Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Two: Naomi

Naomi missed the Rocinante, but then she missed a lot of things these days.

Her old ship and home was still parked on Freehold. Before they’d left, she and Alex had found a cavern system on the edge of Freehold’s southernmost continent with a mouth big enough to edge the ship into. They’d put it down in a dry tunnel and spent a week running seals and storage tarps that would keep the local flora and fauna out. Whenever they got back to the Roci, it would be there, ready and waiting. If they never did, it would be there for centuries. Still waiting.

Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, she’d take herself through it. She still knew every centimeter from the top of the cockpit to the curve of the drive cone. She could think her way through it on the float or under thrust. She’d heard about ancient scholars back on Earth making palaces of memory that way. Imagine Alex in the cockpit, holding an hourglass for time. Then down to the flight deck, where Amos and Clarissa were tossing a golgo ball with the numeral 2 painted on it back and forth for initial and final velocities divided by two. Then down to her cabin, and Jim. Jim by himself. Jim who meant displacement. A simple kinematic equation, three things that were all the same, easy to remember because they all stung her heart.

That was one reason she’d agreed to the shell-game plan when Saba and the underground had reached out to her. Memories were like ghosts, and as long as Jim and Amos were gone, the Roci would always be a little bit haunted.

And it wasn’t only Jim, though he had been the first. Naomi had also lost Clarissa, who would have died from the slow poisons in her implants if she hadn’t chosen to die by violence. Amos had taken a high-risk mission from the underground, deep in enemy territory, and then gone silent, missing pickup window after pickup window until they all stopped expecting to hear from him again. Even Bobbie, healthy and well, but in the captain’s seat of her own ship now. They were all lost to her, but Jim was the worst.

Freehold, on the other hand, she didn’t miss at all. The experience of being under a vast and empty sky had its charm for a while, but the unease lasted longer than the novelty. If she was going to live as a fugitive and outlaw, she could at least do it in something where the air was held in by something visible. Her new quarters—spare and terrible as they were—at least had that going for them.

From the outside, her bunk looked like a standard cargo container made to transport a low-yield planetary fusion reactor. It was the kind colonists in the thirteen hundred new systems would use to power a small city or a medium-sized mining station. With its actual cargo gone, there was enough room for a gimbaled crash couch, an emergency support recycler, a water supply, and half a dozen modified short-burn torpedoes. The crash couch was her bed and her workbench. The support recycler was her power and food and her waste disposal. The kind of thing that would keep the crew of a stranded ship alive for weeks, but not in anything like comfort. The water supply was for drinking, but also part of the stealth, connected to small evaporation panels on the exterior of the container to bleed off her waste heat.

And the torpedoes were how she spoke to the larger world.

Except not today. Today she was going to see actual people. Breathe their air, touch their skin. Hear their living voices. She wasn’t sure if she was excited about that, or if the energy stirring in her belly was foreboding. The one could seem so much like the other.

“Permission to open?” she said, and the crash couch’s monitor hesitated, sent the message, and then a few breaths later came back with

CONFIRMED. DEPARTURE AT 18:45 STANDARD. DON’T BE LATE

Naomi unstrapped herself from the couch and pushed to the inner door of the container, securing the helmet on her suit as she went. When the suit showed solid seals, she double-checked them anyway, then cycled the air in the container into her emergency recycler, bringing the interior down to near vacuum. When the pressure reached the efficiency limit of the unit and stopped dropping, she popped the container doors and pulled herself out into the vastness of the cargo hold.

The Verity Close was a converted ice hauler acting as a long-haul shipping vessel for the colonies. The hold around her was as wide as the Freehold sky, or it felt that way. The Rocinante and eleven more like her could have fit in it and not touched the sides. Instead, thousands of containers like Naomi’s were locked into place and ready to be hauled out from Sol to any of the new cities and stations that humanity was building. Taming the new wilderness of planets that didn’t know humanity’s genetic codes or tree of life. And most of the containers were what they claimed—soil, industrial yeast incubators, bacterial libraries.

And then, like hers, a few were something else.

This was the shell game.

She didn’t know if Saba had come up with the idea, or if his wife, the figurehead president of the Transport Union, had found some covert way to tell him. With Medina Station and the slow zone firmly under Laconian control, the greatest obstacle the underground faced was moving ships and personnel from one system to another. Even something as small as the Roci couldn’t hope to pass by Medina’s sensor arrays unnoticed. Traffic control through the gate network was too important to ever let that happen.

But as long as the Transport Union was still in charge of its own ships, the records could be forged. Cargo containers like hers could be moved from ship to ship, making it difficult if not impossible to track her communications—or Saba’s or Wilhelm Walker’s or any of the other organizing heads of the underground—to any one vessel.

Or, if the reward seemed to justify the terrible risk, something larger could be smuggled. Something dangerous. Something like the captured warship Gathering Storm could be snuck into Sol system. And with it, Bobbie Draper and Alex Kamal, who she hadn’t seen in over a year. And who, right now, were waiting for her at a private rendezvous.

She launched herself along the row of containers, skimming past them with accuracy born of a lifetime’s practice. The guide lights blinked at the containers’ edges, marking the ever-changing maze of access and control and leading her toward the crew hatch. The actual crew space was probably smaller than the Rocinante’s. Her secret cargo container, as spacious as the crew cabins.

She didn’t know the crew of the ship that had carried her for the last months. Most of them weren’t aware she was there. Saba arranged things that way. The fewer people knew, the less they could say. The old Belter term for it was guerraregle. War rules. It was how she’d lived as a girl, back in the bad old days. It was how she lived now.

She found the airlock into the ship and cycled through. Her contact was waiting for her. She was a young woman, not more than twenty years old, with pale skin and wide-set dark eyes. Her shaved head was probably meant to make her look tough, but it just reminded Naomi of baby fuzz. Her name might not have been Blanca, but that was how Naomi knew her.

“You’re clear for twenty minutes, ma’am,” Blanca said. She had a good voice. Musical and clean. A Martian accent that reminded Naomi of Alex. “After that, I’m off shift. I can stay around, but I can’t keep the next guy from coming on.”

“More than enough,” Naomi said. “I just need to get to the habitation ring.”

“Not a problem. We’re going to be transferring your container to the Mosley in berth sixteen-ten. It’s going to take a few hours, but the work order’s already been approved.”

The pea slipping into a different shell. By the time Naomi was ready to send out her next set of orders and analysis, the Verity Close would be past the Sol gate and off toward some other system. And Naomi would be in her same little hole, sleeping on her same little couch, but traveling with a different ship. Blanca would be replaced by her new contact waiting for her at the docks. Naomi had lost track of how many times she’d done this. It was almost routine.

“Thank you,” she said, and started to pull herself through toward the dockside airlock.

“It’s been an honor, ma’am,” Blanca said, spitting the words out quickly. “Meeting you, I mean. Meeting Naomi Nagata.”

“Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I appreciate it more than I can say.”

Blanca braced. It felt like theater, but Naomi saluted the girl all the same. It meant something to the girl, and for Naomi to treat it with anything less than equal seriousness would have been rude. Worse, it would have been cruel.

Then she pulled herself into the cramped green corridor of the Verity Close and left Blanca behind. She didn’t expect ever to see her again.

Deep Transfer Station Three lived between the orbit of Saturn and Uranus, locked in position with the Sol gate. Its architecture was familiar: a large spherical dock capable of accepting several dozen ships at maximum capacity and a habitation ring spinning at one-third g. It was both a critical central hub for traffic in and out of Sol system and a glorified warehouse complex. Ships from across the system brought cargo here ready to send out to the colony worlds or came to pick up incoming packages. At any given time, there were probably more alien artifacts on the transfer station than anyplace else in the system.

All told, the station could hold twenty thousand people, though the traffic rarely if ever demanded full capacity. A permanent staff and the crews of whatever ships came and went, along with contractors to run the hospitals, bars, brothels, churches, stores, and restaurants that seemed to follow humanity everywhere it went. It was a base where crews from across the system and from the other systems on the far sides of the rings could get away from each other for a few days, see unfamiliar faces, hear voices they hadn’t lived with for months, climb into bed with someone who didn’t feel like family. It created a constant fraternization that had led to the station’s ring getting the unofficial name “Paternity Row.”

Naomi liked the place. There was something reassuring in the stability of human behavior. Alien civilizations and galactic empire, war and resistance: They were there. But also drinking and karaoke. Sex and babies.

She walked through the public corridor of the habitation ring with her head bowed. The underground had a false identification for her in the station system so that her biometrics wouldn’t raise an alarm, but she kept from making herself too obvious all the same in case a human might recognize her.

The rendezvous was a restaurant in the lowest and outermost level of the ring. She’d expected to be ushered into a storeroom or freezer, but the man at the door led her back to a private dining room. Even before she stepped though the doorway, she knew they were there.

Bobbie saw her first and stood up, grinning. She wore a nondescript flight suit without identifying tags or patches, but she wore it like a uniform. Alex, rising with her, had an older cut. He’d lost weight, and his remaining hair was trimmed close. He could have been an accountant or a general. Without words, they stepped into each other, arms raised. A three-way embrace with Naomi’s head on Alex’s shoulder, Bobbie’s cheek against hers. The warmth of their bodies was more comforting than she wanted it to be.

“Oh, God dammit,” Bobbie said, “but it is good to see you again.”

The embrace broke, and they moved to the table. A bottle of whiskey and three glasses waited, a clear and unmistakable sign of bad news to come. A toast to be made, a memory to be honored, another loss to carry. Naomi asked her question with a glance.

“You heard about Avasarala,” Alex said.

The relief came in a little rush followed by chagrin at feeling relief. It was only that Avasarala had died. “I did.”

Bobbie poured out shots for each of them, then raised one. “She was a hell of woman. We won’t see her like again.”

They touched glasses, and Naomi drank. Losing the old woman was hard—harder for Bobbie, probably, than any of the rest of them. But they weren’t mourning Amos yet. Or Jim.

“So,” Bobbie said, putting down her glass, “how’s life as the secret general of the resistance?”

“I prefer ‘secret diplomat,’ ” Naomi said. “And it’s underwhelming.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Alex said. “Can’t talk without food. It’s not family unless there’s a meal.”

The restaurant did a good Belt/Mars fusion menu. Something called white kibble that was related to the real thing, but with fresh vegetables and bean sprouts. Rounds of vat-grown beef-pork hybrid cooked in the shape of a Petri dish and touched with a sweet hot sauce. They leaned on the table here the way they had on the Rocinante in their previous incarnations.

Naomi hadn’t realized how much she missed Bobbie’s laugh or Alex’s way of sneaking another small helping onto her plate when she was almost finished eating. The little intimacies of living in close quarters with someone for decades. And then not living there anymore. It might have made her sad if it weren’t for the pleasure of being there in the moment with the two of them.

“The Storm’s crewed up pretty well,” Bobbie was saying. “I was worried for a while that it would be straight Belters. I mean, that’s where Saba’s bench is the deepest. Two Martian vets running a crew full of folks who still call us inners?”

“Could have been a problem,” Naomi agreed.

“Saba pulled a whole sheet of UNN and MCRN vets,” Alex said. “Young ones too. Weird being around people who were the age I was when I mustered out. They look like babies, you know? All fresh-faced and serious.”

Naomi laughed. “I know. Anyone under forty looks like a child to me now.”

“They’re good,” Bobbie said. “I’ve been running drills and simulations the whole time we’ve been parked.”

“There’ve been a couple fights,” Alex said.

“It’s just nerves,” Bobbie said. “When this mission’s done, that shit will evaporate.”

Naomi took another bite of white kibble so that she wouldn’t frown. It didn’t work, though. Alex cleared his throat and spoke in his changing-the-subject voice. “I’m guessing there’s still no word from the big guy?”

Two years before, Saba had found a chance to slip an operative onto Laconia itself with a pocket nuke and an encrypted recall-and-retrieve transmitter. A long-odds mission to get Jim back, or destroy Laconia’s rule by cutting off its head. Saba had asked Naomi who she would trust with something that important. That dangerous. When Amos heard about it, he’d packed his bags in the same hour. Since then, Laconia had built new defenses. The underground had lost most of its presence in Laconia system, and Amos had gone silent.

Naomi shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Yeah, well,” Alex said. “Soon, probably.”

“Probably,” Naomi agreed, the same way she did every time they had this conversation.

“You two want any coffee?” Alex asked. Bobbie shook her head at the same time Naomi said Not for me, and Alex popped up. “I’ll go settle up, then.”

When the door closed behind him, Naomi leaned forward. She wanted to leave the moment where it was—a reunion with family. A bright spot in the darkness. She wanted to, and she couldn’t.

“A mission with the Storm in Sol system is a hell of a risk,” she said.

“It stands a real chance of getting some attention,” Bobbie agreed, not making eye contact. Her tone was light, but there was a warning in it. “It’s not just me, you know.”

“Saba.”

“And others.”

“I keep thinking about Avasarala,” Naomi said. There was still some whiskey in the bottle, and she poured herself a finger. “She was a hell of a fighter. Never backed down from anything, even when she lost.”

“She was one of a kind,” Bobbie agreed.

“She was a fighter, but she wasn’t a warrior. She was always leading the struggle, but she did it by finding other ways to get the work done. Alliances, political pressure, trade, logistics. Her strategy was always that violence came last.”

“She had leverage,” Bobbie said. “She ran a planet. We’re a bunch of rats looking for cracks in the concrete. We’re going to do things differently.”

“We have leverage,” Naomi said. “And more than that, we can cultivate leverage.”

Bobbie put down her fork very carefully. The darkness in her eyes wasn’t anger. Or it wasn’t just anger, anyway. “Laconia is a military dictatorship. If you want anyone to stand against Duarte, we have to show people that he can be stood against. Military action is what shows people that there’s hope. You’re a Belter, Naomi. You know this.”

“I know that it doesn’t work,” Naomi said. “The Belt fought for generations against the inner planets—”

“And won,” Bobbie said.

“We didn’t, though. We didn’t win. We held on until something came in and knocked over the playing board. Do you really think we’d have gotten something like the Transport Union if the gates hadn’t appeared? The only way we succeeded was by something totally unexpected changing the rules. Only now we’re acting like it’ll work twice.”

“We’re acting?”

“Saba’s acting,” Naomi said. “And you’re backing him.”

Bobbie leaned back, stretching the way she did when she was annoyed. It made her seem even bigger than she was, but Naomi was a hard woman to intimidate. “I know you disagree with the approach, and I know you’re not happy that Saba didn’t put you in on the details, but—”

“That’s not the issue,” Naomi said.

“No one’s arguing against leverage. No one’s saying that we shouldn’t be looking for political angles too. But pacifism only works when your enemy has a conscience. Laconia has a deep tradition of discipline through punishment and I know—No, hear me out. I know that because it’s a Martian tradition too. You grew up with the Belt, but I grew up with Mars. You tell me that my way doesn’t lead to victory? Okay. I believe you. But I’m telling you that your soft approach doesn’t work on these people.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“Same place as always,” Bobbie said. “Doing the best we can for as long as we can and hoping something unexpected happens. On the upside, something unexpected almost always does.”

“That’s not as comforting as you think,” Naomi said with a chuckle, trying to lighten the mood.

Bobbie wasn’t having it. “Because sometimes the thing we don’t expect is that we lost Clarissa and Holden. Or that we lost Amos. Or that we lose me. Or Alex. Or you. But that’s going to happen. We’re all going to lose each other eventually, and that’s been true since before we were a crew. That’s what being born means. Everything else is just specifics. And my specifics are that I’m leading a top-secret military mission in Sol system using the enemy’s captured ship against them, because even if it’s a bad plan, it’s the only plan I have. And maybe my risk will get you your leverage.”

But I don’t want you to risk anything, Naomi thought. I’ve lost too much. I can’t stand to lose anything more. Bobbie’s features softened, just a little. So maybe she understood.

The familiar tap of a footstep outside the door was Alex as clearly as if he’d said his name. Naomi took a deep breath and forced herself to relax.

She didn’t want to spoil the reunion for him too.