“Then what is it?”
“He’s getting serious,” Alex said. “Maybe even married. Probably married. It’s just making me think about how much I don’t want to mess things up for him. You always think you’re going to leave things better for your kid than you found them for yourself. That’s not working out for me.”
Alex moved his bag of onions to the other side of his head, but it had started to warm up.
“Worrying feels like you’re at least doing something,” Caspar said. “I get it. When I started flying for the union, I worried about my mom so that I wouldn’t feel guilty for leaving her behind.”
“You’re too smart for your age,” Alex said. “But yeah, that’s probably it. Or close enough. I was a shit father long before I left my family to play revolutionary.”
“I dunno,” Caspar said, then stood up. “My father took off because my mother asked him to stop spending the rent money on pixie dust. You’d win father of the year if it was down to a two-man race.”
“Thanks,” Alex said, and surprised himself by laughing. “That’s a hell of a compliment.”
Alex’s terminal buzzed in Caspar’s pocket. The kid pulled it out, then said, “Cap wants to know where the fuck you are.”
“On my way.”
The dining room was an abandoned storage space about six meters square with spray foam insulation walls and a carbon fiber door that didn’t even have a latch. Piping that entered through the walls and then just ended hinted at a past as a machine room, though what infrastructure used to occupy the space was lost to history. A tiny green chalk X had been placed on the lower left-hand corner of the door and was surrounded by other graffiti. The graffiti was mostly gang boasts and assertions of sexual prowess. The green X meant the room had been swept for surveillance less than thirty hours ago and found to be clean. If it had been red, the underground would have left the devices in place and abandoned the room.
Bobbie was waiting for him when he arrived. Impatience in the former Marine eluded most people. She didn’t pace. She never bounced a knee or a foot. The only time he’d ever heard her crack her knuckles was before they sparred in the gym. But Alex knew something was up the moment he walked into the room. She was standing perfectly still, but she was stiff, as though she was half flexing every muscle in her body.
“You’re late,” she said.
“I got caught up talking to Caspar at the drop, and now you’re kind of scaring me.”
“We have the battleship that shrugged off the combined fleets of Earth, Mars, and the Transport Union cruising toward us because we killed a high-ranking Laconian officer. If you weren’t already scared, you’re fucking stupid, and I know you’re not fucking stupid, Alex,” Bobbie said.
“Copy that, Gunny. It’s a fair point,” Alex said, and raised his hands in mock surrender. The dining room was his least favorite place to meet, mostly because there was nothing in it to sit on. Instead he found a patch of wall without any pipes sticking out of it and leaned into the foam of the insulation. “Why don’t you get me up to speed?”
“Sorry,” Bobbie said. She clenched her hands into fists and jammed them into her pockets. “I’m pissed at you right now and it’s not your fault.”
“What can I stop not doin’ so it ain’t not my fault anymore?”
Bobbie chuckled at that and shot him a thin smile. It wasn’t a very funny joke, but he knew she appreciated his not taking her anger personally.
“Something’s been bothering me. You’re right. And Naomi’s right,” she said. “The timer’s running out on our little resistance, and what have we accomplished? We’ve annoyed the empire. Snatched a few ships, some supplies. Killed a few Laconians. And maybe I used to think it was enough to spit in my enemy’s eye while he strangles me. But I’ve been thinking about Jillian’s assessment of the objective value of moral victories, and she wasn’t wrong either.”
Bobbie went silent, like she was listening to the words she’d said. She probably hadn’t spoken these thoughts out loud until just now.
“Are we talking about what I think we’re talking about?”
“I don’t know what you think we’re talking about, Alex.”
“Because,” Alex said, “if we’re talking about packing it in, it’s a lot easier to get off Callisto if we’re not trying to take the Storm with us. I mean, I’ve got a plan either way, but—”
“No,” Bobbie said, “we’re not talking about that.”
Anger roughened her voice. He wanted to pull back from her. Retreat, but he’d known her long enough to see it was the wrong way with her. Whatever she was thinking through, she needed someone to slam it up against. Placating her wasn’t going to make either of them happy. Or safe. Even if she did scare him a little, she was still Bobbie Draper, his old friend and compatriot.
But she was also a creature of violence whose frustrations were coming out sideways.
“Copy that, Gunny,” Alex said, trying not to sound like a hostage negotiator.
“I’m not giving up,” Bobbie said. “I’m figuring out how to win. How can we take our present circumstance and find the orthogonal move, the surprise attack that snatches victory from defeat. How do we do more than just survive?”
“Survive is a pretty good start,” Alex said. “I’ve worked up a launch plan to get the Storm off of Callisto, if that helps.”
“Yeah, it does. But running away isn’t going to solve our larger problem.”
“Cap… Bobbie,” Alex said. “There are three Magnetar-class ships in the universe, and the one that kicked the whole combined fleet’s ass is steaming toward us right now. Pickin’ a fight with her is like me pickin’ a fight with you. Not being scared is fucking stupid, to use your own words.”
Bobbie didn’t answer. She pulled a terminal out of her pocket. It was one of the cheap ones that kiosks in the markets would spit out for a few bucks. Enough battery charge for a few hours, and then you just threw it away and bought another one. She tossed it to him. On the screen was a picture of a small metal ball with text printed on it, and some sort of cable running out of the top.
“The fuck is this?” Alex said.
“The report’s linked.”
Alex flicked the screen with his index finger, and it changed to an article about the theoretical uses of antimatter for high-energy reactors. Even so, it took him a minute to understand what she meant.
“No,” he said.
“Oh yes,” Bobbie replied. “Rini is ninety-nine percent sure. She’s been looking them over and doing the research. We’ve been able to produce trace amounts of antimatter since the dark ages, but it’s never been practical. Now it is. The Laconians know how to produce and store it. I will bet you a week’s wages that it’s coming from the same construction platforms that made the Storm and the Tempest, and it’s part of the resupply for the battleship. That big cannon of theirs must burn it like crazy when it fires.”
“Laconia’s a hard target, but if you’re right and we could figure a way to knock out those platforms—”
“Yeah, taking out their resupply is great,” Bobbie said. “But that’s just a tactical victory. That’s my kind of target. It’s not yours. Or Naomi’s.”
“My kind of target?”
“If we blew out the Laconian construction platforms, Duarte and his admirals would know why it mattered. But Kit’s friends at university? They’re the ones we need to inspire, for them it has to be something they can see. We have to do something that shows Laconia’s not invincible. That there’s a chance for us to get a new generation on board.”
“You want to drop these on Laconia?” Alex asked, aghast. Sure, they were enemies, but the idea of killing a planet full of people was horrifying. Even in war, there were lines no one should cross.
“If we start carpet-bombing civilians, we’re worse than the enemy.”
Alex felt a rush of relief. He was still fighting for the good guys. “Okay, good. I didn’t think you’d—”
“I want
to kill the Tempest,” she said. “We show Earth and Mars and everyone in the Belt and every other colony out past the gates that Laconia’s battleship isn’t invincible. Show them that we can win. We’ll create a whole new generation of people willing to fight by lighting the biggest god damn signal fire the human race has ever seen.”
“Bobbie,” Alex said. Something in her eyes was more frightening than her fists had been. A fervor he wasn’t used to seeing there. All the fear and desperation suddenly transformed into something verging on fanaticism. “This is crazy.”
“We’re fucked, and we’ve been playing not to lose. I’m going to start playing to win.”
“No, you’re not.”
Bobbie stared at him. Her jaw slid forward a fraction of a centimeter. Every fiber of his body told him to back off, except for the one little part of his brain that knew showing weakness now was a path to disaster.
“You aren’t,” he said. “You’re stung because we had a win in our hands and we lost it. And then Jillian twisted the knife because she was frustrated too, and she’s kind of an asshole. And we found this”—he held up the hand terminal with the antimatter information—“so it feels like the universe handed you a way to redeem the loss. But what you’re really doing is trying to win back what you’ve lost by going all in. It’s shitty poker, and even worse as a battle strategy.”
“Fuck you, Alex. I do this for a living.”
“And you’re really good at it. And you’re smart. And I’m just a glorified bus driver who takes you where you need to be so you can kill people. But you’re wrong about this one, and you know you’re wrong.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“You want the big symbolic victory,” Alex said. “When has that ever been the smart move?”
For the first time, a shadow of doubt crossed Bobbie’s eyes. She crossed her arms, but she looked away from him. He leaned forward.
“You’re frustrated. And you feel trapped. And hitting back hard is what you do when you feel frustrated and trapped. But let me get us out of here. We’ll get these little balls of hell to Saba. And yeah, maybe he’ll send us back and we can take the Tempest down. Or maybe he’ll do something else. But let’s get more voices weighing in on this plan before we go all damn-the-torpedoes. Okay?”
“You think it’s an unwinnable fight. That’s what you just said.”
“I do,” Alex admitted. “But I’ve been divorced twice now. I wouldn’t take my word as gospel. I could be wrong about a lot of things. Yeah, your best soldiers are old shoe leather like you and me. But kids like Caspar are here too. Not as many as I want. Not as many as I think we’re going to need. But some. I just don’t think we should throw them away without a lot of consideration. Let’s get out of Sol system. Let the big brains have a crack at the new info, and see what they think is the right strategy.”
Bobbie took in a long slow breath and let it out through her teeth. “How long before dust-off? If we run?”
“We’ve got some time.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”
“Good,” he said, and stood up, ready to give her the room.
“Alex?”
“Yeah, Gunny?”
“Don’t take this wrong.”
“All right?”
“If you really believe we can’t win, you should think about whether you’re coming with me if I go.”
Chapter Eighteen: Naomi
It wasn’t the first time Naomi had found herself the new addition to a crew. Even under the best circumstances, there was an unsettled period. Anyone coming into the webwork of established relationships, enmities, and personal loyalties that was a ship’s crew needed time to find or create their own place. A time of isolation in the midst of a crowd.
In that sense, her appearance on the Bhikaji Cama was no different from other times. In the sense that she had appeared on the ship halfway through a run without stopping at a station or transferring over from another ship, it was a little weirder. And while they’d kept her identity hidden from Laconia, the small town’s worth of crew on the ship was corrosive to secrets. Even as the command staff made a point of not noticing her existence, everyone knew who she was.
Her presence was equal parts embarrassment to the Transport Union, threat to the crew, and the most interesting thing that had happened in the long weeks of transit. Pulling herself down the corridors or getting meals from the commissary, she felt the attention in the way people didn’t meet her eyes and the killing effect she had on conversations.
When they reached Auberon, she would need to vanish for a while and hope that her mysterious appearance was put down to rumor and myth. I was serving on a ship last year, and when the ship was searched, Naomi Nagata just showed up in with the crew. Stayed with us for the rest of the run. It was implausible enough that it might pass. Or it might be a problem. Either way, she had to touch base with Saba and see what her options were. The advantage of keeping the underground firewalled was that any single accident couldn’t bring down everything. The disadvantage was that she could never know what the big picture looked like. Even as one of Saba’s top-tier strategists, she only knew what he asked her to know. And it was possible—likely even—that he chose to be ignorant of some operations himself.
The commissary was wide enough to seat fifty at a time, but she tried to come at off-hours when the three rotating shifts were in the middle of work or sleep cycles. The tables were bolted to the floor, but on the float, no one used them anyway. The food dispensers were old, gray machines that decanted a nutritive slurry in eight different flavors directly into recyclable bulbs. Even the worst rock hopper in the Belt was more pleasant. Someone had painted bright flowers—daisies in yellow and pink and pastel blue—on the walls to make the place seem welcoming. Oddly, the effort halfway worked. Naomi ate the yellow curry flavored gruel with her feet hooked into footholds in the wall. But afterward, there was coffee that was a thousand times better.
Three environment technicians floated in a clump on the far side of the room, talking through a problem with the water purification system. The temptation to insert herself into the conversation was huge, but she held back. Hearing normal human conversation but not being part of it was like a starving woman smelling fresh food but not able to put it on her tongue. She hadn’t realized how badly she missed humans until she was among them again. And so when Emma pulled herself into the commissary, it was a relief to see her.
In the days of Naomi’s internal exile, she’d learned that Emma’s last name had been Pankara before she’d taken Zomorodi as a contract name with four other people. She had siblings on Europa in Sol system and Saraswati, one of the three habitable planets in Tridevi system. She’d been in private security before she joined up with the Transport Union. And she had a hookah designed to function anywhere between five gs and the float. She was also willing to talk to Naomi directly, which made her company more precious than gold. Now she pulled herself to a stop at the machines, took a bulb of something, and launched out to stop herself at Naomi’s side and in her orientation.
“All well?” Naomi asked.
Emma shook a flat hand in a gesture that meant yes and no. “Captain Burnham won’t talk to me and Chuck won’t stop.”
“I made things hard for you,” Naomi said.
“I made things hard for myself,” Emma said, cracking the seal on her food bulb. “You’re just when it blew up on me.”
“Fair,” Naomi said. It was astounding how good it felt to speak to someone in person and without light delay. Even when the conversation was banal. Maybe especially when it was. “Chuck seems like a decent person. He’s underground?”
Emma chuckled. “He’s not cut out for it. He worries too much. The only reason he’s not sucking down euphorics now is that he figures that no one will say anything to this political officer at the transfer station. Half of the people on the ship have something they’d rather not be looked at too close, and the other half have t
o work with them.”
“Seems tenuous.”
“Because it is,” Emma said. “But we work with what we have. Besides, that’s what the fight’s all about, isn’t it?”
“How do you figure?” Naomi asked.
Emma took a long, thick pull on the bulb, then shrugged as she swallowed. “The first ship I served on after I ditched Pinkwater, the XO had a thing for one of the mechanics. They were both babies. More hormones than blood. The company had a no-fraternization policy, but what can you do about it? The XO, she started being where the mechanic was. Started using the ship system to keep track of where people were, on shift and off. Mechanic didn’t love that. Got to where they had a screaming fight in the middle of the med bay. XO started crying. Didn’t come out of her cabin for two days. Good XO otherwise. Mechanic knew his job too. But both of them got fired. Rules, you know.”
“That’s how you see the underground?” Naomi said through a real smile. “Making the union safe for romantic drama?”
“Easy to make rules,” Emma said. “Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it’s the person’s fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that’s worth shit, we’ve done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people. Laconians making the same mistake as ever. Our rules are good, and they’d work perfectly if it were only a different species.”
“You sound like someone I know,” Naomi said.
“I’ll die for that,” Emma said. “I’ll die so that people can be fuckups and still find mercy. Not why you’re here?”
Naomi considered the other woman. The anger in her jaw and the pain in her voice. She wondered whether Emma had been the XO. It probably didn’t matter.
“We’re all here for our own reasons,” Naomi said. “What they are isn’t as important as the fact that we came.”
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