If Alex was losing heart, Bobbie didn’t believe for a second he was alone. The failure to capture the political officer combined with the looming threat of the battleship might be enough to get her crew wondering why they were still risking their necks fighting an unbeatable foe.
And as much as she disliked it, Alex was right.
The old-guard OPA attitude of resistance for resistance’s sake would only keep them going so long. Part of what she should be doing was training up the next generation of fighters. Only so far, they weren’t waiting in the wings to step in. Duarte and his people were smart. They kept things from getting bad too quickly. They made the right speeches about respect and autonomy. They let people believe that government by a king would never go wrong. And by the time it did, and things got bad enough to inspire a younger resistance, she and Alex and the old-school OPA would be off the board. Then who would be left to fight? Why would they think there was any hope in it?
Recruitment wasn’t her job. It belonged to Saba or Naomi or one of the other secret leaders of the underground, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Alex had opened the issue. Now it itched.
Bobbie finished her check of the fuel cell crates and moved on to something the manifest listed as sensor components. The team had grabbed it off the freighter because any repairs the Storm needed were done in-house and on the fly. Spare parts were always at a premium.
Inside the crate was a sealed gray ceramic box about the size of a toaster with seven input ports on its side. Bobbie used her terminal to look up the serial number on the case. It was listed as an active sensor array control node—the little processing station that coordinated data coming in from the radar and ladar sensors, did first-level analysis, and acted as the hindbrain between the main computer and the sensors themselves. An expert pattern-matching system about as smart as a pigeon. If they were sending a new one to the Tempest, it might mean that they’d lost one in the fight for Sol. It was a nice idea, anyway. That the big dreadnought had taken some damage in the fight it couldn’t just heal for itself. And it made sense. The weird hulls and reactors and engines of the ships might heal like the ship was a living thing, but they were protomolecule technology. The sensors and computers on the Laconian ships were human tech. Anything built by humans had to be hand repaired or replaced. It was one of the few weaknesses of the hybrid ships.
And if she had the replacement parts, it might mean there was a hole in the Tempest’s sensor package. If they could figure out where it existed, maybe they could get close to the big ship before detection. They could… fire one meaningless torpedo before the big bastard swung around and ripped them into atoms. Paint something rude on the hull. Pee on it. Jillian’s crack about moral victories was annoying, but that didn’t make her wrong.
Bobbie put the sensor node back into its case and marked the box as one to definitely keep for themselves. An hour later, she’d finished going through the pallet of spare parts and tagged them all as keepers. Her terminal was playing a little three-dimensional game of “fit all the loot.” Every time she marked a crate, the program shuffled everything in the Storm’s storage compartments looking for a place to put it. At some point, they’d have to start storing things in the staterooms and hallways, and that point wasn’t far off.
She opened a crate of protein flavorings for the galley food processor and marked it DO NOT KEEP. She started to close it, then sighed and changed it to KEEP. The terminal played its little space-shuffling game. An army marches on its stomach, the ancient saying went, and people who were risking their lives for the cause should probably be able to have a tasty meal every now and then.
It was interesting, though, that the Tempest was coming after them. It felt good to know she’d hit the enemy hard enough to sting. Maybe it was just pride. Admiral Trejo angry that a pirate would dare act in his solar system. Or maybe the political officer had been close enough to someone high in command that this was a personal vendetta now. Or maybe they just really wanted their protein flavoring back. Whatever it was about the raid that made Laconia jump, she hoped they were as bothered and itchy as she was.
She reached the end of her row of pallets, which meant her work was half-done. A few more hours digging through boxes, and she could sneak off to one of those old bars at the port and drink her troubles away. Or at least distill them down to nausea and a hangover. And maybe she’d get a steak. She felt like Saba and the resistance could afford to buy her a steak. Her stomach rumbled at the thought. So maybe she called it a day now, and came back to finish tomorrow.
A small pile of high-impact crates had been set off to the side, away from the main rows of pallets. They had a variety of warning labels on them, so her crew had put some space between them and the rest of the supplies. All right. Go through the dangerous stuff now, then call it a day.
The top crate in the pile had a caustic chemical warning, and was filled with spray cans of degreaser. Not exactly a threat to life and limb. She moved the crate over to the regular supplies. Beneath it was a crate marked HIGH EXPLOSIVE that had reloads for the rocket launchers the Laconian power armor could attach. She marked that one as definitely keep and set it aside.
Under that was a large metal crate. The label said MAGNETIC CONTAINMENT EXPLOSIVE DANGER. That was odd. None of those words seemed to go together in a way that made sense to her. She checked the serial number on the side of the crate with her terminal, and it came back ID not found.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Nothing on the crate indicated that opening the latches was hazardous, so Bobbie popped them and lifted the lid. It was much heavier than it looked. Lead lined, maybe. Inside, cradled by enough foam to keep a robin’s egg intact during high-g maneuvers, were four metallic spheres about the size of Bobbie’s two fists held together. All four had cables running to a massive power cell that gave off a low hum of high electricity. The power cell’s indicator showed that it was at 83 percent charge. Each sphere had its own indicator where a cable from the power cell connected to it. They all showed 100 percent.
Bobbie very carefully lifted her hands away from the box and took a step back. Nothing in the box itself looked all that dangerous. Just four big metal balls and a high-capacity battery. But every hair on her body was standing straight up. It was all she could do to stop herself from running away.
Bobbie knelt back down next to the crate and very gingerly lifted one of the metal balls out, making sure to keep the cable connected to the power supply. Once it was out of its foam cradle, warning text could be seen. ENSURE MAGNETIC CONTAINMENT SYSTEM REMAINS CHARGED—DANGER OF EXPLOSION, it said. Another, smaller warning read, DO NOT RUN ON INTERNAL POWER SUPPLY FOR MORE THAN TWENTY MINUTES. The labels on it were from the Laconian Science Directorate. Not military, except in that everything Laconian was military. Not usual ordnance, anyway. Nothing familiar.
Bobbie returned the sphere to its place in the foam. And sat back. Something in the spheres exploded when it wasn’t magnetically restrained. Fusion reactors worked that way. The magnetic bottle held the fusion reaction suspended because nothing material could handle the heat of the core. These little spheres weren’t reactors, though. A fusion reactor was huge. It required extensive support mechanisms to inject fuel pellets, compress and fuse those pellets, and turn the fusion reaction into electricity. The Laconians were advanced, but it didn’t seem plausible that they were so advanced that they’d created fusion reactors a little bigger than a softball. And these things were using power, not generating it.
She pulled out her terminal and called Rini Glaudin. She was an old Belter on the Storm. A high-energy physics PhD from way back in the day at Ceres Polytech who’d gotten radicalized in college and spent a couple of decades in a UN prison after she started helping the Voltaire Collective build bombs. Now she was the chief engineer and resident gearhead on the Storm.
“Boss,” Rini said after a couple moments. She sounded sleepy, or drunk.
“Catch you at a bad time?”
“I have a weird question, but if you had company,” Bobbie said.
“He’s gone. He was pretty enough, but postcoital conversation was not his strong suit. What’s going on?”
“I’m going through the loot we pulled off that freighter,” Bobbie said. “And I found this crate of stuff I’m having a hard time identifying. Thought maybe you could help.”
“You’re at that warehouse by the surface? Let me pull on some clothes and I’ll get right down there.”
“No,” Bobbie said. “Don’t do that. I think this might be dangerous and I don’t want anyone in here until I figure it out. Hold on, let me send you some video.”
Bobbie passed her terminal across the crate, giving Rini a good look at the power cell and the spheres. Then she propped the terminal up against the edge so she could use both hands to pick up a sphere and show the warning text to the camera. When she was done, she said, “Any ideas?”
There was a long pause. Bobbie felt the unease rising in her like an illness.
“Fuck me,” Rini said at last.
“What do you think it is?”
“So the big question about the Magnetar-class ships has always been power,” Rini said. There was a lot of background noise as she spoke, drawers opening and closing. Clothes being pulled on. She was dressing in a hurry. “The stars the ships are named after have incredible magnetic fields, but they’re rapidly rotating neutron stars, so how do you get that beam effect the ships have without, you know, spinning up a neutron star?”
“Okay,” Bobbie said. Her knowledge of astrophysics was pretty thin. “How do they?”
“No one knows!” Rini said. “But it would take way more power than a typical fusion reactor puts out. Everyone just sort of assumed that meant the Laconians had much better reactors than us. But we have the Storm, and our reactor is good, but its design is nothing paradigm shifting.”
“I’m sitting right next to this thing while you talk,” Bobbie said, “so go faster maybe.”
“Antimatter results in a one hundred percent conversion of matter into energy. Nothing else even comes close. If the Laconians power their beam with antimatter, that actually makes sense.”
Bobbie laughed. There was only a little mirth in it. “Am I sitting next to four bottles of antimatter, Rini?”
“Maybe? I mean, the only way to contain it would be a magnetic field. If it touched anything, boom. So, sure? Maybe.”
“How much of that stuff do you think is in here?”
“I don’t know. A kilo? A gram of it would be a bomb big enough to level a city. Based on the size of those orbs, you’ve probably got enough there to punch a hole in this moon. I mean, if that’s what’s in there.”
“All right,” Bobbie said. “Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”
“Fuck that, I’m on my way down there,” Rini said, then killed the connection. At least Bobbie understood now why the Tempest was treating this as high priority. Looking at the metal balls in their case was making Bobbie’s scalp crawl.
And then, all at once, it wasn’t.
The fight had just changed. And she knew how to win.
Chapter Thirteen: Naomi
The question is,” Saba said on Naomi’s monitor, “why did they have a political officer in the first place, que no?”
The Bhikaji Cama was on the float, and still half a week from a gentle quarter-g braking burn that would take weeks before they reached the transfer station at Auberon. With the drives on the ship, they could have done a full g the whole way, but efficiency and speed weren’t always the same thing. Carrying the reaction mass to accelerate and brake that hard would have meant giving up more of the cargo space. Maybe someday the Laconian technology would overcome the constraints of inertia—the protomolecule had been doing so since Eros—but for now that mystery was still a mystery, like so many others. Where did the ships that went dutchman end up? What would draw the attention and anger of the thing that had destroyed the protomolecule engineers?
Or, on a smaller level, why had a Laconian political officer been riding on a Transport Union freighter?
News of the failure had been slow coming to her. The first report had been sketchy and brief, and said little more than that the raid had gone pear-shaped. Political officer, the informants on the freighter, and one member of the assault team lost. The next thirty-four hours had been a thin slice of hell as she waited for the full after-action report, certain beyond doubt that Bobbie had been the one who’d died.
Only it hadn’t been her. One of her crew was dead, and her mission objective had slipped through her fingers, but Bobbie and Alex and the Gathering Storm lived to fight another day. The death of the political officer was just one of the stupid, random tragedies that happened anywhere, anytime, but significantly more often during battle. If he’d lived, they’d know much more about what he’d been doing. As it was, they were down to educated guesses.
“We have confirmation that he was on his way to the Transport Union’s transfer station at Earth,” Saba said. “But whether that was a permanent placement or a stop along a longer path…” He shrugged eloquently.
Naomi stretched. She liked the freedom of free fall even though it meant doubling up her exercise routine. Or maybe because it meant that. More hours in the resistance band meant at least doing something physical. Feeling her body. And also there was a sense of being where she belonged. From the recording, she could tell that Saba was someplace with a steady gravity. The last four communications from him had all been the same, so a spin station or a mass large enough to hold him down. No one was on a steady burn for that long.
It wasn’t really a surprise that something was happening on Earth important enough to warrant a dedicated representative at the transfer station. Apart from Sol’s permanent role as humanity’s original home, it was still the largest population center in the gate network. And Earth had the largest population of any planet. Even with settlements like Auberon and Bara Gaon Complex growing, there would never be enough ships or shipping to make a dent in the billions still left on Earth. But what exactly was on Winston Duarte’s mind about Sol system was an important question. And one that they could have answered, if luck had broken their way just a little bit more.
She considered, rubbed her eyes, and hit Record. She’d edit her response down before she committed it to a torpedo, but just saying the words helped her think. And she could pretend she wasn’t quite as isolated and alone as she was.
“The loss of our informants on the ship is going to be important,” she said. “Without them, we wouldn’t have known that the political officer was there in the first place. And if they hadn’t spoken up, they’d still be alive. Not the best argument for working with us. Their families need to be taken care of, and by us. Not Duarte’s people. Otherwise we’ll see fewer of these tips in the future.”
It’s always about relationships, Jim said in her imagination.
“It’s always about relationships,” she said. “And we have to hold up our end of the bargain. Take care of our own. To the other point, if we’re going to find what Duarte’s doing there, we need to get one of ours on the transfer station. Either find someone already on staff sympathetic enough to feed us information or someone who can be inserted into the administration. Trying to get the Storm to intercept another freighter is too high a risk.”
But she thought it was possible that someone from the Storm could act as an agent of the underground on TSL-5. She wondered if Bobbie would go. Part of her thought she would. It was the dangerous assignment, after all. But Naomi also couldn’t quite imagine her giving up command of the Storm, even for something important.
But she was getting ahead of herself.
“Before we take any direct action, we should finish a full inventory of what was on the freighter. If there were any supplies or equipment on it that were
out of the ordinary, that might—”
Her system threw out an alert, and Naomi’s heart leaped despite her better judgment.
It was a new message from Jim.
Duarte had been doing this almost since Jim had been taken to Laconia. Not quite public announcements, though there had been some of those too. Broadcasts sent out and picked up on passive with an old, compromised encryption scheme. Someone would have to want to know what was in them, anyway. The security wasn’t the issue so much as a signature. An address. Here was a message that Laconia could spread through every system in the gate network, but only she could watch it. Or only she and the Roci. Or someone else who’d taken the time to crack the Roci’s old codes.
It was a private message, then, between Jim and her and every high-end government censor on Laconia. She had a vague memory about nobility on old Earth having witnesses on important wedding nights to watch the newlyweds fuck. This felt about as dignified.
And still, there was nothing under any sun that would keep her from playing it.
The message began with the blue wing-shaped crest of the Laconian Empire, a test tone, and then there he was. Jim looking into the camera with a mild amusement that most people wouldn’t recognize as a variety of rage. He had on a collarless shirt, and his hair was combed enough to show where his hairline was starting to pull back a little. Anti-aging regimens had pushed human life from the three- to four-decade range of prehistory to four times that, but wear and tear still counted for something. Jim had suffered more than his fair share of punishing life experiences. And then the fake grin ended and he really smiled, and the decades fell away. Even before he spoke, she heard him. The mix of sorrow and amusement in his eyes, like a guest at a party that had gone so wrong that the travesty had lapped itself and become a little bit fun again.
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