The suicide attack reached its peak. It reminded her of pictures she’d seen of cloudbursts over the deserts of Earth. Huge, angry clouds with numberless tentacles of gray falling from them. A torrent of water racing toward a parched landsca
pe, and evaporating again before a drop could darken the soil.
On the visual display, the bright, dancing veins on the Tempest were fading, and now that she knew to look, Drummer could see tiny openings along the sides of the ship opening and closing like pores. The lights of the missiles’ drive plumes were like blue fireflies.
“How can they do that?” she whispered past the tightness in her throat.
“I have Cameron Tur,” the communications tech said.
The camera made his face even longer than it seemed in person. The light shone in his eyes.
“Where the fuck are you?” Drummer snapped. “Are you seeing this?”
There was almost no lag before he answered. He was close, then. One of the escape ships. “I don’t understand. The number of missiles they’ve fired … that they’re firing. These can’t be normal devices.”
On the display, the last three suicide attackers blinked out. If the Tempest moved to avoid the debris fields, it wasn’t enough to register at this scale. It looked as though the enemy wasn’t even bothering to evade anymore.
“The first battle, we wanted to learn from them,” Tur said, talking fast and not looking directly at the camera. “I mean, we wanted to win. Of course we wanted to win, but we didn’t expect to. The data—how we lost—was as important as stopping them.”
“Tur?”
“Maybe they were learning from us too. Maybe they recalibrated something about the regrowth of the ship. Or the missiles.”
“They survived a direct nuclear strike,” Drummer said. “Are you telling me that’s something they can just do?”
“Apparently?” Tur said. He licked his lips anxiously. “We knew from the moment they stripped the rail guns off the ring station that they are capable of focusing and directing incredible sources of power. Things we’ve only ever seen on celestial levels. Collapsing stars.”
“Collapsing stars? We’re fighting a supernova in the shape of a ship? Why the hell didn’t you see this coming?” She was shouting. Her throat hurt with it.
Tur blinked and his jaw shifted forward. He would have looked like a man spoiling for a fight if it hadn’t been for the tears on his cheeks. She didn’t think those tears had anything to do with her raising her voice. “Ma’am, that ship stripped Pallas Station down to something less than atoms. It shut down consciousness throughout the system in a way that I don’t have the structural language to explain, and it seems pretty fucking unimpressed by the idea of locality. It’s affecting the nature of vacuum through the whole solar system. If you didn’t know we were punching above our weight here, I’m not sure what I could have said to clarify that.”
“There is a way to beat them,” Drummer said, “and we are running out of time. Find me how to win this, and do it now.”
She cut the connection before he had the chance to reply. Silence filled the control room. No one was looking straight at her, but she felt their attention like a weight. All the time she’d spent resisting the pressure to make the Transport Union into a police force—into a military—and here she was anyway.
“Mister Vaughn?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Find me whoever is in command of the EMC wing of the fleet. I need them now.” Whoever’s still alive, she thought, but didn’t say.
“Yes, ma’am.”
The weapons tech’s voice shook. “Should we—”
“Keep firing,” Drummer said.
Drummer felt a heat in her chest. A rage and a certainty. This was the moment that tested everything she’d meant to be. This was what it was to be a leader in a time of crisis. She felt the power of it, the raw will to succeed. To devastate and end the people who would destroy her and the systems she embodied. She rose to her feet, her hands behind her, and she knew that everyone in the control room who looked at her would see nothing beyond her superhuman resolve. Not even Vaughn.
And she knew it for the hollow mask that it was. How fragile.
“Guard of Passage is reporting a missile strike that got past their PDCs,” Vaughn said. “They’re requesting permission to withdraw.”
“We can’t run away,” Drummer said. “If we break now—”
People’s Home shuddered. A sound like the wail of a demon rattled up from the deck, bellied out from the bulkheads, rained from the ceiling. She waited for the wide, low hiss of escaping atmosphere. The fading of screams as the air became too thin to carry them. Instead, Klaxons blared.
She held her voice as steady as she could. “Report?”