“In New Egypt, we could have done this easy,” she said, imagining Nagata and Holden and their crew. “This is what you picked.” She smiled while she said it, the tightness in her wounded cheek pulling it into a lopsided grimace. It didn’t hurt much.
Corridor by corridor, meter by meter, Tanaka moved through the station. She headed toward the large clumps of heartbeats first. Hoping that the center of the largest resistance would be the heroes of the Rocinante, but it never was. The resistance fighters were tenacious and brave, Tanaka would give them that. They came at her with little regard for their own safety, and some of the counterattacks had a real cunning to them. Though, given that her rampage had left little indication surrendering would lead to safety, she’d have been doing exactly the same thing in their situation. And everywhere she went, the seventy-meter range of her heartbeat detector found new pockets of people, hiding or preparing to fight. One by one, she went to them all, offering them amnesty if they put down their guns and turned over the girl. Not that she expected them to. Not that she’d necessarily stop shooting if they did.
Tanaka realized she’d lost track of Houston’s heartbeat. It gave her a moment of pause, but only a moment. She was concentrating on the map layout in her HUD, looking for possible ship docking points, when she rounded the corner into the base’s single largest pressurized room. A massive warehouse space, over a hundred meters on a side and a dozen meters high. The room was filled with racks of supplies and ship parts. The secret treasure trove of the revolutionary underground. All of it stolen from Laconia.
The suit warned her that three people were moving up behind her, and when she glanced at the warning it popped a rear view up on her screen. Three Belters were maneuvering what looked like a tool cart laden down with a massive compressed-gas tank. She was just starting to turn when one of the Belters hit the rear of the tank and it launched at her like a battering ram.
Oh, she thought as it picked her up off her feet, an improvised missile.
She only blacked out for a moment, but when she came to, her suit was blaring half a dozen alarms at her. She was embedded a good half meter into the foam-covered wall of the warehouse. The improvised missile oxygen tank was holding her upright, still pressed against her chest.
The suit warned her that it had lost secondary actuator control for her upper torso, and 30 percent of the reserve battery power before the system had rerouted to stop the leak. She also had four broken ribs and a dislocated left shoulder. She chinned the medical override and had the suit shoot her full of painkillers and amphetamines. She felt a surge that was almost like pride in her opponents. Nice job, little bunnies. Good try.
The three Belters were cautiously approaching. She hadn’t moved since their missile hit, and they were undoubtedly hoping it had finished the job. One of the three had a portable plasma torch in his hand. To cut her out of the suit and make sure, she guessed.
“RPG,” she said, locking her eyes on the middle man. The suit raised the launcher up over her shoulder and took aim. The three Belters only had a moment to register a look of surprise before a twenty-millimeter rocket-propelled grenade struck the man in the center and turned into a cloud of shrapnel that would kill anything within ten meters.
Some of the shrapnel sprayed across her breastplate and visor, with a sound inside the suit like hail hitting a metal roof. A half second later, the shrapnel was followed by a spray of blood and viscera.
“Motherfuckers,” Tanaka said, then used the right arm of her suit to shove the oxygen tank away from her chest. Its mass was significant, but the suit was up to the challenge, and a few moments later she was back on her own two feet, pain-free and jittery from the drug cocktail in her veins.
“I’ll make you a deal,” she yelled out, turning the suit’s speakers up so high that anyone in the warehouse space with her would probably suffer permanent hearing loss. “The person who brings me Teresa Duarte lives. They’re the only one who gets to walk out of this place in one piece. So if you have her, you’d better be the first to show up with the girl in your hands.
“Because everyone else here is going to die.”
Chapter Twenty-Two: Jillian
As soon as the Laconian stepped into the base, Jillian knew she’d fucked up. She tried to believe that it was just nerves, that the trade would go down as promised, but in her gut, she’d known.
She hunched down in the access channel, head low. Blood was wicking through the fabric of her shirt, making the cut along her ribs seem bigger than it was. In the distance, the Laconian’s amplified voice echoed, but Jillian only made out a few of the words. Duarte. First. Die. She plucked her hand terminal out of her pocket with her left hand, thumbing through the options with the same crisis-calm she’d always prided herself on. Her impulse was to go take care of the prisoners herself. Instead, she opened the comm.