Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Eleven: Alex

The shipyards on Callisto were a perfect example of the old idea that ships and buildings keep learning even after they’re built. History took whatever it found and used it for what was happening at the time, remaking the spaces into whatever worked well enough to get by at the moment, until history itself became a kind of architect.

Callisto had been a divided base once. Pretty much the same way medieval villages had been built just outside castle walls, civilian shipyards had grown up around the older MCRN base until the military and commercial concerns were almost the same size. The Free Navy had raided the Martian side even before the Free Navy really existed, pounding that half of the base into dust and bodies. Then, in the aftermath of the great defection that became the seeds of Laconia, the rebuilding of the Martian shipyards had been left incomplete. During the starving years, it had been abandoned. But the real estate was there, and as the need grew again, what had been military structures were taken over again. Nothing died without becoming the foundation for what came after.

They had been on Callisto for eight days so far, and it wasn’t certain when they’d ship back out. There were several of the big cargo ships in Sol system that might be able to smuggle the Storm, if that was what the underground decided to do next. Or maybe they’d stay in Sol. For all Laconia’s ambitions, there were still more people, stations, and ships in the Sol system than outside it. That was changing, though. Someday within Alex’s lifetime, they’d cross the threshold, and Sol really would be just one system among many. The oldest, most human system in the empire, sure. But not home. There would be a thousand homes, and if history was a guide, in a generation or two, everyone would think wherever they were was the most important one.

The restaurant Caspar had taken him to, for example, was in a reinforced dome that had clearly been Martian military construction. A supply depot, probably. Now all the fail-closed locks were gone, and the reinforced walls were hung with batiked cloth and the kind of tapestry that interior decorators churned out by the square meter. The menu billed itself as Moroccan, but the couscous was made with mushrooms and the beef all had the overly consistent grain that meant it had grown in a vat. The recipes might have had their roots on Earth, but Alex knew Belter food when he tasted it.

He and Caspar and the rest of the crew wore printed flight suits with a triangle-and-curve logo that implied they worked for a gas-mining cooperative called Három Állam that worked the Jovian moons. The Gathering Storm was hidden in a generations-old mine that was marked on the surveys as having been lost to collapse fifteen years before. It had been an OPA smuggling base, and the plan was to leave it there for a few weeks while the Laconian security forces were on high alert. Which meant, in the meantime, the crew could take a little time off the ship, drink, visit brothels, play golgo and handball and two-court football. Or fold up their legs on soft, woven cushions, listen to flute and drum music from hidden speakers, and scoop up little bits of fungus pretending to be wheat flour and cubes of spiced beef that had never been a cow.

Another advantage was that a little time on Callisto with civilians meant they could take the temperature of the system. See how everyone was reacting to the news of the underground’s attack. It turned out the response wasn’t what Alex had expected.

“Nothing?” Caspar said.

Alex cycled through the newsfeeds again. Food production on Earth and Ganymede were up this quarter, easily matching the established projections. A group in the Krasnoyarsk-Sakha Shared Interest Zone was petitioning for trade autonomy. The settlement on Navnan Ghar was reporting the discovery of a massive underground crystal network, and a special scientific commission was being assembled to determine whether it was another alien artifact or something that had occurred naturally on the planet. The lead singer of Tuva T.U.V.A. had sent nude photos of himself to an underage fan, and the authorities were investigating. The Laconian Science Directorate was reporting a potential breakthrough in the survey of dead systems: a massive green diamond that experts suspected might contain records that, if decoded, would spell out the history of the species that had created the ring gates.

That two Laconian frigates and a freighter carrying a critically important political officer had been destroyed in Sol system was listed precisely nowhere.

Or at least nowhere he could see without searching the news-feed indexes. And since Saba had it on good authority that Laconia was keeping a close eye on search terms, Alex was stuck browsing and hoping for something. Anything. But …

“Nope,” he agreed. “Nothing.”

Caspar took bit of bread and scooped up a bite of his tagine. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad one.”

“When I was your age,” Alex said, “it would have been on every feed. Earth and Mars would have had official responses, and there would’ve been eighteen different mainline feeds analyzing every word they said from different perspectives. The Belt would have had a thousand different pirate broadcasts with at least a dozen of them taking credit for it personally, and at least one saying it was all a Jesuit conspiracy.”

Caspar grinned. One of his eyeteeth was a little yellowed. Alex had never noticed that before. “Sounds like you miss it, grandpa.”

Alex looked up, questioning. Caspar put on a comic frown and an exaggerated drawl. “When I was your age, we had to make our own water from scratch every morning and dinosaurs roamed Mariner Valley.”

Alex felt a little stab of annoyance, but he pushed it back and laughed. “There was some variety at least.” He gestured toward the feeds spooling through on the tabletop monitor. “Everything on this feels like it’s been vetted by the same bureaucrat on Luna. It’s all got the same voice.”

“Probably was.”

“Yeah,” Alex said, shutting it off. “It probably was.”

Caspar stretched like a cat waking up from a nap, then tapped the monitor. The newsfeeds vanished and the restaurant’s interface popped up.

“We can split this,” Alex said.

“You buy next time,” Caspar said. “Anyway. Not like it’s real money, right?”

All the Storm crew on Callisto had false identities generated by the underground and slipped into the systems. Including biometrics and bank accounts. It was an uncomfortable way to live, knowing that everything was brittle. Alex’s fake records could all be exposed if the Laconian security system raised a red flag. He could spend tonight and then the rest of his life in a jail cell. Everything could fall apart at any moment.

Which, to be fair, had always been true. It was just harder to forget now.

“I’m meeting some of the engineering crew down on the third level. There’s a bar that has open mic comedy and half-price whiskey. Enough karaoke, and a pretty boy like me might even find someone to take him home tonight.”

“Drink one for me, and don’t make any mistakes you can’t regret the next morning,” Alex said, rising from his cushion. “I’ve got some things of my own to do.”

“Fair enough,” Caspar said. “See you when I see you.”

They parted in the corridor. Caspar headed for the passage leading deeper below the moon’s surface, Alex off to the left and toward the docks and the coffin apartments for people on shore leave. People like him. He walked with his hands stuck deep in the flight suit pockets, his eyes on the ground ahead of him. Avoiding eye contact with the people walking in the same halls. The passage came to a Y intersection with a brushed steel sculpture that didn’t seem to know if it was a human or a transport shuttle. Above it, the ships and their berths were all listed. All but his.

When Alex had been a boy back on Mars, his great-uncle Narendra had come to stay with his family for a week once while his group home in Innis Shallows had been renovated. Alex still remembered his great-uncle walking through the corridors of Bunker Hill with a calm, bemused expression while he and Johnny Zhou explained the fine points of the game they had been playing. Alex felt the same expression on his own face now.

Maybe it was something that happened with every generation, this sense of displacement. It might be an artifact of the way human minds seemed to peg “normal” to whatever they’d experienced first and then bristled at everything afterward that failed to match it closely enough. Or maybe the change that Laconia’s conquest was ushering in was different in kind from what had come before. Either way, the Callisto shipyard didn’t feel like Sol system anymore, or at least not the one Alex knew. It felt like the first days of Laconian rule. The sense of fear and fragility like a ringing in his ears that never went away. Amos used to say that everywhere was Baltimore. That wasn’t true anymore. Now everywhere was Medina.

His coffin apartment was near the docks. It was one of the larger models, a little over a meter high so that he could sit up in it. The mattress was old, recycled crash couch gel, and the walls and ceiling were layered glass and mesh with lights embedded in them to create the illusion of space going out beyond the surface. Alex crawled in, closed the access door, and made himself comfortable. He had a couple new entertainment feeds he’d been thinking about checking out. Over the years, he’d made himself an expert on neo-noir crime thrillers, and there had been work coming out of Ceres even before the Laconian takeover that used Pilkey montage to do some interesting things. He wondered, though, if signing in through the coffin’s system would compromise him. If Laconia knew enough about Alex Kamal to put together the kind of movies he liked, the kind of food he ate, the way he walked, and whatever other data he’d left behind him to pierce the mask that Saba had given him. If he was too much himself, would it send security officers to his door? Did it make more sense to watch something popular and generic and stay at the center of the herd?

He pulled up his profile on the coffin system. A red icon showed a private connection from the Storm. There was a certain irony in the fact that he was more worried that Laconia would catch him out because he watched a certain kind of entertainment feed than he was that actual encrypted communications from the underground would give him away. But there it was. He’d made the decision to trust Saba’s old OPA techs when he got into this business. Didn’t make sense to start second-guessing them now. He opened the message, and his son looked back at him from the screen.

“Hey, Da,” Kit said with a grin that reminded him of Giselle. Kit looked more like his mother than like him. Thank God. “Weird to hear from you again so soon. Are you in-system? I mean, don’t tell me. I know we’re all hush-hush. But hey. Things are great this semester. I’m pulling top marks in three of my sections, and”—the smile turned rueful—“I’ve got a good tutor for the other two. And … ah … yeah. So I’m dating this girl, and I think it’s starting to look kind of serious. Her name’s Rohani. I haven’t told her about … um … you. But if there ever gets to be a chance for you to come meet her? Mom is talking to her family, and I think she may be your daughter-in-law pretty soon here. So it would be good, yeah?”

There was more to the message, and Alex listened to it with a warmth in his chest, and a sorrow. He wasn’t going to meet the girl. He wasn’t going to attend the wedding if there was one. Rohani would go on the list with Amos and Holden and Clarissa. Another loss. It was just another loss. He’d live with it. He had to.

His hand terminal chimed, and an alert popped up from the false ID that Saba used for high-priority messages. With dread in his gut, he opened it.

BE ADVISED THAT THE TEMPEST HAS BROKEN ORBIT AND IS MOVING TOWARD JUPITER

“Well,” Alex said to himself. “Shit.”

“My little man’s getting married?” Bobbie said, but she kept looking at the supply crates while she said it. “Girl will be lucky if I don’t swoop in and carry him off first.”

The warehouse was on the edge of the complex. It didn’t use the station’s power grid, and the environmental system was a retrofit from an old rock hopper. It left condensation on the walls and ceilings, water discoloration like leopard spots. The larger gear, like torpedoes, was still on the Storm. But the smaller salvage from the Laconian freighter had been transferred onto four wide rows of pallets and moved to the warehouse. Bobbie had unpacked them, scattering the storage crates through the space as she did her own private inventory. Scorch marks darkened some of the boxes. The chalky smell of ceramic that had been heated until it flaked hung in the air.

“You’re taking the news that the largest battleship in the empire is heading toward us very calmly,” Alex said.

She took a deep breath, and kept her voice patient. “Jillian’s getting word to everyone. The Tempest is days out, and this work needs to be done one way or the other. I’m hoping by the time I’m done with it, I’ll have a plan.”

“How’s that working for you?”

“Nothing so far. I’ll let you know.”

Alex sat on one of the boxes. He felt heavier than the gentle gravity of the moon could explain. “Bobbie, what are we doing here?”

She paused, looked over at him. She had a lot of different expressions, and he’d come to know most of them. He knew when he was talking to his friend and when she was the captain. Right now, she was listening to him as the woman he’d been on the Roci with, back in the day. The one who had known him since before Io.

“Fighting the enemy,” she said. “Degrading their ability to bring force and influence to bear. Denying them the use of resources.”

“Sure,” Alex said. “But to what end? I mean, are we trying to get back to the Transport Union running things? Or are we trying to make it so that every planet is calling its own shots, and then seeing if it all works out?”

Bobbie crossed her arms and leaned against a stack of boxes. The work lights were harsh, and Alex could see all the roughness in her face and arms that decades of hard work and radiation had left. Age looked good on her. It looked right.

“I’m hearing you ask whether authoritarianism is necessarily bad,” she said. “Did I get that right? Because yeah, it is.”

“That’s not what I mean. It’s just … I don’t know what it is. I’m feeling overwhelmed. And maybe a little demoralized.”

“Yes,” Bobbie said. “Yes, we are.”

“You too?”

“We lost the target. That political officer might have given us something that could break these fuckers back to the Stone Age. I mean maybe not, but I’m not going to know now. So yeah, I’m a little grumpy. But I’m guessing that’s not exactly what’s biting you?”

“I don’t know what the win looks like.”

“Well, for me, it looks like dying with the knowledge that humanity’s a little bit better off than it would have been if I’d never been born. A little freer. A little kinder. A little smarter. That the bullies and bastards and sadists got their teeth into a few less people because of me. That’s got to be enough.”

“Yeah,” Alex said, but she kept going.

“I’m not a grand strategy girl. That’s for the eggheads. I’m a ground pounder, and I always will be. These people want every planet to be a prison where they get to pick who’s the guard and who’s the inmate.”

“And we’re against that,” Alex said. He heard the exhaustion and agreement in his own voice. “You ever think Naomi’s right? Maybe it’s better to try getting inside the system. Changing it that way?”

“She is right,” Bobbie said, turning back to her inventory. “It’s just I’m right too. Naomi wants there to be one way to fix this, and she wants it to be the one where there’s no blood.”

“But there’s two ways,” Alex said, thinking that he was agreeing.

“There’s no way,” Bobbie said. “There’s just pushing back with everything we’ve got and hoping we can outlast the bastards.”

“You know we’re on the clock here,” Alex said. “I’m thinking about Takeshi.”

“I sent a message to his people,” Bobbie said. “It’s always hard losing someone, and we’d been very lucky up to that point. It couldn’t last.”

“I’m thinking that he was one of your best, and he was damn near sixty. Jillian, Caspar, and a few others aside, our resistance is made up of old Belters. Old OPA.”

“Agreed,” Bobbie said. “And thank God for that. Most of them have a clue what they’re doing.”

“Behind them is a whole new generation who were never in the OPA. Never fought the inner planets for independence. Who grew up fat and rich on Transport Union freighters, with respect and important jobs. Kids like Kit. How are you going to convince them to give up everything they’ve got and join this fight?”

Bobbie stopped and turned to look at him.

“Alex, where is this coming from?”

“I think we have a resistance right now because we have a lot of old guys who grew up resisting an enemy too strong to ever beat. They’ve been inoculated against fear of failure. But when they’re gone, I think we’re done. As a movement. As a force in history. Because we’re not going to convince anyone born after the Transport Union was formed to fight an unwinnable fight. And maybe, in the long run, Naomi’s plan to win politically is all we’ll have left.”

He saw Bobbie’s eyes go flat. “Unwinnable fight?” she said.

“Well,” Alex said. “Isn’t it?”