“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.