“Sweetheart. Darling. Light of my life. Whatever we call Laconia in public, when you take its clothes off, it’s a dictatorship,” Fayez said. “We never had a choice.”
“I know.”
“So why do you do this to yourself?” Fayez said.
She didn’t answer, because she couldn’t have explained it even if she wanted to.
“I’ll catch up.”
The catalyst holding area was in the heart of the Falcon, surrounded on all sides by thick layers of depleted uranium shielding and the galaxy’s most complicated Faraday cage. It had become clear very quickly that the protomolecule communicated at faster than light speed. Some application of quantum entanglement was the leading theory, but whatever the mechanism, the protomolecule defied locality, much like the ring gate system it had created. It had taken Cortázar and his team years to figure out how to keep a sample of the protomolecule from talking to itself, but they’d had decades and they’d eventually come up with a combination of materials and fields that tricked a node of protomolecule into locking itself off from the rest.
A node. It. The catalyst.
Two of Sagale’s Marines guarded the door to its chamber. They wore heavy blue power armor that whined and clicked when they moved. Each was equipped with a flamethrower. Just in case.
“We’re going to use the catalyst soon. I want to check on it,” Elvi said to the space between the two guards. For all that she had a military title, she still often couldn’t figure out who was the ranking officer in any given room. She lacked the indoctrination of boot camp, and the lifetime of practice the Laconians took for granted.
“Of course, Major,” the one on the left said. She looked too young to be the senior officer, but that was so often true of the Laconians. Most of them looked too young for their titles. “Will you need an escort?”
“No,” Elvi said. No, I always do this alone.
The young Marine did something on the wrist of her armor, and the door behind her slid open. “Let us know when you’re ready to come out.”
The catalyst’s room was a cube, four meters on a side. It had no bed, no sink, no toilet. Just hard metal and mesh drains. Once a day, the room was flushed with solvent and the liquid was sucked away to be incinerated. The Laconians were obsessive about contamination protocols where the protomolecule was concerned.
The node, it, the catalyst, had once been a woman in her late fifties. What her name had been and why she’d been selected for protomolecule infection was not in the official record Elvi had access to. But Elvi hadn’t been in their military for long before she found out about the Pen. The place where convicted criminals were sent to be deliberately infected, so that the empire would have a limitless supply of protomolecule to work with.
The catalyst was special, though. Through some work of Cortázar’s or through some accident of the woman’s genetics, she was only a carrier. She showed early signs of infection—changes to her skin and skeletal structure—but in the months since she’d been brought on board the Falcon, those changes hadn’t progressed at all. And she never entered what everyone called the “vomit zombie” phase, puking up material to try to spread the infection.
Elvi knew that she was perfectly safe in the same room with the catalyst, but she shuddered every time she entered anyway.
The infected woman looked at her with blank eyes and moved her lips in a soundless whisper. She smelled mostly of the solvent bath she received every day, but under it was something else. A morgue stink of decaying flesh.
It was normal to sacrifice animals. Rats, pigeons, pigs. Dogs. Chimpanzees. Biology had always suffered the cognitive push-pull of proving that humans were just another kind of animal while at the same time claiming to be morally different in kind. It was okay to kill a chimp in the name of science. It wasn’t okay to kill a person.
Except, apparently, when it was.
Maybe the catalyst had agreed to this. Maybe it was this or some other, more gruesome death. Whatever that would be.
“I’m sorry,” Elvi said to her, as she did every time she came into the catalyst chamber. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know that they did this. I would never have agreed to it.”
The woman’s head lolled on her neck, nodding forward as if in mock agreement.
“I won’t forget that they did this to you. If I can ever make this right, I will.”
The woman pushed at the floor with her hands as though she wanted to stand up, but her arms lacked the strength, and her hands flopped bonelessly. It was just reflexes. That’s what she told herself. Instinct. The woman’s brain was gone, or at least changed into something that wasn’t by any sane definition a brain. There wasn’t anyone really alive in that skin. Not anymore.
But there had been once.
Elvi wiped her eyes. The universe was always stranger than you expected. Sometimes it was full of wonders. Sometimes full of horrors.
“I won’t forget.”
Chapter Two: Naomi
Naomi missed the Rocinante, but then she missed a lot of things these days.
Her old ship and home was still parked on Freehold. Before they’d left, she and Alex had found a cavern system on the edge of Freehold’s southernmost continent with a mouth big enough to edge the ship into. They’d put it down in a dry tunnel and spent a week running seals and storage tarps that would keep the local flora and fauna out. Whenever they got back to the Roci, it would be there, ready and waiting. If they never did, it would be there for centuries. Still waiting.
Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, she’d take herself through it. She still knew every centimeter from the top of the cockpit to the curve of the drive cone. She could think her way through it on the float or under thrust. She’d heard about ancient scholars back on Earth making palaces of memory that way. Imagine Alex in the cockpit, holding an hourglass for time. Then down to the flight deck, where Amos and Clarissa were tossing a golgo ball with the numeral 2 painted on it back and forth for initial and final velocities divided by two. Then down to her cabin, and Jim. Jim by himself. Jim who meant displacement. A simple kinematic equation, three things that were all the same, easy to remember because they all stung her heart.
That was one reason she’d agreed to the shell-game plan when Saba and the underground had reached out to her. Memories were like ghosts, and as long as Jim and Amos were gone, the Roci would always be a little bit haunted.
And it wasn’t only Jim, though he had been the first. Naomi had also lost Clarissa, who would have died from the slow poisons in her implants if she hadn’t chosen to die by violence. Amos had taken a high-risk mission from the underground, deep in enemy territory, and then gone silent, missing pickup window after pickup window until they all stopped expecting to hear from him again. Even Bobbie, healthy and well, but in the captain’s seat of her own ship now. They were all lost to her, but Jim was the worst.
Freehold, on the other hand, she didn’t miss at all. The experience of being under a vast and empty sky had its charm for a while, but the unease lasted longer than the novelty. If she was going to live as a fugitive and outlaw, she could at least do it in something where the air was held in by something visible. Her new quarters—spare and terrible as they were—at least had that going for them.
From the outside, her bunk looked like a standard cargo container made to transport a low-yield planetary fusion reactor. It was the kind colonists in the thirteen hundred new systems would use to power a small city or a medium-sized mining station. With its actual cargo gone, there was enough room for a gimbaled crash couch, an emergency support recycler, a water supply, and half a dozen modified short-burn torpedoes. The crash couch was her bed and her workbench. The support recycler was her power and food and her waste disposal. The kind of thing that would keep the crew of a stranded ship alive for weeks, but not in anything like comfort. The water supply was for drinking, but also part of the stealth, connected to small evaporation panels on the exterior of the container to bleed off her waste heat.
And
the torpedoes were how she spoke to the larger world.
Except not today. Today she was going to see actual people. Breathe their air, touch their skin. Hear their living voices. She wasn’t sure if she was excited about that, or if the energy stirring in her belly was foreboding. The one could seem so much like the other.
“Permission to open?” she said, and the crash couch’s monitor hesitated, sent the message, and then a few breaths later came back with CONFIRMED. DEPARTURE AT 18:45 STANDARD. DON’T BE LATE.
Naomi unstrapped herself from the couch and pushed to the inner door of the container, securing the helmet on her suit as she went. When the suit showed solid seals, she double-checked them anyway, then cycled the air in the container into her emergency recycler, bringing the interior down to near vacuum. When the pressure reached the efficiency limit of the unit and stopped dropping, she popped the container doors and pulled herself out into the vastness of the cargo hold.
The Verity Close was a converted ice hauler acting as a long-haul shipping vessel for the colonies. The hold around her was as wide as the Freehold sky, or it felt that way. The Rocinante and eleven more like her could have fit in it and not touched the sides. Instead, thousands of containers like Naomi’s were locked into place and ready to be hauled out from Sol to any of the new cities and stations that humanity was building. Taming the new wilderness of planets that didn’t know humanity’s genetic codes or tree of life. And most of the containers were what they claimed—soil, industrial yeast incubators, bacterial libraries.
And then, like hers, a few were something else.
This was the shell game.
She didn’t know if Saba had come up with the idea, or if his wife, the figurehead president of the Transport Union, had found some covert way to tell him. With Medina Station and the slow zone firmly under Laconian control, the greatest obstacle the underground faced was moving ships and personnel from one system to another. Even something as small as the Roci couldn’t hope to pass by Medina’s sensor arrays unnoticed. Traffic control through the gate network was too important to ever let that happen.
But as long as the Transport Union was still in charge of its own ships, the records could be forged. Cargo containers like hers could be moved from ship to ship, making it difficult if not impossible to track her communications—or Saba’s or Wilhelm Walker’s or any of the other organizing heads of the underground—to any one vessel.
Or, if the reward seemed to justify the terrible risk, something larger could be smuggled. Something dangerous. Something like the captured warship Gathering Storm could be snuck into Sol system. And with it, Bobbie Draper and Alex Kamal, who she hadn’t seen in over a year. And who, right now, were waiting for her at a private rendezvous.
She launched herself along the row of containers, skimming past them with accuracy born of a lifetime’s practice. The guide lights blinked at the containers’ edges, marking the ever-changing maze of access and control and leading her toward the crew hatch. The actual crew space was probably smaller than the Rocinante’s. Her secret cargo container, as spacious as the crew cabins.
She didn’t know the crew of the ship that had carried her for the last months. Most of them weren’t aware she was there. Saba arranged things that way. The fewer people knew, the less they could say. The old Belter term for it was guerraregle. War rules. It was how she’d lived as a girl, back in the bad old days. It was how she lived now.
She found the airlock into the ship and cycled through. Her contact was waiting for her. She was a young woman, not more than twenty years old, with pale skin and wide-set dark eyes. Her shaved head was probably meant to make her look tough, but it just reminded Naomi of baby fuzz. Her name might not have been Blanca, but that was how Naomi knew her.
“You’re clear for twenty minutes, ma’am,” Blanca said. She had a good voice. Musical and clean. A Martian accent that reminded Naomi of Alex. “After that, I’m off shift. I can stay around, but I can’t keep the next guy from coming on.”
“More than enough,” Naomi said. “I just need to get to the habitation ring.”
“Not a problem. We’re going to be transferring your container to the Mosley in berth sixteen-ten. It’s going to take a few hours, but the work order’s already been approved.”
The pea slipping into a different shell. By the time Naomi was ready to send out her next set of orders and analysis, the Verity Close would be past the Sol gate and off toward some other system. And Naomi would be in her same little hole, sleeping on her same little couch, but traveling with a different ship. Blanca would be replaced by her new contact waiting for her at the docks. Naomi had lost track of how many times she’d done this. It was almost routine.
“Thank you,” she said, and started to pull herself through toward the dockside airlock.
“It’s been an honor, ma’am,” Blanca said, spitting the words out quickly. “Meeting you, I mean. Meeting Naomi Nagata.”
“Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I appreciate it more than I can say.”
Blanca braced. It felt like theater, but Naomi saluted the girl all the same. It meant something to the girl, and for Naomi to treat it with anything less than equal seriousness would have been rude. Worse, it would have been cruel.
Then she pulled herself into the cramped green corridor of the Verity Close and left Blanca behind. She didn’t expect ever to see her again.
Deep Transfer Station Three lived between the orbit of Saturn and Uranus, locked in position with the Sol gate. Its architecture was familiar: a large spherical dock capable of accepting several dozen ships at maximum capacity and a habitation ring spinning at one-third g. It was both a critical central hub for traffic in and out of Sol system and a glorified warehouse complex. Ships from across the system brought cargo here ready to send out to the colony worlds or came to pick up incoming packages. At any given time, there were probably more alien artifacts on the transfer station than anyplace else in the system.
All told, the station could hold twenty thousand people, though the traffic rarely if ever demanded full capacity. A permanent staff and the crews of whatever ships came and went, along with contractors to run the hospitals, bars, brothels, churches, stores, and restaurants that seemed to follow humanity everywhere it went. It was a base where crews from across the system and from the other systems on the far sides of the rings could get away from each other for a few days, see unfamiliar faces, hear voices they hadn’t lived with for months, climb into bed with someone who didn’t feel like family. It created a constant fraternization that had led to the station’s ring getting the unofficial name “Paternity Row.”
Naomi liked the place. There was something reassuring in the stability of human behavior. Alien civilizations and galactic empire, war and resistance: They were there. But also drinking and karaoke. Sex and babies.
She walked through the public corridor of the habitation ring with her head bowed. The underground had a false identification for her in the station system so that her biometrics wouldn’t raise an alarm, but she kept from making herself too obvious all the same in case a human might recognize her.
The rendezvous was a restaurant in the lowest and outermost level of the ring. She’d expected to be ushered into a storeroom or freezer, but the man at the door led her back to a private dining room. Even before she stepped though the doorway, she knew they were there.
Bobbie saw her first and stood up, grinning. She wore a nondescript flight suit without identifying tags or patches, but she wore it like a uniform. Alex, rising with her, had an older cut. He’d lost weight, and his remaining hair was trimmed close. He could have been an accountant or a general. Without words, they stepped into each other, arms raised. A three-way embrace with Naomi’s head on Alex’s shoulder, Bobbie’s cheek against hers. The warmth of their bodies was more comforting than she wanted it to be.
“Oh, God dammit,” Bobbie said, “but it is good to see you again.”
The embrace broke, and they m
oved to the table. A bottle of whiskey and three glasses waited, a clear and unmistakable sign of bad news to come. A toast to be made, a memory to be honored, another loss to carry. Naomi asked her question with a glance.
“You heard about Avasarala,” Alex said.
The relief came in a little rush followed by chagrin at feeling relief. It was only that Avasarala had died. “I did.”
Bobbie poured out shots for each of them, then raised one. “She was a hell of woman. We won’t see her like again.”
They touched glasses, and Naomi drank. Losing the old woman was hard—harder for Bobbie, probably, than any of the rest of them. But they weren’t mourning Amos yet. Or Jim.
“So,” Bobbie said, putting down her glass, “how’s life as the secret general of the resistance?”
“I prefer ‘secret diplomat,’” Naomi said. “And it’s underwhelming.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Alex said. “Can’t talk without food. It’s not family unless there’s a meal.”
The restaurant did a good Belt/Mars fusion menu. Something called white kibble that was related to the real thing, but with fresh vegetables and bean sprouts. Rounds of vat-grown beef-pork hybrid cooked in the shape of a Petri dish and touched with a sweet hot sauce. They leaned on the table here the way they had on the Rocinante in their previous incarnations.
Naomi hadn’t realized how much she missed Bobbie’s laugh or Alex’s way of sneaking another small helping onto her plate when she was almost finished eating. The little intimacies of living in close quarters with someone for decades. And then not living there anymore. It might have made her sad if it weren’t for the pleasure of being there in the moment with the two of them.
“The Storm’s crewed up pretty well,” Bobbie was saying. “I was worried for a while that it would be straight Belters. I mean, that’s where Saba’s bench is the deepest. Two Martian vets running a crew full of folks who still call us inners?”
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