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.