Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Seven: Bobbie

Cap, launching you now. Make sure you come back,” Alex said. The breaching pod shook as the Storm cut it loose. The drive came on a moment later, slamming Bobbie back into her couch and leaving her with nothing to do while the battle raged around her.

The Storm’s breaching pod was a little more high-tech than the Martian version Bobbie had trained on, but there was only so much you could do with something so simple. The basic concept was a small troop carrier with an engine on one end and an airlock that could blow holes into enemy ships on the other. The interior was a close-walled metal box fitted with crash couches. The “flying coffin” joke Marines had been making for centuries would have made perfect sense even to the ancient soldiers who rolled into battle in armored personnel carriers with wheels: If you die before you get to the fight, you’re already boxed up for eternal rest.

People always claimed that waiting for the fight was the hardest part of fighting. Bobbie had said it herself, as a younger woman. When the fight is coming, when it’s inevitable, let’s just fucking get to it. Once the battle starts, things happen too fast to worry about. The fear is all instinctual, not intellectual. Somehow, that used to feel better.

Age had changed that. Bobbie had learned to see the quiet moment before the fight as a blessing. A gift. Very few people who were headed toward death even knew it was happening, much less had time to sit and reflect on their life. What they’d done that mattered. Whether it would be a good death.

Bobbie’s father had already been a legendary Marine in the MMC before she was born. When his family started to grow, he left the front lines and became an even more legendary training sergeant. An entire generation had learned what it meant to be a Martian Marine under Sergeant Major Draper at Hecate base. A giant of a man, with a face that looked like it had been cut from flint, he had always seemed invincible. An immutable fact of nature, like the avatar of Olympus Mons, come to life and walking among the mortals.

When he’d died, he’d been a tiny shriveled husk. Lying in his bed, hooked to the tubes and monitors that only prolonged the inevitable, he’d held her hand and said, “I’m ready. I’ve done this a dozen times before.”

She hadn’t understood at the time, but now she thought he was talking about sitting right where she was now. In the transport, heading toward battle, examining his life as he rushed toward its possible end. Who am I? Did the things I accomplished matter? Will I leave the universe a better place than I found it? If I don’t come back, what are my regrets? What are my victories?

It was a thing maybe only a warrior could understand. Only those who made the choice to run toward the fire, instead of away from it. That made it feel sacred to her. “This far, and no farther,” she whispered. Her litany to the tyrants and bullies and despots. This far, and no farther. If my life means anything after I’m gone, she thought, I hope it meant that.

“What’s that, boss?” Jillian asked. Her number two was strapped into the crash couch directly across the pod from her.

“Just talking to myself,” Bobbie said. Then she started to sing. “Anything you can do I can do better. I can do anything better than you.”

“Never heard that one,” Jillian said, then sang along, trying to catch the tune. “That new? Sounds Belter.”

Bobbie laughed. “No idea. My mother used to sing it. My brothers were older, and I hated losing to them at anything. I’d burst into tears when they’d win, and she’d sing that song to me. Just one of those things you pick up when you’re a kid and never put back down.”

“I like it,” Jillian said, then closed her eyes and started mumbling to herself. It looked like she was praying. Bobbie knew she wasn’t. She was running through the mission in her mind, over and over. Two meters through the breached hull to the first junction. Turn left. Twelve meters to the engineering hatch. Breach and clear. Three meters to the right is the master console. The other warrior’s litany.

There are people I love. There are people who have loved me. I fought for what I believed, protected those I could, and stood my ground against the encroaching darkness.

Good enough.

The pod screeched a short-lived collision alarm at them. The Storm had sent her pair of rail-gun shots past the hull close enough that Bobbie could have reached out and swatted them as they went by.

“Brace for impact,” she said, using her sergeant voice. As forceful as it could be without quite being a shout. This was her job now. To seem an immutable fact of nature. The avatar of Olympus Mons come to life and striding through the battlefield. God of war now. Shriveled husk later. Maybe. If she wasn’t lucky.

All around her, her squad of six handpicked strike team members locked and inflated their couches. All of them wore Laconian Marine power armor, though the blue color scheme had been repainted black. They were, as her father would have said, the pick of the litter. Jillian from Freehold and five of the Belters.

The Belters were old-school OPA, grizzled veterans of the endless insurgent war with the inner planets before Laconia came and made that irrelevant. Old men and women well practiced in conflict. Her total force on the Storm numbered forty, and included warriors from nearly every one of the old factions. But for a high-speed snatch-and-grab boarding action, you couldn’t find better fighters than Belters.

“Battle mode,” Bobbie said, and her armor woke up, humming with impatience for the fight. The HUD flashed an ammunition inventory at her, then minimized it into one corner of her field of view. A wireframe layout of the interior of the freighter they were about to board appeared and moved to a different corner. The list of six names and the green dot showing they were alive and undamaged scrolled down the left side of her view and remained. Getting everyone back with a green dot instead of a black one was always a mission priority, even if it was never the top.

A flashing message appeared in the center of her field of view:

FREE FIRE AUTHORIZATION

“Free fire, alpha team, Captain Roberta Draper,” she said. Through the suit radio she heard the distant clicks as six suits of armor activated their weapons. She’d never needed to do that as a fire team sergeant back in her Martian Marine Corps days. The Corps issued weapons to people and assumed they would use them correctly and according to their training. The Laconians were much more top-down. Winston Duarte had founded Laconia by betraying Mars and looting the navy. It wasn’t a great surprise that distrust of the people in his chain of command was institutional.

The HUD flashed a new diagram at her. The relative position of the breaching pod and the freighter, along with a rapidly decreasing distance to target.

“Ready,” she growled at her team. “Go in five!”

The breaching pod shuddered as it fired grapples and grabbed the freighter. There was a quick sideways jerk, and then the two ships slammed together. The impact with the freighter was significant, but wrapped as she was in the soft gel interior of her high-tech armor and resting on the inflated padding of her crash couch, it just felt like a sudden pressure on her chest that vanished almost instantly as the pod lost its acceleration and went into free fall. That was a good sign. It meant Alex had hit his target with the rail-gun shots, and the freighter was on the drift.

“Get ready for the burn!” she said, the last word almost lost in the sudden roar of the pod firing its massive braking thrusters to keep the freighter hidden behind Jupiter. Her couch automatically unlocked and swung the other direction, putting her back to the thrust. A new pressure mounted in her chest as the g forces piled on.

When the burn started to ease up, she yelled, “Go go go,” but it wasn’t really necessary. Her fire team was up and out of their couches the second the thrust stopped. Jillian hit the wall panel next to the airlock and extended the breaching sleeve. It made an airtight seal with the freighter, the deck vibrating with the impact. Two seconds later, shaped charges inside the sleeve cut a hole through both hulls of the Transport Union freighter, and the airlock door slid open.

Jillian was inside first, dropping through the glowing red hole into the freighter. She hit the bulkhead at the first corridor she reached and launched herself to the left, heading toward engineering. Hernandez and Orm followed her.

“We’re on board,” Bobbie said on the command channel, back to Alex on the Storm. Their Laconian gear was modulating the signal to match the jamming, which would hopefully let their radio cut through, but Bobbie wasn’t entirely confident in the system. It didn’t really matter yet. Alex would be busy fighting the two frigates no matter what her team was doing. Any messages back and forth before the Storm had secured the freighter’s flight-space were perfunctory.

She followed into the breach, the other three members of the strike team close behind her. When Bobbie hit the corridor wall, she turned right, toward the command deck. The hallway they were in was actually the central lift of the ship, and closed hatches marked each deck they passed. Most of them would lead to cargo space. A few to the crew’s living quarters. One would lead to the ops deck, and that was the only one Bobbie cared about.

Jillian and her team would take control of the drive and life support down in engineering. Bobbie would take the ops deck and cut off communication with the outside world. If the political officer wasn’t in ops when she arrived, it wouldn’t matter. They’d control the ship and search at their leisure. For values of leisure up to maybe five or ten whole minutes.

“Watch those hatches,” she told her team as she skimmed along the bulkhead toward ops. It felt redundant. Their suits were scanning every square centimeter around them for heat, radiation, even the unique electromagnetic signature generated by a beating human heart. It was pretty tough to get the drop on someone wearing Laconian armor. But saying something reminded the team you were there, that you were in charge, and that keeping everyone safe was on your mind.

“Copy that,” Takeshi said. “Most of these aren’t warm. Guessing the cargo is in vacuum.”

“Guy in a vac suit coming at us from behind is low probability,” she agreed, “but low ain’t zero.”

Bobbie’s HUD flashed an overlay over a door one deck ahead. “That one,” she said, and her team fanned out and took positions around it. In the microgravity of the disabled freighter, they stood on bulkheads around the hatch, weapons ready. No matter what the orientation of the ship was under thrust, for purposes of the breach the ops deck was down.

“Remember,” Bobbie said, “there are potential friendlies in there.”

As she said it, a rotating 3-D profile of two women appeared on all their HUDs.

“Protect them first, take prisoners second. Copy?”

There came a rumble of assent. Bobbie slapped the wall panel next to the hatch, and her armor ran the breaching protocol that cut through the electronic security in a fraction of a second. The hatch slid open.

After that, everyone was shooting.

It was a fact of the human brain in close quarters combat that while everything was generally happening all at once, the mind insisted on trying to stitch it into a linear narrative when remembering it later.

In the moment, Bobbie threw herself through the hatch and into the ops deck, her team at her back. Incoming bullets lit up her HUD with bright trails so she’d know the direction of fire. Some of the bullets hit her, or her team. The armor thought the odds of taking real damage were trivial, and ignored it. Seven people in the compartment, wearing light protective armor. Her suit tagged one as a friendly. One of the two resistance partisans. Five with guns shooting at her. One doing his best to hide behind a crash couch. The political officer, if she had to guess.

Her arm moved without her thinking about it, and the gun mounted at her wrist spun up briefly, cutting two of the armed crew in half. The other three were turning into red spray and body parts under the barrage of fire from her team. The whole fight couldn’t have lasted more than two seconds, though when she remembered it later and her brain turned it into a narrative, it would seem much longer.

Less than thirty seconds after she’d opened the hatch, two of her strike team were protectively flanking the partisan, and Takeshi had the political officer shoved up against a bulkhead and was zip-tying his hands. Bobbie examined the deck. No hull breaches, her armor assured her. The Laconian antipersonnel rounds for shipboard use were pretty good tech. Lethal against lightly armored opponents, but they just fragmented into powder when they hit bulkheads.

“Ops is ours,” Bobbie said.

“Engineering is ours,” Jillian immediately replied. “We have one of the two spies. You got the other?”

“Copy. Our people are secure, and we have the package.”

“Oh goody,” Jillian said. “Can’t wait to see his face when he realizes his life just went down the recycler.”

“Jillian, escort the friendly up here,” Bobbie said. “Let’s get everyone into emergency suits and prep them for the ride over to the Storm. The rest of you, fan out and get an eyeball inventory. When the Storm arrives we’re going to want to take all the best stuff with us, and we won’t have much time. Get to it.”

“Copy that,” Jillian said.

“I think we win,” Bobbie said to Takeshi. He grinned back at her.

“Easy peas—” he started to say and then blew apart.

Bobbie knew intellectually that they must have taken a raking pass from someone’s PDCs. But from inside the ship it looked like the bulkheads on either side of the compartment decided to explode in several dozen places all at once. The room was full of glowing shrapnel bouncing off walls and panels, and the gray smoke of vaporized metal. Takeshi was a tangle of technology-wrapped body parts floating in a nebula of blood globes.

It didn’t look like anyone else was directly hit, but before Bobbie could even start to issue an order, the air in the room was just gone. Too many holes on both sides. One moment they were in a pressurized cabin, the next they were in vacuum. It happened so fast it barely ruffled the political officer’s Laconian blue suit jacket.

“Get them in suits!” she yelled, but it was already too late. She was a Martian. She’d started doing vacuum drills in grade school. Fifteen seconds and you lose consciousness. Anything that you needed to do had to happen in that first fifteen seconds or it didn’t happen at all. Any vacuum suit that is more than fifteen seconds away is a lifetime away.

All she could do was watch the partisan who’d helped them take the ship gasp out a cloud of mist that was her very last breath ever. The political officer, their whole reason for coming, died a moment later with a look of profound puzzlement on his face. A thousand facts and secrets that could have meant the difference between the underground thriving and all of them dying in a gulag evaporated as the man’s cells gave up.

Every panel on the ops deck that still worked was flashing red. The ship was dead too.

“Storm, this is strike team,” Bobbie said, opening the command channel. She heard only dead air and the faint hiss of background radiation. “Storm, come in.”

Nothing.

“Shit,” Jillian said. She came into the ops deck dragging their dead ally from the engineering deck with her. “Did we lose the Storm too?”

“Chama,” Bobbie said, pointing at one of her people. “Get outside and see if you can spot the Storm. Maybe line-of-sight comms will work. The rest of you, mission hasn’t changed. Get me that inventory. Get it ready for rapid transfer once we find the ship.”

“Or,” Jillian said, “get ready to fall into Jupiter and die because we’re way under orbital speed now and don’t have an engine.”

“Or that,” Bobbie agreed, surprised at how much she wanted to push across the room and punch Jillian in the face. “But until we do, we’ll stay on mission. Get the fuck out of here and make yourself useful packing cargo.”

On the radio, one of Jillian’s squad mates said, “Lots of stuff here, boss. Ammo, fuel, it’s the mother lode. Primary mission is fucked, but secondary is a win.”

“A moral victory, I guess,” Bobbie sighed.

“You know who talks about moral victories?” Jillian asked as she floated out of the room. “The team that lost.”