Chapter Forty-Six: Bobbie

 

One of Bobbie’s most vivid memories was of the day she got her orders to report to the 2nd Expeditionary Force Spec War training facility. Force Recon. The top of the heap for a Martian ground pounder. In boot camp, they’d trained with a Force Recon sergeant. He’d been wearing a suit of gleaming red power armor, and they’d watched him demonstrate its use in a variety of tactical situations. At the end, he’d told them that the top four boots from her class would be transferred to the Spec War facility on the slopes of Hecates Tholus and trained to wear the armor and join the baddest fighting unit in the solar system.

She decided that meant her.

Determined to win one of those four coveted slots, she’d thrown herself into her boot camp training with everything she had. It turned out that was quite a lot. Not only did she make it into the top four, she was number one by an embarrassing margin. And then the letter came, ordering her to report to Hecate Base for recon training, and it was all worth it. She called her father and just screamed for two minutes. When he finally got her to calm down and tell him what she was calling about, he screamed back for even longer. You’re one of the best now, baby, he’d said at the end, and the warmth those words put in her heart had never really faded.

Even now, sitting on the gray metal deck in the dirty machine shop on a stolen Martian warship. Even with all her mates torn into pieces and scattered across the frozen surface of Ganymede. Even with her military status in limbo and her loyalty to her nation justifiably in question. Even with all that, You’re one of the best now, baby made her smile. She felt an ache to call her father and tell him what had happened. They’d always been close, and when neither of her brothers had followed in his footsteps by choosing a military career, she had. It had just strengthened the connection. She knew he’d understand what it was costing her to turn her back on everything she held sacred to avenge her team.

And she had a powerful premonition she’d never see him again.

Even if they made it through to Jupiter with half the UN fleet hunting them, and even if when they got there, Admiral Nguyen and the dozen or more ships he controlled didn’t immediately blow them out of the sky, and even if they managed to stop whatever was happening in orbit around Io with the Rocinante intact, Holden was still planning to land and save Prax’s daughter.

The monsters would be there.

She knew it as surely as she’d ever known anything in her life. Each night she dreamed of facing it again. The thing flexing its long fingers and staring at her with its too-large glowing blue eyes, ready to finish what it had started all those months earlier on Ganymede. In her dream, she raised a gun that grew out of her hand, and started shooting it as it ran toward her, black spiderwebs spilling from holes that closed like water. She always woke before it reached her, but she knew how the dream would end: with her shattered body left cooling on the ice. She also knew that when Holden led his team down to the laboratories on Io where the monsters were made, she’d go along with him. The scene from her dream would play out in real life. She knew it like she knew her father’s love. She welcomed it.

On the floor around her lay the pieces of her armor. With weeks of travel on the way to Io, she had time to completely strip and refit it. The Rocinante’s machine shop was well stocked, and the tools were of Martian make. It was the perfect location. The suit had seen a lot of use without much maintenance, but if she was being honest with herself, the distraction was the payoff. A suit of Martian reconnaissance armor was an incredibly complex machine, finely tuned to its wearer. Stripping and reassembling it wasn’t a trivial task. It required full concentration. Every moment she spent working on it was another moment when she didn’t think about the monster waiting to kill her on Io.

Sadly, that distraction was over now. She’d finished with the maintenance, even finding the micro-fracture in a tiny valve that was causing the slow but persistent leak of fluid in the suit’s knee actuator. It was time to just put it all back together. It had the feeling of ritual. A final cleansing before going out to meet death on the battlefield.

I’ve watched too many Kurosawa movies, she thought, but couldn’t quite abandon the idea. The imagery was a lovely way of turning angst and suicidal ideation into honor and noble sacrifice.

She picked up the torso assembly and carefully wiped it off with a damp cloth, removing the last bits of dust and machine oil that clung to the outside. The smell of metal and lubricant filled the air. And while she bolted armor plating back onto the frame, the red enameled surface covered with a thousand dings and scratches, she stopped fighting the urge to ritualize the task and just let it happen. She was very likely assembling her death shroud. Depending on how the final battle went, this ceramic and rubber and alloy might house her corpse for the rest of eternity.

She flipped the torso assembly over and began working on the back. A long gouge in the enamel showed the violence of her passage across Ganymede’s ice when the monster had self-destructed right in front of her. She picked up a wrench, then put it back down, tapping on the deck with her knuckle.

Why then?

Why had the monster blown itself up at that moment? She remembered the way it had started to shift, new limbs bursting from its body as it watched her. If Prax was right, that was the moment the constraint systems that Mao’s scientists had installed failed. And they’d set the bomb up to detonate if the creature was getting out of their control. But that just pushed the question one level back. Why had their control over the creature’s physiology failed at that precise moment? Prax said that regenerative processes were a good place for constraint systems to fail. And her platoon had riddled the creature with gunfire as it had charged their lines. It hadn’t seemed to hurt it at the time, but each wound represented a sudden burst of activity inside the creature’s cells, or whatever it had in place of cells, as the monster healed. Each was a chance for the new growth to slip the leash.

Maybe that was the answer. Don’t try to kill the monster. Just damage it enough that the program starts to break down and the self-destruct kicks in. She wouldn’t even have to survive, just last long enough to harm the monster beyond its ability to safely repair itself. All she needed was enough time to really hurt it.

She put down the armor plate she was working on and picked up the helmet. The suit’s memory still had the gun camera footage of the fight on it. She hadn’t watched it again after Avasarala’s presentation to the crew of the Roci. She hadn’t been able to.

She pushed herself to her feet and hit the comm panel on the wall. “Hey, Naomi? You in ops?”

“Yep,” Naomi said after a few seconds. “You need something, Sergeant?”

“Do you think you can tell the Roci to talk to my helmet? I’ve got the radio on, but it won’t talk to civilian stuff. This is one of our boats, so I figure the Roci has the keys and codes.”

There was a long pause, so Bobbie put the helmet on a worktable next to the closest wall monitor and waited.

“I’m seeing a radio node that the Roci is calling ‘MCR MR Goliath III 24397A15.’”

“That’s me,” Bobbie said. “Can you send control of that node down to the panel in the machine shop?”

“Done,” Naomi said after a second.

“Thanks,” Bobbie said, and killed the comm. It took her a moment to re-familiarize herself with the Martian military video software, and to convince the system to use out-of-date data-unpacking algorithms. After a few false starts, the raw gun camera footage from her fight on Ganymede was playing on the screen. She set it to endless loop and sat back down on the deck with her suit.

She finished bolting the back armor on and began attaching the torso’s power supply and main hydraulic system during the first play-through. She tried not to feel anything about the images on screen, nor to attach any significance to them or think of them as a puzzle to be solved. She just concentrated on her work on the suit with her mind and let her subconscious chew on the data from the screen.

The distraction caused her to redo things occasionally as she worked, but that was fine. She wasn’t on a deadline. She finished attaching the power supply and main motors. Green lights lit up on the hand terminal she had plugged into the suit’s brain. On the wall screen by her helmet, a UN soldier was hurled across the surface of Ganymede at her. A confusion of images as she dodged away. When the image steadied, both the UN Marine and her friend Tev Hillman were gone.

Bobbie picked up an arm assembly and began reattaching it to the torso. The monster had picked up a soldier in a suit of armor comparable to her own and then thrown him with enough force to kill instantly. There was no defense against that kind of strength except not to get hit. She concentrated on putting the arm back together.

When she looked up at the screen again, the feed had restarted. The monster was running across the ice, chasing the UN soldiers. It killed one of them. The Bobbie on the video began firing, followed by her entire platoon opening up.

The creature was fast. But when the UN soldiers suddenly turned to open a firing lane for the Martians, the creature didn’t react quickly. So maybe fast in a straight line, but not a lot of lateral speed. That might be useful. The video caught up again to the UN soldier being thrown into Private Hillman. The creature reacted to gunfire, to injuries, even though they didn’t slow it down. She thought back to the video she’d seen of Holden and Amos engaging the creature in the Rocinante’s cargo hold. It had largely ignored them until Amos started shooting it, and then it had erupted into violence.

But the first creature had attacked the UN troop station. So at least to some degree, they could be directed. Given orders. Once they no longer had orders, they seemed to lapse into a default state of trying to get increased energy and break the constraints. While in that state, they ignored pretty much everything but food and violence. The next time she ran into one, unless it had specifically been ordered to attack her, she could probably pick her own battleground, draw it to her where she wanted to be. That was useful too.

She finished attaching the arm assembly and tested it. Greens across the board. Even if she wasn’t sure whom she was working for, at least she hadn’t forgotten how to do her job.

On the screen, the monster ran up the side of the big mech Yojimbo and tore the pilot’s hatch off. Sa’id, the pilot, was hurled away. Again with the ripping and throwing. It made sense. With a combination like enormous strength and virtual immunity to ballistic damage as your tool set, running straight at your opponent, then ripping them in two was a pretty winning strategy. Throwing heavy objects at lethal speeds went hand in hand with the strength. And kinetic energy was a bitch. Armor might deflect bullets or lasers, and it might help cushion impacts, but no one had ever made armor that could shrug off all the kinetic energy imparted by a large mass moving at high speed. At least not in something a human could wear. If you were strong enough, a garbage Dumpster was better than a gun.

So when the monster attacked, it ran straight at its enemy, hoping to get a grip on them, which pretty much ended the fight. If it couldn’t do that, it tried to hurl heavy objects at the opponent. The one in the cargo bay had nearly killed Jim Holden by throwing a massive crate. Unfortunately, her armor had a lot of the same restrictions it had. While it made her very fast when she wanted to be, it was not particularly good at lateral movement. Most things built for speed weren’t. Cheetahs and horses didn’t do a lot of sideways running. She was strong in her suit, but not nearly as strong as it was. She did have an advantage with firearms in that she could run away from the creature while continuing to attack from range. The creature couldn’t throw a massive object at her without stopping and anchoring itself. It might be ungodly strong, but it still only weighed what it weighed, and Newton had a few things to say about a light object throwing a heavy one.

By the time she’d finished assembling her suit, she’d watched the video over a hundred times, and the tactics of the fight were starting to take shape in her head. In hand-to-hand combat training, she’d been able to overpower most of her opponents. But the small and quick fighters, the ones who knew how to stick-and-move, gave her trouble. That was who she’d be in this fight. She’d have to hit and run, never stopping for a moment. And even then she’d need a lot of luck, because she was fighting way out of her weight class, and one shot from the monster was a guaranteed knockout.

Her other advantage was that she didn’t really have to win. She just had to do enough damage to make the monster kill itself. By the time she’d climbed into her newly refurbished suit and let it close around her for a final test, she was pretty sure she could do that.

 

Bobbie thought her newfound peace about the battle to come would finally let her sleep, but after three hours of tossing and turning in her rack, she gave up. Something still itched at the back of her head. She was trying to find her Bushido, and there were still too many things she couldn’t let go of. Something wasn’t giving her permission yet.

So she pulled on a large fuzzy bathrobe she’d stolen from the Guanshiyin, and rode the ladder-lift up toward the ops deck. It was third watch, so the ship was deserted. Holden and Naomi had a cabin together, and she found herself envying that human contact right now. Something certain to cling to amid all the other uncertainty. Avasarala was in her borrowed cabin, probably sending messages to people back on Earth. Alex would be asleep in his room, and for a brief moment she considered waking him. She liked the gregarious pilot. He was genuine in a way she hadn’t seen much of since leaving active duty. But she also knew that waking a man up at three a.m. while in her bathrobe sent signals she didn’t intend. Rather than try to explain that she just needed to talk to someone, she passed the crew deck by and kept going.

Amos was sitting at a station in ops with his back to her, taking the late watch. To avoid startling him, she cleared her throat. He didn’t move or react, so she walked to the comm station. Looking back at him, she saw that his eyes were closed and his breathing was very deep and regular. Sleeping on a duty watch would get you captain’s mast, at the least, on an MCRN ship. It seemed Holden had let discipline lapse a bit since his Navy days.

Bobbie opened up the comms and found the closest relay for tightbeam traffic. First she called her father. “Hi, Pop. Not sure you should try and answer this. The situation here is volatile and evolving rapidly. But you may hear a lot of crazy shit over the next few days. Some of it might be about me. Just know that I love you guys, and I love Mars. Everything I did was to try and protect you and my home. I might have lost my way a little bit, because things got complicated and hard to figure out. But I think I see a clear path now, and I’m going to take it. I love you and Mom. Tell the boys they suck.” Before she turned off the recording, she reached out and touched the screen. “Bye, Dad.”

She pressed send, but something still felt incomplete. Outside her family, anyone who’d tried to help her in the last three months was sitting on the same ship she was, so it didn’t make sense.

Except, of course, that it did. Because not everyone was on this ship.

Bobbie punched up another number from memory and said, “Hi, Captain Martens. It’s me. I think I know what you were trying to help me see. I wasn’t ready for it then, but it stuck with me. So you didn’t waste your time. I get it now. I know this wasn’t my fault. I know I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m going back to the start now because I understand. Not angry, not hurt, not blaming myself. Just my duty to finish the fight.”

Something loosened in her chest the moment she hit the send button. All the threads had been neatly tied up, and now she could go to Io and do what she needed to do without regret. She let out a long sigh and slid down in the crash couch until she was almost prone. She suddenly felt bone tired. Like she could sleep for a week. She wondered if anyone would get mad if she just crashed out in ops instead of going all the way back down the lift.

 

She didn’t remember having fallen asleep, but here she was stretched out in the comm station’s crash couch, a small puddle of drool next to her head. To her relief, her robe seemed to have remained mostly in place, so at least she hadn’t bare-assed everyone walking through.

“Gunny?” Holden said in a tone of voice that meant he was saying it again. He was standing over her, a concerned look on his face.

“Sorry, sorry,” she said, sitting up and pulling her robe more tightly around her middle. “I needed to send out some messages last night. Must have been more tired than I thought.”

“Yeah,” Holden said. “It’s no problem. Sleep wherever you like.”

“Okay,” Bobbie said, backing toward the crew ladder. “With that, I think I’ll go down and take a shower and try to turn back into a human.”

Holden nodded as she went, a strange smile on his face. “Sure. Meet me in the machine shop when you’re dressed.”

“Roger that,” she said, and bolted down the ladder.

After a decadently long shower and a change into her clean red-and-gray utility uniform, she grabbed a cup of coffee from the galley and made her way back down to the machine shop. Holden was already there. He had a crate the size of a guitar case sitting on one of the workbenches, and a larger square crate next to his feet on the deck. When she entered the compartment, he patted the crate on the table. “This is for you. I saw when you came on board that you seemed to be missing yours.”

Bobbie hesitated a moment, then walked over to the crate and flipped it open. Inside sat a 2mm electrically fired three-barrel Gatling gun, of the type the Marines designated a Thunderbolt Mark V. It was new and shiny and exactly the type that would fit into her suit.

“This is amazing,” Bobbie said after catching her breath. “But it’s just an awkward club without ammo.”

Holden kicked the crate on the floor. “Five thousand rounds of two-millimeter caseless. Incendiary-tipped.”

“Incendiary?”

“You forget, I’ve seen the monster up close too. Armor piercing doesn’t help at all. If anything, it reduces soft-tissue damage. But since the lab stuck an incendiary bomb into all of them, I figure that means they aren’t fireproof.”

Bobbie lifted the heavy weapon out of the crate and put it on the floor next to her newly reassembled suit.

“Oh, hell yes.”

 

 

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