Ced licked his lips. "It won't last. They'll build a new fleet. Stick that Swimmer tech in it. And make us obsolete."
"Yes, I'm sure that's their long-term plan. And that's why, when we go with them to the Hive, we'll steal that tech during the fight."
He wandered around the front of the desk. In his hand, the gun felt as heavy as a dinner table. "Everyone who came before you thought the same thing: they're not using us, we're using them. And look where it got us. You're the same as everyone else, Kansas. A puppet. But we finally have the chance to cut the strings."
She snorted. "A puppet? You think that rich fool wanted me to strike down the care debt? The very system that let them put us in their chains? Once the other crews have abandoned it, and I've finished uniting this place, do you really think I intend to keep bowing down?"
"Oh, I believe you'll make your stand. And it will mean the end of us."
Kansas gazed at him for three long seconds. "You think it's so simple. That we roll out of here with the banners of justice waving over our heads. Go to the Hive's aid. Crush Valiant, and live forever free."
"We could try."
"And what happens when we limp home with a crippled fleet? And one of the other groups that's wanted us dead for so long declares that, in the wake of our attack on Valiant, we're a rabid dog that needs to be put down? You might save the Hive—and you'll sacrifice the Locker in the process."
"If we're doomed either way, then the only choice is to go down fighting. It's what the founders would have done."
"I know a third way." She pushed back her chair and stood. She wore white-trimmed blue pants and a sleeveless white shirt. "I have money. More money than you could ever dream of. We leave here. Go to Earth. Set up in one of the mountain countries. Or the islands. Doesn't matter which. They're all friendly to people with money. And we stay there. You and me."
Ced watched her limbs for the tension of an incoming attack. "You'd walk away from this?"
"If the ship's burning, only a lunatic doesn't jump." Her eyes moved between his. "The greed, the corruption, you can't will it away. It will always be here, waiting to devour us. The only escape is to leave it behind."
She was close enough to smell her skin. And then he could taste it, the memory of their first time together in the house of the dead politician. The softness of her skin inviting his touch—and beneath it, the hardness of her muscles denying it. Standing before her, he saw a crack in her expression, a hole in the stone. Through it, he could see that she meant it. She would leave. They could be young. Rich. Free. Together.
And everyone they left behind would fall into the abyss.
She reached for his arm. He pulled back. "Stop."
"Isn't this what you always wanted?"
"We're past that now."
"Don't you love me anymore?" She meant the words to be hard, but she couldn't hide the want in her eye.
"Like you know what love is. You've never done anything but use me."
"You think I was using you?" She furrowed her brow. "For what?"
"First, to get close to Garnes. Then, to get the support of the people I knew. You hadn't been around in years. You needed someone who still knew the streets."
"Nothing was going to stop me from getting to Garnes. You being there just made it a little faster. And the others? They didn't matter. I earned the loyalty of four-fifths of the Dragons the second I nuked their debts."
Ced searched her face. "Then why did you want me?"
She looked past his shoulder. "Doesn't matter. Like you said. We're past that."
"Tell me why!"
Her eyebrows jumped up. "Because," she said, snapping off each syllable like the breaking of a stick, "when you look out there, at the world, you don't see things as they are. You see things how they could be. I wanted to believe you. That things could be different. That things could be better. When I was around you, it was like being inside from the cold."
His throat caught. "Why didn't you ever tell me this?"
"I didn't know that I could believe it. It's not what my eyes see. All I see is lowness. Meanness. People grabbing whatever they can take." She thrust her jaw forward. "And I was right, wasn't I? You betrayed me. Released the people from the Hive. Threatened everything I'd built."
"I thought you were lost. You said you would kill me if I did it!"
"You fucking idiot," she said softly. "And you believed me?"
His world tilted. She hadn't believed he'd do it, had she? She'd bluffed him and he'd called it but he hadn't seen it as a bluff. Was he the one who'd broken things? If so, could they be put back together?
She came toward him, lips parted, chest rising. He wasn't moving yet, but he could feel himself about to, like a ship drifting away from port before firing up its engines. A warm fog enclosed him.
Her hands darted forward. Stiff as a knife, one jabbed into his solar plexus. The other clamped around the wrist of his gun hand. He gasped and pulled back. She anticipated this, flowing with him, driving an uppercut at his chin. He tucked it to his chest and turned his shoulder, her fist glancing off his cheek. Knotted together, he lowered his head and butted at her nose. She dropped her forehead. Their skulls collided with a sickening clack.
As they reeled back, her left hand still clinging to his right, she smashed her heel into his right knee. He knew the move, a basic one from their days in fight class—crumple the opponent, using their fall to yank a weapon from their hand, or, if they held tight, to snap their fingers. Rather than falling backward, he toppled forward in a controlled fall, smashing her into the side of the desk.
She grunted, air rushing from her lungs. He twisted his gun hand, hammering his left fist into her forearm. Her grip slipped free. He scrambled back, breathing hard, pain beating in his skull and chest.
Kansas untangled herself from the desk. A lock of blond hair dangled in her face, dislodged by the fight. She swept it back, revealing a round, red mark where their heads had connected. Her gaze lowered to the gun in his hand, holding there for five heartbeats. She looked into his eyes.
"See?" She shook her head and moved toward the door. Someone was yelling from the other side. "Told you that you didn't have the balls—"
He leveled the gun and shot her in the back.
21
Hundreds of missiles glowed from the screen, their red points highlighted by the tactical system. Outside of simulations, Rada had never seen anything like it. In her experience with dogfights, the back-and-forth of missiles and drones could make it look like you were flying through a supernova. Now, the scale of that chaos was magnified a hundred times over.
The defense shifted, fighters and frigates realigning to face the largest clusters of missiles. They unleashed a barrage of their own and swung back, leaving a picket of drones on the fringes. The FinnTech armada's missiles streaked forward, separating from each other to prevent any counter from knocking out more than a single one. With the tactical displaying the previous few seconds of the missiles' course along with their current trajectory, the screen became a burning spiderweb of red and green lines.
The front ranks of missiles slammed into each other. As sudden as a screen snapping on, dozens of white and orange spheres burst across the void. There was almost something cheery about it, like a fruit stand or the strings of lights people put on their houses leading up to Alone Day. Rada's mouth fell open. For a moment, the scene ceased being about the people in the ships struggling for their lives and became an object of wonder, like a geyser erupting or a solar eclipse.
Before the first salvo of missiles finished fighting and dying, the FinnTech armada launched a second. The defenders responded in kind. She was used to watching missiles react to each other in straightforward, predictable maneuvers, retreating to buy themselves space, or plunging into a sudden gap, but with so many of them filling the sky, their behavior became completely different—flock-like, with swathes of rockets making sudden, jarring sweeps, only to sparrow the opposite way a moment lat
er.
"Ain't that beautiful?" MacAdams said.
"From here, yeah," Webber said. "Our opinion might change once we get closer."
Missiles flew in dizzying quantity. Both fleets kept their distance, probing each other with launches of varying size and ferocity. While this drama unfolded with all the subtlety of a habitat fire, a team of small, quick ships detached from the FinnTech cloud, driving inward, then retreating as soon as the first missiles came their way.
The group pulled the same stunt over and over, undulating a little closer to the Hive each time. After eight or nine swoops, the unit held position. Light flashed from their noses. Tactical indicated they had fired a massive amount of kinetic ammunition. It instantly drew up their course: a straight line to a point on the Hive's silvery ring. One of its main missile batteries.
Webber gawked at the screen. "Tell me the Hive has engines."
"Nothing that can move it in time," Rada said. "This is the chief difficulty in defending a fixed-orbit station against mobile opponents."
"So how do they expect to dodge the bullets? Ask them to go somewhere else?"
"Fortunately, better minds than ours have grappled with this problem for years."
The storm of dumb matter sailed through the vastness. It was virtually zero threat to the nimble members of the Hive's fleet, but the Hive itself sat as immobile as a moon awaiting an inbound asteroid. On the screen, a round, convex ship lumbered toward the end point of the bullets' trajectory.
"And you say they've had years to work on this," Webber said flatly.
"When you can't dodge, the only other option is to absorb."
A limb of fighters detached from the Hive's navy, making to engage the gunships. These retreated readily. The broad, disk-like drone distanced itself from the station, sticking to the bullets' trajectory-line like a train on a rail. While missiles and a smattering of drones continued to duke it out in the no-man's-land between the fleets, the kinetic rounds slammed into the shield drone.
It rocked and juddered. White chunks sprayed from its surface, twirling away. Its engines strained, but the momentum of the rounds striking it drove it back in the direction of the silvery ring of the Hive. The last of the bullets made contact. A few off-course rounds sailed past it, passing wide of the vulnerable station. The pale dust dispersed. The drone's once-smooth surface was now cratered and cracked.
"This is nuts," Webber said. "If they wanted, they could toss a mountain of gravel in the Hive's path. Tear it to ribbons."
Rada nodded. "That's the truth of space. Anyone with a ship can commit an atrocity at any time."
MacAdams rubbed his unshaven jaw. "Yet nobody has. I'm gonna count that as a big win for the human race."
"Or another case of Mutually Assured Destruction saving the day. If they pulled that on the Hive, Toman would do the same to their holdings. More likely, the govs would nuke them into ash."
While FinnTech kept the opposition at bay with a steady diet of rockets and drones, their gunships fired one fusillade after another at the Hive, each time aiming at critical parts of the defense systems. Each time, a shield drone dragged itself to intercept and had its outer layers battered into dust and splinters.
On the seventh attempt, a now-cratered drone moved into position. As the first bullets struck it, the ship cracked down its center. Shards spun away. Kinetics zipped past the disintegrating drone. A pack of missiles erupted from the station, bursting directly in the bullets' path.
Black holes opened in the station's face, as if columns of matter had been subtracted from the universe, replaced by nothing. A gout of flame whooshed from the silvery surface, tall enough to swallow an office tower. Rada knew fire looked way worse in zero G, but for a moment, she feared it would spread, ignite a store of missiles, and start a chain reaction that would take out a quarter of the ring. Then the flames faded, vanishing into thin, greasy smoke.
A ripple went through the Hive fleet. Sixty ships surged forward as one, charging toward the superior numbers of the enemy. Missiles sprung from them in a solid wave. FinnTech's ships dropped drones, retreating. The Hive's fighters deployed drones of their own, advancing without hesitation.
Webber licked his lips. "Shit is about to get real, isn't it?"
The drones tore into each other, disintegrating in spheres of flame; with little oxygen to feed them, they winked out quickly. Watching from afar—they were still 16 minutes out—Rada felt two pangs pierce her chest. The first was pure thrill, a gut-deep urge to charge in. And the second was the sick knowledge that she was helplessly removed, too far away to stop any of the carnage that lay ahead.
The Hive vessels ripped through the drone wall and plunged toward the outermost enemy fighters. Caught off guard by the suddenness of the thrust, these wheeled away, dumping missiles behind them like a squid escaping in a cloud of ink. It wasn't enough. Two FinnTech ships were consumed in the rampaging packs of missiles. Three more boosted away at full burn, barely able to scamper to the safety of the counter-barrage launched by their allies.
Arrayed in a wide chevron, the Hive fleet swept into the defenders. Missiles burst so thickly they often screened out the action behind them. Within moments, the formations grew fuzzy at the edges, ships whirling in and out of momentary dogfights. The Hive fleet recohered, rushing at the gunships that had assaulted the station. For a full minute, the screen was so thick with fire and motion that Rada could no longer tell what was happening.
Then the Hive sucked back, as if drawn out by a tide. The FinnTech fleet pursued, lobbing missiles. A counter in the corner of the screen registered five losses for the Hive, six for FinnTech. The defenders sped away in a ragged plane. As they neared the habitat, many of the FinnTech vessels dropped back, but a cluster of fifteen refused to slow, picking at four damaged ships lagging at the rear of the retreat.
Flames erupted from the full circumference of the habitat ring.
"Sweet winking moons," Webber said. "That looks like the opening of the gate to hell."
A colossal circle of missiles leaped toward the scrum of ships. The Hive's retreat reversed course, swinging about to reengage their over-aggressive pursuit. Corralled by missile fire, the fifteen FinnTech vessels struggled to find a lane out.
Heedless of the streaking ring of missiles, an arm of enemy fighters moved to assist the entrapped ships. After a moment, the remainder of the FinnTech force surged forward in support.
Missiles, drones, fighters, and frigates whirled madly. A dozen different dogfights broke out, both sides fighting defensively. Impressive as the station's salvo of missiles appeared, they became just one more stream in the cataract of rockets. Rada doubted its defenses would be enough to tip the scales. Habitats were too immobile and vulnerable to entrust with significant armament.
It was going to be a slugfest. A fight of attrition. FinnTech's numbers were ticking down slightly faster than the Hive's, but they'd brought so many more to the field that their advantage looked insurmountable.
The fight around the station was still in full swing when the Tine entered engagement range.
They'd been braking hard on the way in, but still traveled far faster than the sluggish speeds of the two fleets. Tactical blinked with an iterating array of targets and approaches. Near the fringe of the action, four fighters from both sides looped around each other, lobbing rockets back and forth. Rada adjusted course, speeding toward a tube-shaped ship that wasted none of its hull on affectations like tails or wings.
A sprinkle of missiles headed toward the Tine, looking to brush them away. The ship sprayed counters in response. Rada pushed onward, cutting across the lead ship's bow and dropping two of the drones the supply freighter had given them. These were small, with limited engines, but she pressed close, relying on the Tine's speed to carry them away faster than the enemy's rockets could close. With the reaction space compressed to nil, the tube-shaped fighter broke hard from the drones' missiles, bringing itself directly into those of the Hive fighter pursuing it. It
poofed into a reddish globe.
"Damn right!" Webber pumped his fist at the screens. "One down, two hundred to go!"
"And two drones down," Rada said. "Four left."
"Are you a professional buzz-harsher?"
They were already skimming out of range, curving past the backside of the scrum. She made a tight, MA-augmented turn, coming around to take another shot at the dogfight. A message pinged her device, suggesting/ordering they come about and strafe one of the conflicts closer to the center of the battle. She ignored it, returning to the same dogfight as before, where one of the ships on each side had disintegrated to missile fire. The remaining three-on-two boosted away from the main battle, letting space grow between each other, rockets blossoming between them.
Rada pulled a turn that would have snapped the spine of a normal ship and blatted a volley of kinetics at the lead enemy, inducing it to roll down and to port. It disgorged a stream of missiles, which exploded frighteningly close to its tail, knocking out the rockets converging on it. A lone rocket U-turned ahead of it, hanging there, waiting for the ship to enter its burst radius. The ship swung up, directly into the bullets the Tine had snapped off seconds earlier. It vaporized into an expanding cloud of matter.
Now facing a single target, the remaining Hive fighters quickly neutralized it. The Tine continued to jet away on its relentless momentum, however, and behind it, the overwhelming enemy fleet continued to pick away at the outnumbered defenders. The count on the upper right of tactical now showed the Hive's numbers at 83. FinnTech had suffered more casualties, but remained at 174, with an equal discrepancy in drones.
The frantic spread of missiles slowed. Both sides were depleting themselves, with the Hive ships relying on rocket support from the station's batteries. The shield drones were now gone—from the rear of the enemy, a gunship hung in space, firing steadily. As ships fought and chased through the vacuum, the bullets raced on, unblockable. They shredded through the ribbon of the station, chunks of plastic and metal spinning away from the impact. A streamer of atmosphere smudged the darkness.
Traitor (Rebel Stars Book 2) Page 24