The med bay was old, but well put together. Nothing had the shine of the new. Everything was worn. But it was only worn, not neglected. Naomi had been around long enough to know the difference. She considered her new face in the hand terminal’s camera. Emma’s first move had been to shave her hair into an unflattering topiary that made her forehead seem wider and her eyes closer together. The swelling in her brow and jaw had thickened her features already. The system’s match to her normal appearance was only 80 percent. Enough that even if they identified her, it could be written off as a false positive.
Unless they already knew she was there.
“I’m putting you in with the crew working the heat sink,” Emma said. “Chief has them swapping out coolant exchanges.”
“Joy,” Naomi said.
“The stink’ll give you a reason to be wearing a mask,” Emma said. “And it’s a mixed-shift crew. Any luck, everyone will think you’re from the other one.”
Emma drove the needle into the flesh under Naomi’s eye. It only hurt a little. “How long do we have?”
Emma checked her terminal and spat out a low, grunting curse.
“We should go,” she said, dropping the needle into Naomi’s skin one last time. “They’re already positioning for transfer.”
“If they take me,” Naomi said, “I will try to hold out until you can get away. But go quickly, and make sure Saba knows what happened.”
Emma didn’t meet her eyes, but she nodded. This had always been a risk. It was what they’d signed up for. As Emma gave her a mask and led her down to the engineering decks, Naomi wondered how Bobbie and Alex would find out about it if she was captured. And what Jim would hear. The temptation was still there. If she did it—if she jumped instead of waiting for the push—she could control the fall.
The coolant lines on the Bhikaji Cama were an old design but in decent condition. She’d flushed lines like them back in her water hauler days, and the process wasn’t that hard. Punishing and foul, but not hard. There were four others on the team. Five people on a three-shift boat. It wasn’t much of a disguise.
The full process would run about four hours if nothing went wrong. She had to hope it was long enough for the Laconians to come, make their inspection and move on. All she would have to do was stay quiet and small until the danger passed. She fell into the work, taking orders from the foreman, doing her part with as little fuss as she could manage. She’d almost forgotten there was anything to worry about more pressing than not getting too much coolant in the air filters, when the interruption came.
“Make safe! Make safe! All you fucking bastards hold the work and make safe, yeah?”
The others all closed down the lines. Naomi did too. There wasn’t much choice.
The man who pulled himself past the yellow work barrier was dressed in a chief engineer’s uniform. Behind him, three soldiers in Laconian blues, one with a captain’s bars. Naomi hooked her foot into a wall handhold. Her heart was going fast, and a hint of nausea plucked at her that had nothing to do with the stink of coolant. The chief engineer motioned for them to take off their masks. The others started to comply. If she hesitated now, it would only call attention where she didn’t want it.
Naomi pulled off her mask.
“Was that discussed with senior staff?” the Laconian captain demanded, continuing whatever conversation they’d been having before they came in the room.
“No,” the chief engineer said. He was a younger man, but with a rough, scarred face that made him ageless. “Why would it be? Captain says it. We do it. That’s how it is. That a problem?”
One of the other Laconians held a hand terminal up to the face of her team foreman. The terminal chimed. Naomi felt a sick kind of peace descend over her.
“It’s an irregularity,” the Laconian captain said. “The political officer will want a full report when you reach the transfer station.”
“Political officer?” the chief engineer asked. Despite herself, Naomi’s ears pricked up. If this was related somehow to the mission in Sol—if Laconia was making a broad crackdown—maybe they weren’t here looking just for her. It was a thin hope, but it was something.
“New oversight regulations,” the Laconian captain said as the hand terminal tracked over Naomi’s face.
“Never heard of them.”
“You’re hearing about them right now,” the captain said.
The soldier frowned. “Sir? This one’s not on the crew list.”
I am Naomi Nagata. I would like to accept the invitation of High Consul Duarte. Please let him know. It was all she had to say. It would even be a relief, knowing that she’d done all that she could first. The chief engineer looked at her and shrugged. “Course she’s not. She’s on the apprentice program.”
The Laconian captain looked at her, uncertain. She kept the confusion off her face. No one on the ship but Emma was supposed to know she was there. Play along, she thought. Just play along.
“She’s old to be an apprentice,” the captain said.
“Had some trouble back home,” she said. “Trying to make something new.” The lie was easy.
“She needs to be on the crew rolls,” the Laconian captain said, turning away.
“Why?” the chief engineer asked. “She’s not crew. She’s an apprentice.”
“Apprentices are part of the crew,” the captain said, a note of exasperation in his voice.
“First I’ve heard of it,” the chief engineer said. “If I put her in, it starts counting her hours toward a benefits package like she was crew. That’s not how it works.”
“You can take that up with the political officer too,” the Laconian captain said. The last of the work crew was scanned and cleared.
As they left, the chief engineer looked back. His eyes met hers. There was a subterranean joy in them. “As you all were. Shit’s not going to maintain itself.”
“Yes, chief,” Naomi said, and put her mask back on.
They fell back into the familiar rhythms of labor, but Naomi’s mind was working on more than the lines. The others on the team didn’t seem to have noticed anything odd in the conversation. One of them—a thick-faced man called Kip—treated her a little worse, but that was probably just because he thought she was lower status now. Nothing odd about that. When the new exchange was in, the old one sealed, and the diagnostics all in optimal range, Naomi wanted nothing more than a shower and a meal. She didn’t have a cabin of her own, she didn’t know where the gang showers were, and she wouldn’t have a locker there. Even if she got to the right place, after she cleaned up, she’d have to put the same coolant-stinking jumpsuit back on. That seemed worse than not cleaning up in the first place.
She followed the others as they headed back to the crew decks. Lagging behind. She wanted to go to her container. The urge to check her incoming feeds itched as badly as her jawline where the swelling was just starting to go down. But it was gone. Months of habit had just become irrelevant, and she pulled herself along the off-white halls, moving from handhold to handhold with the feeling of having woken from a long dream to find herself in some foreign station where she didn’t belong.
The mess hall had six people in it, but it was built for thirty or more. She pulled herself to a dispenser, but couldn’t get food. It wanted an access code or ID match that she didn’t have. She went to a corner by herself, bracing on a wall-mounted foothold, and waited without knowing what exactly she was waiting for.
Her thoughts moved in the silence of other people’s conversations. When, after an hour or so, Emma appeared, Naomi was almost surprised to see her. The woman pulled a double share of food and brought it over.
“They’ve moved on,” Emma said quietly. “Docked, ran down the whole fucking ship stem to stern, told the captain that he’d need to talk to someone at the transfer station, and gone.”
“Political officer,” Naomi said. “I heard. We got word of one heading for the transfer station in Sol system too. Earth.”
�
�Well, looks like we have political officers now,” Emma said sourly.
Naomi nodded with one fist. The crackdown was broad, then. A tightening of control over the whole Transport Union. More than that, it might be a sign that Duarte and his machinery were starting to suspect the Transport Union’s role in smuggling the underground from system to system. Or had other plans that wanted loyal and trusted eyes beyond the governors and their staffs.
If they found the shell game, it could mean a serious retooling of their methods at best. At worst, the end of the underground. With Medina in control of the slow zone and their methods of transportation exposed, they were in real danger of becoming thirteen hundred fragmented, isolated movements, unable to support or help each other.
“No one checked you, though?” Emma said.
“Oh, they checked her,” a voice said behind them. The chief engineer floated over and took position beside them. “They caught her.”
Emma blanched. So apparently she hadn’t been behind that.
“I appreciate you covering for me,” Naomi said. “It might be better for you if we just kept it at that. I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“Are you kidding?” the chief engineer said. “That was the best thing that’s happened to me since I signed up for this haul. Seriously, it was my pleasure.”
“I appreciate your enthusiasm, but—”
He handed her a card. “Override access to a private cabin and a commissary account,” he said. “It’s off the books, so even if there’s an audit, it’ll just come back as unused and overages.”
Naomi looked at it, then at him. Never look a gift horse in the mouth, they said. But it was bad advice. “I’m guessing there’s something you’ll want in return? Because I think we’re going to need to be very, very clear what that is.”
“No,” the chief engineer said. “Nothing. You’ve already paid me out. I’m just glad I get the chance to hand some back.”
“Excuse me for being rude,” Naomi said, “but I’ve never really trusted the whole kindness-of-strangers bit.”
“You’re not a stranger,” the chief engineer said. “You’re the reason I’m an engineer. My dad was a kid on Ceres when the Free Navy stripped it. You and your crew? You put your hands out in peace in the middle of a civil war. You built the Transport Union. As far as I’m concerned, we should kick the captain out of his quarters and give them to you. You more than earned them.”
Naomi reached for her hair, trying to pluck it down over her face, but Emma’s haircut didn’t leave enough for that. “You know who I am, then.”
The chief engineer coughed out a laugh. “Of course I do. Anyone in the Belt’s going to know Naomi fucking Nagata. It’s just these Laconian fucks who can’t see what they’re looking at. And again, it’s a real honor.”
“Chuck,” Emma said, and her tone made the word a warning.
“I won’t say it again,” the chief engineer—Chuck—said, lifting a hand. “But don’t either one of you worry. I’ll get you shuttle access as soon as we’re close to port. You’re safe with me.”
Naomi nodded her thanks, and Chuck beamed. She saw now how young he was. His delight with himself made her heart ache a little. He’d gotten away with something, and his pride was bright enough to read by. She even had a sense of what she must look like through his eyes—a demigod. A figure from myth appearing in his life. A celebrity. God knew she’d seen enough people look at Jim with that expression. This must be what it had been like for him all those times.
It was a feeling she could easily learn to hate.
Chapter Sixteen: Elvi
The ships were old transports that had been hauling people and supplies around Sol system’s asteroid belt for a generation before the first gate opened. Elvi watched them being positioned near the surface of the Tecoma ring gate with the Falcon’s highest-power optical telescopes, and the images were still fuzzy. Both vessels were at most a few dozen meters top to bottom, and they were almost a billion kilometers away. If the Falcon’s sensor arrays hadn’t been orders of magnitude more sensitive than her eyes, they wouldn’t have been anything close to visible. But she could make out the mechs and drones crawling over them, making the automated checks and last-minute verifications. Maneuvering thrusters bloomed and vanished as they shifted along the plating and drive cones, checking and double-checking that nothing would go wrong. There was deep irony in that, but if she thought about it too much, she just got angry.
“Hey, sweetie,” Fayez said from the doorway. “Can I get you anything?
“Still no. Just like three minutes ago,” she snapped. She grunted, regret jumping into her throat just behind the words. “Sorry. That was shitty.”
“No, I see where you’re coming from,” her husband and intellectual companion of decades said. “I’m hovering. Look.”
He let go of the handhold and floated free for a moment, grinning at his own physical pun. She laughed more at the grin than the joke.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Really. Perfectly fine.”
“Good. That’s good. Because some people, when they almost die from being semidrowned in half-alien goo while under a sustained high-g burn, get a little rash. Or zits. Near death can really do terrible things for acne.”
“I’m sorry I scared you,” she said. “I didn’t mean to. Really. But I’m fine now.”
Fayez pulled himself into the room, twisting ungracefully to hook his ankles around the wall footholds and absorb the momentum with his knees. He stood on the wall beside her, looking down at the images on her screen.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “that my deep existential panic at the prospect of your death hasn’t faded as quickly as yours.”
“It’s okay. I probably wouldn’t be as calm about it if it had been you. By the time I found out about it, I already wasn’t dead. Doesn’t really have the same punch when you miss all the will-she-or-won’t-she clinging-to-life thing.”
“Yeah,” Fayez said. “I didn’t love that part. I mean, in fairness, I don’t love this part either.”
She put up her hand, and he wrapped his fingers in hers. It was how they always were. Decades of habit shrouded what they meant in humor and wit, but she knew his distress was real. And that her resentment of it wasn’t really about him as much as the raw idiocy playing out near the transit ring. She took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly between her teeth.
“I feel stupid,” she said. “I really thought we were a scientific mission.”
“Aren’t we?”
She pointed one thumb toward the monitor. “That’s not science. ‘Light shit on fire and see what happens’ isn’t science. This is throwing dynamite into a pond to see if any fish float to the top.”
“So… natural philosophy?”
“Military bullshit. Solving every problem by trying to blow it up.”
“Yeah,” Fayez said. “Almost makes you wish you could quit, doesn’t it?”
Elvi pushed back from the monitor. In free fall, it was only a gesture that she was disengaging. Fayez’s dark eyes didn’t leave hers. “It wouldn’t be the first thing that made me think that.”
“But.”
“I know. If it wasn’t us,” she said, “it would be someone else. Someone who didn’t know as much as we do. It’s just…”
“You think whatever’s on the other side will hit back?”
“Yes. Maybe,” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t like things that can only happen once. You can’t make sense of something when there’s no pattern. One data point is the same as none.”
“Would you feel better if the big man committed to doing this again a few dozen times?”
A couple billion kilometers away, the drive lit up for a moment, flickered, and went out.
“I think he did.”
Elvi wasn’t sure what the atmosphere on the science deck really was. She wanted to think that everyone else was just as uncomfortable with Sagale’s plan and, like her, staying as quiet about it. But the trut
h was that Jen and Travon looked excited. Their screens showed the inputs from a dozen probes and arrays scattered through the local void and three countdown timers. The first timer showed the time—down to minutes now—when the first ship would pass through the gate and, hopefully, into oblivion. Trailing that by only a few seconds, the timer for the second ship—the bomb ship—that would follow it. And then with three full minutes more, the detonation clock.
They were too far away to disarm the antimatter bomb. Making sure the experiment failed safe if it failed would be up to Medina Station. If the bomb ship somehow actually made the transit into the gate network, Medina would shut it down without detonation. The Falcon, almost a light-hour away, was watching literal nothingness for signs that the thing beyond the gates—the thing inside them—had even noticed what they’d done.
“You know what would be funny?” Fayez said. “If this whole blowing-things-up plan broke the gate and we were all trapped here on this ship for the rest of our lives with no way home.”
Sagale glowered and cleared his throat.
“You’re right,” Fayez said. “Too soon.”
The first counter fell to zero, turned from blue time-to-transit to red time-since-transit. In an hour they would see it happen, hear the tech ship’s report. In the vast emptiness, all they had was the assumption that the plan had actually gone forward.
“Everyone strap in,” Sagale said. “If the enemy fires another of those void bullets at the system, we may lose consciousness for a time.”
Jen and Travon put on their restraints. Elvi already had hers on. Twice before, she’d lived through the consciousness-breaking backlash of pissing off whatever had murdered the protomolecule. Once on Ilus with an army of alien bug-robots ready to cut her down, once sitting on a couch in a waiting room on Luna watching the newsfeeds as the Tempest prepared to annihilate Pallas Station. She was almost used to it at this point, or that was what she told herself. Still, she wasn’t looking forward to doing it again. The second timer zeroed. The bomb ship was through the gate. Presumably it had gone dutchman too.
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