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.