Holden looked behind him at Naomi, Alex, and Amos. His crew. They stared back, faces ashen and ghostly in the green light of their suit displays. Gomez pumped his fist in triumph as the outer pressure door slid open, revealing the elevator doors. Kelly gestured to his men.
The one called Mole turned around and started to walk to the elevator when his face disintegrated in a spray of pebble-shaped bits of armored glass and blood. His armored torso and the corridor bulkhead beside him bloomed in a hundred small detonations and puffs of smoke. His body jerked and swayed, attached to the floor by magnetic boots.
Holden’s sense of unreality washed away in adrenaline. The fire spraying across the wall and Mole’s body was high-explosive rounds from a rapid-fire weapon. The comm channel filled with yelling from the marines and Holden’s own crew. To Holden’s left, Gomez yanked the elevator doors open using the augmented strength of his powered armor, exposing the empty shaft behind them.
“Inside!” Kelly shouted. “Everybody inside!”
Holden held back, pushing Naomi in, and then Alex. The last marine—the one Kelly had called Dookie—fired his rifle on full auto at some target around the corner from Holden. When the weapon ran dry, the marine dropped to one knee and ejected the clip in the same motion. Almost faster than Holden could follow, he pulled a new magazine from his harness and slapped it into his weapon. He was firing again less than two seconds after he’d run out.
Naomi yelled at Holden to get into the elevator shaft, and then a viselike hand grabbed his shoulder, yanked him off his magnetic grip on the floor, and hurled him through the open elevator doors.
“Get killed when I’m not babysitting,” Lieutenant Kelly barked.
They shoved off the walls of the elevator shaft and flew down the long tunnel toward the aft of the ship. Holden kept looking back at the open door, receding into the distance behind them.
“Dookie isn’t following us,” he said.
“He’s covering our exit,” Kelly replied.
“So we better get away,” Gomez added. “Make it mean something.”
Kelly, at the head of the group, grabbed at a rung on the wall of the shaft and came to a jerking stop. Everyone else followed suit.
“Here’s our exit. Gomez, go check it out,” Kelly said. “Holden, here’s the plan. We’ll be taking one of the corvettes from the hangar bay.”
That made sense to Holden. The corvette class was a light frigate. A fleet escort vessel, it was the smallest naval ship equipped with an Epstein drive. It would be fast enough to travel anywhere in the system and outrun most threats. Its secondary role was as a torpedo bomber, so it would also have teeth. Holden nodded inside his helmet at Kelly, then gestured for him to continue. Kelly waited until Gomez had finished opening the elevator doors and gone into the hangar bay.
“Okay, I’ve got the key card and activation code to get us inside and the ship fired up. I’ll be heading straight for it, so all of you stick right on my ass. Make sure your boot mags are off. We’re going to push off the wall and fly to it, so aim straight or you miss your ride. Everyone with me?”
Affirmative replies all around.
“Outstanding. Gomez, what’s it look like out there?”
“Trouble, El Tee. Half a dozen boarders looking over the ships in the hangar. Powered armor, zero-g maneuvering packs, and heavy weapons. Loaded for bear,” Gomez whispered back. People always whispered when they were hiding. Wrapped in a space suit and surrounded by vacuum, Gomez could have been lighting fireworks inside his armor and no one would have heard it, but he whispered.
“We run for the ship and shoot our way through,” Kelly said. “Gomez, I’m bringing the civvies in ten seconds. You’re covering fire. Shoot and displace. Try and make them think you’re a small platoon.”
“You callin’ me small, sir?” Gomez said. “Six dead assholes coming up.”
Holden, Amos, Alex, and Naomi followed Kelly out of the elevator shaft and into the hangar bay and stopped behind a stack of military-green crates. Holden peeked over them, spotting the boarders immediately. They were in two groups of three near the Knight,one group walking on top of it and the other on the deck below it. Their armor was flat black. Holden hadn’t seen the design before.
Kelly pointed at them and looked at Holden. Holden nodded back. Kelly pointed across the hangar at a squat black frigate about twenty-five meters away, halfway between them and the Knight.He held up his left hand and began counting down from five on his fingers. At two, the room strobed like a disco: Gomez opening fire from a position ten meters from their own. The first barrage hit two of the boarders on top of the Knightand hurled them spinning off. A heartbeat later, a second burst was fired five meters from where Holden had seen the first. He would have sworn it was two different men.
Kelly folded up the last finger on his hand, planted his feet on the wall, and pushed off toward their corvette. Holden waited for Alex, Amos, and Naomi, then shoved off last. By the time he was in motion, Gomez was firing from a new location. One of the boarders on the deck pointed a large weapon toward the muzzle flash from Gomez’s gun. Gomez and the crate he’d been taking cover behind disappeared in fire and shrapnel.
They were halfway to the ship and Holden was starting to think they might make it when a line of smoke crossed the room and intersected with Kelly, and the lieutenant disappeared in a flash of light.
Chapter Fourteen: Miller
The Xinglongdied stupid. Afterward, everyone knew she was one of thousands of small-time rock-hopping prospector ships. The Belt was lousy with them: five- or six-family operations that had scraped together enough for a down payment and set up operations. When it happened, they’d been three payments behind, and their bank—Consolidated Holdings and Investments—had put a lien on the ship. Which, common wisdom had it, was why they had disabled her transponder. Just honest folks with a rust bucket to call their own trying to keep flying.
If you were going to make a poster of the Belter’s dream, it would have been the Xinglong.
The Scipio Africanus,a patrol destroyer, was due to head back down toward Mars at the end of its two-year tour of the Belt. They both headed for a captured cometary body a few hundred thousand kilometers from Chiron to top off their water.
When the prospecting ship first came in range, the Scipiosaw a fast-moving ship running dark and headed more or less in their direction. The official Martian press releases all said that the Scipiohad tried repeatedly to hail her. The OPA pirate casts all said it was crap and that no listening station in the Belt had heard anything like that. Everyone agreed that the Scipiohad opened its point defense cannons and turned the prospecting ship into glowing slag.
The reaction had been as predictable as elementary physics. The Martians were diverting another couple dozen ships to help “maintain order.” The OPA’s shriller talking heads called for open war, and fewer and fewer of the independent sites and casts were disagreeing with them. The great, implacable clockwork of war ticked one step closer to open fighting.
And someone on Ceres had put a Martian-born citizen named Enrique Dos Santos through eight or nine hours of torture and nailed the remains to a wall near sector eleven’s water reclamation works. They identified him by the terminal that had been left on the floor along with the man’s wedding ring and a thin faux-leather wallet with his credit access data and thirty thousand Europa-script new yen. The dead Martian had been affixed to the wall with a single-charge prospector’s spike. Five hours afterward, the air recyclers were still laboring to get the acid smell out. The forensics team had taken their samples. They were about ready to cut the poor bastard down.