Avasarala nodded as Drummer slid close, braced on a handhold to kill her momentum.
“You’re leaving too?” Avasarala asked, her voice carefully neutral.
“No,” Drummer said. “I live here.”
“You’re a fucking idiot,” the old woman sighed, “but you’d be one if you left too. It’d be a better world if there was always at least one right answer instead of a basket of fucked.”
“Are you all right?” Drummer asked.
Avasarala waved the comment away, then reached out to the handhold to steady herself. “I’m trying to decide if we’re absolutely certain to lose or absolutely certain to win,” she said. “I change my mind every ten minutes or so.”
“It’s one ship that hasn’t been able to resupply in weeks,” Drummer said. “It’s already been through a battle. And that turning-off-people’s-minds-for-a-while thing it did, we’re ready for it this time. The automated systems have their governors off. We may have to get clever before the next one shows up, but no matter what happens, we’ll keep firing until
“And because it’s this ten minutes,” Avasarala said, “I find that argument persuasive. Next one, I’m going to remember that Duarte sent it, and then I’ll get scared.” She shook her head. “Who knows? The son of a bitch has been off in his own private system since before the Free Navy got their nuts handed to them. And it’s pretty clear he’s been rubbing up against whatever artifacts he found there. Maybe it made him stupid.”
“Doesn’t change what we have to do,” Drummer said.
“It doesn’t,” Avasarala agreed. “I hate this part. You have a clear succession? Santos-Baca went down with her ship too, and even if you turn that ugly motherfucker of a ship to slag, one of the EMC bastards is as likely to throw something the wrong direction. If this goes badly, the last thing we’re going to need is a long, angry committee meeting with everyone saying they’ve got the conch.”
Drummer felt a blaze of annoyance, but pushed it down. The old woman wasn’t trying to be insulting. She was just flailing around trying to find something she still had control over.
“We have bylaws,” Drummer said. “And it won’t matter. If I eat a stray torpedo, Albin Nazari takes over.”
“That whiner? He’s just gotten used to Santos-Baca’s chair, and then to get yours too? He’d be like a five-year-old driving a mech loader.”
“I’ll be dead,” Drummer said. “So I won’t give a fuck.”
Avasarala’s laugh was short, surprised, and joyful. “I don’t hate you, Camina. I hate almost everyone these days, but I don’t hate you.”
“I’m not planning to put Nazari in charge,” Drummer said. “I’m planning to win.”
In the scheme of the battle, People’s Home was many things: battleship, medical facility, port, and resupply. It was all the things a city could be. In the display, it was slightly paler than the other green dots that were its fellows. Guard of Passage had a position that mirrored it. The two great cities of the union with their drums spun down, burning into the fight as anchors for the fleet. Cities that had become battleships.
“Coffee?” Vaughn asked, and Drummer waved him away.
The control room was lit like a theater—dim and warm with the tactical display in a multinetworked holographic output. Drummer had been in other battles. She had studied more than that. She had never seen more firepower leveled at a single target. She was fairly certain it had never happened before.
She strapped herself into her crash couch, checked the juice. The chances were very slim that People’s Home would go on the burn, but if it did, she’d be ready. The whole sphere of battle was less than three light-seconds across. Eight hundred and fifty thousand kilometers from the two most distant ships in the EMC fleet, a balloon holding three hundred quadrillion cubic kilometers of nothing, with a few hundred ships dotting its skin. If she’d been in a vac suit, the drive plumes of the navy would have been invisible among the stars. It was the most tightly formed major battle in decades—maybe ever—and she wouldn’t have been able to see her nearest ally with her naked eye.
“The enemy’s crossed Leuctra Point,” the weapons tech said, his voice calm.
“Are the EMC ships opening fire?”
“They are, ma’am.”
“Then let’s do too,” she said.
She wanted there to be a throb of rail guns, the chatter of PDC fire, but People’s Home was a huge structure. Even as her display told her that the rail guns were firing, the room was silent. Hundreds of other ships were doing the same thing at the same moment. Tens of thousands of tungsten slugs moving at a nontrivial fraction of c. It would be less than a minute before they converged on the
“And the enemy is evading,” the sensor tech reported, her voice sharp.
“Do we have visual?”
