Melba felt a sudden urge to tear off the mech suit, swirl her tongue across the roof of her mouth, feel the chemical rush. To grab the narrow Belter’s neck in her bare hands and feel the bones snap. It would be a yearlong dream of revenge made tactile and perfect. But two other crew members were on the ship, and she didn’t know where they were. The terror she’d felt in that sleazy Baltimore casino came rushing back. Crawling helplessly on the floor in the post-drug collapse while people banged at the door to get in. She couldn’t risk a crash until she knew where everyone was.
Naomi looked up at the sound of the door, pleasure in the woman’s dark eyes as if the interruption were a happy surprise, and then shock, and then a cold fury.
For a moment, neither one moved.
With a yell, the woman launched herself at Melba, spinning the spool of wire in front of her. Melba tried to dodge, but the bulk of the mech and its slow response made it impossible. The wire hit her left cheek with a sound like a brick falling to earth, and for a moment her head rang. She brought up the mech’s arm in a rough block, taking the Belter solidly in the ribs and sending them both spinning. Melba grabbed at a handhold, missed it, and then tried for another. The mech’s hand latched on, crushing the metal flat and almost pulling it from the wall, but the Belter was ahead of her, skimming through the air at Melba, teeth bared like a shark. Melba tried to get the mech’s free arm up to bat her away, but the Belter was already too close. She grabbed the front of Melba’s jumpsuit, balling it in a fist, and used the leverage to swing a hard knee into her ribs, punctuating each blow with a word.
“You. Don’t. Get. To hurt. My. Ship.”
Melba felt a rib give way. She reached her tongue for the roof of her mouth, but again she didn’t make the small private circles that would flush her blood with fire. She had to be awake and functional when the fight was over. She gritted her teeth and curled the mech’s free arm in, bending it against itself, and then snapped her hand closed. The Belter screamed. The mech’s claw had her by the shoulder. Melba squeezed again and heard the muffled, wet sound of bone breaking.
She threw the Belter across the room as hard as the motors let her. Where the woman bounced off the far wall, a smear of blood marked it. Melba waited, watching the Belter rotate in the air, directionless and loose as a rag doll sinking to the bottom of a swimming pool. A growing sphere of blood adhered to the woman’s shoulder and neck.
“I do what I want,” Melba said, and the voice sounded like someone else’s.
Carefully, she pulled herself to the control panel. The panel was off, fixed to the deck with a length of adhesive tape. The guts within were a mess of wires and plates. The Rocinantehad taken some damage in the catastrophe, but not so much that Melba couldn’t do what was needed. She shrugged out of the mech, cracked her knuckles, traced the major control nodes, and plugged them back into the panel. The local memory check took only a few seconds, and she overrode the full system check. It was nothing she could have done before she left Earth, but Melba Koh had spent months learning about the guts of military ships. This was just the sort of thing Soledad, Stanni, and Bob would have checked on if they’d been working maintenance. It was something Ren would have taught her.
Her fingers curled, stumbling over the keyboard for a moment, but she got it back.
The control specs of the reactor came up. Releasing the magnetic bottle that kept the core from melting through the ship was deliberately designed to be difficult. Changing the limits on the reaction itself until it would eventually outstrip the bottle’s ability to contain it was also hard, but less so. And it would give her a little time to tell Holden what she’d done, then get out of the ship and back toward the Thomas Prince. In the chaos of the day, no one might even know that someone had survived the death of the Rocinante.
A flicker in her peripheral vision was the only warning she had, but it was enough. Melba twisted out of the way, the Belter’s massive wrench hissing through the air where her temple had been. Melba pushed back with her legs, struggling frantically to worm back into the mech. She tensed against the coming attack, but no blows came. She shrugged into the metal and jammed her hands into the waldoes, grabbing the wall and spinning back to the fight just as the Belter looked up from the control panel. Blood was crawling up the woman’s neck, held to her by surface tension, and her smile was triumphant. The control panel flashed red and a screen of code crawled over it too fast to read. The lights in the room went off, and the emergency LEDs flickered on. Melba felt her throat go tight.
The Belter had dumped core. The reaction Melba had come to overload was dissipating in a cloud of gas behind the ship. The Belter’s smile was feral and triumphant.
“Doesn’t change anything,” Melba said. It hurt to talk. “You have torpedoes. I’ll overload one of those.”
“Not in my lifetime,” the Belter said, and attacked again.
Her swing was lopsided, though. Clumsy. The wrench clanged against the mech’s joint, but it didn’t do any damage. The Belter launched herself out of reach just as Melba swung an arm at her. The Belter wasn’t using her injured arm at all, and she left spinning droplets of blood whenever she changed direction.
Melba wondered why the woman didn’t call for help. On little ships like this, opening a communications channel was often as simple as saying it out loud. Either the computer was down, the rest of the crew dead or incapacitated, or it simply hadn’t occurred to her. It didn’t matter. It didn’t change what Melba had to do. She shifted to her right, sliding through the air, moving handhold to handhold, never giving the other woman the chance to catch her unmoored and spin her into the open air at the center of the room. The Belter perched on the wall, her dark eyes darting one way, then other, searching for advantage. There was no fear in them, no sentimentality. Melba had no doubt that if the opportunity came, Naomi would kill her.
She reached the hatch, setting the mech’s claw to grip a handhold, and then slipping one arm free to reach for the door’s controls. It was a provocation, and it worked. The Belter jumped, not straight at Melba, but to the deck above her, then turned, kicked, off, and drove down, her heels aiming for Melba’s head.
Melba drove her arm back into the mech and snapped the free arm up, catching the Belter in mid-flight. Her handhold broke free of the wall, and the pair of them floated together into the open air of the room. The Belter’s injured arm was caught in the mech’s clamp, and she kicked savagely with her heels. One blow connected, and Melba’s vision narrowed for a moment. She pulled the Belter through the air, worrying at her like a terrier with a rat, and then managed to swing the free arm up and catch the woman by the neck.
The Belter’s hand flew up to the clamp, panic in her expression. Her eyes went wide and bright. It would take a twitch of Melba’s fingers to crush the woman’s throat, and they both knew it. A sense of triumph and overwhelming joy washed through her. Holden might not be here, but she had his lover. She would take someone he loved from him just the way he’d taken her own father from her. This wasn’t even fighting anymore. This was justice.
The Belter’s face was flushing red, her breath constricted and rough. Melba grinned, enjoying the moment.
“This is his fault,” she said. “All of this is what he had coming.”
The Belter scratched at the mech’s claw. The blood that came away might have been from the old wound, or the mech’s grip might already have broken the skin. Melba closed her fingers a fraction, the pressure feather light. The mech’s servos buzzed as it closed a millimeter more. The Belter tried to say something, pushing the word out past her failing windpipe, and Melba knew she couldn’t let her speak. She couldn’t let her beg or weep and cry mercy. If she did, Melba suddenly wasn’t sure she could go through with it, and it had to be done. Sympathy is for the weak, her father’s voice whispered in her ear.