“Could have been a problem,” Naomi agreed.
“Saba pulled a whole sheet of UNN and MCRN vets,” Alex said. “Young ones too. Weird being around people who were the age I was when I mustered out. They look like babies, you know? All fresh-faced and serious.”
Naomi laughed. “I know. Anyone under forty looks like a child to me now.”
“They’re good,” Bobbie said. “I’ve been running drills and simulations the whole time we’ve been parked.”
“There’ve been a couple fights,” Alex said.
“It’s just nerves,” Bobbie said. “When this mission’s done, that shit will evaporate.”
Naomi took another bite of white kibble so that she wouldn’t frown. It didn’t work, though. Alex cleared his throat and spoke in his changing-the-subject voice. “I’m guessing there’s still no word from the big guy?”
Two years before, Saba had found a chance to slip an operative onto Laconia itself with a pocket nuke and an encrypted recall-and-retrieve transmitter. A long-odds mission to get Jim back, or destroy Laconia’s rule by cutting off its head. Saba had asked Naomi who she would trust with something that important. That dangerous. When Amos heard about it, he’d packed his bags in the same hour. Since then, Laconia had built new defenses. The underground had lost most of its presence in Laconia system, and Amos had gone silent.
Naomi shook her head. “Not yet.”
“Yeah, well,” Alex said. “Soon, probably.”
“Probably,” Naomi agreed, the same way she did every time they had this conversation.
“You two want any coffee?” Alex asked. Bobbie shook her head at the same time Naomi said Not for me, and Alex popped up. “I’ll go settle up, then.”
When the door closed behind him, Naomi leaned forward. She wanted to leave the moment where it was—a reunion with family. A bright spot in the darkness. She wanted to, and she couldn’t.
“A mission with the Storm in Sol system is a hell of a risk,” she said.
“It stands a real chance of getting some attention,” Bobbie agreed, not making eye contact. Her tone was light, but there was a warning in it. “It’s not just me, you know.”
“Saba.”
“And others.”
“I keep thinking about Avasarala,” Naomi said. There was still some whiskey in the bottle, and she poured herself a finger. “She was a hell of a fighter. Never backed down from anything, even when she lost.”
“She was one of a kind,” Bobbie agreed.
“She was a fighter, but she wasn’t a warrior. She was always leading the struggle, but she did it by finding other ways to get the work done. Alliances, political pressure, trade, logistics. Her strategy was always that violence came last.”
“She had leverage,” Bobbie said. “She ran a planet. We’re a bunch of rats looking for cracks in the concrete. We’re going to do things differently.”
“We have leverage,” Naomi said. “And more than that, we can cultivate leverage.”
Bobbie put down her fork very carefully. The darkness in her eyes wasn’t anger. Or it wasn’t just anger, anyway. “Laconia is a military dictatorship. If you want anyone to stand against Duarte, we have to show people that he can be stood against. Military action is what shows people that there’s hope. You’re a Belter, Naomi. You know this.”
“I know that it doesn’t work,” Naomi said. “The Belt fought for generations against the inner planets—”
“And won,” Bobbie said.
“We didn’t, though. We didn’t win. We held on until something came in and knocked over the playing board. Do you really think we’d have gotten something like the Transport Union if the gates hadn’t appeared? The only way we succeeded was by something totally unexpected changing the rules. Only now we’re acting like it’ll work twice.”
“We’re acting?”
“Saba’s acting,” Naomi said. “And you’re backing him.”
Bobbie leaned back, stretching the way she did when she was annoyed. It made her seem even bigger than she was, but Naomi was a hard woman to intimidate. “I know you disagree with the approach, and I know you’re not happy that Saba didn’t put you in on the details, but—”
“That’s not the issue,” Naomi said.
“No one’s arguing against leverage. No one’s saying that we shouldn’t be looking for political angles too. But pacifism only works when your enemy has a conscience. Laconia has a deep tradition of discipline through punishment and I know—No, hear me out. I know that because it’s a Martian tradition too. You grew up with the Belt, but I grew up with Mars. You tell me that my way doesn’t lead to victory? Okay. I believe you. But I’m telling you that your soft approach doesn’t work on these people.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“Same place as always,” Bobbie said. “Doing the best we can for as long as we can and hoping something unexpected happens. On the upside, something unexpected almost always does.”
“That’s not as comforting as you think,” Naomi said with a chuckle, trying to lighten the mood.
Bobbie wasn’t having it. “Because sometimes the thing we don’t expect is that we lost Clarissa and Holden. Or that we lost Amos. Or that we lose me. Or Alex. Or you. But that’s going to happen. We’re all going to lose each other eventually, and that’s been true since before we were a crew. That’s what being born means. Everything else is just specifics. And my specifics are that I’m leading a top-secret military mission in Sol system using the enemy’s captured ship against them, because even if it’s a bad plan, it’s the only plan I have. And maybe my risk will get you your leverage.”
But I don’t want you to risk anything, Naomi thought. I’ve lost too much. I can’t stand to lose anything more. Bobbie’s features softened, just a little. So maybe she understood.
The familiar tap of a footstep outside the door was Alex as clearly as if he’d said his name. Naomi took a deep breath and forced herself to relax.
She didn’t want to spoil the reunion for him too.
Chapter Three: Alex
Bobbie and Naomi were at it again.
They played it cool when Alex came back into the room, but he could tell a heated conversation had been going on while he was away. Naomi was dipping her head, letting her hair fall in front of her eyes the way she did when she was upset. Bobbie’s face was a shade darker than usual, flushed with excitement or anger. Alex had lived on the same small ship with Naomi for decades, and Bobbie only a little less. There was almost nothing they could conceal from each other.
It hurt his feelings a little that they were even trying to hide it because that meant he had to hide it too.
“All settled up,” Alex said.
Bobbie nodded and drummed her fingers on the table. Naomi gave him a small smile through her hair.
Alex would have put money that their argument was the same one they’d been rehashing since they’d left Freehold. Pretending like nothing was wrong was the only safe choice. A wise man doesn’t get between two fighting animals, but even a dim bulb didn’t step into an argument between Naomi Nagata and Bobbie Draper. Not if he wanted to keep all his fingers. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
“So …,” Alex started, letting the word draw out until it became awkward.
“Yeah,” Naomi answered. “I’ve got a lot to do before I climb back into my storage crate.”
Bobbie nodded, started to speak, and then stopped. In the blink of an eye she’d crossed the distance to Naomi and swept her up in her massive arms. While the two women were close to the same height, Bobbie outweighed Naomi by at least forty kilos. It was like watching a polar bear grapple a coatrack. But it wasn’t the beginning of a fight, because both women were crying and patting each other on the back.
“It was good to see you,” Bobbie said, hugging Naomi a little tighter and lifting her off the deck.
“I miss you,” Naomi answered. “Both of you. More than I can say.”
The both of you felt like an
invitation, so Alex moved in and threw his arms around the two of them. A moment later, he was weeping too. After a while, when it felt right, they separated. Bobbie wiped her eyes with a napkin, but Naomi ignored the streaks down her face. She was smiling. Alex realized it was maybe the first real smile he’d seen from her since Holden had been taken to Laconia. It made him wonder how lonely her life was now, hidden away in her cargo container, moving from ship to ship and station to station. Even though it was the choice they’d all made together, he felt a pang of guilt for leaving her alone like that. But Bobbie had needed a pilot, and Naomi, in her wandering-statesman role, didn’t. And didn’t want one.
“When will we see you again?” Bobbie asked.
“I wish I knew,” Naomi replied. “You guys going to be in Sol long?”
“Not up to me,” Bobbie said with a shrug. In this case it was true, but even if it hadn’t been, the answer would have been the same. You never knew who was listening, and even here on a Transport Union station in the back room of an OPA sympathizer bar, the habits of secrecy died hard.
As if on cue, Alex’s hand terminal buzzed an alert at him. They were getting ready to transfer the Storm from its current ship to the new one. Naomi wasn’t the only one living inside a high-stakes shell game.
“Boss, gonna go oversee the transfer,” he said to Bobbie.
“I’ll come with,” she replied, then grabbed Naomi for one last fierce hug. “You stay safe, XO.”
“That’s all I do nowadays,” Naomi said with a sad grin.
Leaving her behind felt wrong. The way it always did.
Alex would never admit it out loud, but the Gathering Storm scared the shit out of him. The Rocinante was still his first love. Like a hand tool that grew to fit the shape of the hand that held it, the Roci was comfortable, familiar, safe. For all that it was a dangerous warship, it still felt like home. It felt right. He missed it terribly.
The Storm was like living inside an alien creature that was pretending to be an overpowered racing ship and then someone had strapped a shit-ton of firepower onto it. Where flying the Roci felt like a collaboration, the ship an extension of his will, flying the Storm felt like a negotiation with a dangerous animal. Every time he sat in the pilot’s chair he worried about getting bitten.
Bobbie had gone over the ship with her techs from stem to stern and reassured him that there was nothing in the specs that made the Storm dangerous to her crew, or at least not more than all spaceships were dangerous to their crews. Alex remained unconvinced. There was something about using the controls that felt like the ship wasn’t reacting to his inputs; it felt like the ship was interpreting them and agreeing with them, but also making its own damn decisions. The only person he’d ever confided this to was his copilot, Caspar Asoau.
“I mean, yeah, the controls feel a little loose I guess, but not sure that means the ship is fighting back,” Caspar had said, giving Alex a suspicious side-eyed glance. Alex hadn’t brought it up again. But Alex had been flying spaceships for a lot of years now, and he knew what he knew. There was more to the Storm than just metal and carbon and whatever that crystal-looking shit was. Even if no one else could see it.
Still, it was a damn beautiful ship.
Alex stood at a small observation window and watched as it was carefully moved from the open hangar bay of their old transport ship to the new one. The two massive transports flanked the Storm as it moved, and the enormous bulk of the transfer station’s central hub overshadowed them both. It was all very deliberately done to block line of sight to all the known government telescope and radar stations. For all the Laconian Empire would ever know, two heavy freighters had briefly docked at the same transfer point, dropped off or picked up some cargo, and then gone their separate ways. That a stolen Laconian warship had been moved from one to the other wouldn’t appear on any official records or in any video feeds. And the Storm and her crew would be free to live and fight another day. Assuming they hadn’t overlooked anything.
The gleaming crystal-and-metal flanks of the ship seemed to glow with their own inner light even in the box canyon shadow that two freighters and the transfer station created. Bright white puffs of superheated gas flashed and disappeared as the maneuvering thrusters fired. Caspar would be at the controls, gently nudging the Laconian destroyer out of the open cargo bay of their old ship and into the new with practiced ease. They’d played this game a lot, and both pilots had become expert at moving the ship in very confined spaces.
As a former military man, Alex was always surprised that they could actually manage to keep the conspiracy a secret. They were sneaking a stolen imperial warship through the gate network hidden in the bowels of Transport Union ships. At least dozens and maybe hundreds of people were directly involved. Somehow, they kept getting away with it.
The Occam’s razor argument to nearly all conspiracy theories was that people were really shitty at keeping secrets, and large groups of people were exponentially worse. But with the help of their former OPA friends in the Transport Union, they’d been sneaking and peeking for months without getting caught. It was a testament to how bred to insurgency the Belters had become over the last century or two. Hiding a rebellion from vastly superior military forces was in their DNA. During his twenty years as a member of the Martian Navy and then later fighting the Free Navy, he’d had a part in hunting their more radical factions. Alex had often found the Belter capacity for subterfuge and guerrilla fighting infuriating. Now it was literally keeping him alive.
Alex wasn’t sure if that was ironic or not. Funny, maybe.
The Storm finished buttoning down in their new freighter. It was a cow of a cargo hauler shaped like a fat bullet and named the Pendulum’s Arc. Its doors slid shut and locked, and Alex felt a tiny tremor in the deck as they did. A pair of doors bigger than a destroyer had some mass to them.
Alex pulled out his terminal and opened a channel to Bobbie. “The baby’s tucked in. We can be oscar mike on your word.”
“Copy that,” Bobbie said, and killed the channel.
She was off doing final prep with her team. Saba’s chain of whisperers hadn’t told them what their mission in Sol was, but Bobbie kept her troops so drilled on the fundamentals that the specific mission just became a checklist of shit to get done. Alex had been skeptical when Bobbie took a mixed bag of old-guard OPA, stuffed them into Laconian Marine power armor, and said she was going to turn them into a legit covert ops strike team. But damned if she hadn’t done exactly that. They’d run three different operations with a hundred percent success rate and a zero percent casualty rate. It turned out that as formidable as Gunny Draper was, she was even scarier when you let her train her own backup.
There had to have been a moment when this had become the new normal. Playing their cargo ship version of three-card monte with the Storm while Saba and Naomi and the rest of the underground picked mission targets for them. He couldn’t say when it had passed. Only now he was back to being the bus driver he’d been in the MCRN a few lifetimes ago. Every day carried the risk of discovery and capture or death. Every operation sent Bobbie and her team into the meat grinder of the Laconian dominion. For all their successes, they were walking on the edge of a razor blade. If he’d been twenty and unaware of his own mortality, he’d probably have loved it.
He turned away from the observation window and picked up his gear bag. As he walked, his terminal squawked at him. “Locked and powered down,” Caspar said.
“I was watching. Elegantly done. The gunny will be drilling the troops, and I’m headed that way. Ship’s yours for the duration.”
“Copy that.”
The corridors of the transfer station were spare and functional. Smooth taupe ceramic walls and a floor just padded enough to keep the occupants from getting shin splints in the habitat ring’s one-third g rotation. Alex trudged along one for half a kilometer, then rapped at a door marked STORAGE 348-001.
A grizzled Belter opened it a crack and looked up and down the h
allway around Alex. He had gray hair in a military-style buzz cut and flat gray eyes of almost exactly the same color. Alex could see the heavy black pistol he held behind his thigh as he checked to see if the corridor was clear. His name was Takeshi Oba, and he was one of Bobbie’s killers.
“All clear,” Alex said with a smile, and Oba let him in with a grunt.
It was an empty room of about five by ten meters with the same plain ceramic walls as the corridor outside. Bobbie’s team was standing in loose ranks facing her as she addressed them. She gave Alex a tiny nod as he entered, but didn’t stop her speech.
“Make no mistake,” she was saying, “the Sol system is the most dangerous theater we’ve operated in. Its threat level is second only to Laconia for our style of covert op. Nearly every rock or chunk of ice bigger than a troop transport has a station, telescope, or radar emplacement on it. There are eyes everywhere.”
A mutter passed through the group, but Alex couldn’t tell if it was grumbling or agreement.
“And,” Bobbie continued, “the Earth-Mars Coalition fleet is entirely under Laconian control. Which means the Laconians’ relatively small number of ships—the one fact that has allowed us to operate up to this point—is not going to help us here. To make matters worse, the Laconians have left the dreadnought Heart of the Tempest in orbit around Earth. It’s there primarily as a threat to keep the inner planets in line, but if it detects us, we are in a world of hurt. The Storm cannot survive an engagement with a Magnetar-class battleship. End of story.”
“Any word yet on the target?” Jillian Houston asked. She was the daughter of Freehold’s governor, Payne Houston, and had been one of the first volunteers for Bobbie’s team. She was tall and rangy, with white-blond hair, the muscles and bone structure of a born Earther, and a perpetual scowl line between her eyes. She’d become Bobbie’s unofficial second in the time they’d worked together. Alex worried about that. Jillian was mean as a snake. When he’d told Bobbie that, she’d responded, I just make sure she never runs out of mice. He still didn’t know quite what that meant.
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