The voice that answered was older and rough. “We have a shot at this pinché motherfucker, Rocinante. We’re taking it.”
“You don’t, though,” Naomi said.
Alex pulled up the tactical, and even then, he didn’t see it at first. The other ships with their odd spiraling paths had teased their own ships farther and farther apart until one strayed too far. Now, like different limbs of the same beast, the enemy ships had turned, burning hard on paths that would keep the pirate from support and help while they surrounded it.
“We’re fine,” the voice from Godalming said, stubbornly. “We’ve taken worse than this.”
It’s all right to let go. There’s no honor in death.
The tactical threw another alert up. Five more red dots transiting through different ring gates in the same moment. Alex saw them now for what they were. A hunt group.
He was already setting up the queue of tightbeam connections, new orders to address the new enemy, when another transit came. Small and blisteringly fast, already braking hard to shed its velocity so that it wouldn’t slam into the ring station and die. The Roci estimated the burn at something near twenty gs. Even if the people in the ship were in submersion tanks, they were in as much danger from their own deceleration as from the fight they were diving into.
“Naomi?”
“Get us there,” she said.
There wasn’t time to detach from the Falcon, so Alex took control of both ships, whipping them around and laying in a coordinated burn to keep them together. The tiny, fast ship would be half blinded by its own drive cone, but the other enemy ships would see everything the Roci did. All the eyes were connected. All the minds were one. Alex laid in a firing solution, synced with the Falcon, and put a rail-gun slug out along the enemy’s path. It was already dodging even as he fired the shot. Alex switched to torpedoes and fired a tight spread, set to detonate between the ship and the station.
The missiles launched as an emergency mayday came from the Godalming and then cut off. They seemed to crawl across the display. Alex willed them to go faster, to defy the laws of physics just a little bit. Just for him.
“They’re not going to hit,” Naomi said.
“They’re not meant to,” Alex said. “I’m just trying to put some debris in their way.”
The torpedoes blinked out as they detonated, and the Roci tracked the spheres of energy and scrap metal that radiated out along the paths they’d been going. The fast ship came into the spheres like a stone falling through a cloud. Alex held his breath. There was still vastly more empty space in those fields than matter, but at the speed the dropship was going, even a sliver of metal the size of a fingernail clipping would be enough . . .
The enemy ship’s drive flickered. Alex exhaled.
“Good job,” Amos said over the comms.
“Sometimes you’re lucky,” Alex said, but he felt a little bloom of pride all the same.
“Pull us back,” Naomi said. “I want us parked right outside Jim’s entrance. They’re trying to get to the station, and we’re going to be the last thing they have to go through to get there.”
Chapter Forty-Three: Jim
The passageways varied. Some were large enough to fit a ship through, more like a dry dock than a corridor. Some were like the Roci or the Falcon, well fitted to a human form. Some were barely crawl spaces and some as thin as drinking straws. Probably there were others too small for the naked eye to see. The station functioned at all sizes, like a fractal of itself.
Jim’s fever was steady, but a numbness had started at his feet and fingers. Pins and needles at first, and then a growing absence. If he squeezed his hands together, he could feel the deep pressure like an ache, but lighter touch was gone. And there was a vibrant, unsteady, electric feeling in his belly that he didn’t like. Tanaka didn’t ask him for another health update, though, and he didn’t volunteer anything.
The passage they were trying bent sharply, but Jim had lost a sense of direction. It might have been turning in toward the center of the station or out toward its skin. The only things he was sure of were that Tanaka always seemed certain of the next path to try and they were running out of time. Jim and Teresa followed Tanaka around the bend and forward into a widening where the passage they were in crossed another like it traveling at an oblique angle. Tanaka stopped at the junction and tapped at the wrist controls on her suit. Her scowl was harsh enough to sharpen knives on.
“Is there something you’re looking for?” Jim asked on the open channel. “This is kind of a large structure to just hope we bump into Duarte.”