The connection to traffic control went live. “Skiff eighteen forty-two, your transit to Bara Gaon is approved. You are clear to exit.”
“Acknowledged, Control. Releasing the clamps now.”
The little ship, light as an empty food can, shuddered when the docking clamps let go, and Naomi opened the throttle on the drive. The image of Auberon grew a little smaller, and a little smaller, and a little smaller until she closed it down. The moment was over.
The skiff was a tiny little thing, too small and undistinguished for a name. A transponder code, a number, and a perfunctory paper trail. It was as cramped as a racing ship, but without the maneuverability or high-end crash couch. It was intended for in-system trips, usually between planets in similar orbits. Taking it into the depths of the system, through the ring, and then back down some stellar gravity well meant traveling well outside its intended use. Naomi didn’t find it intimidating. She’d gone much farther in much worse in her life. After a few days’ hard burn, she went on the float.
She spent the hours double-checking the system, such as it was. Making sure the air mix was where it should be, the reactor bottle, the water tanks. Knowing everything about her little bubble of air and life was comforting. If she caught a micrometeorite, it would be too late to learn, so she did it now. Prepare for the worst and be pleasantly surprised. The skiff didn’t have a gym, but she still had her resistance bands from her life in the shell game. She could adapt. She always did.
She also found herself imagining conversations with Saba and with Jim and Bobbie and Alex. There were strategic decisions she was going to have to make. Bobbie’s victory put Duarte on his back foot.
With only a single Magnetar-class ship left, there was a chance for the underground to drive Laconia into a purely defensive posture. Even restrict it to its
own system. It would mean making a real and credible threat on Laconia itself, but it was possible. But it wasn’t enough.
There had been a time when the Transport Union and the governments of Mars and Earth had expected Laconia to be like any other colony world: struggling for base survival and aiming for self-sustaining agriculture sometime in a generation or so. But Duarte had taken the protomolecule with him along with the expertise to use it, and he’d found the construction platforms that could build ships like the Tempest and the Storm. And apparently a way to create and bottle antimatter. A threat wasn’t enough. She had to find a way to break that manufacturing capacity. If Laconia fell, it had to fall hard. It had to know that its dream was over, that it wasn’t exceptional. Once it was broken down to the same level as other worlds, it could be brought back. Reintegrated. Because that was the trick. That was the deep lesson of the Belters and the inner planets. The OPA and the Transport Union.
It was the single central argument that the universe had made to her through her whole life, and she was only now seeing it clearly: Wars never ended because one side was defeated. They ended because the enemies were reconciled. Anything else was just a postponement of the next round of violence. That was her strategy now. The synthesis of her arguments with Bobbie. The answer she wished they’d found together, when they were both alive.
Once she reached Bara Gaon—the other major success among the colony worlds—she’d have to get a sense of what warships she could muster and the transit times. If there was a way to lure Duarte’s forces out away from Laconia system and then push in when their home fleet was spread thin, there might be a way.
She was still thinking about that, imagining what Saba or Bobbie or Jim might think, when she started the braking burn. The bottle from Sol system passed through the Auberon gate just a few hours after that. The skiff captured the encrypted data, just the way Chava’s system would do back on the planet’s moon. It took half a day to finish unpacking, so hours passed before she heard Alex’s voice again and knew what they’d lost in order to win.
He looked… not older. He didn’t look old. Or tired. She’d seen him look tired before. He looked diminished. Like the grief had taken some of the color from his eyes.
“So it turns out I’m done here,” he said in his private message to her. “I got this young guy I been training up should be able to take over. We’re headin’ for… our little dry dock. You know the one.” Even in three layers of encryption, Alex wouldn’t say the word Freehold. “When we get there, I’m stepping out. I thought I might go check on the old girl. Make sure nothing’s been makin’ a nest in her. After that, I don’t know. I guess that’s your call, since you’re running the show now. I don’t want to take her out unless you’re good with it. You and me are the only ones left now. So. Yeah. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to let Bobbie go.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” Naomi said to the screen. Her tears made lenses over her eyes. “Oh, sweet man, don’t apologize for this.”
But the message was done, and the passage through the ring gate was almost upon her. She passed into the slow zone with a heaviness that didn’t have anything to do with the rate of her change of velocity.
It was her first transit since they’d lost Medina. And Saba. And the model of human civilization that she’d understood. The station at the center of the ring was glowing bright as a little star, still shedding the energy it had absorbed from the gamma burst. The surface of the ring space, which had been a featureless blackness, danced with twisting auroras that were weirder and more threatening than the dark had been. What scared her more, though, were the ships.
She had expected the space to be empty. After everything that had happened, she’d thought traffic between the gates would be close to nothing. She’d been wrong. Her little skiff picked up transponder signals for almost two dozen ships, and drive signatures for more than that. The Laconian directive that the ring space be kept clear was being ignored on a scale she hadn’t understood, and the raw danger of it took her breath away. With no Medina Station to control the passages, the chances of going dutchman were much worse than they should have been.
She’d made her transit in distraction and ignorance, and she could have vanished and never known why. And that was assuming that the event that killed Medina and the Typhoon, that had destroyed two of the gates in the network, hadn’t changed the rules. If the threshold for vanishing was different now, they wouldn’t know. Not without testing it.
Maybe it was the need for supplies on the vulnerable colonies or the chance to deliver goods without paying the union. Maybe it was that humanity, given freedom, forgot about the prospect of consequences. Whatever the drive, it took her breath away. It was such a shock that she didn’t notice at first that two of the ships were Laconian warships like the Gathering Storm, or that they were burning toward her. In the mess of the traffic and her own internal chaos, she didn’t see that until the skiff got the connection request from the Monsoon.
Her system had the software to disguise her voice and appearance, and she checked five different times that it was running before she accepted the request.
“This is Chief Petty Officer Norman of the Monsoon,” the man on the screen said. “You are in violation of quarantine. Please leave the ring space immediately.” His voice had the irritated singsong of someone reciting a hated ritual.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to. It’s just that my brother’s sick. I was supposed to be back to him weeks ago. I don’t have any contraband, I swear.”
“I don’t care where you go,” the Laconian said. “Just get out of here and stay out. There will a permanent force in here soon, and this kind of thing will get people shot. Be somewhere else when that happens.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “I’ll transit out right away, sir.”
The connection dropped. They were swamped. More than that, they had ships in the slow zone that weren’t stopping to control the space. That meant they either understood the risks and were keeping their exposure to a repeat of the catastrophe that had killed Medina Station and the Typhoon to a minimum or they had bigger fish to fry or both. And, she saw as she tracked their courses, the Laconian destroyers were heading for Auberon.
“You came close,” she said softly, “but no cigar.”
The Bara Gaon gate was on a secant that cut her passage through the ring gate to almost half what the maximum distance would have been. The gate wasn’t quite where the navigation system expected it to be. The loss of the Thanjavur and Tecoma gates had shifted all the others just the smallest bit, but enough to make the software care about it. She went to correct the course manually… and paused.
My brother’s sick, she thought. And so am I.
She corrected the skiff’s course, aiming it for Freehold. And for home.