Bobbie considered their faces. The one Amos was talking about stood in the rear, just behind Katria. He had olive skin, close-cropped hair, and a long nose that had been broken a couple times and not set right. A white scar marked one nostril like someone had slit it for him once. She was pretty sure she’d have remembered him if she’d run into him before. The others, she wasn’t as certain. Katria, obviously, and two of her guards at the front all seemed familiar enough.
“Maybe we’ll get to know him,” Bobbie said.
“Now you’re just flirting with me, Babs. Promising a good dustup when everyone else is here for talking.”
“Yeah, well,” Bobbie said. “A girl can dream.”
The banter felt almost normal, but she wasn’t easy with it. Not yet. She was plenty willing to play along for the moment, though. Katria caught her eye and nodded. Bobbie smiled, her cheek pulling at its new scab, and nodded back. It could have been respect between equals or the handshake at the start of a fight. Bobbie figured they’d all find out which soon enough.
The meeting space was new to her. A long, thin room that had been part of the water-recycling system recently enough that it still smelled a little bit of wet plant and sewage. Twice as long as it was wide, there was enough space for the Roci crew, Saba, and a half dozen of his most trusted crew. The ones who already knew the plan. It wasn’t a pleasant spot, but the cartography of the underground’s borders were shifting now, more and more often. The Laconian surveys had been finding the holes in the system surveillance, denying them free access to the corridors and units they’d made their own. They’d been spending more and more of their time in the monitored public spaces. Part of that had been reconnaissance for her plan. Part of that had been that there were fewer and fewer spaces left on Medina where they could speak freely.
All through the station, there were soldiers and crowd-suppression drones. It didn’t bother her, passing the people with haunted eyes, walking like the deck might be too fragile to support their mass. She understood them. The others, the ones who were laughing and talking and listening to music loud enough that she could hear the bass, bothered her more. They were acting like the open-air prisons and the power-armored Marines, the communications control and shift curfews were normal. And because of that, they were.
It wouldn’t be long before the Laconians started shipping through the slow zone again. Maybe she and the others would be allowed back on the Roci when that happened, but Bobbie found it hard to believe there wouldn’t be monitors placed in there too. It could take Naomi and Clarissa days or weeks to purge them all and make their ship fully their own again.
And by then, it would be too late anyway. Every day, every hour, brought the Typhoon’s arrival closer. And once it had cleared the Laconia gate, staying ahead of the occupying forces became orders of magnitude more difficult. Which was the optimist’s way of saying “impossible.” Bobbie felt the pressure of time slipping away like she was watching a door close, with her on the wrong side of it. If it hadn’t been for the time pressure, she wouldn’t have gone along with Saba’s suggestion to reach out to the Voltaire Collective. Or at least not so soon after she and Amos had kicked their asses.
The only good thing was that Katria and her people were just as screwed as Saba and Bobbie and Holden, and by the same things.
“So,” Katria said once the requisite sniffing was done, “I’m surprised at having so civil a meeting. I have to think you need something from me you can’t manage by yourselves?”
Saba smiled, but waved his hand twice sharply. “Too many ears, sa sa? Come sit with me and mine, have a drink, and we’ll talk about what we talk about.”
Katria crossed her arms.
“It’s not you,” Holden said. “It’s just that the fewer people know about this, the less chance someone gets picked up by security. You can’t tell anyone what you don’t know, right?”
Katria Mendez looked from Saba to Holden and then, pointedly over to where the Roci crew were sitting. Not just Bobbie and Amos, but Naomi and Alex and Clarissa besides. “So none of mine but all of theirs?”
“All of theirs already know,” Saba said. “They’re who wants to talk with you most.”
“They have strange ways of showing it,” Katria said.
“This is my house,” Saba said. “My salt on it, yeah? Parley. And if it’s nothing, it’s nothing. But we’re under the same thumb, you and me. Not asking you to love anyone. Just listen to.”
For a moment, Katria hesitated. Her scowl bit into her cheeks like it was going for bone. Bobbie had a brief flash of certainty that the whole Voltaire Collective was about to turn and walk away without even hearing her pitch, and she was more than a little relieved at the idea.
“Esá es bullshit,” the one with the nose spat. “They’re just trying to get you on your own, que? Make you not be here, that’s all. It’s all of us or none!”
“It’s my call, Jordao,” Katria snapped. “Not yours.”
The one with the nose—Jordao, apparently—stepped back, sulking. Holden was smiling like a salesman, as if his radiant goodwill could warm up every other interaction in the room. It left him looking more than a little ridiculous, but damned if Katria didn’t consider him for a long moment and chuckle.
“If I refuse, then we all took a long walk for nothing,” she said. Holden beamed. Bobbie wasn’t sure how he did it. The way he could disarm a situation with his almost palpable guilelessness astonished her every time.
“Thank you,” Holden said. “I really appreciate this.”
Saba lifted a hand and two of his people ghosted in from the corridor and led Katria’s guard away. Standing by herself, she didn’t seem any less imposing. The door to the corridor slid shut, and the bolt clicked. It was as near to privacy as anyone on Medina could have.
“So,” Katria said. “What’s on your mind?”
Bobbie took a long breath, let it out between her teeth. The idea had been hers from the start, and she’d been mulling it over for days. She hadn’t slept as much as she’d wanted. Even when she hadn’t been reviewing it and looking for holes in the plan, she’d felt too jagged and amped up to sleep. Part of that had been thinking about how to make the approach she was going for now.
“There’s a single point of contact between the Laconian destroyer and Medina,” Bobbie said. “And we have a bug on it.”
Katria’s eyes went a degree wider. She glanced over to Saba, who nodded. It was true. Katria didn’t sit, but her weight settled into her hips a little. Bobbie had her attention. That was good.
“The encryption isn’t breakable,” she said. “Not from the outside. The Martian codes it’s based on are solid. We might be able to crack them if we had between now and about a decade on, but we’re down to a countable number of days. So we’ve got enough intelligence gathered to fill libraries that we can’t read. But I think we can fix that.”
She plucked her hand terminal out of her pocket, slaved it to Saba’s local system, and pulled up the schematic of Medina that she’d been using. The cavernous center of the drum, command and control on one end, engineering and the docks and the massive but quiescent engines on the other. The elevator shafts that ran between them outside the surface of the drum. And also the ships in the dock, including—highlighted in red—the Gathering Storm.
“The longer goal is that we find a way to disable the Storm, here, shut down Medina’s sensor arrays, and distract or isolate the security forces on Medina long enough to let all these ships get off station and out through the rings before their reinforcements from Laconia get here. The short-term goal”—she zoomed in on a small red mark inside Medina proper, near the docks—“is this.”
“And that is?” Katria asked.
“It used to be backup power storage,” Bobbie said. “But since our guests from Laconia got here, it’s been repurposed.”
“The thing is,” Alex said, breaking in, “these Laconian fellas? They were all Martians to start, or their leadership were a
nyway. And they were serving just a little after me and Bobbie here did our tours.”
He looked from Bobbie to Katria to Saba and then back. Bobbie nodded him on. Alex licked his lips.
“One of the things we trained on was how to go about securing an enemy station,” he said, which wasn’t true. It was something Bobbie had trained to do, not him. Storm and control the homes and communities of Belters. If there was going to be a sore spot, this would be it. It was why Alex was saying it instead of the woman who’d cleaned Katria’s clock and left her zip-tied to her friends. It seemed less likely to rub on Katria wrong that way. “You heard of air-gap encryption strong rooms?”
Katria’s eyes were brighter. She hadn’t, but she didn’t want to admit that. Alex licked his lips again, shot a look from Bobbie to Katria and back to Bobbie, then went on. “One thing that we did was maintain physical separation between whatever ship was taking control and the local systems. Lay in a pipe to one of our own boxes on the station, and send any commands we wanted for the base there. Communications, control protocols, everything. It gets unencrypted there, and set onto onetime physical media to walk over to the local system. No live connections at all.”
“Bullshit,” Katria said.
“It’s standard,” Bobbie said. “And it’s part of why no one was ever able to hack back into a Martian ship from a controlled station. And since the Laconians are basing their protocols on Martian ones, this is where that machine is.”
“But the lag time—” Katria shook her head. “That’s impressive.”
“The room is crewed by two people, always. The door is physically locked. Not connected to the security grid, no electronic interface. Old-school bolt and key, and no keyhole on the outside. Can’t be hacked into remotely, can’t be circumvented easily,” Bobbie said. “And a full complement of guards at shift change.”
Katria took control of the model, zooming farther in on the encryption vault. Her face was thoughtful, which was better than Bobbie had hoped. It made her nervous to talk about this.
“I see,” Katria said. “You can’t get in without making a lot of noise and calling in the cavalry. Is that why you need me? To blow the door?”
“No,” Bobbie said. “We have a way in. We need your help to cover it up once we’re done.”
Katria traced a slow circle with her fingers. Go on.
Clarissa picked up the thread. “The room is still connected to the environmental system. But if we put a team here”—she pulled the model back to a larger frame and touched the power junctions near engineering—“we can shut down the fans and open the carbon dioxide scrubbers and recycling systems.”
“Choke them out?” Katria asked.
Alex shook his head. “Make a path to pilot some little drones in. Half a dozen of ’em with point-blasting charges. Take down the two guards, then use the rest to pop the lock.” He made a little boom sound with his lips and opened two fists in the physical cartoon of an explosion.
Bobbie pointed toward Naomi. “She has a snapshot cloning deck. I’ll have a crowbar and a hammer. We get in, make a full-state copy of the encryption box, and get out to the hardened-radiation shelter”—Bobbie moved the model—“here. And then you come in.”
“If los security coyos know we stole their codes,” Saba said, leaning against the wall, “they change things up, yeah? Not just new crypt but new procedures. Everything we’ve got turns into a whole lot less. So they can’t know what we do, even after it’s done.”
Holden pulled the model out to show where the Storm was docked against the side of the station. “We need to give them a different story. The Storm’s parked here. And the primary liquid-oxygen storage tanks are … right here. If that blows out, it will look like we’re trying to blow up the Storm, but Tycho built this place well. Lots of redundancy and fail-safes. There’s an explosion-relief route that’ll vent the pressure blast out along this pathway here … which takes out the communications vault. And, y’know, a bunch of other stuff.”
“You want to blow our air out as cover?” Katria said. “I think you may owe us an apology. We’re usually the ones who are called extreme.”
“Not our air,” Saba said. “Theirs as soon as they came here. We’re breathing on their grace, us. Plus, those tanks are docked-ship refills. Not for the habitat.”
“And there will be plenty in the secondary and tertiary tanks,” Holden said. “Remember, lots of redundancy, lots of fail-safes. And Tycho’s original design remembers longer than the people living in it do.”
Katria went quiet for a long time. Bobbie felt the anxiety growing in her gut. It had been a mistake to bring the Voltaire Collective in on this. It didn’t matter how much Saba trusted them or how good they were with demolitions. She should have kept it just within her own crew, where she could control it. Where she was sure of everyone …
“I don’t like it,” Katria said, shaking her head. “A lot of moving parts. The more pieces there are, the more ways there are for it to break.”
Bobbie shrugged. “If the time wasn’t so short, I’d do something simpler.”
“All we need is the right bomb, the right place,” Saba said. “You give us those, and we take the mission from there.”
“No,” Katria said. “You need the charges, you need someone to put the charges in the right places at the right time. And need someone on the remote switch who doesn’t panic and throw it a little too early and take out your team. And even if they don’t, do you think someone in a rad shelter’s going to live through that blow?”
Naomi cleared her throat. “They’re rated for it. But you’re right. We can’t know until we try.”
“What’s the evac plan once your little Armageddon is over?” Katria asked.
It was more than Bobbie had wanted to say. There should be some parts of the plan that weren’t being shared. Saba paused, weighing whether to bring Katria that far in. When he spoke, his voice was surly. He didn’t like having his hand forced any more than Bobbie did. “Vac suits in the shelter. Go out through the hole. Same airlock we used to bug the line the first time, we use it to get back in.”
Katria took control of the model again, turning it, moving through the lower reaches of Medina deck by deck. “It’s going to kill people,” she said. “When the engineering decks start breathing vacuum, not everyone’s going to make it to the shelters.”
“Savvy,” Saba said. “Has a price.”
“Is it one you’d pay?”
“Is,” Saba said, but Holden’s expression had a distance to it. Bobbie could tell what was in his mind. There could be innocent people on the decks when the time came. At best, their plan would risk them. At worst, some would be killed. If Saba and Katria were bothered by the idea, they didn’t show it. Holden was bothered by it. She wondered if he’d stand on principle and scrub the whole thing. It was even money, knowing him.
“Demolition team goes here,” Katria said. “Plant the charges, then fall back to the shelter and wait for the team with the stolen data to arrive, then blow it. Everyone leaves together, or no one does. It’s not my first time on an op like this. You’ll need a couple more vac suits, is all.”
Bobbie didn’t catch the important word until Clarissa spoke, her voice gentle and questioning. But Bobbie heard the sharpness under it. “Your first time on an op like?”
“Who else?” Katria said. “If you want it done right, you get the best to do it. I’m the best. I make the charges, I place the charges, and it’s my steady hand holding the detonator.”
The room was quiet apart from the soft hiss of the air recyclers and the soft, harmonic thrum of the ship. The hint of old sewage smelled a little worse. Saba had only wanted the Voltaire Collective involved for material support. They weren’t looking for another player when the operation took place. But telling Katria she couldn’t be active in the field … would it insult her? And if it did, would that be enough to get her to turn on them?
“Sounds good,” Amos said. “You and me on the
demo team, Miss Kitty.”
His smile was placid and empty. Bobbie felt a shock of alarm. She met Holden’s gaze and shook her head a millimeter. This is a very bad idea. Holden swallowed, nodded, forced himself to smile as well.
“All right, then,” Holden said. “Clarissa leads the support team on environmental controls for Alex. Alex pilots in the drone swarm. Bobbie and Naomi take care of the server, and Katria, Amos, and I will set the charges to cover it all up afterward.”
Bobbie leaned back, a lump forming in her gut. Adding Holden in was not a better solution.
“This’ll be great,” Holden said.
Chapter Thirty: Singh
SOL OPERATION NEARING COMPLETION. PREPARE INITIAL SHIPPING AUTHORIZATIONS.
Singh read Trejo’s message over twice, joy blooming in his chest. He took a moment to send the order to his section heads and group commanders, and pulled up what everyone jokingly called the “occupation calendar.” Even based on the amended projections from Laconia that included not pausing to rebuild the battery, the immediate transit of the Tempest to Sol system, and the early deployment of the Typhoon, they were weeks ahead of schedule. They’d built some flex into the schedule in the event that the Transport Union put up a more bitter fight to hold Medina, or the Earth-Mars Coalition Navy had revealed naval forces or technology significantly greater than their estimates. But neither thing had turned out to be true, and sooner than anyone expected, they could get down to the business of building the new human civilization.
The sad fact of the human species that High Consul Duarte understood so well was that you could never overcome tribalism and jingoism with an argument. Tribalism was an irrational position, and it was impossible to defeat an irrational position with a rational argument. And so, instead of presenting a logical plan for why humanity needed to give up the old national and cultural divides and become a single unified species, the high consul obeyed the old forms that everyone would understand, and went to war. Thankfully, a brief one.