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“What the f**k was that?” Amos asked quietly. “And how about we don’t do it anymore?”
“Alex?” Holden said.
“Still here, Cap,” the pilot replied, his voice eerily calm.
“My panel’s dead,” Holden said. “Did we kill that son of a bitch?”
“Yeah, Cap, he’s dead. About half a dozen of his rounds actually hit the Roci. Looks like they went through us from bow to stern. That anti-spalling webbing on the bulkheads really keeps the shrapnel down, doesn’t it?”
Alex’s voice had started shaking. He meant We should all be dead.
“Open a channel to Fred, Naomi,” Holden said.
She didn’t move.
“Naomi?”
“Right. Fred,” she said, then tapped on her screen.
Holden’s helmet was filled with static for a second, then with Fred’s voice.
“Guy Molinari here. Glad you guys are still alive.”
“Roger that. Begin your run. Let us know when we can limp over to one of the station’s docks.”
“Roger,” Fred replied. “We’ll find you a nice place to land. Fred out.”
Holden pulled the quick release on his chair’s restraints and floated toward the ceiling, his body limp.
Okay, Miller. Your turn.
Chapter Forty: Miller
Oi, Pampaw,” the kid in the crash couch to Miller’s right said. “Popped seal, you and bang, hey?”
The kid’s combat armor was gray-green, articulated pressure seals at the joints and stripes across the front plates where a knife or flechette round had scraped the finish. Behind the face mask, the kid could have been fifteen. His hand gestures spoke of a childhood spent in vacuum suits, and his speech was pure Belt creole.
“Yeah,” Miller said, raising his arm. “Saw some action recently. I’ll be fine.”
“Fine’s fine as fine,” the kid said. “But you hold to the foca, and neto can pass the air out to you, hey?”
No one on Mars or Earth would have the first clue what you’re saying, Miller thought. Shit, half the people on Ceres would be embarrassed by an accent that thick. No wonder they don’t mind killing you.
“Sounds good to me,” Miller said. “You go first, and I’ll try to keep anyone from shooting you in the back.”
The kid grinned. Miller had seen thousands like him. Boys in the throes of adolescence, working through the normal teenage drive to take risks and impress girls, but at the same time they lived in the Belt, where one bad call meant dead. He’d seen thousands. He’d arrested hundreds. He’d watched a few dozen picked up in hazmat bags.
He leaned forward to look down the long rows of close-packed gimbaled crash couches that lined the gut of the Guy Molinari. Miller’s rough estimate put the count at between ninety and a hundred of them. So by dinner, chances were good he’d have seen a couple dozen more die.
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Diogo.”
“Miller,” he said, and gave the kid his hand to shake. The high-quality Martian battle armor Miller had taken from the Rocinante let his fingers flex a lot more than the kid’s.
The truth was Miller was in no shape for the assault. He was still getting occasional waves of inexplicable nausea, and his arm ached whenever the medication level in his blood started thinning out. But he knew his way around a gun, and he probably knew more about corridor-to-corridor fighting than nine-tenths of the OPA rock jumpers and ore hogs like Diogo who were about to go in. It would have to be good enough.
The ship’s address system clicked once.
“This is Fred. We’ve had word from air support, and we’re green for breach in ten minutes. Final checks start now, people.”
Miller sat back in his couch. The clicking and chattering of a hundred suits of armor, a hundred sidearms, a hundred assault weapons filled the air. He’d been over his own enough times now; he didn’t feel the urge to do it again.
In a few minutes, the burn would come. The cocktail of high-g drugs was kept on the ragged edge, since they’d be going straight from the couches into a firefight. No point having your assault force more doped than necessary.
Julie sat on the wall beside him, her hair swirling around her like she was underwater. He imagined the dappled light flashing across her face. Portrait of the young pinnace racer as a mermaid. She smiled at the idea, and Miller smiled back. She would have been here, he knew. Along with Diogo and Fred and all the other OPA militia, patriots of the vacuum, she’d have been in a crash couch, wearing borrowed armor, heading into the station to get herself killed for the greater good. Miller knew he wouldn’t have. Not before her. So in a sense, he’d taken her place. He’d become her.
They made it, Julie said, or maybe only thought. If the ground attack was going forward, it meant the Rocinante had survived—at least long enough to knock out the defenses. Miller nodded, acknowledging her and letting himself feel a moment’s pleasure at the idea, and then thrust gravity pushed him into his couch so hard that his consciousness flickered, and the hold around him dimmed. He felt it when the braking burn came, all the crash couches spinning to face the new up. Needles dug into Miller’s flesh. Something deep and loud happened, the Guy Molinari ringing like a gigantic bell. The breaching charge. The world pulled hard to the left, the couch swinging for the last time as the assault ship matched the station’s spin.
Someone was shouting at him. “Go go go!” Miller lifted his assault rifle, tapped the sidearm strapped to his thigh, and joined the press of bodies making for the exit. He missed his hat.
The service corridor they’d cut into was narrow and dim. The schematics the Tycho engineers had worked up suggested they wouldn’t see any real resistance until they got into the manned parts of the station. That had been a bad guess. Miller staggered in with the other OPA soldiers in time to see an automatic defense laser cut the first rank in half.
“Team three! Gas it!” Fred snapped in all their ears, and half a dozen blooms of thick white anti-laser smoke burst into the close air. The next time a defense laser fired, the walls flashed with mad iridescence, and the smoke of burning plastic filled the air, but no one died. Miller pressed forward and up a red metal ramp. A welding charge flared, and a service door swung open.
The corridors of Thoth station were wide and roomy, with long swaths of ivy grown in carefully tended spirals, niches every few feet with tastefully lit bonsai. Soft light the pure white of sunlight made the place feel like a spa or a rich man’s private residence. The floors were carpet.
