A low screech started, which cycled up into a howl. For a second, Holden thought Naomi was screaming into her headset. He almost started comforting her before he realized he could feel the vibration in his feet. The sound wasn’t coming across the radio. It was transmitting through his boots on the elevator wall. The entire ship was vibrating.

Holden placed his helmet against the wall to get a better sound, and the scream of the ship was almost deafening. It stopped after an endless minute with an ear-shattering bang. Silence followed.

“What the f**k?” Corin said under her breath.

“Naomi? Bull? Anyone still on the line?” Holden yelled, thinking that whatever had happened had torn the ship apart.

“Yeah,” Bull said. “We’re here.”

“What—” Holden started.

“Mission change,” Bull continued. “That sound was them slamming the brakes on the habitat drum. Catastrophic inertia change 2.0. There are a lot of people in that drum getting thrown around right now.”

“Why would they do that? Just to stop the broadcast?”

“Nope,” Bull said with a tired sigh. He sounded like a man who’d just been informed he was going to have to pull a double shift. “It means they think we fortified the elevator shaft and they’re coming the other way.”

“We’re on our way back,” Holden said, gesturing at Corin to follow him.

“Negative,” Bull said. “If they get the laser back online here while Ashford’s still sitting at that control panel, we lose.”

“So what? We’re supposed to get up there, break into the bridge, and shoot everyone while their guys are down there breaking into engineering and shooting all of you?”

Bull’s sigh sounded tired.

“Yeah.”

Chapter Forty-Eight: Bull

T

hey came out of the maintenance shaft like an explosion. Four black-and-red monsters in roughly human shape. Bull and the people he’d managed to gather opened fire as soon as they saw them. A dozen guns against a maelstrom.

“Don’t let them get to the reactor controls,” Bull shouted.

“Roger that,” one of the Earthers said. “Any idea how we stop them, sir?”

He didn’t have one. He unloaded his pistol’s clip with one hand, driving the mech backward across the deck with the other. One of the Martian marines cut across overhead, rifle blazing. Small white marks appeared on the breastplate of the nearest attacker, like a child’s thumbprints on a window. The man in powered armor reached the nearest workstation, ripped the crash couch out of the decking with one hand, and threw it like a massive baseball. The couch sang through the air and shattered against the bulkhead where it hit. If there had been anyone in its path, it would have been worse than a bullet.

Bull kept backing up. When his clip ran out, he gave his full attention to driving the mech. The last of the attackers out of the shaft tried to leap across the room, but the armor’s amplification made it more like a launch. The red-and-black blur careened off the far wall with a sound like a car wreck.

“And that,” Sergeant Verbinski said across the radio, “is why we spend six months training before they put us in those things.” He sounded amused. Good thing somebody was.

Fighting in null g complicated the tactics of a firefight, but the basic rule stayed the same. Hold territory, stay behind cover, have someone there to keep the other side busy when you had to move. The problem, Bull saw almost at once, was that they didn’t have anything that would damage their opponents. The best they could do was make loud noises and trust the people in the battle armor to give in to their reflexive caution. It wouldn’t win the war. Hell, it would barely postpone losing the battle.

“Naomi,” Bull said. “How’re you doing back there?”

“I can dump the core, power this whole bastard down. Just give me three more minutes,” she said. He could hear the focus and drive in her voice. The determination. It didn’t count for shit.

“That’s not going to happen,” he said.

“Just… just hold on.”

“They’re coming back that way now,” Bull said. “And there’s not a goddamn thing we can do to stop them.”

The four attackers bounced through engineering like grasshoppers, massive bodies crashing into walls and consoles, shearing off bits of the bulkhead where they scraped against it. At this point, their best hope was that the enemy force would beat itself to death against the walls. Bull pulled back toward the entryway to the drum, then took a position behind a crate and started firing at the enemy, trying to draw them toward him. If he could get the enemy out into the habitation drum, he might be able to close down the transition point and make the bastards dig back through. It might even give Naomi the minutes she needed.

The people in power armor didn’t seem to notice he was there. One caught a desk, the steel bending in the suit’s glove, and started pulling hand over hand toward the reactor controls.

“Can anybody stop that guy?” Bull asked. No one on the frequency answered. He sighed. “Naomi. You got to leave now.”

“Core’s out. I can drop the grid too. Just a few more minutes.”

“You don’t have them. Come out now, and I’ll try to get you back in when things cool down.”

“But—”

“You’re no good to anyone dead,” he said. The channel went quiet, and for a long moment he thought the Belter had been caught, been killed. Then she came sailing out of the hallway, leading with her chin, her good arm and hair streaming behind her like stabilizing fins. The nearest of the people in power suits grabbed at her, but she was already gone, and they were too timid to try jumping after her.

Bull saw another of the enemy struggling with something. A gun. The massive glove was too thick to fit through the weapon’s trigger guard. As Bull watched, the enemy snapped the guard off and settled the gun in its fist, like a child’s toy carried by a large man. Bull fired at it a few more times without much hope of doing damage.

Four Earthers shouted with one voice and launched themselves at the one with the gun. The attacker didn’t fire. Just swept one big metal arm through the air, scattering Bull’s people like they were sparrows.

His people were going to get killed—were getting killed—and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“Okay kids,” he said. “Let’s pack up and go home. It’s getting too hot in here.”




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