Chapter 7

If you’ve never beennext to the detonation of a twenty-mike mini-rocket, count yourself lucky. Twenty millimeters wide, a gel-cell motor that outputs a hundred Earth-g acceleration, and an explosive head with a ten-meter kill radius—it’s a clean kill weapon unlike that bastard’s pistol.

In vacuum, not even a sound.

But that close a flash of light would have seared out our eyeballs despite the sun visors, if it hadn’t blown up inside his kit.

The whole rocket only weighed a kilo. In the two-tenths of a second it took to reach him, it was already moving at two hundred meters per second. It struck him in the chest with the localized kinetic force of a Magnitude 2 moonquake—a hundred kilos of TNT.

The force knocked him back twenty meters in the time it took to pass through his spacesuit and his body. The explosion of the warhead less than ten centimeters past his air pack was inconsequential in his final state, which was scattered kinda far and wide. Thankfully most of it was flash frozen before it got to us and just bounced off.

Vanya handed me back my rifle.

“Ivan was a pig. Yes, I can maybe fly us there, but the price is you have to take me with you. I was sick of Tycho by the time I was born.”

“I’ve do have an opening on my squad.” Sorry, Camryn.

She held out a hand and we shook on it.