For a moment, Cara was still as stone. When she nodded it felt like watching a statue come to life.
“Did you and your brother lose time?”
“When the thing happened, and we could see the air?”
“Yes, then.”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t give us a clock to look at.”
“You’re conscious, then. You’re not… You aren’t just… You and your brother are sentient? Self-aware?”
The huge, black eyes changed. Glimmered. A thick tear rolled down Cara’s cheek. Elvi put her palm against the cage.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I am so, so sorry.”
Chapter Thirty: Bobbie
Bobbie couldn’t sleep.
This was a new thing, or at least one that she didn’t remember from when she was young. Back when she’d been active duty with the MMC, she’d been able to close her eyes and lose consciousness whenever a few minutes presented themselves. The idea of lying on a cot in a converted office, staring up at the ceiling, strapped lightly to keep from launching herself out of bed given Callisto’s mild gravity… It wouldn’t have made sense to that Bobbie Draper.
But here she was, three hours into her sleep cycle, making an inventory of her muscles and forcing each tense one to relax. A live monitor on the desk’s surface threw flickers of light and darkness above her. She noticed the tension that had crept back into her shoulders and made herself release it for the fourth or fifth or twenty-fifth time. She closed her eyes and willed them to stay closed. Something in the hallway dripped. Condensation that might mean a failure in the heating system or in the air recyclers. She tried to ignore it.
Her crew was scattered through Callisto Station or on the Storm or in their own cots in the complex of smugglers’ caves. It made her anxious to have her people diffused out into the civilian population like that. It also made her anxious to have them all together where they’d make a single target. The Laconian security forces only needed one lucky break. She needed all of them.
Her shoulders were tense again.
“Fuck.”
She undid the restraint with one hand and hauled herself up. Maybe an hour in the Storm’s gym would get her past the worst of her insomnia. But on the way out toward the hangar, she stopped at the desk, checking again the way she did fifty times a day. The map was broken into two frames. The smaller one showed the relative positions of the major bodies in Sol system, tracking the inevitable and predictable change in cartography like an orrery. The larger showed the Jovian system in great detail with data copied from the traffic control logs. On the small screen, Jupiter and its moons looked calm and serene, passing through the vastness of space with the tranquil beauty of the inevitable. Closer up, it was like a beehive. Hundreds of ships from ancient rock hoppers and mining skiffs to the Tempest and everything in between.
It was the Tempest that drew her.
Trejo had transferred out of the system on one of the fast Laconian shuttles, burning hard back to Laconia to deal with the crisis in the slow zone. The Tempest, on the other hand, had been sniffing around the Jovian moons like a dog searching for its lost antimatter. It had been in a complex orbit near Ganymede most of the time, though once it had darted out to Europa. It would come to Callisto eventually and force her hand. Until then, the best she could do was take comfort in imagining the fresh new Laconian vice admiral losing sleep in his cot because a moon-killing load of antimatter had gone missing and it was his job to find it.
She tapped the red dot on the map that was the Tempest. “Anything you can do, I can do better.”
An alert popped up. A newsfeed from Ceres Station with a breaking report. She opened it, and a young man with a Lunar accent looked earnestly up at her from the desk.
“This is Davis Myles with Ceres Beat, and behind me you can see station security in cooperation with Laconian state intelligence agents securing a cell of criminal separatists here at the heart of Ceres Station in what is being called the biggest bust since the coalition joined the Laconian Association of Worlds.”
Bobbie felt the tightness across her back get worse. It wasn’t only that every loss to the underground was more risk to her and hers. She hated the way history was being rewritten before her eyes. Sol system joined the Association of Worlds was a hell of a way to say, Laconia trucked in a half-alien warship and killed the shit out of everyone until we showed them our bellies.
The time was coming when, even if she didn’t hear from Naomi, she was going to have to make the ancient human decision again: fight or flight. As the reporter enthused about how many guns and enemy soldiers had been captured, she cracked her knuckles. She had three options. Take on the Tempest, run for the gate, or destroy the Storm and let her crew dissolve into the civilian population. Every option was its own kind of bad.
“The cell was exposed by the discovery of an encryption package running on a public system,” the reporter said, and the feed kicked over to a wide-faced woman with a pattern of moles on her cheeks that looked like paint spatter.
“The activity of the decryption package coincided with a data drop from known separatist elements earlier today,” she said, and Bobbie killed the feed.
She made a connection to Jillian. Her second in command accepted like she’d been expecting her. Before Jillian could speak, Bobbie asked, “Did a bottle come through?”
“It did,” Jillian said. “We got a full copy of the data. I was going to let you sleep until the decryption run was finished.”
“We’re running the decrypt on our own system, yeah?”
“You saw the thing on Ceres,” Jillian said. It wasn’t a question. “Those yokels were stupid and so they’ll die. Good riddance. We’re not stupid. We won’t die.”
“How long before the data’s clean?”