wide corridor, people were scampering to hardened shelters and evacuation stations.
An older man with close-shaved hair and a mouth set in a permanent grimace saw Fred and the blood. Without a word, he took Fred’s far arm across his shoulder.
“Are we heading to medical bay or evac?” Grimace asked.
“Neither one,” Fred said. “The bad guys are trying to take engineering. My men got jumped. They’re pinned down, and there are two enemy torpedoes on their way to disable the engines. We’ve got to relieve our people, and get the grid back up. See if we can’t start firing back.”
“Are you joking?” Holden said. “You’ve been shot. You’re bleeding.”
“I’m aware of that,” Fred said. “There’s a security transfer up here to the left. We can take it. Get to the construction sphere. What’s your name, chief?”
Grimace looked at Holden, asking by his expression who Fred was talking to. Holden shook his head. Fred knew his name already. “Electrician First Class Garret Ming, sir. Been working for you about ten years, one way and another.”
“Sorry I haven’t met you before,” Fred said. “You know how to use a gun?”
“I’m a quick study, sir.”
Fred’s face was gray. Holden didn’t know if it was blood loss or shock or the first symptoms of a deeper despair. “That’s good.”
Tycho Station was built like a ball half a kilometer across. The construction sphere was big enough to accommodate almost any ship smaller than a battleship in its interior space. At rest, the two rings at its equator gave spin gravity to a city’s worth of the Belt’s best engineers and technicians. The great drives at the sphere’s base could move the station anywhere in the system. Or out of it, now. Tycho had overseen the spinning up of Ceres and Pallas. It was the beating heart of the Belt and its loudest boast. The Nauvoo, the ship that would have taken humans to the stars, had been too large to fit inside the construction sphere, but it had been built in space next to the massive station. There was no better place for the construction of grand dreams than Tycho. Along with the terraforming of Mars and the farms of Ganymede, it was a living testament to humanity’s ambition and skill.
Holden would never have imagined it could feel fragile.
The transfer from ring to construction dome was like taking a particularly awkward lift. They began at the full one-third g of the station, lurched, and their weight began to leach away. When doors opened again, they were in free fall. The blood that had started dripping from Fred’s arm was a fluid coating now, the liquid held to his body by surface tension as it gradually thickened into a kind of jelly. Garret was covered with it. Holden was too. He kept expecting Fred to pass out, but the old man didn’t lose focus or determination.
Visible from the long translucent tube of the access corridor, the construction sphere looked like a network of purified functionality. Other corridors curved between the ship berths, the walls tiled with a subtly repeating pattern of access panels, power transfers, storage and equipment lockers, and mech parking plates. The steel and ceramic bones of the station showed everywhere, and the light was as bright and harsh as sunlight in vacuum. The air in the access corridor was sweet with the scent of carbon lubricant and electrical discharge. Together, the three of them pulled themselves headfirst toward station south, the engineering decks, and the massive fusion reactors. Holden’s body couldn’t decide if he was falling down a long, bent well or swimming along an underground river of air.
“Drummer!” Fred snapped. “Report.”
The audio feed from his hand terminal was confused for a moment, then the woman’s voice came, her syllables clipped, calm, and measured in a way that sounded like the professional version of raw panic.
“Understood. Main engineering has been shut down by the hostiles. They are holding auxiliary engineering with a force of approximately twenty well-armed enemy, sir. We’re in a mutual holding action.”
“Can you disengage?”
“Not safely, sir. They can’t move, but neither can we.”
“Do we know —”
Something loud happened on the other end of the terminal, and a second later, a bone-deep ringing shuddered through the corridor. Garret swore under his breath.
“The first torpedo has made impact, sir,” Drummer said.
“The ring?”
“No, sir. The drive cone. The torpedo targeting the ring hit a few minutes ago, but failed to detonate.”
“Small favors,” Fred said. “Do we know the armament of the insurgents?”
“Small automatic weapons. Some grenades.”
“Can you shut down their air?”
“There’s a manual cutoff, but I haven’t had the spare manpower yet.”
“I’ve got an electrician first class with me,” Fred said. “Tell me where to take him.”
“Understood. We’re looking at an access on service deck four. Environment controls Delta-Foxtrot-Whiskey-slash-six-one-four-eight.”
“They had vacuum suits,” Holden said. “The ones in your office. They had emergency suits. Turning off the air may not matter.”
Drummer answered from Fred’s hand terminal. “We’ll keep them in place until their bottles run out if that’s what we need to do.”
“Good,” Fred said. “We’re on our way.”
“Don’t stop for beer, sir,” Drummer said, and the background hiss of the connection dropped. Fred made a small, satisfied grunt and pushed himself farther down the hall.
“It’s not going to work,” Holden said. “They’ll figure out what we’re doing and cut through a bulkhead or something.”
“You know the difference between a code and a cipher, Holden?”
“What?”
“A code and a cipher. Cipher, you encrypt text so that no one can tell what the words in the message are. A code, you say the words right out in the o
pen, but you change what they mean. Anyone with a smart computer and a lot of time can break a cipher. No one can break a code.”
Holden launched himself across a wide intersection where three passageways came together. For a moment, the station extended around him on all three axes. Fred and Garret floated close behind him but pushed off faster, so that they reached the far side before him. Fred turned to his left and gestured for them to follow.
“Service deck four’s the other way, sir,” Garret said.
“But the four people on the ambush team are this way,” Fred replied. His words were getting slushy. “Level six, section fourteen, berth eight. Once we’re in position, I’ll try to pull the bad guys out, and we’ll take them in the flank.”
Holden thought for a moment. “You had a whole system set up in case this happened. But what if Drummer had been one of them?”
“I had other systems set up with Oliver, Chu, and Stavros,” Fred said. “Secure, open communications with whoever I had left.”
“Tricky,” Holden said.
“I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while.”
The ambush team was where Fred said it would be: three male Belters and a woman with the thick build of Earth, all in light armor with riot guns and suppression grenades. Fred gave Garret a short-barreled shotgun and a position at the rear where he could be both useful and safe. One tried to tend to Fred’s gunshot wound, but he waved the man away.
Near the bottom of the station, the curve of the corridors was tighter, the horizon close. They were less than ten meters from the doors to auxiliary engineering, and the bent wall offered them cover. When the time came, they’d have to get even closer.
Holden’s hand terminal vibrated in his pocket. Around a red frame, the newsfeed announced a third rock had struck Earth. Holden thumbed it off. If he let himself think about what was happening around the rest of the solar system now, he couldn’t think about what was about to happen in this corridor. Still, his throat felt thick and his hands had a shudder he couldn’t entirely control. His family was on Earth. Amos was on Earth. And Alex was in a tiny ship someplace not too far from the Martian prime minister’s convoy. And Naomi was… somewhere. That he didn’t know where made it worse.
“Be okay,” he murmured. “Just be okay.”
“What?” Fred said.
“Nothing. I’m ready.”
Fred opened a connection. “Drummer. Killing the air is a no-go. We’re going to have to pull in heavy artillery. I have a squad of combat marines I scraped out of a bar. They’re coming to relieve you now.”
“Understood,” Drummer said. Holden thought there was a smile in her voice. “Make it fast, though. We’ve got two down. I’m not sure we can hold much longer.”
“Ten minutes,” Fred said, raising his bloodied left hand in the Belter idiom for Take position. The ambush team steadied their weapons. Holden did too. It took the people holed up in auxiliary engineering almost five minutes to decide they should make a break for it.
The door popped open, and the first half dozen or so of the enemy streamed out of engineering. They were dressed like normal people: security uniforms, technicians’ jumpsuits, the sort of casual clothing Holden would have seen in a bar or in the corridors. They were just people, citizens of Tycho. Of the Belt. They took positions that gave them cover from Drummer’s suppressing fire, unaware at first of the second team. At Fred’s signal, the six of them opened up, though Holden was aware that he wasn’t trying very hard to hit anyone. A second wave tried to get out of engineering as the first one tried to retreat back into it. Drummer’s force moved forward with a barrage of gel rounds and suppression grenades that burst into foam and hardened to stone almost instantly.
In half a minute, the fight was over. Fifteen minutes later, the defense grid was back up, and the attacking torpedo boat was burning hard for someplace in among the Trojan asteroids. It was almost an hour before the real cost became clear.
With the station in relative safety, Fred had allowed himself to be taken to the medical bay. The gentle gravity of the ring was still enough to show how weak he’d become. The expert system inserted four needles, inflating him with artificial blood, and the color began to come back to his face. Holden, sitting at the bedside, watched the readouts without really seeing them. He wanted to check the newsfeeds about Earth, and he also didn’t. The longer he could put it off, the longer he didn’t have to think about it. When Drummer came in with the damage report, it was almost a relief. Another distraction.
“The torpedoes cracked the drive cone,” she said.
“How badly?” Fred asked.
“Do you want to fly this thing on a patched-up cone? Badly enough that we’re going to manufacture a new one.”
“Fair enough,” Fred said.
“At least they didn’t blow the ring,” Holden said. “If that one hadn’t been a dud —”
Drummer’s face went still. “About that. We were mistaken. The enemy fired a weapon with the hull and drive of a torpedo, but they rigged it with a salvage mech on the end. Ran it into your office, sliced through the exterior decking, and pulled half the wall away with them.”
Fred blinked.
“That was why they needed EVA suits,” Holden said. “I was wondering. But it seems like a pretty weird way to get to you. Peeling your office open like a sardine can.”
“They weren’t after me,” Fred said, then paused and said something obscene.
“What?” Holden said. “What is it?”
Drummer answered. Her voice had the same professional calm she’d used in the firefight. “The enemy took the wall that had Colonel Johnson’s safe. It won’t be easy getting it open, but with enough time and resources, we have to assume they will.”
“But they already compromised your command structure, right? Any sensitive information they get, they probably already had?”
Holden knew even before Fred said it, but he wanted to give the universe a chance to prove him wrong. Make it so that the worst possible thing hadn’t happened.
“They got the sample,” Fred said, making it a reality. “Whoever did this? They now have the protomolecule.”
Chapter Twenty-four: Amos
“Wouldn’t the density figure in?” Clarissa asked. Whatever crap they’d been feeding into her bloodstream, it had run out. She was starting to look a little better. He could still see the veins under her parchment-thin skin, but she was getting some color back in her cheeks.
“Sure, but that’s all energy you’d put in getting the rocks up to speed in the first place. You drop a slug of tungsten out of a ship or a fucking feather pillow, you’ve still got to get the ship going whatever speed you’re aiming for. All that price got paid at the front, energetically speaking.”
“But a pillow would have burned up before it hit ground.”
“Okay, now that’s a fair point.”
On the screen, the newsfeed showed the strikes again and again, looting footage from as many different sources as they could find – terminals, security cameras, high-orbit mapping satellites. The bolt of ionized air glowed like the trail of a rail gun, and North Africa bloomed a massive rose of fire, again and again. Another beam-like trail in the air, and the Atlantic Ocean went from a vast expanse of slate-blue water to an expanding circle of eerie green and then spewed white and black to the sky. It was like the reporters thought if they all just kept looking at it, it would start making sense.
Millions of people were dead, and millions more would be in the next few hours as the tsunamis and flooding hit. Billions would go in the next few weeks and months. The Earth had become a different planet since he’d gone underground. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could make sense of by staring at it, but he couldn’t look away either. All he could do was talk to Peaches about trivia and wait to see what came next.
The man doing the voice-over had a gentle European accent and a sense of calm that probably meant he’d sucked down a lot of pills. Or it might have been tweake
d and enhanced by the sound techs. “The weapons remained undetected by radar until they entered the Terran atmosphere, less than a second before impact.”
The image shifted to an apocalyptic satellite image: five frames in a loop showing the Atlantic impact and the raw shock wave rolling out from it across the ocean. The scale was massive.
“You see,” Amos said, pointing a thumb at the screen, “that’s how you know they were using radar-absorbing coating on the rocks. Burned off and stopped working after they hit atmo, right? Anyway, you figure it went from the ionosphere to sea level in about half a second, so that’s about two hundred klicks per. I’m making this up here, but the kind of bang they’re talking about, you could do it with a block of tungsten carbide maybe three and a half, four meters to a side. That ain’t big.”
“You can figure all that in your head?”
Amos shrugged. “My job has been playing with magnetically contained fusion reactions for a lot of years now. It’s the same kind of math, more or less. You get a feel for it.”
“I can see that,” she said. And then, “You think we’re going to die?”
“Yup.”
“Of this?”
“Maybe.”
On the screen, the newsfeed replayed a five-second clip from a sailing boat. The flash of perfectly straight lightning, the weird deforming lens of the pressure wave bending the air and light, and the image shattered. Whoever had been in the ship, they’d died before they knew what they were looking at. Probably the most common last words that day were going to be Huh, that’s weird. That or Oh shit. Amos was aware in a distant way that his gut hurt, like he’d eaten a little too much food. Probably fear or shock or something. Clarissa made a small sound in the back of her throat. Amos looked over at her.