Bobbie nodded with one hand, then tapped the side of her helmet. Now we wait for word from Holden. She turned on the small emergency radio in her suit, already tuned to the channel Holden would be using to call Daphne Kohl up in station ops, and waited. Clarissa stared at her across the vacuum between them, motionless and patient as a hunting cat.
The minutes dragged. When her radio crackled to life, Bobbie found herself grinning. “Medina control, this is workcrew kilo alpha, do you copy?”
Bobbie could only hear Holden’s side of the conversation, so there was a long pause and then his voice again. “Copy that. Can I get Chief Kohl on the line? Gotta route some repairs though her office.”
Office was their code that meant Ramez was outside of ops, waiting for permission to enter, so the plan was proceeding, and waiting only on Kohl’s cooperation.
“Hey, Chief. Good to hear your voice again,” Holden said, hitting the words hard. He hadn’t identified himself by name, and he wouldn’t. If Daphne Kohl didn’t pick up on what was going on, they’d scrub the mission. If she raised the alarm … Well, that would be an interesting problem. “Working with Saba down here in electrochemical. Tracking a grid problem that Laconian death ray caused, and we’d love to pull a panel up there to really nail it down.”
And here’s where the most dangerous part of the plan happened. It wasn’t flying through space on a tether, or climbing up the outside of a massive station wearing the thinnest and crappiest vacuum suits. It wasn’t even going to be later, when they climbed down to the Laconian ship to hook in their signal sniffer, hoping no one was watching the outside of the dock. It was here, where Holden was counting on his voice, Saba’s name, and the mention of Laconians to signal Kohl that they were up to no good and needed her help.
And more than that, counting on her Belter pride being stronger than her fear of execution by their Laconian masters. Because if any of those things weren’t true, Kohl could refuse them, and that was the end of the plan. Or worse.
Bobbie waited a very tense minute of radio silence, and then Holden said, “That’s great. I’ve got a tech heading to ops to pull that panel, if you can let him in. He’ll take a gander at our glitch and get out of your hair.”
Gander. Code for Go in five.
“Copy that, Chief. We appreciate the patience while we sort this out.”
Bobbie gave Clarissa a thumbs-up, then flashed her five fingers. Clarissa nodded with her fist, then started pulling tools out of the mesh bag at her hip.
First thing down, Bobbie thought. Just a two-kilometer climb aft and planting a bug on a Laconian destroyer without getting caught left to go.
With Medina Station functionally motionless in the slow zone, it was less of a climb than a mag-booted shuffle down the two-kilometer length of the maintenance shaft. Bobbie pulled the blocky module containing the field-strength sensor on a short leash behind her. It didn’t have much mass, but she’d taken it without conversation when she’d looked through Clarissa’s visor and seen the technician’s complexion going a sickly gray. Other than jumping out of a rotating airlock, they hadn’t done anything particularly taxing, but it was pretty clear that Claire was already running on fumes.
As they got closer to the engineering-and-docking-bay section of Medina, the Laconian ship came into view around the curve of the station. Bobbie couldn’t help but whistle her appreciation of the beauty of the thing. Say what you would about Laconian authoritarianism, their engineering included a lot of aesthetic beauty in its design.
The destroyer—Holden had called it the Gathering Storm—looked like a natural crystal formation that someone had chipped into a knife. The colors were all translucent pinks and blues, faceted like a gem. She spotted something at the tail that probably served as the ship’s drive cone but didn’t look anything like the UN or Martian designs she was familiar with. The nose of the ship ended in a pair of sharp projections, like a dagger point with a channel cut down the center that left her almost certain it was a rail gun. If the ship had torpedo launchers or PDCs, she couldn’t see them.
T
he ship was so strange, so unlike anything humans had ever designed or flown before, that if it had docked and green three-eyed aliens had walked off, it would have felt more appropriate than the humans that actually flew her.
Clarissa stopped and turned, so Bobbie yanked the sensor array to a stop on its leash, then pushed their two helmets together.
“There,” Clarissa said, pointing to a maintenance access hatch that looked exactly like a hundred they’d already passed. “That’s the router that feeds from the dock into the station network.”
“You’re sure?” Bobbie said, looking around at all the other hatches.
Clarissa didn’t answer, just rolled her eyes and took the leash. She pulled the sensor array down and attached it to the hull, right next to the hatch. She pulled a few leads from the box and plugged them into slots inside the hatch, then stuck a hand terminal on the side of the array and spent several minutes going through what looked like menus. Bobbie replaced both of their air bottles while she worked.
A few minutes later, Clarissa stood up and gave her the thumbs-up. Bobbie looked over at the massive blade of the Laconian destroyer. If anyone on it had seen them working, the ship itself gave no hint. Clarissa walked over holding her hand terminal and touched it to the side of Bobbie’s helmet. Her HUD snapped on, and a wall of text rolled past. The signal traffic between the destroyer and the local decrypt facility, complete with routing flags and timestamps. It was still locked behind military encryptions, but everything that the Gathering Storm sent down to Medina and everything it got back was here, and the underground was skimming a copy of all of it.
“Huh,” Bobbie said to no one. “I honestly thought that would be harder.”
Chapter Twenty-Three: Drummer
The ship came through the ring like an old video of a whale breaching the surface of the sea. The thousand kilometers of the ring gate was tiny in the scale of the solar system, huge by human measure, and the Laconian battleship fit between the two—too large to be comfortable in one, too small to fit well in the other. Its design seemed to come from the same uncomfortable place, neither the now-familiar eeriness of the protomolecule nor the history of human manufacture, but both and neither. Drummer watched the observations feed again and again, and it made her skin crawl a little every time.
She wasn’t ready. Rock hoppers full of gravel were burning hard for positions that didn’t matter anymore. The EMC fleet was consolidating around the inner planets and the Jovian system, but with days—sometimes weeks—left on their burns. The void cities were looping down to meet them. All of it preparation for tactical situations that weren’t on the board anymore. Duarte and his Admiral Trejo had stolen the tempo. She had to make sure the price would be higher than they’d intended to pay.
“Madam President,” Vaughn said. Drummer watched the Tempest emerge through the gate again before she spoke. It was astounding to her that something so large could make it through the gate at all. It looked big enough to break the safety barriers with its own mass and energy. Maybe there would have been a way to use that with Laconia the way they had with the Free Navy. Except that the fucking thing was already through the gate.
“Vaughn,” she said, not looking back at him.
“Communications is asking for your decision on the repeater,” Vaughn said.
She took a deep breath, let it out slowly between her teeth. There were thousands of radio signal repeaters scattered through the system, but she knew which one Vaughn meant. Their clandestine traffic to and from Medina—Avasarala’s gift to her—ran through a low-energy repeater that was floating dark outside the ring gate. From Medina, its signal was weak and the wavelengths it jumped among similar enough to the gates’ usual interference that it was easy to overlook. From normal space, it was more obvious.