“We were,” she said.
The water ration chimed again, a little more urgently. Holden felt some vast emotion move in his chest, but he didn’t know what it was. Grief or anger or something else. He turned off the water. The rush of white noise stopped. The gentle chill of evaporation brought goose bumps up his arms and legs. Naomi’s eyes were soft, dark, unflinching.
“Come to bed,” he said.
“Yes,” she answered.
In the darkness, the control pad on the door glowed amber. Green would have meant unlocked. Red, locked. Amber meant override. It meant that they weren’t in control of it. That, in a fundamental way, it wasn’t their door anymore. It belonged to station security. Naomi was still asleep, her breath deep and regular, so Holden sat in the darkness, not moving to keep from waking her, and watched the amber light.
It was the dead hour of curfew between each shift. Right now, all the hallways in Medina were empty. The curved fields and parks of the drum. The lifts in lockdown. Only the Laconian security forces could travel freely while everyone else huddled in place. Including him. Measured in work-hours, it was a massive tax. If it had just been the Roci, it was the same as losing someone for eighteen hours a day. Medina put a coefficient on that with at least three zeros at the end. Someone in the Laconian chain of command thought it was worth the sacrifice. That alone told him something.
Naomi murmured, shifted her pillow, and fell back into it without ever quite breaching up to consciousness. She would be awake soon, though. They’d been sleeping in the same couch long enough that he knew the signs her body gave out without even being certain what he was reacting to. He felt it when she was heading back up. He hoped she could stay down until it was their door again. Maybe she wouldn’t feel the same kind of trapped that he did.
Over the years, the Roci had done its fair share of prisoner transport duty. Houston had been the most recent, but they’d taken on half a dozen like him one time and another since the Tachi had become the Rocinante. Now that he thought about it, the first had been Clarissa Mao. All of his prisoners had spent months in a cabin smaller than this, staring at a door they couldn’t control. He’d always known in a distant, intellectual way that had probably been uncomfortable for them, but it wouldn’t have been that different from being in a brig, and he’d been in brigs.
It wasn’t the same, though. A brig had rules. It had expectations. You were in a brig until your lawyer or union rep came to talk to you. There would be hearings. If it went badly, there was prison. One thing followed another, and everyone called it justice, even when they all knew it was an approximation at best. But this was a cabin. A living space. Turning it into a prison cell felt like a rupture in a way that an actual prison cell wouldn’t. A brig had an inside and an outside. You were in it, and then you passed through a door or a security lock, and you were out of it. All of Medina was a prison now, and would be for another twelve minutes. It left him feeling claustrophobic and oppressed in a way he was still trying to wrap his head around. He felt like the station had just become small as a coffin.
Naomi shifted again, pulling the pillow over her head. She sighed. Her eyes stayed closed, but she was with him again. Awake, but not ready to admit it.
“Hey,” he said, softly enough that she could pretend not to have heard him.
“Hey,” she said.
Another minute passed, and Naomi pulled the pillow back under her head, yawned, and stretched like a cat. Her hand landed on his, and he laced his fingers between hers.
“Been brooding the whole time?” she asked.
“Some of it, yeah.”
“Did it help?”
“Nope.”
“Right. Spring into action, then?”
He nodded at the amber door alarm. “Not yet.”
She glanced down. The override light flickered in her eyes like a candle flame. “Huh. All right. Brush teeth, pee, and spring into action?”
“That’ll work,” he agreed, and hauled himself up out of the bed. The way it worked out, he was brushing his teeth when the door clicked over to red—locked, but under his control. The relief and resentment at the relief came packaged together.
The hallways in the residential deck were no busier than usual. The checkpoint they’d passed through earlier was gone, relocated to some other intersection of hallways. Keeping the surveillance unpredictable and visible, he assumed. If the security systems were in Laconian control, the guards and checkpoints were all theater anyway. A show of force to keep the locals scared and in line. The transport was down—no lifts, no carts. If anyone wanted to go anywhere, the only option was to walk.
In the drum, the false sunlight was as warm as ever. The fields and parkland, streets and structures, curved up and around the same way they always had. Holden could almost forget that it was an occupied station until they interacted with anyone.
The man they paused to get bowls of noodles and sauce from gave them extra packets of peanuts and a twist of cinnamon sugar candy, on the house. An older woman they walked past as they headed aft toward engineering and the docks smiled at them, then stopped and stroked Naomi’s shoulder until little tears appeared in the older woman’s eyes. A group of young men heading the other way made room for them to pass long before they needed to and nodded their respect. It wasn’t, Holden decided, that people recognized him and deferred to his celebrity. All the citizens of Medina were treating each other like everyone was made from spun sugar. Likely to shatter if you breathed on them too hard. He recognized it from being on Luna after the rocks had fallen on Earth. The deep human instinct to come together in crisis. To take care of each other. In its best light, it was what made humanity human. But he also had the dark suspicion that it was a kind of bargaining. Look, universe, see how kind and gentle and nice I am? Don’t let the hammer fall on me.
Even if it was only grief and fear, he’d take it. Anything that helped them all treat each other well.
Beside a little café that served tea and rice-flour cakes, a dozen people in Laconian uniforms were building something—a wall made from cubes two and a half meters to a side, eight wide, and three high, with steel walls and backs and wide mesh doors facing the pathway. Like kennels. Half a dozen locals stood watching, and Naomi went to stand beside them. A young woman with mud-brown hair and a scattering of freckles across her cheeks made a little space for them. Another small kindness, like a coin in a wishing well.
“Are they expecting prisoners, then?” Naomi asked the woman as if they were friends. As if everyone who wasn’t Laconian was part of the same group now.
“That’s the thought,” Freckles said, then nodded a greeting to Holden. “Making a show of it. Supposed to keep us all in line, isn’t it?”
“That’s how it works,” Holden said, trying to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Show everyone what the punishment is. Enough fear, and we’ll all be obedient. They’ll train us like dogs.”
“That’s not how you train dogs,” Freckles said. She made a little, deferential bow when he looked at her, but she didn’t back down. “You train dogs by rewarding them. Punishment doesn’t actually work.” Tears glistened in her eyes, and Holden felt a lump in his own throat. They’d been invaded. They’d been taken over. They could kill everyone on the station, and no one would be able to stop it. This couldn’t be happening, and it was happening.
“I didn’t know that,” he said. Banal words, the closest he could offer to comfort.
“Punishment never works,” Naomi said, her voice hard. Her face was unreadable. She shifted her weight like she was looking at sculpture in a museum. The spectacle of power considered as art. “Not ever.”
“Are you from here?” Freckles asked. She hadn’t recognized them.
“No,” Holden said. “Our ship’s in the dock. Or our old ship anyway. The one we came in on. And the crew we flew with.”
“Mine’s in lockdown too,” Freckles said. “The Old Buncome out of New Roma. We were slated to go home next week. I don’t know where
we’re going to stay now.”
“Not on your ship?”
She shook her head. “The docks are off-limits. No one’s allowed on their ships without escort. I’m hoping we can find rooms, but I’ve heard we may have to camp out here in the drum.”
Naomi turned, and he saw everything that he was thinking mirrored in her face. If the docks were off-limits and the crews turned out, the others wouldn’t be on the Roci. And with the network down, they couldn’t put through a connection request. They didn’t have any way of contacting Bobbie or Alex or Amos. Or Clarissa. Counting each deck and the inner surface of the drum, it was something over fifty square kilometers of hallways, cabins, access tubes, and warehouses. Recycling plants. Hydroponic farms. Air storage. Medical bays. A maze the size of a small city, and somewhere in it, four people he needed to find.
Holden coughed out a small, harsh laugh. Naomi tilted her head.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just not very long ago I was thinking how small Medina felt.”
Chapter Eighteen: Bobbie
A rope defined the line to the ships. Two and a half, maybe three hundred people, each with their fist on it, went the length of the dock and switched back twice. Men and women in the jumpsuits of dozens of different companies jostled in place in the dock’s microgravity, inching forward along the line as if registering their silent impatience would make the whole operation move faster. Laconian guards floated along the perimeter, rifles drawn and ready for violence. If it came to that, Bobbie thought, it wouldn’t be surgical. Not in a mob like this. If anyone started anything, the air recyclers would be spitting out blood clots for months. She hoped everyone else knew that too. She hoped they cared.
Every now and then, a team of Laconian military escorts came, took the people from the moored end of the line, checked their authorization, screened them for weapons, and led them off to their ship. Everyone on the rope would pull a little forward, grabbing on another half meter closer to their turn, feeling the weave of the strands, the grease from all the palms before their own. The unmoored end floated free, waiting for the next hapless crew to join the waiting horde.
They were lucky, Bobbie told herself. Most of the ships had full crews of twenty or thirty people. The Roci just had the four of them. They could all go aboard at once. Small blessings indeed. Almost too small to see.
The guards led away another group. They moved down the rope again, that much closer.
“How you holding together, Claire?” Bobbie asked.
Clarissa took a long, shuddering breath and nodded. When she spoke, the words came just a little too fast, and all the consonants had sharp edges. Like she was trying to rein them in and couldn’t. “It would be very nice to get to the med bay. But right now, it’s just euphoria and nausea. Nothing I can’t handle.”
“That changes,” Amos said, “you let me know.”
“Will,” she said. Bobbie wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that. There weren’t many actions Amos could take that would make the situation better. If putting their heads down and enduring wasn’t enough to get Clarissa to her medications, the options got bad fast.
“Anyone else think it’s cold in here?” Alex said.
“It is,” Clarissa said. “I think the pressure’s a little low too. The environmental systems are all off.”
“That doesn’t sound like a good thing,” Alex said.
“Belters,” Bobbie said. “We trained for this.”
“You trained for low air pressure?” Amos asked. He sounded amused. That was better than sounding frustrated.
“We trained for occupying Belter stations. One of the base tactics that Belters used was throwing environmental stasis off just enough that we’d have to keep bumping it up our priority queue. Someone somewhere on the station is trying to make it harder for these folks.”
“Huh,” Amos said. “That’s pretty ballsy.”
“It only works if the occupying force isn’t willing to just kill everyone and start over. So yeah. There’s an element of playing chicken.”
The group in front them on the rope wore gray-black jumpsuits with CHARLES BOYLE GAS TRANSPORT logos in green on the back. The one floating nearest them looked back over his shoulder, catching Bobbie’s eye almost shyly. She nodded, and the man nodded back, hesitated, tilted his head a centimeter forward.
“Perdó,” he said, nodding toward Clarissa. “La hija la? She’s sick?”
Bobbie felt herself tense. It wasn’t a threat. It wasn’t an insult. It was just someone who wasn’t part of her crew putting themselves into her business. But maybe she was feeling as tense as Amos. She took a little breath and nodded.
The man tapped his compatriot ahead of him on the rope. They spoke for a moment in Belter cant so thick and fast, Bobbie couldn’t follow it, then they all released the rope and gestured Bobbie forward. Giving up their place in line so that Clarissa could get to the Roci a few minutes sooner. It was a tiny thing. A gesture. It shouldn’t have hit her as hard as it did.
“Thank you,” Bobbie said, and ushered the others forward. “Thank you very much.”
“Is is,” the man said, waving her thanks away. It wasn’t an idiom she’d heard before, but his expression explained it. We do what we can for each other.
The Laconians were efficient. The line moved quickly. Even with as many people as were waiting, the Roci crew reached the head of the line in only a couple of hours. An escort of four Marines checked her authorizations, scanned them all for weapons. Apart from a momentary hit of panic when they were looking at Clarissa’s scan—would her modifications keep them from letting her on?—everything went smoothly. And after all, her mods had been designed to get past security unnoticed. Good to know they were still doing their jobs, even while they killed her.
The Rocinante was waiting for them in the dock, loyal as a dog. When they cycled the airlock and pulled themselves in, Bobbie felt her shoulders relax. The air smelled familiar. It wasn’t even a particular scent so much as a sense of rightness. Of being home. Bobbie let herself imagine they were getting on board to leave, that they’d be burning for one of the gates. Diving down toward one sun or another.
Someday, maybe. Not now.
“You have one hour,” the escort lead said.
Bobbie shook her head. “My mechanic needs to be in the med bay for longer than that. She has to have a blood flush.”
“She’ll have to do the best she can in an hour. She can visit medical facilities on the station.”
Bobbie looked at the guard. The man had a wide face and skin just a shade darker than Bobbie’s own. A lifetime of habit mapped out how Bobbie would try disarming him, controlling his weapon, getting into cover. Chances weren’t great. The Laconians moved like they’d been well trained, and the oldest of them still looked to be hauling around a decade less than she was.
“It’s fine, Captain,” Clarissa said. “I can set the system to do a fast push and get blockers. I’ve done it before.”
“If you need another waiver,” the guard said, “you can apply for it once you’ve left.”
“Fine,” Bobbie said. “Let’s get on with this.”
They moved through the ship like they were visiting someone in prison. The guards went with them everywhere, examined everything they took from their cabins, watched every command they gave the ship, copied every report the ship returned. The resentment in Bobbie’s gut ached, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it. Their pass allowed them to retrieve personal items and any tools they needed for their work, provided they didn’t present a security risk. Which was a shame. There was a part of her that would have liked to explain that she worked as a mercenary so that she could walk out of here with Betsy around her like a shell.
As she packed her things from the captain’s cabin, her guard watching wordlessly from the doorway, she opened a connection to Alex.
“What’s the good word?” she said.
“Roci’s a little bored, but she’s in good condition,” Al
ex said from the flight deck. “A little impurity in the water supply we should look at, but it’s likely just a seal that’s wearing out. A little stray leaching.”
“Okay,” Bobbie said. She wanted to stay. She wanted to spend her hours polishing her ship and fixing every flaw they could put hands to. She had thirty-five minutes left. “Flag it. We’ll dig in next time.”
“Next time, Cap’n,” Alex agreed. Because there would be a next time. Even if there wasn’t, they were going to pretend there would be. She locked down her cabinets, checked the message queue from the ship’s system to make sure everything was getting to her hand terminal—or at least that the Laconian censors were locking everything down equally—and pulled herself back down the corridor and toward the lift.
“This a Martian ship?” her guard asked.
“It is,” Bobbie said as they reached the lift and headed down for the machine shop.
“I’ve seen some like her back home. First fleet had a lot like this.”
First fleet meaning all the ships that Duarte had stolen when he’d escaped to Laconia. But also, Bobbie realized, meaning there was a second fleet. One with ships like the monstrosity that had killed the Tori Byron.
“Must look pretty quaint, eh?” she said, trying to make light of it, inviting the guard to give something away. But if there had been an opportunity there, she’d missed it.
In the machine shop, Amos had almost finished collecting a set of safety-approved tools into a small ceramic toolbox. He nodded to her as she floated in, stopping herself on a handhold. She saw his sign again: YOU TAKE CARE OF HER. SHE TAKES CARE OF YOU. The words had more weight now. She’d barely had a chance to take care of the Rocinante, at least not as her captain. She hoped another chance would come.
“You ready to roll out?” she asked.
“Yep,” Amos said.
Clarissa and Alex were already in the airlock with their guard when Bobbie and Amos got there. Clarissa looked more relaxed, and there was more color in her skin. Alex would have seemed relaxed to anyone who didn’t know him, but Bobbie saw how he looked at the ship, how his hand lingered on the bulkhead. He knew as well as she did that there was no guarantee they’d ever be back.