“I don’t know,” Naomi said. “The point of having the Typhoon in with Medina was always that they could defend every gate at once. Hit the station with its magnetic field projector and all the gates bake anyone that’s too close, but…”
“I saw the data from when they did that. It wasn’t this big.”
“It wasn’t even close,” Naomi agreed.
Emma sipped from her bulb, hunched in a degree more, and lowered her voice. “Did we make a play? Did we try to take the slow zone?”
“If there was an attack planned, I didn’t know about it,” she said, but with a knot in her gut. She didn’t think Saba would have put together something that audacious without her, but maybe he would. She had been arguing for restraint and less violent, longer-term strategies. If all she’d managed was to cut herself out of the loop… She imagined Bobbie and Alex and the Gathering Storm burning in toward the gate with a ragged and improvised fleet. They couldn’t have been that stupid. But even if they had, the gamma burst from the gate had been so much more powerful…
“Can you find where we put my system?” Naomi asked. “If I can rebuild it, I might be able to find Saba’s signals. Get a report.”
“Could hunt it down, maybe,” Emma said. “But we’re putting you on a shuttle for Big Moon in four hours, get you out before we’re in range of the transfer station. Doesn’t leave much time.”
“So we hurry.”
Finding all the spare parts of her former cell was harder now that thrust had changed the nature of the architectural space, but Naomi didn’t need all of it. The physical hardware had some built-in security that made finding the hidden messages easier, but without the keys and information that she kept only in her own memory, they’d have been useless. Her records from the long passages in the storage container were wiped. Even if the Laconians had found the devices, they wouldn’t have been able to pull the secrets of the underground from them. But neither could Naomi.
Emma drove a loading mech, shifting the heavy pallets that they’d moved before, and Naomi found the pieces she needed—the signal processor from her crash couch, a monitor different from the one she’d had but close enough, a hand terminal interface. They set up in a workroom by the machine shop. Neither of them had said it, but they both knew that everything would be broken down again and hidden away when they were done.
The workroom was small and grimy, with long, discolored patches on the fabric walls. The tool racks had been used for so many years that the ceramic was wearing through and the titanium bones glittering under it. It smelled like oil and sweat, and Naomi liked it better than anyplace she’d been on the Cama before.
She looked through all the usual places where Saba hid communications for the underground, but most of them weren’t there at all. Not just empty of hidden messages, but whole channels missing. The Transport Union’s coordination feed—the running record of ship locations and vectors—was just a repeating standby message. The entertainment feed from Medina of a young man talking breathlessly about the three-factor philosophy of design for hours on end wasn’t transmitting at all. Medina’s communications channels were closed for business, covert or otherwise.
“That a good thing, or bad?” Emma asked.
“I don’t know what it is,” Naomi said.
“Got to get you to a shuttle soon.”
“Just another few minutes.”
Emma shifted her weight, trying not to show her impatience. It wasn’t just the time pressure on the shuttle. Everything about the situation itched.
Naomi was almost ready to resign herself to failure when she found the message. It was hidden in false-static fluctuations under a navigation beacon for the repeaters that ferried comm signals across the interference of the gate. The encryption was key based, and it took her six tries to find the right one. When it popped onto the monitor, it was text. No voice, no picture. Nothing to show that it had come from Saba apart from the fact of its existence.
MAJOR INCIDENT IN THE SLOW ZONE. SUSPEND ALL OPERATIONS AND SHELTER DOWN. NO IMMEDIATE THREAT TO THE ORGANIZATION, BUT ENEMY SURVEILLANCE HIGH. NO TRANSITS IN OR OUT OF ANY GATE BY ORDER OF LACONIA. TWO GATES LOST. UPDATE TO FOLLOW.
“‘Two gates lost’?” Emma said. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Be patient and find out, sounds like,” Naomi said. She shut down her system, the words blinking into darkness.
The shuttle was a two-couch model. No Epstein drive, but an efficient teakettle good enough for orbital transits that didn’t take more than a month or two. She wasn’t going to be on it for more than a couple of days. It was the kind of thing a new prospector would rent for claim surveys or an old couple for a long, slightly adventurous vacation. Naomi felt Jim’s absence even though he’d never been on board it. As the Bhikaji Cama dropped away behind her and she did her first sustained burn toward Auberon’s lunar outpost, she checked the transponder output. A day ago, the shuttle had been a maintenance and safety vehicle for the Transport Union. Today, it was a rental craft registered to Whimsy Enterprises and had been for the last year and a half. The ship didn’t care what story they told about it. It worked just as well either way.
She set the local censored newsfeed to play for a while, using the thin-faced, cheerful man spouting the Laconian official positions as a kind of white noise while she thought. In the hours she let it play, neither he nor the dour and serious woman who took his place mentioned Medina or the Typhoon or the gamma radiation burst. Or how someone could lose two ring gates. She tried to reassure herself that, whatever was going on, it at least wasn’t Bobbie and Alex charging into the teeth of a Magnetar-class battleship and dying. There was even the chance that the crisis, whatever it was, would open some opportunities for the underground. With her bottles gone, she’d have to find another way to get messages back to Saba.
Auberon was one of the success stories of the new systems. A wide, lush planet with clean water, hundreds of viable microclimates, and a tree of life that coexisted with Earth’s biochemistry in a kind of mutual indulgent neglect. The story was that a farm on Auberon could grow native plant analogs and Terran crops side by side, with each acting as fertilizer for the other. It sounded like an exaggeration, but there was a seed of truth there. Food and water weren’t a struggle on Auberon the way they had been on so many of the other worlds. It had twelve cities with populations over a million and a wide scattering of smaller towns, farms, and research stations. A lunar station that fed cargo and supplies through the near asteroids and a handful of dwarf planets big enough to have civilian populations. It had almost one-tenth of a percent of Earth’s population at its height, and it had been self-sustaining for over two decades.
Naomi found the place a little creepy.
The docks, when she reached them, were cleaner than any she’d seen in a lifetime traveling through Sol system. It wasn’t just the eerie perfection she disliked, though. The void cities that had been, for a time, the dream of Belter culture made real
had been as new and shining and optimistic as Auberon’s lunar base. But they had been rooted in history. Everything in Sol system, from the great port of Ceres to the rock hoppers digging ore and water from asteroids that were hardly more than a hold’s volume of gravel, had come from a shared past. Yes, the expansion into the void had been bloody and cruel and filled with as much violence as cooperation, but it had been real. Authentic.
There were no old levels in the station, because there was no old. On Ceres, there were neighborhoods built in the excavations where the great engines that had spun the asteroid up had been housed. On Ganymede, there were levels of tunnels that had been abandoned in the war and never recovered. On Earth, there were cities built on the ruins of the cities before them, layer after layer back through millennia. Auberon was a theme park version of itself. A prefabricated culture that could have been assembled anywhere with equal cheerfulness. It didn’t feel human.
The Whimsy Enterprises office was a closet-sized door between an ice cream shop and a land claims lawyer. Inside, the air smelled like hydroponics tanks and fresh plastic. A woman her own age with close-cut hair stood at the kind of desk Naomi expected to get takeaway food from.
“Hello,” the woman said with a barely repressed grin.