“Okay, I assume Bobbie’s got you guys hiding in the station’s radar shadow still, since I’m talking to you and you’re not dead.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “She seems pretty strongly in favor of not doing anything to make it mad.”
“Let me see what we can find out here, and I’ll call back.”
“Copy that,” Alex said. “
“It’s … magnetic?” Naomi said, her tone managing to be authoritative and astounded at the same time.
“Is that possible?” the duty officer said, her voice small and tight.
“Only if you define ‘possible’ as things that have already happened,” Naomi said, not turning to look at her.
“So anything made of metal is vulnerable,” another tech said.
“It isn’t just metal,” Holden replied, then pushed off to drift over to Naomi’s station and look at the data she was pulling up.
“Everything has a magnetic field,” Naomi added. “Usually it’s too weak to matter. But at the levels that beam is hitting, it could spaghettify hydrogen atoms. Anything it touches will be ripped apart.”
“There’s no way to defend against something like that,” Holden said, then went limp. In microgravity, it was not as satisfying as collapsing into a chair would have been.
“That’s what shook Medina,” Naomi added. “Just the beam passing near us. The maneuvering thrusters had to fire to hold us still.”
“Holden, this is Draper,” his terminal said.
“Holden here.”
“Looks like that big bastard is ignoring us as long as we stay really still and keep the weapons unpowered.”
“That’s a good sign,” Holden said. “It might mean they’re not looking to kill everyone. Just making a point of destroying anything that’s a threat.”
“Point loudly and clearly made,” Bobbie agreed. “But be aware, there is a second ship. Smaller. And it’s heading for Medina.”
“Tactical assessment?”
“Based on how thoroughly they took out our defenses,” Bobbie said, “I’d bet they do a hard breach, storm ops and the reactor room, and grab full control of the station. If their ground troops have tech like that ship does, it shouldn’t take long.”
“Copy that. I’m going to try to minimize casualties down here. Wait for me to make contact. Holden out.”
“Hard breach?” Naomi asked, though her tone said she already knew the answer.
“They’ll drop fire teams all over the station to take over access points, control centers, power, and environmental support,” Holden replied, more to the room at large than to Naomi. He turned to Daphne Kohl. “I think you should have everyone here start making calls. Get every union and planetary rep in secure locations, but tell their security details to stand down. No visible weapons. Tell them we’re
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Are you taking command?”
“No, I’m not. But this is the right thing to do, and we need to do it now. So we should do it. Please.”
Her expression fell a degree. She’d hoped someone in authority had arrived. Someone who knew what to do. He recognized the hope and the disappointment both.
“We’re not going to fight back at all?” Kohl asked.
He gestured toward the screens. The dust that was
“Not yet,” Holden said. Naomi was already collecting side-arms from the other techs in the ops center and putting them in a duffel bag.
The second ship looked to be about destroyer sized, to Holden’s eye. It did a slow flyover of Medina Station, taking out the torpedo racks and PDC emplacements with pinpoint-accurate rail-gun shots, then dropping a dozen Marine landing craft.
As it came, Kohl did as he suggested, passing the word throughout the ship not to resist. Live to fight another day. After the last call, she seemed to sway for a moment, then turned, spat on the deck, and pulled up something that looked like a security interface.
“What are you doing?”
“Purging the security system,” she said. “No census. No biometric records. No deck plans. No records. We can’t stop the fuckers, but we don’t need to make it easy for them.”
“Fou bien,” Naomi said, approving. Holden wondered whether the forces coming in would be able to track the decision back to her. He hoped they wouldn’t.
