“It ain’t that high if you’re only looking at one ship,” Amos said. “You can bend the odds pretty good. I mean, no one’s going for Sol gate unless they’re tired of life. And there’s not going to be any ships waiting to come through from Charon or Naraka.”
“If we’re down to hiding out in dead systems …” Alex began.
Clarissa interrupted him. “We should go to Freehold.”
“You feeling okay, Claire?” Alex asked. “You remember we didn’t leave on good terms, right? It was even money for a while that they were going to shoot Bobbie and Holden before they could get back to the ship.”
From where Naomi was sitting, she could see Clarissa’s ankles shift around each other as she rolled onto her belly. “No, I’m serious. They’re fiercely independent. They were willing to stand up to the Transport Union, and I don’t see them rushing to wave the Laconian flag either. They’re underdeveloped enough that there won’t be complex local politics. No factions within factions that we don’t understand. Or at least fewer than you’d get somewhere like Gaon Complex. Plus which, we know there aren’t any ships observing the other side of their ring, because we were the only ship in the system, and no one’s gone out there since the occupation started.”
“That Houston asshole was pretty smart,” Amos said.
“Ah! I see what you’re doing,” Alex said. “You’re trying to make flying out to Charon and dodging radiation flares sound like a good idea. It’s that whole ‘I’ll put a shitty idea next to a really shitty idea so the first one looks shiny by comparison’ thing.”
“I think we should go to Freehold,” Amos said. “Naomi? You think we should go to Freehold?”
“Sure,” she said, starting the data run.
“Seriously?” Alex said.
“Her points are all solid,” Naomi said. The data run stopped a third of the way through. She ended the process and opened the run logs. “We have to get small for a while. Be hard to see. Wait for Laconia to show us where its weak spots are. We’ll have to be someplace while that happens. It might as well be there.”
“But the shooting-us part?”
“Is something we’ll need to work through,” Naomi said. “Hey, those paper uniforms people can get out of the station kiosks? Do you think we could get that to print out sheets?”
“Like bedsheets?” Alex said.
“Something to write on so we can distribute this when I’m done. Can’t put it on the system.”
“Maybe,” Amos said. “Be kind of weird, though.”
The run log looked decent until it started the confirmation routine. Then it hung on something. She grabbed the code reference and went back to the original script.
The others were still talking, but her focus on the screen lowered the volume on them. She was aware of Amos’ low, gravel-strewn voice. Clarissa, higher and more musical. Alex with the ghost of a Mariner Valley drawl that was more habit than accent. Her family. Part of her family.
There was a zero result where there should have been a berth number. That was where the code was choking. It probably made sense to just chuck the routine entirely. Reaching beyond Saba’s secret network—even if it was only for passive information like reading docking records—was a little risky. But building a schedule on unconfirmed data could screw them up as well.
She hesitated, pulled the code, then put it back and reopened the logs. The bad entry was the twelfth ship in the logs. The Lightbreaker. She tapped her fingers against her thigh. Dig deeper and risk being noticed by security or ignore the error and move ahead as if everything was as expected. If she’d gotten a little more sleep, it would have been easier to make the decision.
“Bárány o juh, son toda son hanged,” she said to herself and opened a low-level request to the docking records. It only took seconds for confirmation to come through. The Lightbreaker wasn’t in its berth. It had shipped out two days ago. The flight plan listed the destination as Laconia with a service code that looked military. Well, that was one less for the evacuation plan. It would make things faster, but Saba would need to know. The crew, if they weren’t on the burn for the heart of the enemy, would need other bunks.
She looked at the service code. Touched it with a fingertip.
“Alex? Did the MCRN have a code eighteen twenty-SKS?”
“Sure,” he said from the hall. “Did a few of those myself, way back when. Priority prisoner transfer. Why?”
When she’d been about eleven, Naomi had been working in a warehouse on Iapetus. A steel support beam had popped its welds and sprung out, clipping the back of her head. It hadn’t been pain, not at first. Just a feeling of impact, and her senses receding a little. The agony had two, maybe three seconds to clear its throat and straighten its sleeves before it crashed over her. This felt very much the same.
Her hand trembled as she looked for a manifest. Something to say who’d been on the Lightbreaker. Who’d been important enough to the empire that they’d commandeered a ship just to take them away. There was nothing. Of course there wasn’t. Why would the Laconians announce that to anyone? She checked the dates, the times. It didn’t have to be Jim. It could have been someone else. But it wasn’t. She took a moment for herself and the pain. Five seconds. She could let herself hurt for five seconds. Then she had to get back to work. The rest would be for later.
She sent a message—text only—to Saba. The missing ship, the service coding, her suspicion that James Holden was already past the ring gate and into Laconian space. Did Saba have any contacts who could confirm that? After the message sent, she took a deep breath. Then another. She pulled the Lightbreaker out of her dataset and ran her code again. It didn’t hang this time.
She got up, surprised by how steady she felt, and took the two steps to the door.
“What’s the matter, boss?” Amos asked.
Naomi shook her head. When she spoke, she spoke to Clarissa.
“I had a talk with Saba. I’m going with you on the sensor-array leg of this.”
Clarissa’s brow was bent by whatever she saw in Naomi’s face. “Okay. Why?”
“Risk management,” Naomi said. “If the prison break fails, we don’t get as many people out. If the sensors come back up and they’re able to track which ships went through which gates, the whole mission fails. Better that we spend our resources where they matter the most.”
“But if Holden is …” Clarissa began, then went quiet. Naomi watched her understand. “The prisoner transfer.”
Alex’s face was grayish. And pale. “Fuck,” he said.
“And we need something to write down the evacuation plan on,” Naomi said. “Something small and portable, and not connected to the computer networks at all.”
Amos pushed himself up from the sink. “You got it, boss. Give me twenty minutes.”
“And something to write with,” Naomi said as the big man walked out into the public corridor.
Her hand terminal chimed, and she went back to her crash couch. The run was finished. Twenty ships, in the order that would get them through the gates and gone at the min-max point of risk and speed. Optimal was eighty-seven minutes, even with the Rocinante looping back to pick up Amos, Bobbie, Clarissa, and her. It was a solid plan.
She had a solid plan.
She pulled up her organizational notes and sat for a moment, looking at the words she’d put there.
SAVE JIM.
She drew a line through them.
Chapter Forty-Four: Bobbie
Tag,” Katria said, then turned to look at her. A ghost of a smile touched the other woman’s lips, and Bobbie wondered just exactly how much of the violence of their first meeting was really forgotten and forgiven. “You ready to play a game?”
After half a beat, Naomi’s gaze tracked over to her. Exhaustion had yellowed her sclera, and her skin had an undertone of ash. She put a hand on Naomi’s shoulder to steady her as much as anything.
“Take care of the kids until I get back.”
“I wil
l. Good hunting.”
The words were a little punch in the gut. Hope you kill someone. Some other Marine who had the bad luck to be born on the wrong side of this. Who’s as loyal to his people as you are to yours. Whoever they are, I hope you get them before they get you. The truth of it was, despite everything, there was a joy in this. She’d spent some of the most important years of her young life training for moments like this one, and as much as she wanted to have grown and matured, aged into a woman of peace, part of her still really liked it.
“Thanks,” Bobbie said, and stepped out.
“Bobbie … I’m sorry.”
Bobbie nodded as Katria scooped up her toolbox. They walked together toward the intersection with a larger corridor. The door closed behind them with a soft click and the whir of the lock. Katria chuckled under her breath, but Bobbie didn’t ask why. She didn’t much want to know.
Most of the people in the corridor were walking, but there were a few carts loaded with containers. At one intersection, a man was driving a loading mech, moving it from one warehouse to another. It was a four-point harness. If she got in by his side, she could loop one arm around his neck and choke him out while she unbuckled him from the controls with the other. Drop him out, swing around, and strap herself in. It would probably take thirty seconds. Maybe less. Easy peasy.
As they walked, she felt herself relaxing, sinking down into her hips as she walked. Lowering her center of gravity. She whistled a little, softly. Katria raised an eyebrow, but didn’t comment. The screens along the walls announced that the security forces were closing in on the terrorist cell that had blown up the oxygen tanks, but Bobbie didn’t see anyone giving the pair of them a second glance, much less closing in.
There was a sparseness about the halls. Even with the carts and the people, there was an emptiness showing through. Part of it had to be that, with no ships coming in or out of the station, there just wasn’t as much to do as there would have been. But part of it was also fear. People staying in their holes. Staying out away from the checkpoints. Out of trouble.
They took the ramp down, away from the inner surface of the drum. There weren’t many places on the drum that came close to the skin of the station. Most of the outer layers had been designed with radiation shielding in mind. Water tanks, storage for ceramic and metal and steriles. Service halls with anti-spalling covered in paint and conduit and pipes. But there were a few junctions near service airlocks where only a few layers of steel and ceramic and foam separated their feet from the outside. It reminded her of being on one of the old Donnager-class battleships. The bare functionality of the design belonged to a different generation from the residential levels or the inner face of the drum.
The hallway where Katria stopped looked just like the sections they’d been walking through, but she checked the section identifiers painted on the walls and the pipes, then stamped her foot on the deck like she was listening for something in the way it rang.
“Here?” Bobbie asked.
“This is the place. Boost me up.”
Bobbie locked her fingers together into a cradle, and Katria put her foot into it. She didn’t weigh much. Bobbie hauled her up toward the ceiling. Could have kept her there for hours, she thought. Katria caressed the ceiling with her palm, then found what she was looking for, pressed hard enough that Bobbie felt it, and slid a panel aside. A little gap, hardly more than a decimeter, between the panel and the structural beam above it. Katria hoisted her toolbox, checked its orientation, and slid it into place. She pulled the ceiling tile back and tapped Bobbie on the shoulder to be put down.
“That’s it?”
“No,” Katria said, and pulled a bit of black tape from her pocket. After a moment’s consideration, she curled it around a bit of pipe just beside the bomb, then took her hand terminal out and shifted to a screen Bobbie had never seen before. A rough, grainy image of the hallway appeared on it, including her and Katria from the tape’s perspective.
Katria stood directly under the bomb, then tapped her own image on the screen. Red script came up—LOCKED—and she put the terminal back in her pocket.
“Now, that’s it,” she said.
“Okay,” Bobbie said. “Let’s go outside.”
The maintenance airlock was uncrewed. Two vac suits hung in the lockers, a large gray transport box with its lid open and unsealed, and inside of that, a yellow ceramic box beside them with ZEMÎ TOR stenciled on it in black.
The transport box’s wheels were retracted, the steering handle stowed on its side. The walls and lid were only a little thicker than the real thing. Whatever they were using for shielding, it was thin. She hoped it was light too.
Bobbie put on the environment suit, checked her seals and air supply. She and Katria checked each other. The suit had a magnetic tether built into it, a ribbon as wide as her hand and thick as her pinky, dirty from years of use. The airlock itself was set into the floor. The little platform to carry them out to the drum’s surface, and hopefully not fling them out into the emptiness of the slow zone. With both of them and the box, it was a tight fit. Bobbie watched the suit’s sleeve puff out a little as the lock cycled out the air.
Katria pressed her helmet against Bobbie’s and shouted. With only physical conduction to carry the sound, her voice was distant and muffled. “Last chance to back away.”
Bobbie smiled and made an obscene gesture. She could see Katria laughing, but she couldn’t hear it. The lock cycled, and the platform descended.
The body of Medina’s drum curved away above her to the left and right, extended ahead of her and behind. She felt like she was hanging on to the belly of some massively vast whale. The gates were only pinpoints of eerie and erratic light, as regular as a printed pattern against the surreal darkness below her. The gates and the tiny dot of the alien station in the center of ring space. It wasn’t her first time outside a ship in the slow zone, but she shuddered all the same. Falling off a spin station in normal space meant drifting out at whatever velocity the station had given her until someone came to haul her back or she ran out of air. Losing her connection here meant falling into the blackness between the gates and vanishing into whatever existed—or failed to exist—on the other side. Normal, star-strewn space could feel like an infinite ocean, vast and glorious and uncaring. The slow zone felt like being in something’s mouth.
Katria put her safety tether on the surface of the drum, then lay on her back and pushed her feet up until her mag boot locked to the station. Bobbie waited to follow until she’d taken a couple of awkward, swaying steps. And then she was also hanging upside down from the turning station. The crate in her hand wanted to fly up like the loop of her safety harness. Blood rushed into her head, filling her ears with their own distant roar as they walked—release, swing, push up, and reconnect to the station—back along until they found the stretch of plating that would become the breach point. Katria gestured to the crate—two fingers pointing, the Belter’s gesture for opening or deploying. Bobbie nodded yes with a closed fist.
The mining net was a square of woven steel cable reinforced by carbon fiber. Rock hoppers and subsistence miners had been using things like it since humanity had first crawled up the well and started harvesting the near-Earth asteroids. The primary piton was thicker than Bobbie’s thigh. She fastened it to the skin of the station, then waited for a moment as the external elevator shaft that ran along the drum from engineering to the command center passed overhead. She and Katria took different edges, pulling and stretching the net as they navigated around the target, placing the secondary pitons until the whole thing lay like a low, black blister on the side of the drum.
The trap set at last.
Katria dropped the box, and it flew up and away into the darkness, gone in an eyeblink. She led the way back almost to the airlock platform, then turned off one mag boot, and then the other, and swung on her safety harness, feet to the void. Bobbie did the same. It felt better to be right-side-up again, and worse to know that only one f
ailure point was keeping her alive. Trade-offs. There were always trade-offs.
Katria slaved her hand terminal to the suit’s arm display, copied the output to Bobbie’s, and set up a low-power radio connection between them. The corridor where they’d set the bomb appeared in the same grainy, muted colors as before. Empty for now, but not forever.
“Now we wait,” Katria said through the radio. “The patrol puts their foot in our trap, or someone notices that we’re out here.”
“Yeah,” Bobbie said.
“Don’t worry. These Laconians are just like Earthers. They only think of ships and stations as inside. Comes from growing up in free air.”
“‘The predictable limits of a conceptual framework,’” Bobbie said. A phrase from her classroom on Olympus Mons. “It’s always where to hit the enemy. Whoever they turn out to be. When I learned how to do things like this, we were thinking about Earthers and pirates.”
Katria laughed. “When I taught myself how to do this, I was thinking of people like you. Strange how the wheel turns.”
The elevator passed above them again, the glowing orb of the alien station at the slow zone’s heart appearing like a moon on her left, vanishing again on the right. Bobbie turned to look toward the docks. The Rocinante was down there somewhere. Her home and her ship. Or Holden’s. Or neither of theirs.
Strange how the wheel turns.
The minutes stretched. Became hours. Twice, people passed through the corridor. A pair of electrical technicians. A sketchy-looking young woman pulling a child by the hand and looking over her shoulder as she walked. Bobbie wondered what the story was there, but it wasn’t hers. Her anxiety slowly faded into a kind of dull anticipation, and then to both at the same time. The void passed beneath her feet again and again and again. She switched her air to the secondary bottle.
“Ah,” Katria said. “Here we go.”
On the monitor, two people walked down the hall toward the camera. Bobbie couldn’t mistake the Laconian power armor for anything else. The patrol they’d been waiting for. The enemy approaching. Without a word, she swung back, set her feet against the station, and reengaged her mag boots. The spin gravity would try to straighten her legs, but that was exactly the wrong thing. She bent double, put her hands behind her knees, and held herself there. Katria did the same. Bat-brace position. It was hard to relax like that, especially knowing what was coming. She took a deep breath starting in her belly and moving through her whole chest, then let it out. Shook her shoulders to get out the tension. Smooth and loose. That was the way to be.