Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

“Carry him. We can’t wait here. We don’t know if the target was alone. We have to get the girl out.”

“He’s my friend,” Teresa shouted, but Ilich didn’t hear her, or he didn’t care.

The night air was cold now. She could see her breath in the glare of the guard transport headlights. Ilich shoved her into the backseat before pushing in beside her. They threw the wounded guard in the back. He groaned when the transport truck lurched backward. Ilich leaned against her, murmuring something fast and low. Her ears weren’t right, so it wasn’t until she could shift enough to see his lips that she understood it was fuck fuck fuck fuck… There was blood on his neck, dark and thick.

“Sir!” the driver said. “Are you okay? You’ve been hit.”

“What?” Ilich said, and then, “Teresa, are you okay? Tell me you’re okay!”

The transport truck hit a bump in the road, shaking a little, and the shock of it all fell away. She understood clearly what had just happened. She balled her fists and she shrieked.

The infirmary was quiet. She was shaking. Cortázar and Trejo and Kelly were all there, standing in the anteroom talking to each other in low, urgent voices. Ilich was in the autodoc beside hers, a thick bandage on his shoulder and neck. Dawn would be coming soon. She didn’t care as much as she’d expected to. The autodoc fed something cool into her bloodstream. Another sedative, maybe. It made her feel cloudy, but she wasn’t going to sleep. She half suspected she’d never sleep again.

When the door opened, Trejo stepped in. He wore gray flannel pajamas a size too small for his belly. He didn’t look like the secret ruler of humanity, he looked like a sleepy uncle. He pulled a chair up to her bed, sat down, and sighed.

“Teresa,” he said, sternly. “I need you to tell me everything you know about the man in the cave. What he said to you. What you said to him. Everything.”

“He was my friend,” Teresa said.

“He was not. We have body camera data from Ilich and the recovery team. The facial recognition data matches the… the bloodstains. We know who he was, and once we have a secure perimeter and get a cleanup team back into that beshitted cave, we may have a better idea what he was doing here. But I need to hear everything from you. Now.”

“His name was Timothy. He was my best friend.”

Trejo’s jaw went tight.

“His name was Amos Burton. He was a terrorist and murderer and the mechanic on James Holden’s ship, and apparently he’s been sipping tea with the daughter of the high consul for months. Anything you told him, the underground may know. So begin at the beginning, go slow, be thorough, and tell me what you have fucking done to us.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Naomi

The thing that surprised Naomi most was how quickly it happened. How little convincing people needed. She had assumed that Emma and Chava would agree because they knew her personally. They had a history together. And maybe their contacts would be amenable to connecting with her, since known-safe members of the underground were vouching. After that, she had expected it to be difficult—sometimes impossible—to convince Saba’s network to reveal itself to her. Everyone in the underground was in danger of death. Maybe worse. They would all be as wary as she would have been in their place.

She’d overlooked the fact that she was Naomi Nagata, and that fear drove people to look for leaders. Emma had five contacts in the underground. Three of them were on ships in other systems, but one was a technician in Auberon’s planetary transfer station, and the other was an engineer on a Transport Union ship that was presently in-system. Chava’s connections were more local. A doctor at one of the major hospitals down the well. A taxation agent and forensic accountant on contract to Laconia. A manager of a fashionable brothel at the governmental center. The husband of a security specialist contracted with Laconia to maintain and protect the biometric identification systems. Some of those were single nodes in the network, but some were cell leaders with four or five other connections, some of whom knew a couple other people and so on until it felt like the underground had as many loyalists as the governor.

It was an illusion, but it was a powerful one.

“The thing is the fuckers came in like the flood, yeah?” the man across the table from her said. He was a communications engineer for an independent design collective tasked with building a tightbeam network—repeaters and relays—in the still-unexplored vastness of Auberon system. He called himself Bone, but Naomi was fairly certain it was a nickname he’d given himself. “Overwhelming force, Laconia. Unstoppable. Which, yeah, they are. But you can beat the shit out of a river and not change how it flows.”

“Wouldn’t know,” Naomi said. If he heard her, it didn’t slow him down. Some men got loquacious when they were nervous.

“They’re one system, and not that populous. They’ve got no choice but to rely on us poor local bastards for help. And Laconia…” He chuckled. “Laconia has no local tradition of cheerful corruption. They don’t expect it, and they don’t know what to do about it when they find it. Besides make the kind of examples of people that piss off all their families.”

“Give them time,” Naomi said. “They’ll catch up. If we let them.”

Bone grinned. His left upper canine had been decorated to look like it was made from stone. Fashion never stopped. It was one of many things Naomi was pleased that age allowed her not to care about anymore. She smiled back.

The public park was another sign of Auberon’s wealth and success. The designers of the lunar base had built in common areas and open space. The dome above them was still under the lunar surface, but light panels made it seem as open and airy as a resort on Titan. Children skipped in the thin gravity, hopping from bar to bar of a climbing structure that rose almost half the height of the Roci. At a full g, a slip and fall would be fatal. Here, they might get bruised.

A drip fountain beside them filled the air with white noise as the tiny drops drifted down from the ceiling and tapped an inclined slate, flowing slowly down to a fish-filled reservoir. It was beautiful. She didn’t feel like she belonged there.

“The repeaters,” she said, bringing them back to the issue at hand.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bone said. “We got your design out. Bottle network is on its way. Nice thing about it? Cheap. Any union ship close to a ring gate can slip something out the lock.” Bone made a pushing gesture so graceful it was almost dance and then snapped his fingers. “We’ll be trading fresh gossip before you know.”

“Sol and Bara Gaon are the priorities.”

“Already got bottles through to them. They know we’re here and what we’re doing. This can only spread.”

“And Laconia?”