“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.