“What the fuck is going on?” Holden whispered. “Did I do something to piss Bobbie off? Because I really try not to do that unintentionally.”
Naomi shook her head so slightly, he only felt it. “You’ll have to ask her what’s up,” Naomi said. “But you’re not wrong. It’s something.”
The conversations in the room rose and shifted, swirling like birds. A word or phrase that passed between Amos and Clarissa got overheard by one of Saba’s people, shifted what he was saying, and soon Saba mentioned it to Alex. Controlling people is usually having stuff they want. Don’t want nothing, and they’re pretty much just down to hitting you until you do what they say became Was easier with the inners because they wanted to get rich and make rich-people toys became What do these Laconia coyos want, anyway? What do they think they do it for, yeah? Everyone in conversation with everyone else, whether they were aware of it or not.
Holden watched it, listening and waiting for Bobbie to come over. If humanity ever developed a hive mind, it wouldn’t be psychic brain links that welded it together. It’d be gossip and cocktail parties.
“Hey, Holden,” Bobbie said, touching his shoulder. “Can I borrow you for a minute?”
“You bet,” he said, hauling himself up from the floor. Bobbie slouched out toward the corridor, and he followed. The air outside the room was cooler and seemed less like it had just come out of someone else’s lungs. The lighting was strung maintenance LEDs, harsh and bright. The walls were painted in a dozen different colors, guides to the pipes and conduits behind them. The map and the territory both.
Bobbie paused at the junction of a service crawl with the main corridor. Voices murmured behind them, too distant to make out, but present. As tight as the spaces were, she could have leaned against both corridors’ walls at the same time, one with each shoulder. She flexed her hands like a fighter about to go into the ring. There had been a time, when they’d first met, that he’d found Bobbie’s physicality intimidating. Over the years, she’d grown in his mind into a place where she was only herself. Every now and again, he’d be reminded that she was a professional warrior and well trained in violence.
Her expression was intense, focused. She could have been thinking her way through a hard problem or restraining herself from a killing rage. The two looked similar with her.
“Hey,” Holden said. “What’s on your mind?”
Her focus shifted to him, and she nodded like he’d said something worth agreeing to. “So are you here to help this or hinder it?”
“Well,” Holden said. “I would have said help until you asked me that, but now it’s feeling like a trick question. Am I missing something?”
Bobbie put out her hand palm first, like she was telling someone to slow down, but it seemed intended as much for herself as for him. “I’m thinking this through while I’m saying it, so just …”
“Got it,” Holden said. “Whatever it is, take a swing at it. We’ll work it out.”
“Other people? People like me? We can show up and maybe not have an effect. That’s not how it is with you. Either you’re helping or you’re holding things back. There’s no middle setting.”
A little discomfort tugged at him, and he crossed his arms. “Is this … Bobbie, is this about you being the captain of the Roci? Because that hasn’t changed. Naomi and I—”
“Yes,” Bobbie said. “It’s exactly like that. Look, you’ve seen all those people who keep interrupting the meetings, right? They’re all just swinging by to be in the room for a minute, even if it’s something they could have done on hand terminals. Or not done at all.”
“I know the ones you mean,” Holden said. “But that’s not me.”
“That’s absolutely you. James Holden, who led the fight against the Free Navy. And stopped Protogen from killing Mars. And captained the first ship through the ring gates. Brought people together on Ilus in the face of fifty different kinds of shit falling apart. You’re in the center of everything just by walking into the room.”
“Not because I like it,” Holden said.
“When you showed up, Amos and I were getting ready to fight our way into all this. But then there you were, and you got recognized, and now we’re all sitting in the absolute center of the conspiracy. Even if I’d pushed my way into this, there would have been days, maybe weeks, of proving to Saba and his people that they could trust me. You got that for free, and the rest of us drafted off you. I came in as the captain of the Rocinante, and it wasn’t enough to be taken as seriously as you got for free.”
Holden wanted to object. He could feel the denials welling up in his chest, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to say them out loud. Bobbie was right.
“I have an idea how we gather intelligence on the Laconians,” Bobbie said. “It’s the first step that we need. But we have to move quickly. Saba and his people? They think this is like going back to before there were gates. No matter what they say, they think this is going to sustain and become a way of life for them the way it used to be. Did you notice how they’ve started calling the Laconians ‘inners’?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“But you were right in there. We’re looking at a really small window. So if we’re going to do what I think we really need to do? It has to be your idea.”
“Okay, little lost here. Which idea of mine are we talking about?”
“I’m talking about you taking the operation I have in mind, waltzing back in there, and presenting it like you just came up with it yourself.”
Holden didn’t know whether to laugh or scowl, so he did a little bit of both.
“No, I’m not going to do that,” Holden said. “You say what you need to say, and I’ll back you. But I’m not going to start taking credit for your proposals.”
“If it’s my idea, it’ll be like when we showed up,” Bobbie said. “I’ll have to fight to prove it. If you do it, they’ll just listen. Coming from you will give it weight that just being the right damn thing won’t.”
A clank came from behind them, a hatch being opened or a tool being dropped. He didn’t turn to look. The unease he’d felt before shifted, changed its nature, but it didn’t go away.
“I don’t like that,” Holden said. “I hate the idea that you’re being treated as anything less than me. It’s bullshit. I’ll tell Saba that—”
“You remember the last time we went out to karaoke with Giselle? Right before Alex and she called it quits?”
Holden blinked at the non sequitur. “Yeah, of course. That was a terrible night.”
“You remember the song she sang? ‘Rapid Heartbeats’?”
“Sure,” Holden said.
“Who was the singer? On the original, I mean. Who sings that one?”
“Um,” Holden said. “The band is Kurtadam. The singer’s Peter something? The guy with the one steel eye.”
“Pítr Vukcevich,” Bobbie said, nodding. “Now, who plays bass?”
Holden laughed, and then a moment later, sobered.
“Right?” Bobbie said.
“Yeah, okay. I got it. I don’t like it, though. I’m not more significant than anyone else. Acting like everything important has to go through me or else it’s not legitimate … I don’t know. It feels like I’m being an asshole.”
Bobbie put a hand on his shoulder. Her eyes were calm, and her smile was a straight line. “If it helps at all, I’m thinking about all of this as me using you as a tool to achieve my own ends. It makes me less angry that way.”
They talked for another twenty minutes, Bobbie laying out her plan in enough detail that he could introduce it. He asked a few questions, but he didn’t need many. The sense of working together with her had a weird nostalgia. As if the gap between arriving at Medina and now had been years instead of days.
Large, sudden events did that. They changed the way time passed. Not technically, maybe, but as a measure of who he and Bobbie were to each other. And to themselves. A month before, Laconia had been one background issue among tho
usands. Now it was the environment. A truth as profound as the EMC or the union. More, maybe.
Back in the meeting room, the food had arrived. Recycled wheatpaper bowls filled with rice noodles and chopped mushroom bacon and fish sauce. It smelled better than it should have. Bobbie went to sit by Alex and Clarissa, folding herself gracefully down beside them. Holden felt the impulse to go sit there too, to be part of the family again. And he could have, except he also sort of couldn’t. Would he be doing it to help or to hinder? Because he couldn’t do both. For the first time, he felt what stepping back from the Roci had cost him.
And still, he couldn’t regret it.
“All well?” Naomi asked, snaking her arm around his waist. “You look thoughtful. Are there thoughts?”
“There were a few, yeah,” he said. “Mostly that I’m a tool, but in a useful way.”
Naomi sat with that for a moment. Saba caught sight of them and waved them over. Two bowls with forks and bottles of beer were waiting on the low table for them.
“Should I be offended on your behalf?” Naomi said.
“Nope,” Holden said. “You should come eat.”
Saba leaned forward as Holden sat. “This is good. One thing we can say about Medina, the ingredients are always fresh.”
“True,” Holden said. “But they’re usually still fungus and yeast. Vat-grown bacon is … well, it’s just its own thing. So, Saba, I had an idea I want to talk to you about …”
Chapter Twenty-Two: Bobbie
We can’t place a physical monitor on the data connection to the Laconian ship,” Holden said, just the way she’d told him to. Saba had chosen the people to be briefed, selecting them by some means Bobbie didn’t know and didn’t care to guess. They were watching Holden intently. It felt weird that the role of the great James Holden, come to lead them to glory, was being played by the Holden she knew. Apart from the coincidence of naming, the two didn’t have much in common. “We need to passively monitor incoming and outgoing signal without detection. Mirror the data.”
“For for?” a tall, stick figure of a man said. His name was Ramez and he was in Medina Station’s technical support department. According to Saba, he had the run of the ship, their insider on this mission. Bobbie didn’t like him. “Alles la thick with encrypt. Better off reading their coffee grounds.”
“Decrypting it is a later problem,” Holden said, not giving too many details of the plan away to any one person. Bobbie had a decent idea, but she was still working out the details of how to get the decryption codes. The fewer people knew the details, the less likely it was to get out before she was ready. “Right now we just want to get as much as we can so that we can decrypt it when the time comes. The important aspect right now is that we get the signal without anyone knowing it’s happening.”
“Gotta look inside the pipe without touching the pipe. Que pensa?”
“I’ve brought along my team leader and technical expert to explain the how of the thing,” Holden said, nodding to Bobbie and Clarissa. “Captain Draper?”
Bobbie gave him a wink only he could see. Say what you would about the man, he did take to the role of meaningless figurehead with panache.
Bobbie walked to the front of the room and pulled up a volumetric map of Medina on the wall display behind her.
“The Nauvoo was intended as a generation ship,” she started.
“Fuck is a ‘no view’?” a Belter woman asked. The others chuckled.
“Read some fucking history once,” Saba said to her, then nodded to Bobbie to continue.
“They knew she’d be picking up signals from farther away than anything had ever needed to before,” Bobbie said. She zoomed in on Medina’s comm array. “So the comm system is massively overpowered, and much more sensitive than anything on a commercial or military vessel.”
Ramez nodded and shrugged expansively with his long hands. “We don’t even use most of that shit. No one talking from far away in here.”
He meant inside the slow zone, and he was right. Nothing was ever more than half a million klicks from Medina. The physical boundaries of the space prohibited it.
“True, but the equipment is still there. And up on that comm array is a signal sniffer sensitive enough to track a single photon through a fiber bundle a meter thick,” Bobbie said, zooming in on the technical map behind her. “But we can’t just steal it. Claire?”
Clarissa pushed herself out of the corner she’d been hiding in and came to stand next to Bobbie. She wore a mechanic’s jumpsuit with the name TACHI on the back, and had her hair pulled into a tight bun. With her gaunt cheeks and sunken eyes, it made her look severe and impatient.
“Even though this array isn’t in use,” Clarissa said without preamble, “it’s still hooked to the primary comm system. If we start unplugging things, alarm bells are going to go off up in ops. So we need to put the circuits into a diagnostic shutdown before we physically yank the parts.”
“Fuckonians all over in ops now, ninita,” Ramez said. “Watching everything all the time, them.”
Clarissa nodded her agreement, then said, “And that’s where you come in. We need to get you onto the ops deck to shut down the panel long enough for us to do our work,” she said. “And also if you call me ‘little girl’ again, I will hurt you.”
“Is that right, ninita?” Ramez said, his grin turning condescending.
“No,” Bobbie said, stepping toward him. “No, that’s not right. Pulling that gear will be delicate work. I can’t risk her damaging her hands before we get out there.” Bobbie took another step into Ramez and stared down at him. “So I’ll hurt you. Mao’s my second on this. Don’t make me beat some respect into you, ninito.”
She glanced over at Holden. He looked shocked, and maybe a little sad. She wondered how he would have handled it, back before. It was so strange to be doing all this in the same room with each other.
Ramez threw a look to his buddies on the crates. No one stepped up to back him up. Saba was smiling and making a Let’s get on with it circular motion with his hand.
“Sabe,” Ramez said, looking to the side the way abashed primates had since the Pleistocene. “Just for fooling, que?”
“Sa sa,” Bobbie replied, then switched the screen from the volumetric map over to her mission plan. “Here’s the rundown, including precise times for each thing to happen. Mao and I will be on the outside of the station for most of this, and we can’t afford to do any broadcasting out there, because the Laconian sniffers will almost certainly pick it up.”
“I’ll be calling up to ops using an unlocked hand terminal that Ramez here will get for me,” Holden said, nodding at the man as an invitation for him to nod back. “We’re picking a time when Daphne Kohl is the duty officer. She knows me now, and I’m thinking she’ll understand what we’re trying to do without me having to explain it. Comm discipline is in full effect, the assumption is everything is heard by everyone.”
“So that call between Kohl and Holden is what we’re all listening to,” Bobbie said. “We’ll pass out a list of code words Holden will use during the call as signals. This is our only method of coordinating the action, and there’s no way for us to signal an abort or call for help. Our backup plan is everyone does this right the first time so we don’t need a backup plan. Understood?”
“Lot of risk for a dump of gibberish we can’t make sense of,” Ramez said.
Bobbie felt a little flush of annoyance at the man. “The more we have, the more likely we find what we need in it when the encryption problem gets fixed,” she said. “We start where we can, and that’s this. Are we all clear?”
A murmur of dui and sabe and sa sa rippled through the room.
“Outstanding,” Bobbie said. “Let’s get to work.”
The slow zone or the ring space or the gate network. No matter what you called it, it was fucking weird.
Bobbie and Clarissa exited the drum section of Medina Station using an old maintenance airlock that Saba swore wasn’t monito
red from ops. They were wearing emergency vac suits, the so-thin-they’re-barely-there type whose only purpose was keeping the wearer from dying of asphyxia before help could arrive. They were bright orange and yellow to make the wearer easy to find in smoke or against the black of space. They had large flashing lights on the helmet and shoulders to aid rescue workers, but Bobbie had smashed those with a wrench before they put them on. Bad enough to be a brightly colored blob climbing up the outside of the station. No reason to flash a distress signal too. Under normal circumstances, going outside a ship or station wearing the emergency suits was asking to be cooked by radiation. The cheap throw-away suits had almost no shielding to them.
But the slow zone was fucking weird.
There was literally no radiation in the ring space that humans didn’t bring in with them. No background radiation, no solar wind, nothing. Just a massive, unnaturally black void all around, defined only by the distant and faintly glowing rings equally spaced around it and the blue sphere of the alien station at the center where they’d had the rail-gun emplacements.
Bobbie and Clarissa rode the outside of the massive, spinning drum section of Medina inside the old airlock. The indicator of their motion being the occasional distant ring moving past the black window of the outer airlock door, and the fact that something kept trying to shove them out the door at a third of a g. Bobbie had them both tethered to a clip inside the airlock so they wouldn’t be hurled into the strange non-space outside.
A large rectangular structure whipped past the outer airlock door. Bobbie pressed her helmet to Clarissa’s and yelled so that sound would conduct directly. “That’s one of the exterior elevators. We go for the next one.”
Clarissa nodded, wide-eyed, and braced for the jump. Outside of the drum section of Medina, two structures ran the entire length of the ship from the engineering deck aft of the drum to the ops deck in the bow. They housed machinery, conduit, and a pair of elevators for moving from one zero-g section to the other without passing through the drum itself. Bobbie and Clarissa planned to use one of them to climb the station up to the comm array on the nose, and back down to the Laconian ship docked at the stern.