Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Twenty-Five: Naomi

Naomi had lived long enough to see history change more than once now. In the reality where she’d been born, Earth and Mars had maintained an alliance built to keep their boot permanently on the neck of Belters like her. The idea of alien life had been something for scientific speculations and thrillers on entertainment feeds. Some changes had been so slow it was almost possible to miss that they were happening. The change of Belter identity from underclass to the de facto governing party at the height of the Transport Union’s power had spanned decades. The rebuilding of Ganymede after its collapse also. The others had been sudden, or had seemed that way. When Eros moved. When the gates opened. When the rocks fell on Earth. When Laconia came back.

The sudden changes, as different as they were, all followed the same pattern. After it happened—whatever it was—humanity went into a kind of shock. Not just her and the people around her, but the whole vast and varied tribe of people. For a moment, it was as if they were all still primates on the fields of Africa going silent at a lion’s roar. All the rules they’d lived by were suddenly open to question. The inner planets have always been my enemy, but are they still? The far reaches of the solar system are as distant as humanity will ever be, but can we go farther? Earth will endure, won’t it?

Naomi didn’t like the feeling, but she recognized it. And more than that, she saw the power in it. Moments like these were opportunities. They could bring new alliances, new empathy, a new and broader sense of being together in a single human tribe. Or they could be the poison that ran through human minds for decades to come and welcomed ancient wars onto new and bloody battlefields.

Auberon held its breath and waited to see if the predators were coming for it. She saw it on the in-system newsfeeds that were the only newsfeeds now. It was in the wideness of the Laconian governor’s eyes. And, Naomi had to admit, it was in her own heart too.

The Typhoon was the absolute symbol of Laconian dominance. After the Tempest’s inexorable conquest of Sol system, Laconian rule was a given. It wasn’t just that Laconia had found a way to defend the ring space against simultaneous attacks from any or all gates, though that was part of it. It was also the clear knowledge that by being in the slow zone, the Typhoon was already halfway to anyone’s home. That once it started coming, nothing could stop it but the whim of the empire.

And now it was gone.

Medina Station had been a feature of the ring space from the start. It had been one of the first ships through the Sol ring, and taken up its place even before the other gates had opened. Medina had been the farthest trading post of the new land rush and then the traffic cop at the center of the colony worlds. Its history as a religious generation ship and then as a battleship for the OPA had made it as rich and complicated as the people who lived on it. It was a permanent fact of how humanity moved through the rings, as constant and permanent as the rings themselves.

It was gone too.

If it had been just one or the other, maybe it would have been simpler. But having the hammer that had threatened every head in the empire and the longest-standing human presence at the gates both wiped away at once pulled Naomi’s heart in two directions. She was rejoicing and mourning at the same time. And also feeling the deep unease that came from the reminder that that being familiar wasn’t the same as being understood.

“How do you take your eggs?” Chava asked.

Naomi, sitting at the breakfast bar, rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “Usually reconstituted and from a nozzle.”

“So … scrambled?”

“That would be great.”

Chava’s rooms were in a fashionable part of the station, assuming there was an unfashionable part. Auberon hadn’t existed long enough to have history built in its bones yet. Nothing there had been reappropriated or reused or reimagined yet. The hard industrial white of Chava’s kitchen was exactly as the designer had imagined it. The ferns in the hydroponic vases that showed the white of their roots and the green of their fronds were placed exactly where they would photograph best. The windows looking out over the common space three levels below as if it were a city apartment on Earth, except cleaner, had the intended effect. In a generation or four, it would develop its own style and character, but it hadn’t yet.

Or maybe Naomi just needed to get some coffee and work out. That was possible too.

“Did you sleep well?” Chava asked over the sizzle and pop of eggs on their hot pan. “I don’t usually have visitors. You’re the first one to be in the guest room for more than a night.”

“It’s lovely,” Naomi said. “Is there any news?”

Chava put a white ceramic coffee cup on the bar next to Naomi’s elbow and then a small glass French press already filled with black coffee beside it. “The political officer at the transfer station is saying all traffic out of the gate is prohibited until we’ve had instructions from Laconia. Which is tricky because the repeaters are still down. There’s a freighter that was on its way out when the shit hit the fan, and the Transport Union is saying that if it doesn’t get its cargo to Farhome system, there’ll be a lot of starving people a year from now.”

Naomi poured the coffee into the cup. Black welled up in the overwhelming white, steam rising up from it. The smell was lighter than she was used to. She wondered if Jim would have liked it.

“Any word from the governor?”

“Radio silence,” Chava said. “There are stories that the governor’s been taking payoffs for a long time. His loyalties aren’t perfectly clear.”

“That’s weirdly refreshing,” Naomi said. The coffee tasted better than it smelled. Another layer of sleep that she hadn’t recognized slipped away. The smell of the eggs started to seem very interesting.

Chava saw it and smiled. “Hungry?

“I think I am,” Naomi said. “The local underground. How does it look? What kind of resources does it have?”

Chava shrugged. “I don’t entirely know. Saba keeps us com-partmentalized. I’m not even sure how much he knows, except that he knows who to ask if something’s possible.” She realized the error in what she’d said, and her lips pressed thin. “Knew, I mean. I can’t quite believe he’s …”

“I know,” Naomi said. “Without coordination, we’re not really an underground anymore. We’re thirteen hundred different undergrounds that can’t talk to each other.” Communication, she thought as she sipped her coffee, was always a problem.

Chava swirled the pan of eggs and decanted the fluffy yellow clouds onto a white plate. “On the upside, there are thirteen hundred different Laconias now. Less than that, really. A lot of the smaller colonies don’t have governors on-site yet. They’re essentially free.”

“And in danger of collapsing without support. I’m not sure dying free is as attractive when it stops being rhetorical.”

“Truth,” Chava said.

The eggs tasted strange. Thicker and more substantial than the approximation that the Roci had put out, and with a different aftertaste that Naomi couldn’t decide at first whether she liked or not. Having food in her stomach felt wonderful, though. And it went well with the coffee.

Chava hadn’t brought up the subject of Naomi’s future. They both knew that there were too many unknowns now for any plan to mean much. Even if there was a ship that could take in the shell game, there was no Saba to send her information to analyze or consider her recommendations. Naomi’s role in the underground, the underground’s ability to survive, everything was radically uncertain. They papered over the gaps with hospitality and kindness. Naomi was Chava’s guest. Slept in her spare room. Ate her food and drank her coffee as if they were sisters.

It was strange to think that people lived like this. Not just citizens either. People in the underground had nice apartments and windows with carefully sculpted views, fresh fruit, and coffee. It was so exaggeratedly normal that it felt like the bait in a trap. Would Chava be able to walk away from it all the way Naomi had left the Roci and Alex and Bobbie? Or would the comfort keep her here too long if something went wrong? If something had already gone wrong?

“Problem?” Chava asked, and Naomi realized she’d been scowling.

“I was thinking about …”—she reached for something less rude than my instinctive disapproval of your lifestyle—“traffic control in the ring space. If that freighter does make the transit, it’ll be going through blind. They all will be.” Now that she was saying it out loud, it actually did worry her. “And there’s going to be pressure. All of those colonies that aren’t quite self-sustaining yet? They may wait for a while. Hold back, but sooner or later, the risk of making the transit is going to be better than the certainty of having their colony fail.”

“That’s true,” Chava said as she cracked another egg into the pan. “But I can’t see rebuilding in the ring space either. Not before we know what happened and whether there’s a way to keep it from happening again. Can you? I mean, maybe Laconia will send another one of its system-killer ships through and park it there again, but only if they’re up for the risk of losing it.”

“It does start looking like hazard pay,” Naomi said, trying levity. It didn’t feel right, though. Not yet.

“Once could mean anything,” Chava said as the new egg started to bubble and pulse from the heat. “Maybe it was just the one time. Or maybe it’s every thousand years. Or every third Thursday from now on. We don’t even know what triggered it this time.”

“By the time we have enough points to make a good scatter plot, it’s a lot of dead ships.”

“If there’s even a way to know when a ship went dutchman. There’s no one watching, so who’d be keeping track? The whole communications grid is down at this point. If someone did know, they’d have to build some way to tell us. No one’s in charge. Do you want some more coffee?”

“No, thank you,” Naomi said, her mind already racing along somewhere new.

She and Chava weren’t the only ones having this conversation. Thousands of other people in Auberon were thinking about these same things in restaurants and bars and on ships traveling though the vast emptiness between this sun and gate. It was how the shock started to wear off. How the moment after the moment created itself.

And it wasn’t only Auberon either. Every system with a ring gate was looking at the same questions, fearing the same possible futures. Every system including Laconia.

The thought landed with a weight. Her grief at the loss of Saba and Medina and her unexpected hope in seeing the Typhoon destroyed. The dread of the mysterious enemy and its escalating body count. They all led to the same conclusion.

It was like a nightmare where you spent the whole night running from something and ended up in its lap all the same. No one’s in charge.

“Sorry?” Chava said as she slid her own egg with its golden yolk onto a plate. “Did you say something?”

“We’re going to need to break some protocols,” Naomi said. “And I’ll need access to a machine shop. You wouldn’t know how I could get my hands on some torpedoes, do you? I don’t need warheads. Just the drives and the frames. Long-range designs, if we can find them.”

“I can look,” Chava said. “How many do you need?”

“Ideally about thirteen or fourteen hundred.”

Chava laughed, saw Naomi’s expression, and sobered.

“And,” Naomi said, “if the offer’s still open, I might take the coffee after all.”

The yard that Chava found would have been small back in Sol system. There were thousands like it scattered through the Belt. Improvised shipyards that catered to rock hoppers and independents who couldn’t afford docking fees at Callisto or Ceres or any of the other centers. Apart from the fact that this one didn’t have anything manufactured over fifteen years ago, it could have been anywhere.

The man who ran it was called Zep, and he had a faded split-circle tattoo on his neck. He spoke English, Mandarin, Portuguese, and a dialect of Belter creole that put his background in the Martian trojans. He gave her the tour of the yard. It was a high, pale bubble of ceramic and steel with harsh white work lights overhead and a misting of oil every morning to trap the lunar fines. Everything there was a little sticky to the touch and stank of gunpowder. It was the first place in Auberon system she felt even slightly at home.

Even with the oil, the fines—tiny bits of stone smaller than dust that erosion had never smoothed—were dangerous enough that she wore a mask and eye protection. She went through the rows of decommissioned ships that had been repossessed or damaged by misadventure or malice to the point that it made more sense to sell them as scrap. They were mostly orbital shuttles and semiautomated prospectors. The shuttles were no use to her, but some of the prospectors had probes. They didn’t have the range or speed of real torpedoes, but she could start with them. Over the course of a long, sweat-soaked morning, she’d assembled half a dozen that seemed worth closer examination.

The idea wasn’t that different from the bottles she’d used before. It was only the scale that was different. And the stakes. She could load transmitters and explosives into the probes and then send them out through the different gates. No one would be exposed to danger by coming through the newly haunted slow zone, and the messages would be untraceable. Anyone listening as she had been would hear them just like the ones she’d dropped off before. She needed to work on the exact wording. It would be the first voice from the underground since Medina. Getting it right mattered. Getting it done quickly mattered more.

There had been a moment in the neo-noir films that Alex always watched that happened so often it became a cliché. She had to have seen it a dozen times over the years, and she hadn’t been paying much attention. A firefight would start with operatic choreography and impossibly high-capacity magazines. The hero and the villain would play through the scenario with whatever peculiar flourishes the director had invented to make this one different from all the ones before. Then, at the climactic ending, the two enemies faced each other, and both would run out of ammunition. The resolution of all the heroic violence came down to which of them could reload faster.

That was where the underground and the empire stood. They were both disrupted. Whichever of them was able to organize again first would survive. Laconia still had the firepower. It still had the technological edge. But if the underground could rebuild a communication grid faster, she could change the story of their inevitability. Laconia’s advantages wouldn’t be enough.

Speed mattered. If Saba were still alive, if Medina had survived, it would have been time for him to stand up, announce himself, and become the public face of the opposition. To forge the thirteen hundred different undergrounds that were out there now in the cut off systems back into one thing, and exploit the confusion of the enemy before Duarte could find his feet. Take the crisis and make it a turning point, even if it meant more pressure on Drummer and the Union. Naomi would have told him it had to be done. She’d have been right.

Her hand terminal chimed. She pulled off her goggles and air filter and accepted the connection. There was only one person it could be. Chava was in her office, her hair perfectly in place, her blouse unsmeared and her demeanor as polite and professional as if she did work like this every day.

“I have the secure connection you asked for,” she said. “The light delay won’t make it a conversation.”

“How far?” Naomi asked.

“About fifty minutes, one way.”

Naomi pictured the Auberon system. Its three gas giants the greater and lesser belts. The Bhikaji Cama was still a fair distance from the ring. She had time.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Not a problem,” Chava said. “I’m sending you the route and encryption. I’ll see you for dinner tonight?”

“I don’t want to impose.”

“It isn’t an imposition,” Chava said. “And it’s safer than anyplace else.”

“Then yes, thank you,” Naomi said. Chava smiled and killed the connection. Naomi thumbed up the data packet configuration and slotted in the information she’d been given. If it worked, it would slide unnoticed through the Transport Union’s system and appear to Emma Zomorodi in particular.

Naomi considered herself in the preview display. Dust and sweat-smeared skin. Hair more pale than black. Wrinkles at her eyes and mouth. This was the woman who turned down High Consul Winston Duarte’s invitation to live the rest of her life in a palace with the man she loved in order to take on the one job she never wanted. She smiled, and the woman on the screen looked happy. Exhausted, yes. Well bruised by life, yes. But happy. She started the recording.

“Emma, I need to ask you to break protocol for me. I want you to send me everything you know about the status and function of the underground. Contacts. Ship names. Procedures. Anything you have, tell me. And if you can get messages to your operatives, tell them to expect a message like this from me in the near future.

“I know it’s exactly what I told you never to do before, but the situation has changed. Medina is off the board, and we’ve lost Saba. We have to regroup, reorganize. And someone has to take initiative.”

A thick trickle of sweat broke free from her temple and began its slow fall down toward her eyebrow. She wiped it away, pulling her hair back from her eyes.

“Until you hear otherwise from me, I will be running the underground.”