Chapter 32
On the bridge, the other three crew members were waiting on her. Their faces told her how it went with the MCRN before anyone said a word.
"That bad?"
"They're not buying it," Holden confirmed grimly.
"Not surprising," she frowned. "What now?"
"I sent a message to the UN Secretary General and asked her to intervene. We're waiting on her response, but she won't even get the message for another 10 minutes."
"In the meantime, those angry Martians out there are threatening to forcibly board the Roci and take us into custody," Alex added.
"And Drummer won't let us dock," Naomi finished.
Nik hung her head, "still want me to be part of your crew?"
Holden patted her on the shoulder, "don't worry about it. If it wasn't you, it would be something else. We have a knack for getting into messes like this. We've survived worse."
"The good news is that they don't dare fire on us in here," Alex told her.
"But we can't fire back either."
"True."
"What are we going to do? Go in slow circles until they get tired of chasing us?"
"That's the plan. At least until we come up with something better," Holden answered. "There's only two of them, so it will be hard for them to corner us."
"Um, Hoss," Alex interrupted, "there's two more warships coming through the gate right now."
"Things are going to get crowded in here if they keep coming," Naomi said pulling up the area on her console.
"They are ordering us to stand down for boarding."
"Keep us out of range of their grapples, Alex."
"This is going to get dicey if we're not going to break the speed limit," Alex threw over his shoulder as he fired the thrusters to move the ship out of reach. "And the old girl still isn't one-hundred percent."
"Just do what you can," Holden told him. "I need time to think."
"I'll do my best."
"I'll stay and give him a second set of eyes," Naomi volunteered.
"Let's hope Avasarala comes through for us again," he told her as he stepped onto the ladder.
After an hour and several close calls with the warships they were running from, Holden still hadn't heard from Avasarala.
"Goddamnit!" Holden cursed as he paced.
"I guess saving the system a couple times only buys us so much good will," Amos joked.
"Could you just turn me over to them and say you had no involvement?" Nik asked. She was tired of her new friends risking their lives for her.
"No," Jim shook his head. "Even if we wanted to, it's too late for that now. We've lied and are actively keeping you away from them. They'd never believe we're not involved. Anyway, if we let them get close enough to take you, they could go ahead and board us. It'd be lose-lose."
"Jim, we can't keep this up. Alex has been at it for an hour and he's going to get tired and slip up eventually," Naomi told him.
"You think I don't know that?"
"Hey, guys," Alex called out. "We got more incoming."
As they watched, two more MCRN ships came through the ring.
"Jim, there's no way we can outmaneuver six ships."
"Um," Alex cleared his throat, "there are three belter ships changing course now."
"What do you mean?" Holden leaned over his shoulder to look.
Naomi's panel beeped.
"It's Drummer," she told them as she read the incoming transmission. "She's having them run interference for us."
As the Roci and the six warships played a lethal game of tag around the slow zone, a total of five belter ships joined them, trying to stay between the Martians and the Roci. With room to breathe, Holden came up with an idea.
Pointing to one of the gates, he asked, "can you get us through it without getting caught?"
"Do bears shit in the woods?" Alex answered.
Naomi and Nik exchanged confused looks.
"What are you thinking," Naomi asked.
"We still can't keep this up indefinitely. Not without dragging the entire system into conflict because of it."
"But we can't outrun them either," she pointed out.
"But we'll have room to maneuver."
Amos looked up from the console he was consulting, "that's one of the unexplored systems. We don't know what's waiting for us on the other side."
"That's why I chose it. Look," Holden held up his hands to stop more objections, "we have three choices. Keep this up until we either screw up and get caught or start a system-wide shooting war. Head back into the Sol system and hope the UN comes through for us before we're blown apart by the MCRN. Or we can go through that gate and maybe find another option. At least we go down fighting and don't take everyone with us."
Everyone was silent as they considered his words.
"Or, you can give me the shuttle and I turn myself over to them," Nik suggested.
"We have no way of knowing that will stop them even then," Holden shook his head.
"I'll let the other ships know what we intend to do," Naomi announced. "If they can delay the warships for as long as possible, we'll have a good head start. Who knows how far they're willing to chase us in an unknown system?"
"Hopefully not as far as we're willing to run," Alex quipped, not taking his eyes from his screen.
Once again Nik strapped in for a high-G burn. Naomi had been right; it sucked every time. There was no getting used to it, but knowing what to expect made it less stressful, so maybe that was the most she could hope for.
Burning as fast as they dared to the ring gate Holden had picked, they watched as the MCRN ships changed course to pursue and the belter ships maneuver to stay between the Roci and them.
Getting the go-ahead from Medina, they passed through the ring uneventfully and lost contact with the slow zone on LADAR. Until the MCRN ships passed through behind them, they would be blind to any pursuit.
The system they entered seemed ordinary enough on their scans. A white A-type main sequence dwarf star nearly twice the size of Sol orbited by a small red dwarf formed the heart of the system. Three gas giants were in close orbits around the pair. Further out, in the 'Goldilocks' zone, were two rocky planets just a bit bigger than Earth and several smaller than Mars. A wide asteroid belt separated the inner planets from the far-flung outer ones, including at least one more gas giant.
"Since we're the first, do we get to name it?" Alex asked.
"Only if we live," Amos answered.
"Speaking of," Holden broke in, "let's head for the belt and get some distance between us and the gate."
"Got it, Hoss. Plotting a course now."
"At least there's plenty of places to hide," Naomi said.
"Here comes the juice," Alex announced as he increased their burn to race away from the ring at an angle nearly parallel to its plain.
Nearly twelve hours later, they were still playing hide and seek in the asteroid belt with five of the warships. They had managed to put enough distance between them and the gate before the six ships came through and tucked in behind a large asteroid and went silent. It took a while for one of the ships that were searching for them to get close enough to pick up the slight heat signature they were still giving off. Then the chase began again.
Tempers were running high onboard as the stress took its toll on the crew. Keeping larger asteroids between the Roci and five other ships required not only the skills of their pilot, but of Naomi and Holden. Alex, normally even-tempered, had yelled at Naomi when she calculated the trajectory for the wrong asteroid.
Feeling useless, Nik anxiously followed the action on her screen.
"How're you holding up?"
She looked up from her screen and looked over at Amos. Throughout the run, he had been quiet, seeming to doze in his chair.
"It gets a little easier each time," she lied. "But I don't think I will ever get used to high-G maneuvers."
He frowned, "that's not what I'm talking about."
Oh. "I'm fine." Another lie, but she was not going to tell him that she was only keeping herself from screaming her frustration at being so completely at the mercy of others by chewing on the insides of her cheeks. The coppery tang of blood on her tongue and the pain gave her something else to focus on besides her helplessness in this situation.
He leveled a look at her that said 'bullshit' loud and clear, "you have blood on the corner of your mouth."
Did nothing escape his notice? "I bit my lip when we changed direction and slipped behind the two cruisers."
Amos looked unconvinced. "It's a hard thing to have to rely on others if you're not used to it," he said casually. "The things I can do, the things I'm good at, don't mean a damn right now. If we get boarded, that's where I come in. Their job is to make sure it doesn't come down to that."
"And where do my skills, what I'm good at, come in?" she shot back. "I know how to hide and steal. What good is that?"
"Come on, Kitten," he shook his head slightly against the force pressing him down in his chair, "you've got more skills than those. You know the systems of this ship and how to fix things. You can rebuild a printer from junk and scraps. You just need to get creative."
She looked at him dubiously, "right."
"Hold on to your hats, partners," Alex's voice over the comm made her jump, "this is going to be a close one!"
Looking down at her screen, Nik saw that two of the frigates were closing in on them from each side as one of the cruisers slipped up behind them, then her chair pivoted with the change in course and she closed her eyes to keep the nausea at bay.
"In coming!" Naomi grunted.
"Got it," Holden answered.
Through the hull of the ship, Nik heard the thrum of the PDCs as they fired.
"Should we fire back?" Naomi asked.
"No," Holden told her firmly, "we will only fire in self-defense."
"Are you serious?"
"We are not going to engage five warships. It would be suicide. Right now, they're just trying to disable and board us. We don't want to give them any reason to blow us out of existence."
On her screen, Nik watched as the distance increased marginally between them and the three red dots. Two other red dots moved in from a different angle while a sixth dot moved sharply away from them and the others.
"Hey," she keyed her comm unit, "did another MCRN come through the gate?"
"No," Naomi replied quickly, "why? What do you see?"
Looking back down at her screen, Nik tried unsuccessfully to locate the sixth dot among the scattered asteroids. "That's weird," she frowned.
"What?" Holden asked this time.
"I just saw a sixth ship out here with us, but it's gone now." She sighed, "sorry, I guess I was wrong."
"No," Naomi said. "It could be a stealth ship."
"Shit," Alex cursed. "We can't run from a ship we can't see."
"Nik send Naomi the coordinates where you saw it and keep your eyes out for it. If it showed up once, it might do so again," Holden told her.
"Kay, I'm on it."
Yea! She finally had something to do.
Her elation dissipated as she scanned her screen over the next few minutes as the others continued their efforts to avoid the MCRN ships.
"We have incoming!" Alex barked.
"I see them," Holden answered in a tight voice. "We've got four nukes."
"Hold on, I'll try to shake them."
Nik swallowed down the bile that rose in her throat as the Roci lurched in a new direction and accelerated. The smaller flashing dots that marked the torpedoes moved faster than the larger dots on her screen. She watched as one impacted an asteroid as their ship whipped around it, using the rock as a shield. Another was diverted by the ensuing explosion and detonated almost immediately afterwards.
"Two down," Alex breathed. "Still got the others on our tail."
"Deploying countermeasures," Holden intoned.
Another abrupt change in direction, then the third flashing dot disappeared.
"One still locked on," Alex said.
Her eyes watering from focusing intently on her screen, Nik unconsciously held her breath as the final blinking dot rapidly closed the distance between it and the Roci. A solid dot blinked into existence moving almost perpendicular to their course and moved between them and the torpedo.
"Guys," she called out. "Are you seeing this?"
Before anyone responded, the torpedo changed course slightly to intercept the new target then disappeared from the screen.
"What the hell was that?" Holden asked.
"Who cares?" Alex answered. "It took out the final nuke."
"I don't detect any radiation from the explosion," Naomi said. "Jim, it didn't explode, we just stopped getting a return from it."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean…," she stopped suddenly. "Oh, my God."
On Nik's screen, dozens of red dots appeared throughout the asteroids around them. Unlike the six dots that denoted the Roci and the MCRN warships, there were no designations for them on the display.
"The computer can't identify any of the ships," Naomi said.
"Pulling up a visual," Holden said before her screen changed from the LADAR display to an outside camera feed.
"What the hell?" Amos exclaimed.
"Um, can someone explain what I am seeing?" Alex asked in confusion.
Nik understood exactly how he felt as her heart hammered in her chest.