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.

Almost without thinking, he engaged the maneuvering thrusters and the crash couches clicked to match the new vector. The missiles seemed to leap closer, correcting for the new course and anticipating where the pinnace would be. He sent an emergency signal, broadcast on all standard frequencies, and hoped whoever saw it on the flotilla was a quick thinker. The two spheres – time-to-collision and Martian antimissile range – didn’t overlap, but there were only a few hundred klicks between them. Barely an eyeblink at their relative speeds. He shifted to medical control and switched Bobbie from juice to life support protocol.

Sorry, Bobbie, he thought. I’d warn you if I had time, but you’re gonna need to take a little nap if we don’t want you bleeding out. He watched her vital signs spike and then drop, her blood pressure and core temperature falling like a stone in the ocean. He pushed the ship to fifteen g.