And it wasn’t only Auberon either. Every system with a ring gate was looking at the same questions, fearing the same possible futures. Every system including Laconia.
The thought landed with a weight. Her grief at the loss of Saba and Medina and her unexpected hope in seeing the Typhoon destroyed. The dread of the mysterious enemy and its escalating body count. They all led to the same conclusion.
It was like a nightmare where you spent the whole night running from something and ended up in its lap all the same. No one’s in charge.
“Sorry?” Chava said as she slid her own egg with its golden yolk onto a plate. “Did you say something?”
“We’re going to need to break some protocols,” Naomi said. “And I’ll need access to a machine shop. You wouldn’t know how I could get my hands on some torpedoes, do you? I don’t need warheads. Just the drives and the frames. Long-range designs, if we can find them.”
“I can look,” Chava said. “How many do you need?”
“Ideally about thirteen or fourteen hundred.”
Chava laughed, saw Naomi’s expression, and sobered.
“And,” Naomi said, “if the offer’s still open, I might take the coffee after all.”
The yard that Chava found would have been small back in Sol system. There were thousands like it scattered through the Belt. Improvised shipyards that catered to rock hoppers and independents who couldn’t afford docking fees at Callisto or Ceres or any of the other centers. Apart from the fact that this one didn’t have anything manufactured over fifteen years ago, it could have been anywhere.
The man who ran it was called Zep, and he had a faded split-circle tattoo on his neck. He spoke English, Mandarin, Portuguese, and a dialect of Belter creole that put his background in the Martian trojans. He gave her the tour of the yard. It was a high, pale bubble of ceramic and steel with harsh white work lights overhead and a misting of oil every morning to trap the lunar fines. Everything there was a little sticky to the touch and stank of gunpowder. It was the first place in Auberon system she felt even slightly at home.
Even with the oil, the fines—tiny bits of stone smaller than dust that erosion had never smoothed—were dangerous enough that she wore a mask and eye protection. She went through the rows of decommissioned ships that had been repossessed or damaged by misadventure or malice to the point that it made more sense to sell them as scrap. They were mostly orbital shuttles and semiautomated prospectors. The shuttles were no use to her, but some of the prospecto
rs had probes. They didn’t have the range or speed of real torpedoes, but she could start with them. Over the course of a long, sweat-soaked morning, she’d assembled half a dozen that seemed worth closer examination.
The idea wasn’t that different from the bottles she’d used before. It was only the scale that was different. And the stakes. She could load transmitters and explosives into the probes and then send them out through the different gates. No one would be exposed to danger by coming through the newly haunted slow zone, and the messages would be untraceable. Anyone listening as she had been would hear them just like the ones she’d dropped off before. She needed to work on the exact wording. It would be the first voice from the underground since Medina. Getting it right mattered. Getting it done quickly mattered more.
There had been a moment in the neo-noir films that Alex always watched that happened so often it became a cliché. She had to have seen it a dozen times over the years, and she hadn’t been paying much attention. A firefight would start with operatic choreography and impossibly high-capacity magazines. The hero and the villain would play through the scenario with whatever peculiar flourishes the director had invented to make this one different from all the ones before. Then, at the climactic ending, the two enemies faced each other, and both would run out of ammunition. The resolution of all the heroic violence came down to which of them could reload faster.
That was where the underground and the empire stood. They were both disrupted. Whichever of them was able to organize again first would survive. Laconia still had the firepower. It still had the technological edge. But if the underground could rebuild a communication grid faster, she could change the story of their inevitability. Laconia’s advantages wouldn’t be enough.
Speed mattered. If Saba were still alive, if Medina had survived, it would have been time for him to stand up, announce himself, and become the public face of the opposition. To forge the thirteen hundred different undergrounds that were out there now in the cut off systems back into one thing, and exploit the confusion of the enemy before Duarte could find his feet. Take the crisis and make it a turning point, even if it meant more pressure on Drummer and the Union. Naomi would have told him it had to be done. She’d have been right.
Her hand terminal chimed. She pulled off her goggles and air filter and accepted the connection. There was only one person it could be. Chava was in her office, her hair perfectly in place, her blouse unsmeared and her demeanor as polite and professional as if she did work like this every day.
“I have the secure connection you asked for,” she said. “The light delay won’t make it a conversation.”
“How far?” Naomi asked.
“About fifty minutes, one way.”
Naomi pictured the Auberon system. Its three gas giants the greater and lesser belts. The Bhikaji Cama was still a fair distance from the ring. She had time.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Not a problem,” Chava said. “I’m sending you the route and encryption. I’ll see you for dinner tonight?”
“I don’t want to impose.”
“It isn’t an imposition,” Chava said. “And it’s safer than anyplace else.”
“Then yes, thank you,” Naomi said. Chava smiled and killed the connection. Naomi thumbed up the data packet configuration and slotted in the information she’d been given. If it worked, it would slide unnoticed through the Transport Union’s system and appear to Emma Zomorodi in particular.
Naomi considered herself in the preview display. Dust and sweat-smeared skin. Hair more pale than black. Wrinkles at her eyes and mouth. This was the woman who turned down High Consul Winston Duarte’s invitation to live the rest of her life in a palace with the man she loved in order to take on the one job she never wanted. She smiled, and the woman on the screen looked happy. Exhausted, yes. Well bruised by life, yes. But happy. She started the recording.
“Emma, I need to ask you to break protocol for me. I want you to send me everything you know about the status and function of the underground. Contacts. Ship names. Procedures. Anything you have, tell me. And if you can get messages to your operatives, tell them to expect a message like this from me in the near future.
“I know it’s exactly what I told you never to do before, but the situation has changed. Medina is off the board, and we’ve lost Saba. We have to regroup, reorganize. And someone has to take initiative.”