Part 21 (1/2)

”They're not shooting either,” Alex said. ”As long as they think we're just some yahoo out joyriding, we'll be fine. Probably.”

Bobbie's couch hissed on its gimbals as she s.h.i.+fted her weight. She didn't believe it either. The moments stretched. Alex opened the channel again. ”Hey out there, unidentified s.h.i.+p. I'm going to cut thrust here until I hear from you. I'm just letting you know so I don't startle anyone. I'd really appreciate a ping back, just so we all know we're good here. No offense meant.”

He cut the drive; the grip of acceleration gravity loosened its hold on him. The gel of the couch launched him gently against his restraints. He could feel his heartbeat in his neck. It was going fast.

”They're deciding what to do about us,” Bobbie said.

”That's my guess too.”

”Taking them a while.”

The Razorback announced a visual match, but it wasn't with the data Holden had sent them. The s.h.i.+p with its sights on them wasn't any of the colony s.h.i.+ps that had gone missing out in the gates. With an eighty-nine percent certainty, it was a Martian naval corvette, floating dark. Behind him, Bobbie saw the same thing and drew the same conclusions.

”Well,” she said. ”f.u.c.k.”

Profile match completed, the Razorback returned to its scanning arc. Another pa.s.sive contact. If the corvette was the Pau Kant, it wasn't out here alone. And then two more. And then six. The Razorback picked the nearest one and cheerfully started matching its profile. By reflex, Alex went to activate his point defense cannons. Only, of course, he didn't have any.

”Maybe they'll talk,” Bobbie said. He could hear it in her voice that she didn't expect them to. He didn't either. Half a second later, the Razorback announced two fast-movers coming from the corvette.

He spun the pinnace away from the missiles and punched the drive. The couch slammed into his back like a blow. Behind him, Bobbie grunted. With a mental apology to her, he pushed them to ten g, and the pinnace leaped forward eagerly.

It wasn't going to be enough.

As light as the Razorback was, the missiles were an order of magnitude less ma.s.s to accelerate. And they didn't carry anything as fragile as a human body. They could pull a much heavier burn and close the gap to target in a matter of hours. He didn't have countermeasures to shoot them down, and there was nothing to hide behind. He didn't even have a load of cargo to drop out the back in hopes the missiles might blunder into it.

His vision started to narrow, darkening at the edges and dancing gold and fractured in the center. He felt the couch's needles slide into his thighs and neck, the juice like pouring ice water into his veins. His heart labored and he was fighting to breathe, but his vision was clear. And his mind. He had to think. His s.h.i.+p was fast, as s.h.i.+ps went, but nothing compared to a missile. There was no cover he could reach in time, and if the missiles were half as good as the s.h.i.+p that fired them, they'd be able to guide themselves right up his drive cone, no matter what he tried to huddle behind.

He could run away, draw the attackers into a line behind him, and then drop core. The vented fusion reaction would probably take out at least the first one. Maybe more. But then they'd be on the float, and at the mercy of a second volley.

Well. A bad plan was better than no plan at all. His finger twitched on the controls. The layout was unfamiliar and the fear that he was coding in the wrong information just because he wasn't on his own d.a.m.ned boat was like a stake in his heart.

Bobbie grunted. He wasn't strong enough to look back at her. He hoped it wasn't pain. High g wasn't a good thing for someone who'd had a bunch of holes pushed through her recently. He told himself it was just the needles feeding her the juice.

An alert popped onto his screen from Bobbie's console. PRIME MINISTER. GUARD s.h.i.+PS.

Between the drugs and the panic and the compromised blood flow in his brain, it took Alex a few seconds to understand what she meant. The Razorback didn't have point defense cannons or interceptor missiles, but the flotilla heading for Luna did. Alex pulled the data into the plotting system. There was no way they could reach the Martian s.h.i.+ps before the missiles caught up with them, but it was just possible barely to get inside the range of their antimissile defenses. If he turned course now. If the Martians figured out what was going on and launched almost immediately. And the burn was going to be at the outer limit of what he or Bobbie could handle.

Almost without thinking, he engaged the maneuvering thrusters and the crash couches clicked to match the new vector. The missiles seemed to leap closer, correcting for the new course and antic.i.p.ating where the pinnace would be. He sent an emergency signal, broadcast on all standard frequencies, and hoped whoever saw it on the flotilla was a quick thinker. The two spheres time-to-collision and Martian antimissile range didn't overlap, but there were only a few hundred klicks between them. Barely an eyeblink at their relative speeds. He s.h.i.+fted to medical control and switched Bobbie from juice to life support protocol.

Sorry, Bobbie, he thought. I'd warn you if I had time, but you're gonna need to take a little nap if we don't want you bleeding out. He watched her vital signs spike and then drop, her blood pressure and core temperature falling like a stone in the ocean. He pushed the s.h.i.+p to fifteen g.

His head hurt. He hoped he wasn't having a stroke, but it'd be fair if he did. Sustained fifteen g was a stupid, suicidal thing to do. He felt the air pressed out of his chest under the weight of his ribs, his skin. The sound of his gasping was like gagging. But the spheres touched now. Minutes stretched. Then fast-movers from the Martian flotilla. It had taken d.a.m.ned long enough, but the defenses were on the way. He tried to type in a message, warning the Martians that there were more s.h.i.+ps out there, a dark fleet. He couldn't keep hold of the thought long enough to send it. His consciousness kept blinking, like the universe stuttering.

The medical system flashed up a warning, and he thought it was Bobbie, her old wounds reopening after all. But it was tagged for him. Something in his gut had ripped free. He canceled the alert and went back to watching death get closer.

They weren't going to make it. The lead missile was too close. It was going to take out the Razorback before the rescuers could come. Hadn't he had an idea about that? Something...

He wasn't aware of changing course. His fingers just did it. The spheres didn't touch anymore, until he switched to collision to track the second missile. Then, maybe. Maybe.

He waited. The lead missile closed. Five thousand kilometers. Four thousand. He vented the core.

Two hundred kilometers - The crush of gravity vanished. The Razorback, still hurtling through s.p.a.ce, stopped accelerating. Behind him, the lead missile died in the nuclear furnace of the rapidly diffusing core. The second missile jittered and turned to avoid the expanding cloud of superhot gas, and four lights burned before him, streaking across his screens so quickly he only knew them by their afterimages.

A fraction of a second later the Martian antimissile defenses destroyed the pursuing torpedo, but he had already lost consciousness.

Chapter Twenty-one: Naomi.

”Bist bien, Knuckles?” Karal asked.

The thin, slapped-together galley was too big for so small a crew. Bad design, waste of s.p.a.ce. It wasn't worn; it was cheap. She looked at him from behind the veil of her hair and smiled. ”Fine, things being,” she said, making a joke. ”Como sa?”

Karal shrugged with his hands. His hair had gotten gray over the years. And the stubble of his beard. It had been as black as the s.p.a.ce between the stars once.

He looked at her eyes and she didn't flinch. ”Something to say, me.”

”No secrets between us now,” she replied, and he laughed. She smiled back. The prisoner flirting with the turnkey, hoping a kind thought in his head would help her later. Maybe it would.

The thing that frightened her most was how well she knew how to play it. From the moment she'd come back to consciousness, she talked when people talked to her, laughed when someone told a joke. She acted like her abduction was just one of those things that happens, like using someone's tools without asking first. She pretended to sleep. Ate as much as she could past the tightness in her gut. And they all treated her like she was the girl she'd been, like they could all ignore the years and the differences, fold her back in as though she'd never gone away. As if she'd never been anyone else. Hiding her fear and her outrage slipped back on so easily, it was as if she'd never stopped.

It made her wonder whether perhaps she hadn't.

”So I was one,” he said. ”Helped with Filipito. Took care.”

”Good.”

”No,” Karal said. ”Before that. Sometimes, he was with me.”

Naomi smiled. She'd been trying not to remember those desperate days after she'd told Marco she was leaving. The days after he'd taken Filip. To keep the boy safe, he'd said. Until she got her emotions under control, he'd said. A knot filled her throat, but she smiled past it.

”Those days. You had him?”

”Immer, no. But sometimes. Hijo moved, yeah? Night here, two nights there.”

Her baby pa.s.sed around among the people she knew. The manipulation of it was brilliant. Marco using his child as a marker of how much trust he placed in them and at the same time painting her as the crazed one. The dangerous one. Making sure the story in their community was about how solid he was and how close to cracked she'd come. She had the sudden powerful memory of Karal looking in from the kitchen while she broke down in his wife's arms. Souja, her name had been. What must her tears and profanity have looked like to him then?

”Kept it quiet,” Naomi said, ”and I wouldn't have known. So why say it here?”

Karal's hands shrugged again. ”New day. New start. Looking to sc.r.a.pe off some old rust.”

She tried to read from his face whether that was true, or if this was just another little cruelty in a form she couldn't call out without looking like the crazy one. If it had been back on the Roci, she would have known. But here, now, the balance between fear and anger and trying to control herself swamped little things like truth. It was the beauty of the way Marco had set her against herself. Tell her she was broken as a way to break her, and here they were a decade and a half past, and it still worked.

Then, for a moment, Amos was there, stronger in her memory than the surrounding s.h.i.+p. It don't matter what's inside, boss. They only care what you do. She didn't know if it was a memory or just her mind reaching for a place of certainty in an environment where nothing could be relied upon.

If Amos has become my personal touchstone for wisdom, I'm f.u.c.ked, she thought, and laughed. Karal ventured a smile.

”Thank you for telling it straight,” Naomi said. ”New start. Sc.r.a.pe off the rust.”