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“Roger that, Cap. Ready to go down here.”
“Bring the reactor up to one hundred percent and pull control of the point defense cannons to your console down there. If they shoot at us at this range, Alex won’t have time to fly and shoot back. You see a red dot on the threat console, you open up with the PDCs immediately. Copy?”
“Roger that,” Amos said.
Holden blew a long breath through his teeth, then opened the channel to the Ravi again.
“McBride, this is Holden. We are not surrendering, we are not going to let you board us, and we aren’t going to comply with your demands. Where do we go from here?”
“Holden,” McBride said. “Your reactor is coming up. Are you getting ready to fight with us?”
“No, just getting ready to try and survive. Why, are we fighting?”
Another short harsh laugh.
“Holden,” McBride said. “Why do I get the feeling you aren’t taking this seriously?”
“Oh, I absolutely am,” Holden replied. “I don’t want you to kill me, and believe it or not, I have no desire to kill you. The nukes are on a little detour, but this isn’t something we need to go down in flames over. I can’t give you what you want, and I’m not interested in spending the next thirty years in a military prison. You gain nothing by shooting us, and I will fight back if it comes to that.”
McBride cut the channel.
“Captain,” Alex said. “The Ravi is startin’ to maneuver. She’s spraying clutter. I think she’s gettin’ ready to make an attack run.”
Shit. Holden had been so sure he could talk her out of it.
“Okay, go defensive. Naomi, start your countermeasures. Amos? Got your finger on that button?”
“Ready,” Amos replied.
“Don’t hit it until you see a missile launch. Don’t want to force their hand.”
Sudden crushing g’s hit Holden, stuffing him into his chair. Alex had started maneuvering.
“At this distance, maybe I can out-turn her. Keep her from bein’ able to take a shot,” the pilot said.
“Do it, and open the tubes.”
“Roger,” Alex said, his professional pilot’s calm not quite able to keep the excitement about a possible battle out of his voice.
“I’ve broken the targeting lock,” Naomi said. “Their laser array is not nearly as good as the Roci’s. I’m just drowning it in clutter.”
“Hooray for bloated Martian defense budgets,” Holden replied.
The ship jerked suddenly through a series of wild maneuvers.
“Damn,” Alex said, his voice strained by the g-force of the sharp turns. “The Ravi just opened up on us with her PDCs.”
Holden checked his threat display and saw the long glowing pearl strands of incoming rounds displayed there. The shots were falling well behind them. The Roci reported the distance between the ships as 370 kilometers—pretty long range for computer targeting systems to hit a wildly maneuvering ship with a ballistic shot from another wildly maneuvering ship.
“Return fire?” Amos yelled into the comm.
“No!” Holden yelled back. “If she wanted us dead, she’d be throwing torpedoes. Don’t give her a reason to want us dead.”
“Cap, we’re out-turnin’ her,” Alex said. “The Roci’s just too fast. We’ll have a firing solution in less than a minute.”
“Roger,” Holden said.
“Do I take the shot?” Alex asked, his silly Martian cowboy accent fading as his tension rose.
“No.”
“Their targeting laser just shut off,” Naomi said.
“Which means they’ve given up trying to cut our jamming,” Holden replied, “and have just switched their missiles over to radar tracking.”
“Not as accurate,” Naomi said hopefully.
“A corvette like that carries at least a dozen fish. They only need to hit us with one to make us dead. And at this range… ”
A gentle sound came from his threat console, letting him know that the Roci had calculated a firing solution to the Ravi.
“I’ve got tone!” Alex yelled. “Fire?”
“No!” Holden said. He knew that inside the Ravi, they were getting the loud warning buzz of an enemy lock. Stop, Holden willed them. Please don’t make me kill you.
“Uh,” Alex said in a low voice. “Huh.”
Behind Holden, at almost the same moment, Naomi said, “Jim?”
Before he could ask, Alex came back on the general comm.
“Hey, Captain, Eros just came back.”
“What?” Holden said, a brief image of the asteroid sneaking up like a cartoon villain on the two circling warships popping into his head.
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Eros. It just popped back up on radar. Whatever it was doing to block our sensors, it just stopped doing it.”
“What’s it doing?” Holden said. “Get me a course.”
Naomi pulled the tracking information to her console and began working on it, but Alex was done a few seconds sooner.
“Yeah,” he said. “Good guess. It’s changing course. Still heading sunward, but deflecting away from the Earth vector it was on.”
“If it keeps this course and speed,” Naomi chimed in, “I’d say it was heading toward Venus.”
“Wow,” said Holden. “That was a joke.”
“Good joke,” Naomi said.
“Well, someone tell McBride she doesn’t need to shoot us now.”
“Hey,” Alex said, his voice thoughtful. “If we made those nukes stop listening, that means we can’t shut ’em down, right? Wonder where Fred’s going to drop those.”
“Hell if I know,” Amos said. “Just disarmed Earth, though. That’s gotta be f**king embarrassing.”
“Unintended consequences,” Naomi sighed. “Always with the unintended consequences.”
Eros crashing into Venus was the most widely broadcast and recorded event in history. By the time the asteroid reached the sun’s second planet, several hundred ships had taken up orbits there. Military vessels tried to keep the civilian ships away, but it was no use. They were just outnumbered. The video of Eros’ descent was captured by military gun cameras, civilian ship telescopes, and the observatories on two planets and five moons.
Holden wished he could have been there to see it up close, but Eros had picked up speed after it had turned, almost as though the asteroid were impatient for the journey to end now that the destination was in sight. He and the crew sat in the galley of the Rocinante and watched it on the broadcast newsfeeds. Amos had dug up yet another bottle of faux tequila from somewhere and was liberally splashing it into coffee cups. Alex had them flying toward Tycho at a gentle one-third g. No need to hurry now.
