They opened the door to an entire deck that had been dropped in a blender, then spun up in a centrifuge. Bulkhead panels, control stations, equipment, decking. It had all been torn, twisted, burned, and then thrown out against the outer walls at high speed. A long piece of pipe was embedded in a wall, still quivering like an arrow shot into a tree. Something that looked like a metal desk had been slammed into a support beam so hard that the metal had actually fused. And in one corner, a single boot had been pinned to the ceiling and then melted into a stalactite of rubber. She hoped there wasn’t a foot in it.
They floated silently through the wreckage looking for their exit. It wasn’t hard to find.
A hole gaped in the exterior bulkhead of the drum nearly five meters across. The nearly circular rim of it was all bent outward, like the metal wall had been breached by a giant’s battering ram. Which, Bobbie supposed, it had. Only instead of concrete and steel, it had been oxygen and fire. Outside, she saw the faint twinkle of light on the ejecta as it raced away from the station and toward the curtain of black at the edge of the ring space.
“
“Do you think anyone survived?” Naomi asked.
“We kept everyone we could out of the affected area,” Bobbie replied. “Only should have been Laconians down here …”
“And anyone who didn’t get our fucking memo,” Amos added.
“Jim would have warned anyone he ran into,” Naomi said. “He wouldn’t be able to stop himself.”
“Yeah, by then it wouldn’t matter much,” Amos agreed. “No time to track the bomb down before it did its business.”
“And fuck any Laconians who were here,” Katria said in a tone that sounded like she’d have spit if she weren’t wearing a helmet. “I hope they fucking saw it coming.”
“Kat,” Bobbie said, “please shut up now.”
“This is going to work,” Naomi said, pointing out the hole toward the docks. “They’re going to think that was our target.”
The
It was an eerie ship. The angles of it were like something cut from crystal, and the curves felt like something grown more than built. It was like looking at a venomous snake. She had a hard time pulling her eyes away.
“Too bad we didn’t kill it,” Katria said, ignoring Bobbie’s request.
“Yeah,” Bobbie agreed. “Too bad.”
Amos pulled a magnetic grapple gun out of the gear bag he was carrying and fired a line over to the elevator shaft exterior. They’d need to climb up to a point not far from the maintenance hatch on the outside of the drum she and Clarissa had used earlier. The hard part would be getting a grapple onto the drum, then hanging on while the station tried to hurl them away at a third of a g. After that, it was an easy climb up to their secret entrance back into the station. Up into Medina from the underworld, and mission accomplished.
Unless something else went wrong. The only thing worse than losing Holden would be losing him for no damned reason.
“Laconians are gonna find this hatch,” Amos said. “Shouldn’t plan to use it again after this. No way the crews that come to fix that hole are gonna miss it.”
“Yeah,” Bobbie agreed. “If we thought the sweeps before were bad, they’re about to get a hundred times tighter.”
“Yeah, fuck ’em,” Katria snorted.
“No,” Naomi said. “It’ll be worse than that. We stung their pride before. But today we hurt them. Hurt them bad. And they’re going to try to make it better by hurting us back. Not just us either. Anyone who they think might be like us.”
While Amos hooked his grapple line to the edge of the hole so that they could climb up to the elevator housing, Naomi remained staring at the damaged Laconian ship.
“We killed a lot of people today,” she said. “Some of them just don’t know it yet.”
“The battle will be here,” Benedito Lafflin said, indicating a space between the curve of the asteroid belt and the orbit of Mars. The place where physics and geometry calculated that the paths of the
“Luke-tra?”
“The Spartans were decisively defeated there by Thebes,” Lafflin said. “I mean, they call their planet Laconia. Psy ops thought it might speak to their sense of their own invincibility.”
