Nemesis Games

Bobbie’s couch hissed on its gimbals as she shifted her weight. She didn’t believe it either. The moments stretched. Alex opened the channel again. “Hey out there, unidentified ship. I’m going to cut thrust here until I hear from you. I’m just letting you know so I don’t startle anyone. I’d really appreciate a ping back, just so we all know we’re good here. No offense meant.”

He cut the drive; the grip of acceleration gravity loosened its hold on him. The gel of the couch launched him gently against his restraints. He could feel his heartbeat in his neck. It was going fast.

“They’re deciding what to do about us,” Bobbie said.

“That’s my guess too.”

“Taking them a while.”

The Razorback announced a visual match, but it wasn’t with the data Holden had sent them. The ship with its sights on them wasn’t any of the colony ships that had gone missing out in the gates. With an eighty-nine percent certainty, it was a Martian naval corvette, floating dark. Behind him, Bobbie saw the same thing and drew the same conclusions.

“Well,” she said. “Fuck.”

Profile match completed, the Razorback returned to its scanning arc. Another passive contact. If the corvette was the Pau Kant, it wasn’t out here alone. And then two more. And then six. The Razorback picked the nearest one and cheerfully started matching its profile. By reflex, Alex went to activate his point defense cannons. Only, of course, he didn’t have any.

“Maybe they’ll talk,” Bobbie said. He could hear it in her voice that she didn’t expect them to. He didn’t either. Half a second later, the Razorback announced two fast-movers coming from the corvette.

He spun the pinnace away from the missiles and punched the drive. The couch slammed into his back like a blow. Behind him, Bobbie grunted. With a mental apology to her, he pushed them to ten g, and the pinnace leaped forward eagerly.

It wasn’t going to be enough.

As light as the Razorback was, the missiles were an order of magnitude less mass to accelerate. And they didn’t carry anything as fragile as a human body. They could pull a much heavier burn and close the gap to target in a matter of hours. He didn’t have countermeasures to shoot them down, and there was nothing to hide behind. He didn’t even have a load of cargo to drop out the back in hopes the missiles might blunder into it.

His vision started to narrow, darkening at the edges and dancing gold and fractured in the center. He felt the couch’s needles slide into his thighs and neck, the juice like pouring ice water into his veins. His heart labored and he was fighting to breathe, but his vision was clear. And his mind. He had to think. His ship was fast, as ships went, but nothing compared to a missile. There was no cover he could reach in time, and if the missiles were half as good as the ship that fired them, they’d be able to guide themselves right up his drive cone, no matter what he tried to huddle behind.

He could run away, draw the attackers into a line behind him, and then drop core. The vented fusion reaction would probably take out at least the first one. Maybe more. But then they’d be on the float, and at the mercy of a second volley.

Well. A bad plan was better than no plan at all. His finger twitched on the controls. The layout was unfamiliar and the fear that he was coding in the wrong information just because he wasn’t on his own damned boat was like a stake in his heart.

Bobbie grunted. He wasn’t strong enough to look back at her. He hoped it wasn’t pain. High g wasn’t a good thing for someone who’d had a bunch of holes pushed through her recently. He told himself it was just the needles feeding her the juice.

An alert popped onto his screen from Bobbie’s console. PRIME MINISTER. GUARD SHIPS.

Between the drugs and the panic and the compromised blood flow in his brain, it took Alex a few seconds to understand what she meant. The Razorback didn’t have point defense cannons or interceptor missiles, but the flotilla heading for Luna did. Alex pulled the data into the plotting system. There was no way they could reach the Martian ships before the missiles caught up with them, but it was just possible – barely – to get inside the range of their antimissile defenses. If he turned course now. If the Martians figured out what was going on and launched almost immediately. And the burn was going to be at the outer limit of what he or Bobbie could handle.