“Zomorodi back to you,” Emma’s familiar voice replied a few seconds later. “We’ve got the Cama, a half dozen rock hoppers with rail guns mounted on ’em, and ten antipirate gunships recently liberated from the governing council’s shipyard at Newbaker.”
“Ammunition?”
The lag was present, but not so bad that she had to trade recorded messages. The immediacy felt almost intimate.
“Oh, damn. Knew I forgot something,” Emma said, and Naomi heard the teasing in her voice. “Of course we’re loaded up. The Cama’s got a full hold too. Anyone needs resupply, we’ll be there. Unless they kill us all. Then, not so much.”
“Fair enough. Send me the specs and transponder codes. And what happened to Captain Burnham?”
“Early retirement,” Emma said. “Cashed out and bought part of a medical clinic.”
“Probably smarter than all of us put together.”
“I’m leaning toward coward.”
“Good to hear from you, Emma. Keep drives ready. I’ll be sending a flight plan as soon as I have everyone.”
“Standing by until then, Admiral.”
Naomi dropped the connection and took the next. Eight ships with old-style stealth composites and internal heat sinks. They’d have been the kings of space a couple generations back, but they weren’t bad even now. The next group had a Donnager-class battleship they were pulling out of mothballs. A quarter million tons of pieces smuggled to an empty moon and welded back together like a child’s model kit with a one-to-one scale. If she was lucky, there would be three or four more like it. Building them had been a pet project of Saba’s.
Saba, who’d started it and hadn’t lived to see it through. These people she talked with, whose lives she was now in a position to risk at best, spend outright at worst, were Saba’s network. They were the sword he’d dropped on the battlefield that she had picked up.
Fifty-three systems. Four hundred and eighteen ships with five Transport Union supply ships and three Donnager-class battleships among them, and the Storm—still compromised, but able to fly, still on her way. The best hammer that the underground could put together.
And it still wasn’t half the size of the force the Tempest had killed in Sol. Hopefully, if she’d done this right, it would be enough. If she’d been fooling herself, they’d all pay the price. But she was pretty sure she was right.
Once she had all the specs, she started sorting through by drive model, ship mass, and total energetic profile. Alex showed up with a tube of spiced lentils and a bulb of cold tea. She didn’t know she was hungry until she started eating it, and then she was ravenous. She put the monitor aside, rolling the tube and pressing to get out every bit of the spicy, rich mush. When it was gone apart from a burning aftertaste and a pleasant pressure in her gut, she sighed.
“Just like old times,” Alex said. “You never could remember to eat when you had a good problem to solve.”
“My old problems were never like this. It was more how to make sure we get to the next port safely.”
“That’s not what we’re doin’?” Alex asked with a grin.
“Nothing about this has any relationship to safety. This is exactly what I never wanted to be doing. Fighting? Getting people killed? I never even carried a gun.”
“I knew that,” Alex said, and the grin had turned into something softer. “There’s still time. Call this off, head back to port. Go back to getting our people elected into the Association of Worlds.”
Naomi was silent, her mind and her heart at odds the way they so often were. Alex misunderstood.
“I’m only half joking,” he said. “There is time to pull back. We haven’t committed these folks to anything. Not yet.”
“No, we have to do this. If there was time… I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I’d have kept looking until I found a better way. One that wasn’t this.”
The comm controls alerted, a little orange strobe blinking with the incoming message. But it was only the Storm, updating her ETA. Naomi tucked the empty food tube into her pocket. She’d throw it in the recycler when she was done here. The bulb of tea cooled her fingers and pulled a tiny sheen of condensation out of the air.
“You feel like you owe it to them?” Alex asked, gently. “To Bobbie. And Saba. Amos.”
“No,” Naomi said. “And not to Jim either. This isn’t guilt. It’s… possibility? I don’t want to fight. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. Or die. Not our side, and not them either. I want to reconcile. That’s why Bobbie always got so frustrated with me. She wanted to win.”
“Looks like you do too, now.”
“The problem is it’s hard to reconcile when you’ve lost,” Naomi said. “Someone takes all the power, and you try to bring them into the fold again? That’s capitulation. I don’t think violence solves anything, not even this. Not even now. But maybe winning puts us in a place that we can be gracious.”
“Meet Duarte halfway?” Alex said. She could hear in his voice that he wasn’t convinced. If she couldn’t sway him, maybe there wasn’t hope. But she tried.
“Make space for him. Maybe he’ll take it, maybe he won’t. Maybe his admirals will see something in it he doesn’t. The point of this fight isn’t to kill Laconia. It’s to get enough power that we can close the distance they opened between them and everyone else. That may mean punishing some people. It may mean answering for old crimes. But it has to mean finding some way forward.”