Holden leaned forward. The logs spooled past, storage filling with traffic that might be everything to them. Or nothing. Bobbie wasn’t something he’d talked about before. He wasn’t sure he wanted to start now, but he was living in Saba’s rooms, eating the man’s food, coordinating on his operations.
“It’s not exactly my crew,” Holden said. “I had some trouble with the union before all this happened.”
Saba’s grin came again. “You’re forgetting whose man I am, que no? Drummer spends a little time talking about you behind your back, and that means to me.”
“Right, so … I was in the process of retiring when all this came down. Dropping off the Freehold guy was my last mission. Was going to be. The crew is really Bobbie’s, only then history got in the way, and now I’m sort of back in charge and sort of not. It’s awkward.”
“Savvy,” Saba said. “I’m there too.”
“Something wrong between you and Bobbie?”
“No, no, no. Only that Medina’s my home port, but the Malaclypse is my home. This came down, and I got put at the front because of my spouse and her job and the union. Plenty enough around here don’t like that. Do their own thing because it’s their own.”
“Like the bombing,” Holden said.
“Like that trap, yeah. Like the trying for the governor. Like a bunch of assholes I stopped who were looking to steal Laconian uniforms, beat up some of our own so they could start shit between, yeah?”
“That doesn’t seem productive,” Holden said.
“Not about productive,” Saba said. “About reaching for what can get done. Plenty of old OPA on Medina. When the Alliance turned into the union, it didn’t erase all the old factions. There’s Ochoa OPA and there’s Johnson OPA even when there’s no Ochoa or Johnson. Voltaire Collective set that bomb like they’d just been waiting for the chance, and maybe they were. Oldsters going at it like they were young again. Young ones trying to live up to the stories of the bad old days. Like pumping oxygen into a fire.”
Holden shook his head. “If we’re going to manage anything, we have to—”
The dumb terminal chirped, and one of the entries came up highlighted. Saba pulled the interface pad closer and scrolled back to the flagged entry. He cross-checked and opened the file. All the things a real system would have done for him automatically, if they could risk using one.
Saba clicked his tongue against his teeth.
“What’ve we got?” Holden asked.
“Traffic control plan update,” Saba said. “Got something slated as coming in through Laconia gate, but not right away.”
“How far out?”
“Forty-two days?” Saba said. He moved through the data as carefully as he could, checking the distribution stamps and time codes. It didn’t take him long to find the name and transit specs for the ship. The Typhoon. And from the mass and energy profile, it was huge. On a hunch, Holden had Saba match it with Laconia’s first transit. The two were the same. The Typhoon was another Tempest. Holden felt a tightness under his rib cage wondering how many more like it there were.
Saba cursed under his breath. A man’s voice came from behind them, somewhere in the warren of hidden corridors. A woman answered. The bulkheads, the exposed conduits and industrial decking, the thick air and the darkness. All of it was just the same as it had been when Holden sat down, except that now it seemed fragile.
Another warship from Laconia with more soldiers. The beginning of the permanent occupation. Not just the beginning of the end. The end.
Saba cracked his knuckles and smiled ruefully at Holden. “Well,” he said. “Leaves me wishing I could tell Drummer and the union. Kind of thing she’d want to know.”
“Yeah,” Holden said, trying to gather his wits. There was more than a little of him jumping around behind his own eyes like a panicked monkey, but this wasn’t the time for it. “All right. We still have some time. Whatever we decide to do, our obstacles are the Gathering Storm outside the station and something like two hundred, maybe two hundred and fifty power-armor-wearing Marines inside it.”
“And loose-cannon OPA factions firing off without warning,” Saba said. “When they hear about this, they’ll get worse. Complicate everything if they won’t coordinate.”
“So that too,” Holden agreed. His brain felt like it was stuffed with cotton ticking. He wanted to get all his people onto the Rocinante and run away. If there was anyplace that the Laconians wouldn’t just follow them and shoot them down. If there was anyplace in thirteen hundred systems that would be safe anymore. For them, or for anyone.
“Okay,” he said. “All right. Whatever goals we decide on, we have to take those three things into account. And we have to do it in the next forty-two days.”
“Because after that,” Saba said, “no more us, yeah?”
Chapter Twenty-Six: Bobbie
Bobbie, Alex, and Clarissa ate lunch together in a tiny compartment with ELECTRICAL SUPPLIES stenciled on the door in four languages. It had a few unlabeled crates in it that they could use as tables and benches, so they’d taken to calling it the Diner. The meal was the heavily spiced and deep-fried balls of bean paste that Belters called red kibble. On the side they had a few bits of dried fruit, and a thin seafood soup that tasted like the flavor came from having a fish swim through the broth.
“You know what I miss most about the Roci about now?” Alex said, poking at his kibble, which rolled around his plate. “My ship knows how to make Martian food. I’m so sick of this Belter shit.”
He was exaggerating his Mariner Valley drawl the way he always did when he spoke of the ship. Bobbie laughed at him, then noisily drank off the last of her broth.
“It’s good for you, boy,” she said, mocking his drawl.
“It keeps body and soul attached, and that’s about the best I can say for it.”
Clarissa smiled at their banter, but said nothing. She was picking up a single ball of kibble at a time, then carefully chewing it. It was like watching a bird eat in slow motion.
“I wonder if the Laconians still eat Martian food,” Bobbie said. “We could ask.”
Alex tossed his plate down onto their crate-table in disgust. “You know, I think what chaps my ass more than anything else about this shit? The guys who came out of the gate and started wreckin’ our shit and takin’ over aren’t some damn aliens. It’s fucking Martians. I bet there’re people on that Laconian ship I served with back in the day. Dollars to donuts, the top brass in the Marine detachment here are people you know, at least by name.”
Bobbie nodded, chewing the last of her kibble. “That’s actually an interesting idea. I mean, could that be useful? Find some people in their command structure that know us? Is that an in?”
“I ain’t talkin’ about how it’s useful, Bob,” Alex said, nearly knocking over Clarissa’s water glass with his angry hand gestures. “I’m talkin’ about the idea that people just like us, Martian patriots, picked up and ran off with this Duarte guy, and took about a third of the fleet with them.”
“You ever wonder if it could have been us?” Bobbie asked.
Alex lowered his brows at her. “You lost your mind?”
“No, really, think about it,” Bobbie said. “We were both out of the service when Duarte started making his move. You’d been retired for a decade at that point. I’d been out of the Corps for a couple years. But if we’d still been active duty, could we have fallen for his pitch? I mean, a lot of good people did.”
“A third of the stars of heaven,” Clarissa said, as if she were agreeing.
“Uh,” Alex replied, cocking his head in confusion.
“A third of the what now, honey?” Bobbie said.
“From the Bible. Revelation. When the devil fell from grace, he took a third of the angels with him. It’s described as the great dragon pulling a third of the stars of heaven down with its tail.”
“Huh,” Alex said like he had no idea what she was talking about.
“Why’d that pop int
o your head?” Bobbie asked.
“Whatever story Duarte was selling was compelling enough to get a big chunk of the Martian military to buy in. The devil’s story was freedom from the oppression of God’s rules, and it was good enough to win a lot of angels to his side. Whatever Duarte’s pitch was, it’s a good one. Don’t be so sure you wouldn’t have bought it.”
“Oh, I’m pretty fucking sure,” Alex replied with a snort.
Bobbie had to admit she wasn’t. A galaxy-spanning human civilization run the way the Martians, at their best, ran things. Organized, focused on a single overarching goal. Efficient, well planned, not wasting anything. She could see why that appealed to a lot of people when Mars was watching its dream of terraforming die. Duarte could step in and sell them a new dream that used all the same skills and attitudes that the old one had, but was even grander in scope. Bobbie recognized that there was a version of her that was fighting on the Laconian side right now, and it made her itchy.
Alex had started to gather up the plates and cups from their meal when Amos walked into the room. “Hey, Babs. Cap wants to see us about that thing.”
“Which thing?”
“The making-sure-no-more-bombs-go-off-we-don’t-know-about thing.”
“Oh, that thing. Be there in five,” she replied, and he shrugged and walked off without another word.
“Still kinda chafes, don’t it?” Alex said, his voice gentle.
“What? Hearing him go back to calling Holden ‘Cap’?” Bobbie said, ready to shrug it off. But something caught in her throat. “Yeah. I gotta admit it does. I might have a word with him on that.”
“Be gentle,” Clarissa said. “He’s fragile right now.”
Bobbie had no idea what the word fragile meant when applied to Amos. She wasn’t sure she wanted to learn.
Saba leaned against one wall in the larger storage space that they’d been using as their insurgent-cell meeting room. Someone had finally pushed all the crates and boxes up against the walls to serve as seating, and some enterprising thief on the crew had even managed to steal a few benches from one of the parks. About twenty members of their group were scattered around the space, including Holden, Naomi, and Amos.
On the wall screen behind Saba was a diagram of Medina, and a picture of a severe-looking woman with black hair and a lot of facial piercings. She stared at the camera with angry eyes, giving the picture a mug-shot feel. The name Katria Mendez floated beneath her photo.
“The Voltaire Collective,” Saba said, pointing at her. “Bomb throwers from ancient days.”
“Fighters,” someone in the room replied, making the word a term of respect.
“Sa bien,” Saba replied. “Now with Laconia? They go back to the old script.”
“Apart from the fact that their strategy doesn’t work anymore and it’s fucking our shit up, they seem like people we want in our team,” Holden said. “We should recruit them. Coordinate with them. Killing them or feeding them to the Laconians should be our last option.” He sounded a little scattered. Distracted. She wondered what was up with him. He knew something or suspected something that was eating up all his spare cycles. Bobbie had seen it before.
Saba nodded with one fist. “If we can, we should.” He pointed to a sublevel on the Medina map marked Water Reclamation. “Holed up here, them. I say we send our envoys to make them an offer of alliance.”
Holden turned on his bench to look back at Bobbie. She gave him a tiny nod. He stood up to take a spot next to Saba and said, “I think we should send Bobbie to speak for us. She can pass along our respects, tell them we need to join up, and if they get belligerent … well, she can handle that too.”
“Agreed,” Saba said. “How many you want with you?”
“Let’s keep this small,” Bobbie replied. “Just me and Amos for now. This should feel like natural allies reaching out. Not a war party.”
“Sabe bien,” Saba said. “But this ends with they don’t plant more bombs unless we say so. Our house gets in order now. One way or.”
“Yeah,” Bobbie agreed. “One way or, that’s where this ends.”
The shortest path to Water Reclamation included a short jaunt through the inner drum. Bobbie didn’t mind. Hiding out with her resistance-fighter buddies included an awful lot of sleeping and eating in tiny metal rooms. Getting out into the habitat space with open air and a dirt floor and the full-spectrum light on her face was a welcome change.
Even the ubiquitous Laconians didn’t ruin the mood. For the most part, their conquerors were easy to get along with. They acted like people who’d lived on Medina for years: eating in the restaurants, browsing the shops, making use of the entertainment districts. If you gave them a nod, they nodded back like old neighbors. Even the Marine patrols moving past in their exotic blue power armor looked alert, but not particularly threatening.
Bobbie had seen the other version of them during the assassination attempt on the governor, so she knew they could go from friendly and professional to full rock-and-roll at the flip of a switch. Easy to get along with or not, the Laconians were a military occupation. You forgot that at your peril.
“How are you doing?” Bobbie asked as they walked through a particularly lush section of park. The lovingly tended path curved through grass, patches of flowers, and even past the occasional tree. Insects buzzed about, still the best-designed pollinating system there was. Technology did a lot of things well, but evolution had it beat when it came to environmental systems.
“My feet hurt,” Amos said. “Kind of all the time now. Glad these Belters keep the rotation at a third of a g.”
“It’s quicker to list the shit that doesn’t hurt, these days,” Bobbie said. “But that’s not really what I meant.”
“Yeah?” Amos said. His tone didn’t change at all, but Bobbie had flown with him for a couple decades now. She could hear the tension that had crept in.
“Claire thinks maybe you’re having a tough time right now.”
“Does she.” Amos’ voice had gone so flat, it might have been a badly written computer simulation of him. He was checking out of the conversation. Pushing it farther wouldn’t help.
“Anyway,” Bobbie said, keeping it light. “You need anything, I’m up for whatever.”
“Yeah, I know, Babs,” Amos said. “But these Voltaire guys are no joke. We better get our game faces on.”
The Voltaire Collective occupied a dusty crawl space beneath and between half a dozen gigantic stainless-steel tanks. It was a good spot. Unless the piping sprang a leak, there was literally no reason for anyone to come down to the space. The Collective definitely still had some skill sets left over from their OPA resistance-fighter days. Katria Mendez in person was all hard angles and sharp edges, and her dark eyes burned with a constant low-level fury.
“You’re actually coming here to lecture us on how to run an occupied insurgency,” she said. Her voice was gentle and warm. The voice of a favorite teacher, or beloved aunt. A voice that asked if you wanted some lemonade with your cookies. It also had the precise diction and studied lack of accent that Bobbie associated with advanced education. Her Belter accent could have been measured in parts per billion.
“Not at all,” Bobbie started.
“Because,” Katria continued, “the Collective has been a militant branch of the OPA, resisting inner-planets control, for nearly a century.”
“I understand,” Bobbie said.
“Do you? Because it seems like you just showed up here and told us that we’re not allowed to run any resistance operations without your consent. Or did I misunderstand what you were telling me?”
Bobbie heard shuffling feet behind her, and turned around to see five members of Katria’s cell had taken up a loose semicircle at her back. None of them held weapons in their hands, but they all wore the loose-fitting jumpsuits of the Medina Station maintenance workers. Lots of big pockets that could be hiding anything from a hammer to a compact machine pistol. Amos, standing to her left, caught her ey
e without losing his smile. He took a half step back, managing to make it look casual.
“Look,” Bobbie said to Katria, stepping up and looking down at her from their half-meter height difference. “We didn’t come here to start a fight. As far as I’m concerned, we’re all on the same team. But if you force it to go the other way, we’re prepared for that, too. And I promise you it will not go the way you want.”
“Honestly, I’m just not sure why Saba didn’t come himself,” Katria said, not backing down at all. “Or why he thought sending a Martian and an Earther to tell Belters how to fight was the right message.”
Bobbie didn’t know any answer to that other than because we’re the most intimidating soldiers he’s got, now that walking through Medina with firearms has become a really bad idea. She winged it instead.
“Because maybe that is the message. Because this isn’t about Belters and inners and last century’s bullshit. Because now it’s about all of us versus the assholes who popped out of their gate thirty years into our game and decided they get to flip the table over.”
Katria nodded and smiled. “That’s actually not a terrible answer.”
“Then let’s ease down,” Bobbie said, taking a half step back again to give Katria her space. “Let’s find a place to sit and have a drink and chat about how all of us can work together to fuck these Laconian assholes up. Yeah?”
“You keep giving me that eye, boy, and I’m gonna pull it out of your head and hand it back to you,” Amos said, his tone so mellow and conversational that it took Bobbie a moment to recognize the threat was real. He was looking back at the semicircle of OPA toughs at their back, directing his empty gaze at them. But Bobbie saw a vein at his temple throbbing like he was at risk of a stroke. The muscles moved under his skin like taut cable dragging over his jawbone.
“Amos,” she said, and then she wasn’t talking anymore because she was in a fight.
Amos threw himself at someone behind her, and she heard grunts and the meaty thud of fists hitting flesh, but she couldn’t turn around to see what was happening because a long knife had appeared in Katria’s hand and the woman was dancing toward her. Fighters, one of Saba’s people had said. And like the Laconians, the Voltaire Collective folks also seemed ready to go from zero to a hundred at the flip of a switch.