“Gloria is a good warrior, but she gets chatty when she’s nervous.”
“We’re seeing fire,” one of the analysts said. His voice was as calm and businesslike as a surgeon announcing a bleeder.
The display shifted. The EMC ships and Independence were still there, but backgrounded as the focus changed to swarms of missiles pouring out toward the Tempest. Each one burned hard enough that a human body would have been pulped by the g forces, and they barely seemed to move. The distances they traveled were vast. Even at their speed, three million klicks was a long time. Verbal threats that took seconds at lightspeed followed by punches that would take minutes or hours. Even without the warheads, the kinetic force of the torpedoes would be massive. If they hit. The swarm crept forward, pixel by imperceptible pixel. Drummer waved a steward over and ordered a bulb of ice water and a bowl of hummus with bread. She had to try to eat.
The hummus was half gone and the tea tepid before the first of the missiles started winking out of existence.
“What are we seeing, please?” Hu said.
“It appears to be long-range PDCs,” one of the analysts said. “We’re waiting for the bounce feed so we can get higher resolution.”
Another twenty minutes, and a much sharper image of the Tempest appeared with the timestamp to show it was just after the fleet’s launch. All along the sides of the ship, tiny dark eruptions like the spots on a shark.
“The PDCs’ housings appear to be covered by the hull. Telemetry from the Michael Souther is that the remaining missiles were redirected toward those structures.” Were. An hour and twenty minutes ago.
“They’re not using their magnet beam,” Hu said. “That’s good. If it was cheap for them to fire it, they could use it to knock down missiles. If it’s expensive to use, we may be able to exhaust it.”
Drummer thought that sounded like wishful thinking, but she didn’t say so. She tried to take comfort in Hu’s optimism. The data feeds shifted, more information coming in. The images of the Tempest sharpened. The PDCs came into clearer focus, but it didn’t help Drummer understand them. The openings in the side of the ship looked like little mouths opening and closing. Like the whole side of the ship was singing. There was no mechanism she could see. She shuddered. The cloud of torpedoes was thinning. None of them would reach the body of the enemy ship.
A bloom of glowing gas erupted from the Tempest’s side, flinched, and then dissipated.
“Rail guns,” an analyst said.
The chatter of voices went into a higher gear. Tracking the rail-gun round, examining the spectrum of the plasma that had accompanied it, identifying the particular torpedo that it turned to dust.
“Are their PDCs running low already?” Hu said, to herself as much as anyone.
“It was a warning,” Avasarala answered. “They’re showing us that they have teeth and giving us the chance to back away.”
“Maybe we should,” Drummer said.
No one replied. The markers for the EMC ships shifted like a school of fish moving together, and Independence with them. Their own volley of rail guns, the slugs raining down from all directions. The Tempest had no way to stop them. All it could do was dodge. Drummer counted the minutes, watching the Tempest pull back and corkscrew out of the paths of danger. Mostly.
“I’m seeing contact.”
“Two impacts on the starboard. Waiting for confirmation from Pallas and Luna, but I think we did them some damage.”
The knot in Drummer’s gut eased a little. If they could hurt it, they could kill it. It was just a question of scale and tactics.
“The hull appears to be self-repairing.”
“Matches the Medina battle,” Hu said.
“Show me,” Drummer barked, and the image on her screen shifted again. It was a fresh image, still fuzzy. The bone-pale skin of the Tempest rippled as a round struck it, and then again with a second strike. Waves passed through the ship like the surface of water. Nasty black-and-red welts glowed where the rail-gun rounds had hit, but the plating—or whatever it was—folded over the wound, closing it, then folded again, and the damage was gone as if it had never been there.
Another volley of rail-gun fire from the EMC ships, but as the Tempest flinched back again and spun away again, it erupted in a cloud of plasma, and then emerged from it. Drummer didn’t understand until Hu spoke.
“Holy shit. How many rail guns does that bastard have?”
Now the Tempest shifted and swirled, leaving a trail of glowing gas behind it like an afterimage. It was beautiful in its way, a warrior’s dance—power and intention and technique that were almost balletic. And then the EMC ships began to die.
“The Ontario is hit. Reporting reactor breach and dumping core. We are seeing impacts on the Severin, the Talwar, and the Odachi, but no system confirmation yet. Rounds arrived thirty seconds earlier than the model anticipated.”
“Fuckers,” Avasarala said. “That’s why they took out the missile. Throw a changeup and let us think it was their fastball.”
“Whatever they’re using for predictive algorithms, it’s really good,” Hu said, awe in her voice. “That’s almost a third of our attack group down. And if … Oh.”
For a moment, Drummer didn’t understand what she was seeing. Independence, the second void city to launch, the home to hundreds of thousands, seemed to bloom like a flower. Long petals of carbon lace and titanium peeled back, turning as they did. Something terrible and bright happened in the center of the city, but Drummer couldn’t guess what it was. What s