“Welcome to Auberon,” Chava said. “You can talk freely in here. I sweep for surveillance every other day, and I made a special pass when I heard you were coming.”
Naomi walked to the desk and leaned against it. “Thank you for that. Do you know what’s going on?”
“Not in specific,” Chava said, “but I can say that the Laconian security forces have been shitting themselves boneless since that first no-transit alert came. We haven’t been able to decrypt their feeds, but the volume of traffic has been huge. Governor Song was pushing like hell to get every ship she could out of the slow zone before the gamma bursts, and now she’s not letting anyone in or out.”
“Do you have a way to reach Saba?” Naomi asked.
“The Laconians have been updating the security on the repeaters,” Chava said. “I still have a couple back doors, though.”
“Are you sure they’re secure?” Naomi asked, and her voice echoed strangely, like she was hearing more of it than usual. Undertones and overtones rippling against each other as the vibrations touched the hard surfaces of desk and floor and wall and rebounded to make new complexities. She stepped back as Chava’s eyes widened. She could see the wetness in them, the tiny dark dot of her tear duct, the river pattern of blood in the whites of her eyes like a map of an unknown world.
“Fuck,” Chava said, and it was a symphony. Overwhelming and complex. Naomi felt herself falling into the sound and the wide, full, complicated air—
When she came back to herself, her head was pressed against the abrasive industrial carpeting. Chava was still at the desk, her face bloodless. She looked around the room, trying to focus, trying to find Naomi. It took a few seconds.
“What …,” Chava said. “What was…”
“It’s the same thing that happened in Sol system when they killed Pallas. How long have we been unconscious?”
“I… don’t…”
“Do you keep logs? Security tapes?”
Chava nodded, working up from barely a tremor until she was bobbing her head so much it seemed like it would be hard to stop. She opened a screen on her desk display. Nothing inside the room, but a view of the front door from outside. As she rolled it back until Naomi appeared, an alert tone came over the station’s public speaker loud enough to hear even inside the office. This is a public security announcement. Please remain where you are. If you are in need of assistance, use the emergency alert on your hand terminal, and government responders will come to you. Do not seek help on your own. Do not leave your homes or places of business.
“Three minutes,” Chava said. “It’s like time just blinked out.”
“Is there a Magnetar-class battleship in Auberon? That’s the only thing I know that does that… or almost the only thing.”
“No, nothing like that.”
“We have to risk your back doors on the repeater. We have to get a message to Saba. Something’s going on here, and if it’s related to whatever happened that got Laconia worried, he may need to know about it.”
Chava gestured for Naomi to come around the desk. “Follow me,” she said.
Chava’s office was small, with white, generic furniture of ceramic and steel, but it was well equipped. Naomi sat at the other woman’s desk and built a short message, typing fast and not worrying about errors. The Auberon gate had a fifty-five-minute light delay from the planet. Even if Saba wrote back at once, it would be two hours before she heard, and it might take him longer.
In the long wait, Chava made them chamomile tea from the office supplies. The sweetness cloyed, but Naomi drank it anyway. It was something to do. The security alert came off an hour and thirty-five minutes after it started. The station is safe and secure. Please return to your normal activities. It seemed optimistic to the point of being naive.
Chava Lombaugh’s system chirped ten minutes shy of the two-hour mark, and she slapped open the new message like it had stung her. As she read it, she bared her teeth.
“What is it?”
“It’s nothing,” she said, and shifted the monitor for Naomi to see. TRANSMISSION ERROR. REPEATER NOT RESPONDING. MESSAGE QUEUED FOR LATER DELIVERY.
“The repeater’s down?” Naomi said.
“Theirs is,” Chava said. “The one inside the ring. The Auberon-side repeater generated this message, but the two aren’t talking to each other. We might be able to do something else, though. Ring gate interference is a bitch, but it’s not impossible to punch through. I have some ships in the rental fleet with tightbeams, and if I got one close…”
Naomi shook her head. “No. Nothing obvious. I want him briefed, but not at the risk of exposing the organization. Saba can get the message when he can get the message. He knows how to find us once he does.”
Chava made a frustrated sound at the back of her throat and slammed down the last of her tea. “Let me take you to the safe house, then. At least we can chew our nails someplace comfortable. Laconia takes the repeaters seriously. Whatever the issue is, getting the communications network back up will be high on their to-do list.”
“Thank God for the efficiency of the enemy,” Naomi said, making it a joke. Chava even laughed at it a little.
But a day later, the repeater was still down. And the day after that. It was almost a week before a high-speed probe made the long journey to the ring gate and through it, and sent back the images that even the censor’s office couldn’t keep a lid on.
Auberon system—Naomi and Chava and the crew of the Bhikaji Cama included—saw the swirling colors that had replaced the darkness between the ring gates. They found out why the repeater on the slow zone side of the gate wasn’t responding. It was gone, and so were all the other repeaters like it. And the Eye of the Typhoon. And Medina Station and all the ships that had been quarantined inside the ring space. Only the alien station at the center remained, glowing bright as a tiny sun.
Naomi looked at it all until she was on the edge of vertigo, then looked away and had to go back to check that it was real. Over and over again, locked in a cycle of disbelief.
All human existence in the small artificial universe between the gates had been wiped away as if it had never been there at all, leaving no sign of what had killed it.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Bobbie
The bar was worse than shitty. Shitty had character. The place was generic. Fake stone meant to echo a tunnel on Ceres or Pallas marked with graffiti to make it look edgy until you noticed that the pattern of it repeated every couple meters. The appearance of counterculture as churned out by a corporate designer. The food wasn’t bad. Vat-grown ribs in a hot marinade and vegetable kibble that hadn’t been cooked to a mush. The beer was decent, if a little hoppy for her taste. A screen at the back usually played highlights from football games around the system. Now it was playing a newsfeed. And while most of the time the screen was a background for the conversations and drinking, today everyone was watching it.
“The event mirrors the one experienced when the Tempest was forced to employ its magnetic field generator against separatist forces on Pallas Station,” the woman on the screen said. She was pale skinned, with long, dark hair and a serious expression. Bobbie thought the broadcast was out of Luna, but it could as easily have been Ceres or Mars. They all looked the same these days. “But while the previous effect had a clear trigger and was restricted to Sol system, the few ships that have made the transit into Sol since the event report that this was much more widespread, possibly affecting all known systems.
“The loss of Medina Station and the Typhoon along with all civilian ships in the ring space is assumed to be related, but no official report has been released at this time to confirm that.”
Caspar made a low sound, something between a cough and a chuckle. Jillian, across from him, lifted her chin as a question.
“More critical than their pet journalists usually are,” Caspar said.
“You can still see the censor’s arm up her ass working her lips,” Jillian said. “If we had a free press, they’
d be tearing these bastards eight new assholes an hour until we got an explanation.”
An old man in a collarless shirt appeared on the screen with the dark-haired newsfeed host. He was smiling as anxiously as if the camera were mugging him. There was a chyron identifying him and his credentials, but the screen was too far away and the print too small for Bobbie to make them out, except she thought his first name was Robert. She leaned forward, trying to hear better.
“What can you tell us about these events, Professor?” the host asked.
“Well, yes. Yes. The first thing, of course, is that it’s a mistake to use the plural, yes? Events plural. What we’re seeing is better understood as a single, nonlocal event. Which fits with everything we’ve learned about the… I don’t like to say alien life. Too many presumptions. Call it the previous tenants and their enemies.” The old man’s smile grew a little warmer, amused by his own joke. Bobbie thanked the good angels that she’d never taken a university course from him.
Jillian sneered. “They just lost one of their battleships, the central traffic control for the ring gates, a shitload of ships, and two whole fucking gates, and they want to talk about the limits of locality?” She pointed to the screen with a pale bone that had recently been wrapped in rib meat. “These people are idiots.”
Caspar shrugged. “We just lost the underground coordination from Medina and we’re having beer and barbecue.”
“We’re idiots too,” Jillian said.
“You are, anyway,” Caspar said, but he smiled when he said it.
The announcement that the Sol gate was closed for business until further notice had been bad. No one on her crew had said anything to her directly, but they hadn’t had to. No ships in or out of the system didn’t make the shell game impossible. They might still be able to escape. Sneak off Callisto and find a Transport Union ship to hide in. But even if they did, that ship wouldn’t be going anywhere until the quarantine was lifted. Any hope of slipping out to a different system, hiding on some undeveloped moon until the attack in Sol system blew over was lost. Instead, they’d be trying to hide from the tiger without leaving its cage.
Then things got worse.
Bobbie was asleep when it happened. It had been getting harder and harder to get any rest. She’d pull herself onto her cot in what had been a warehouse office, kill the lights, and her mind would launch into scenarios of escape or capture or violence, running through every combination of circumstances she could invent. She felt lucky to get five full hours in a cycle, so when she woke up groggy and confused, she’d thought it was just exhaustion finally catching up. It wasn’t until her hand terminal chirped to let her know that everyone from her crew to the Callistan emergency service to the top newsfeeds in the system had been trying to get her attention that she understood something deeper had happened.
“The important thing to understand,” the old man said, looking into the camera like he was everyone’s kind uncle, “is that while these incidents can be very upsetting and certainly they have caused some accidents when people were in the middle of sensitive or dangerous activities when they came, they pose no real threat in and of themselves.”
“Can you explain that?” the host asked.
“These spells have not been shown to have any long-term effects. There is no indication that they are more than an inconvenience, really. It’s important, of course, to keep in mind they may happen, at least until the Science Directorate understands the cause and… ah …control of them. Until then, we should all make sure fail-safes are engaged on our vehicles and equipment. But that’s good advice in any case, yes?”
Caspar roughened his voice, mimicking the old man. “And don’t concern yourself with the fact that it destroyed gates and battleships. Oh my, no. Don’t worry your pretty little heads about that.”
“Where’s Alex?” Bobbie asked.
“He was heading home last time I saw him,” Jillian said.
Home meant the Gathering Storm. The window for their escape was coming soon. That might have been the reason he’d gone to the ship. Or he might have been avoiding her. She’d pushed him harder than usual last time they’d talked, and she knew he avoided conflict when he could. She’d never have said it aloud, but she wished Amos or Naomi were still with them. Or even Holden. She was always a little worried that she’d break Alex without meaning to.
“I’m out,” she said, then left the shitty bar and the Laconian propaganda channel behind. Everyone else stayed behind to finish their beer and gossip. They could sense she wasn’t looking for company.
She walked through the public corridors of the station, her hands deep in her pockets, her eye on the floor ahead of her. Between her physical size and training almost from the cradle to control the space she occupied, it wasn’t easy for her to back down and look unremarkable. But it was important. They’d already been on Callisto longer than she liked, and she saw that the crew was getting used to it. They were developing favorite shitty bars, favorite brothels, barbers and coffee shops and pachinko parlors. It was normal to fit in after a while. Normal to make a life wherever you found yourself. But it was dangerous for them, because it was also how you became known, and being known too well meant they were all in prison or the pens or the grave.
At the turnoff, she used her hand terminal to unlock the service passage and ducked down into the infrastructure of the shipyard. It was a long walk through poorly heated hallways to the old OPA smugglers’ den. Her footsteps echoed along with the unsteady drip of condensate and the hum of the air recyclers. The graffiti on the walls here was ancient, much of it written in Belter creole or cipher. What little she could make out was wishing ill on the UN and the MCR. The hatreds of the past seemed almost quaint now. Just being authentic made it better than Laconia.
What are my victories? Will I leave the universe a better place than I found it?
When she was a girl, she’d thought she understood what the future would be. Improvement. Progress. She expected to serve her nation, protect the terraforming effort from the resentful Earth and the feral Belt. She knew from the time she could speak that she wouldn’t live to see humanity walking freely on the surface of Mars, but she believed she would die on a world with the spreading green of engineered moss and the aurora of a magnetosphere. The life she’d actually lived was unrecognizably different from the dream she’d had. More astounding, and more disappointing. And her sense of having a place in it was gone. She had her role, first on the Rocinante, now on the Storm. She had her people and her duty. It was Mars that had changed and darkened. It had metastasized into an empire and a grand project she wanted no part of.
She still had decades in her, if she kept her treatments and exercise regimen up. The universe she died in might still be better than the one she lived in now, but she had a hard time believing it would be better than the one she’d been born into. Too much had been lost, and what wasn’t lost was changed beyond her ability to understand it.
Her hand terminal chimed. A message from Jillian, still back at the bar. Bobbie looked at it with distrust. Jillian was a smart woman and a good fighter. Another couple decades of life might eventually convince her to build up her team instead of undermining them. The way she felt at the moment, Bobbie wasn’t sure she was in the mood to hear whatever Jillian was about to say. But she was captain, and Jillian was her XO. She thumbed the connection open. The recording had a tag that read THOUGHT YOU’D WANT TO SEE THIS. Bobbie started playing it.
The screen from the bar jumped to life. The refresh rate of the image there and the recording made a moiré pattern over the newsfeed host’s face, but not so badly that Bobbie couldn’t make her out. Or the man in the window beside her. The old man was gone, and a familiar face had replaced him. Admiral Anton Trejo of the Tempest, de facto governor of Sol system.
Bobbie stopped walking.
“—planned for months,” Trejo said.
“So your return to Laconia isn’t related to the events in the ring space?” the host
asked.
“Not at all,” Trejo said with a smile. He was about a thousand times better at lying than the host. “But I see how people would come to that conclusion. What happened with Medina was a tragedy, and I mourn the loss of life as deeply as anyone. But I have been assured by the Science Directorate and the high consul himself that the situation is under control. I’m just an old sailor heading for his next post. Nothing more dramatic than that. Vice Admiral Hogan is a good man and ready to take command. I have absolute faith in him.”
A third window opened on the screen, pushing Trejo and the host a little smaller and more masked by the interference. Vice Admiral Hogan was a serious-faced young man in Laconian blue. He could have been Caspar’s older brother.
“Well, speaking for the citizens of Sol system, I’d like to thank you for—”
The recording ended. Bobbie typed up a response with one thumb. THAT’S INTERESTING. She leaned against the wall. Trejo was leaving Sol system. Maybe was already on his way. A new officer—a Laconian officer, not an MCRN veteran—was taking command of the Tempest. It might have been enough to convince her, if she hadn’t already decided.
The Storm sat on a mobile landing platform wide enough to fit three more like her. The platform’s treads were taller than Bobbie, and designed to roll it through the massive cavern it was hiding in. Half a klick into the darkness, the passage angled up to a concealed hangar on the moon’s surface. For the moment, the ship stood tall as a tower in its gantry crane, the drive cones almost resting on the platform and the top of the ship lost in the shadows above her.
She made her way up the crane to the airlock, climbing the metal ladder hand over hand rather than calling the powered lift. When the airlock cycled open and she stepped in, she disconnected her hand terminal from the Callisto system before she synced up with the Storm. It wasn’t likely that a dual connection would give them away, but it wasn’t impossible, and every unnecessary risk was unnecessary.
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