His voice was tight and controlled. “I want you to eat your meals. I want you to show up for your lessons. I want you to project normalcy and stability and calm to everyone who sees you. Because that is your duty to your father and the empire.”
The rage felt like it was lifting her body. She didn’t know what she was going to say. She didn’t have an argument or a stance, only the power that came from being incensed beyond her capacity to contain it.
“But you can spend days running around looking for Timothy? You can have Dr. Okoye come teach because nothing she does is as important as making sure you can finish killing my friends? You aren’t doing your work either, so you don’t get to tell me to do mine. That’s hypocrisy!”
Ilich looked at her, looked deep into her eyes, and he chuckled. He reached out and ruffled her hair like she was Muskrat and he was scratching her ears. It was gentle and humiliating. Teresa felt her rage stutter and die, and a vast embarrassment flood into the place it had been. She wanted the anger back.
“You poor kid. Is that what this is about? The spy? You’re mad at me because of him?”
“I’m mad because of everything,” she said, but there wasn’t any power behind it now.
“He wasn’t your friend. He was a spy and an assassin. He was here to kill us. That cave of his? He picked it as shelter for when he set the pocket nuke off. The mountain was a landmark for his evacuation team.”
“That isn’t true.”
He took her arm just above the shoulder. His grip was tight enough to pinch. “You missed your tutorial this morning. We’ll make it up now. You need to learn something.”
The security offices of the State Building were familiar to her. They were offices like any other branch’s, except for the occasional reinforced door and blast-resistant lock. There were cells there for political prisoners, though she didn’t know if anyone was in them besides James Holden. The forensics lab, however, was new. It was a wide room with a high ceiling and movable partitions that could seal off a section and keep its atmosphere separate. Fume hoods with waldoes and blast-resistant glass lined one wall. The tables that filled the center of the room had aisles between them wide enough for specialized tool carts—chemical, biological, electronic, computational—to be wheeled to wherever they were needed. Half a dozen people stood at the workstations. And on them, Timothy’s things. The carved wood tools. The cot. The cases and boxes that had been his. Even one of the repair drones that had apparently been damaged somewhere in the violence lay on a table, the size and rough profile of a dead animal.
Ilich cleared the room so they would be alone. The technicians left, trying not to be obvious in the ways they stared at Teresa. She saw the curiosity in their faces. What was the high consul’s daughter doing there? What did it mean? The weight of their interest was like a hand on her shoulders, pressing down.
When they were alone, Ilich put her on a technician’s stool and brought a data storage core over. She recognized it from Timothy’s cave, though she hadn’t thought about it much at the time. Ilich synced a monitor, pulled up a file directory, and stepped back, gesturing to it as if to say, Go ahead. Look.
Teresa found she didn’t want to.
“Start with the notes files,” Ilich said. “Let’s see how much Timothy was your friend.”
The notes were dates and times. At first, she didn’t see any pattern in them, but the notations with the entries had a security note from the forensic tech. When she opened it, Timothy’s entries matched the security logs for those dates. He’d been watching the State Building’s guards. Working out their patterns and habits. Looking for a hole. And he’d been tracking James Holden. Those records were more scattered, because Holden had less of a pattern. He’d drifted through the buildings and gardens as he saw fit, and Timothy—Amos, his name was Amos—had marked every time Holden came in sight of his watching post on the mountain.
Once she’d gotten through the notes file, she didn’t stop. She opened a tactical maps file and recognized the architecture of the city, of the State Building. A series of files showed blast radii of a small nuclear device. If it were planted at the wall. If it were set off in the city. If it had been smuggled into the State Building. Each one had notes speculating on deaths, on infrastructure degraded. She opened a file called “evacuation protocol.” Topographical maps showed a primary evac site close to where she’d met him the first time and a secondary a day’s hike away, with notes Timothy—Amos—had added about what parts of the visible defense grid would have to be taken out for each site to be practical.
Here is how he would have killed us. Here is how he would have left. Here is the man he came to save, here are the people he came to destroy. She waited for the rage to come back. She expected it. Instead, she thought of James Holden. If he said he was your friend, then he was.
“Do you see now?” Ilich said. “Do you see what he was?”
All these plans to kill her and her father. To slaughter them all. You should lie down on the floor there. Flat as you can. Put your hands over your ears, okay? Were those the words you said to someone you wanted to kill?
“I understand,” she lied. “I do.”
Ilich shut off the monitor. “Then we’re done here.”
He took her arm again and led her away. She hadn’t seen him order up food, but when they got back to her rooms, it was waiting for her. A thick, white protein slurry like they fed to sick people. A steak of vat-grown meat seared black at the surface and warm pink in the center. Eggs. Cheese and fruit. Sweet rice with flakes of dried fish. It was all on a metal tray with a fork and dull knife. Muskrat trotted in, but caught the sense that something was wrong. When Ilich held his hand out, offering to scratch her ears, she ignored him and went to sit on Teresa’s feet instead.
“Now then,” Ilich said. “Eat your meal. Get some rest tonight. Tomorrow, you will be on time for your lesson. We will be in the east garden where everyone on staff can see us, and you will act as if everything were normal. Do you understand?”
“I don’t want to eat this. I’m not hungry.”
“I don’t care. You’re going to eat now.”
She looked at the food in front of her. Reluctantly, she picked up the fork. She remembered something from an old film she’d seen about a girl in Sol system. On Earth. “I don’t have to do this. Body autonomy is written into the constitution.”
“Not ours it isn’t,” Ilich said. “You will eat this now, while I sit here and watch you. Then we will sit for another hour while you digest it. Or else I will call in Dr. Cortázar with a funnel and tube, and we force you. Am I understood?”
Teresa took a forkful of the steak and put it in her mouth. Intellectually, she knew it tasted good. When she swallowed, Ilich nodded.
“Again,” he said.
After he left, Teresa didn’t move. She just sat on her couch, feeling the weight in her stomach. She hadn’t eaten a meal that large in weeks, and it left her feeling bloated and wrong. Muskrat sensed that something was off, and put her wide, furry head on Teresa’s lap, looking up at her with complex brown eyes.
Teresa put on a feed. The same one she’d watched as a child. The nameless Martian girl and the fairy named Pinsleep. Familiar images washed over her, bringing something close to comfort. A sense of predictability, at least. She knew that at the end, the nameless girl would escape fairyland. That she’d go back to Innis Deep and her family. That in the last scene, she’d pack away all her girlhood toys and leave for upper university and an adult life. That was the sign that she’d won. She was free to make any life she wanted, and not be a prisoner of the elves.
She lay down on the couch, resting her head on a pillow. The girl was taken in by Pinsleep again, and ran, and fought to escape. And escaped. Teresa started it again from the beginning.
Prisoners and their dilemmas. She let the images play and took up her handheld. In her notes, she found Ilich’s old diagram.
TERESA COOPERATES TERESA DEFECTS
JAS
ON COOPERATES T3, J3 T4, J0
JASON DEFECTS T0, J4 T2, J2
She ran her fingers over it. She’d forgotten that Ilich’s first name was Jason. She’d forgotten a lot of things.
The puzzle—the unsolvable part—was that no matter what she did, it was better for the others to defect. If she was good, they should take advantage of her. If she was bad, they still should. And the same logic applied to her, except she hadn’t done it. Everyone else had defected, and when she didn’t cooperate, they forced her to. Even though the thing that made sense was to defect.
Pinsleep discovered that the girl wasn’t in her cell and screamed. Thin fairy fingers balled in stylized fists. Muskrat snored deeply, her fuzzy body pressed close to Teresa. She put her own hand down and scratched the old dog. Black with gray in her muzzle and at the tips of her ears. The thing she hadn’t wanted to know pressed at her throat, welling up like a bubble rising from the bottom of the ocean. She felt like she could watch it come, and she knew that when it reached the surface, nothing about her life would be the same. Everything would have to change, because she’d changed.
And it happened, not with a scream, but with an exhalation. She leaned down, her lips almost against Muskrat’s floppy ear. When she spoke, she whispered.
“This isn’t my home anymore. I can’t stay here. I have to leave.”
Muskrat looked up and licked Teresa’s cheek, agreeing.
Chapter Forty-One: Naomi
The Freehold gate, like all the gates, was stationary with respect to its local sun. That it didn’t fall into its distant star was just one of its many mysteries, but since they couldn’t hook a chain between it and the Roci and hang from it, they did not benefit from its gravity-defying properties. Instead, Alex parked the Roci close to it with the Epstein drive on a gentle burn to balance the pull of the sun.
The flight out to the ring gate had been eerie. The Rocinante had been her home longer than anyplace else. She’d slept more of her nights in these crash couches, and eaten more of her meals in the galley. She had breathed the air that passed through the ducts and filters more times than she could calculate. Being inside the ship now, she felt the presence of the others. Her memories of them. What surprised her most was that it didn’t hurt.
She’d left the Roci not long after Amos took his covert assignment to Laconia. Alex was going to join Bobbie on the Storm. Naomi, they had all thought, would hire on a temporary crew for the Rocinante and keep her flying. Only she hadn’t. At the time, she’d barely been able to explain why. She could still remember some of the rationalizations she’d used—A gunship is harder to hide than one person and The Rocinante has symbolic value as a prize that ups the risk of using her and The underground on Freehold will be able to use her if the need for defense arises.
They’d all been true, and none of them had. Looking back now, she saw that she’d left because staying would have been worse. She hadn’t let herself feel the loss of Jim too deeply. Or of Amos. Or Clarissa. Bobbie had invited her to join the crew of the Storm, but Naomi hadn’t accepted, and Bobbie hadn’t pressed the issue.
Now, strapped into the spiderlike framework of a salvage mech and burning for the ring with her two transmitters and the spool of wire, she looked back at the ship—her ship—and it still ached. But it was bearable. She had taken her grief and locked herself away with it because she’d been skinless. It had been the best way she could find at the time to keep every new day from feeling like a little more salt on the wound. But that had been a different version of her. She’d grieved, but more than that, she’d changed. The woman she was now wasn’t quite the one she’d been on the day that Jim left. Or even on the day she’d chosen not to accept Duarte’s invitation. Between the loss of Saba and Bobbie’s defeat of the Tempest, Naomi had been reborn so quietly she’d hardly even noticed. The only real evidence was that she could be on the Rocinante again. She could come home.
“You’re almost there,” Alex said. “How’s it look?”
“Big,” Naomi said.
The gate was only a thousand kilometers across. This close to the surface, it might as well have been half of the universe. This far from the sun, the mech’s HUD needed to add some false color augmentation so that she could see more clearly what she was dealing with. She made her braking burn. She only had a little time before her orbit slid past her, but the transmitters were already wired together. She tapped through the initialization codes, and the compressed nitrogen thrusters took it from there. The primary transmitter shot out through the ring, and the secondary took up a stationary position relative to the ring gate except for a slow drift that would eventually snuggle it up against the physical surface of the ring itself. As repeaters went, it was about the simplest version there was—one step up from cans and string. But it didn’t have to last long.
“How’s it looking?”
“I’m watching,” Alex said. “I’ve got sync from the local side. I’m waiting for a response from… Yeah, okay. We’re looking good. Come on back.”
“Copy that. I’m heading in,” Naomi said. “So much for the easy part.”
“Taking what I can get.”
Naomi turned back toward the Rocinante and started her burn. The mech had enough power in the thrusters that she could have worked out there for a few hours without any risk, but she was just as happy not to. The cooling on the unit wasn’t what it had been, or else she was less tolerant of being overheated.
By the time she’d gotten back to the ship, cycled through the airlock, packed the mech safely away, and floated up to the flight deck, the transmitter had been working for a little under three hours. The first cycle was passive, looking for signals coming from any ships in the ring space and identifying as many as they could. It looked like there were about a dozen at the moment, but all of them were recognizable as Transport Union or smugglers. Nothing had the comm signal or drive signature of a Storm-class destroyer, and nothing was the Whirlwind. No ships at all would have been better, but this was as good as Naomi could have reasonably hoped.
The connection request signal was the first real risk she was taking. If there were Laconian sensors in the ring space, this was going to give away what gates had active cells of the underground behind them. If things went the way she hoped, that information wouldn’t matter much. It was a calculated risk.
For almost a minute, there was no reply. The farthest gate was only a little under a million klicks. The light delay should have been nearly trivial. Naomi had a sinking feeling—What if they were the only ones? What if the plan had already fallen apart?—and then the connections started coming through. First just one, then a handful, then a small flood. Fifty-three answers in all. Fifty-three systems with their full supply of ready warships, out of retirement and at her command. Easily hundreds of ships.
“Not bad,” Alex said from his couch.
“It’s excellent until you do the math,” Naomi said. “Then it’s ninety-six percent no reply.” But she smiled when she said it.
Her plan, long since sent out via bottle and echoed from system to system, was larger than Laconia. Larger than the fifty-three systems that had sent ships for the fight. Even as she’d been setting out her makeshift repeater, an alert was going off at the transfer station on Nyingchi Xin. A pirate was breaking into Laconian warehouses on the largest moon of the smallest gas giant in Sanctuary system. A massive data breach was being reported from the new shipyards in Yasamal system. Hopefully dozens of other small actions and issues, anyplace that a Storm-class destroyer was in the system. After the death of the Tempest, Laconian forces and the factions that had thrown their lot in with them had to be nervous. That was her handle on them. It let her and her people distract them and draw them thin. They had to look strong now in every corner of the empire, because they already looked weak.
The next phase lost the anonymity and safety of the bottles. With a sensation like walking off her ship under an unfamiliar sky, Naomi chose the first of the connection requests and
opened it. There was a hiss of static and the compression of sound that the multiple layers of encryption left behind.
“Nagata here,” Naomi said.
“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.
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