In the days of Naomi’s internal exile, she’d learned that Emma’s last name had been Pankara before she’d taken Zomorodi as a contract name with four other people. She had siblings on Europa in Sol system and Saraswati, one of the three habitable planets in Tridevi system. She’d been in private security before she joined up with the Transport Union. And she had a hookah designed to function anywhere between five gs and the float. She was also willing to talk to Naomi directly, which made her company more precious than gold. Now she pulled herself to a stop at the machines, took a bulb of something, and launched out to stop herself at Naomi’s side and in her orientation.
“All well?” Naomi asked.
Emma shook a flat hand in a gesture that meant yes and no. “Captain Burnham won’t talk to me and Chuck won’t stop.”
“I made things hard for you,” Naomi said.
“I made things hard for myself,” Emma said, cracking the seal on her food bulb. “You’re just when it blew up on me.”
“Fair,” Naomi said. It was astounding how good it felt to speak to someone in person and without light delay. Even when the conversation was banal. Maybe especially when it was. “Chuck seems like a decent person. He’s underground?”
Emma chuckled. “He’s not cut out for it. He worries too much. The only reason he’s not sucking down euphorics now is that he figures that no one will say anything to this political officer at the transfer station. Half of the people on the ship have something they’d rather not be looked at too close, and the other half have t
o work with them.”
“Seems tenuous.”
“Because it is,” Emma said. “But we work with what we have. Besides, that’s what the fight’s all about, isn’t it?”
“How do you figure?” Naomi asked.
Emma took a long, thick pull on the bulb, then shrugged as she swallowed. “The first ship I served on after I ditched Pinkwater, the XO had a thing for one of the mechanics. They were both babies. More hormones than blood. The company had a no-fraternization policy, but what can you do about it? The XO, she started being where the mechanic was. Started using the ship system to keep track of where people were, on shift and off. Mechanic didn’t love that. Got to where they had a screaming fight in the middle of the med bay. XO started crying. Didn’t come out of her cabin for two days. Good XO otherwise. Mechanic knew his job too. But both of them got fired. Rules, you know.”
“That’s how you see the underground?” Naomi said through a real smile. “Making the union safe for romantic drama?”
“Easy to make rules,” Emma said. “Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it’s the person’s fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that’s worth shit, we’ve done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people. Laconians making the same mistake as ever. Our rules are good, and they’d work perfectly if it were only a different species.”
“You sound like someone I know,” Naomi said.
“I’ll die for that,” Emma said. “I’ll die so that people can be fuckups and still find mercy. Not why you’re here?”
Naomi considered the other woman. The anger in her jaw and the pain in her voice. She wondered whether Emma had been the XO. It probably didn’t matter.
“We’re all here for our own reasons,” Naomi said. “What they are isn’t as important as the fact that we came.”
“True,” Emma said.
Naomi laughed, and it was a hard, bitter sound. “Anyway, I spent too much time already with people telling me they’d shoot me if I didn’t do what they said. That tank’s empty for this lifetime.”
“May it never refill,” Emma said.
A flat-faced man in a command uniform pulled himself into the commissary, glanced at them, and did a fast double take. The environmental techs looked from him to Naomi, then pushed off, shoving their spent bulbs in the recycler as they left. The officer went to the dispenser, pulled a drink of some sort—coffee, tea, maté—and left again without looking back at them. His disapproval made the air feel cooler.
“You’ve got what you need?” Emma asked, as if the man hadn’t been there at all.
The question had more weight than the words deserved. “I’m good,” Naomi said. “When we get to port, though—”
“We’ll get you out safe,” Emma said. “After that…”
“I know,” Naomi said. After that, she was still a criminal. Still a fugitive. Still a mouse looking for a safe hole. That would come. “Saba may have something for me.”
“I’ll light you a candle. Meantime, if you need something, better me than Chuck, maybe,” Emma said, then sucked the last of the paste out of the bulb, smacked her lips, and launched for the door. Naomi floated alone in the commissary for a few minutes more. She felt a little guilty taking a bulb of tea back to her cabin, but only a little.
The Bhikaji Cama was a massive ship. Three quarters of a kilometer long and wide enough to look squat in the schematics. It had been built decades earlier to ferry enough people and supplies to one of the outlying worlds that a self-sustaining colony could arrive all at once. Buildings and recyclers and soil and reactors and fuel. Everything that humanity needed to make a toehold in an unfriendly alien ecosphere except a sense of fashion and guidelines on how to woo your mechanics. The halls were a drab green with hand- and footholds that hadn’t been scrubbed in a few too many weeks. The ship conserved water jealously, using passive radiators to shed heat instead of evaporative feeds, and it left the air hotter than she liked.
Her cabin was tiny. Not just smaller than her storage container had been, but smaller than some supply closets she’d had on the Roci. The crash couch was cheap, with gel that stank a little, and there wasn’t enough room for her to stretch her arms in it. The design was called albuepartir back in the Belt, because if your arm drifted off the edge in your sleep, a sudden deceleration could break it. Some previous tenant had illustrated the anti-spalling cloth with a complex and violent firefight between two sets of stick figures, one with colored-in circles for heads, and the other pale and empty. Naomi strapped herself into the couch, pulled up the system and the false record Chuck had given her, and got back to work.
The ironic thing was that, with the access she had now, she could actually reach more information than with the passive feeds she’d relied on before. She tried to be careful about it, not abuse her access in a way that would raise any more red flags than were already flying. But she had requests out to the union database mirror about political officers and changes to Laconian transfer point regulation. It was the sort of thing that anyone on a ship like the Cama might be—and probably was—looking into. It was only her perspective on the information coming back that made it different.