Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Naomi

The thing that surprised Naomi most was how quickly it happened. How little convincing people needed. She had assumed that Emma and Chava would agree because they knew her personally. They had a history together. And maybe their contacts would be amenable to connecting with her, since known-safe members of the underground were vouching. After that, she had expected it to be difficult—sometimes impossible—to convince Saba’s network to reveal itself to her. Everyone in the underground was in danger of death. Maybe worse. They would all be as wary as she would have been in their place.

She’d overlooked the fact that she was Naomi Nagata, and that fear drove people to look for leaders. Emma had five contacts in the underground. Three of them were on ships in other systems, but one was a technician in Auberon’s planetary transfer station, and the other was an engineer on a Transport Union ship that was presently in-system. Chava’s connections were more local. A doctor at one of the major hospitals down the well. A taxation agent and forensic accountant on contract to Laconia. A manager of a fashionable brothel at the governmental center. The husband of a security specialist contracted with Laconia to maintain and protect the biometric identification systems. Some of those were single nodes in the network, but some were cell leaders with four or five other connections, some of whom knew a couple other people and so on until it felt like the underground had as many loyalists as the governor.

It was an illusion, but it was a powerful one.

“The thing is the fuckers came in like the flood, yeah?” the man across the table from her said. He was a communications engineer for an independent design collective tasked with building a tight-beam network—repeaters and relays—in the still-unexplored vastness of Auberon system. He called himself Bone, but Naomi was fairly certain it was a nickname he’d given himself. “Overwhelming force, Laconia. Unstoppable. Which, yeah, they are. But you can beat the shit out of a river and not change how it flows.”

“Wouldn’t know,” Naomi said. If he heard her, it didn’t slow him down. Some men got loquacious when they were nervous.

“They’re one system, and not that populous. They’ve got no choice but to rely on us poor local bastards for help. And Laconia …” He chuckled. “Laconia has no local tradition of cheerful corruption. They don’t expect it, and they don’t know what to do about it when they find it. Besides make the kind of examples of people that piss off all their families.”

“Give them time,” Naomi said. “They’ll catch up. If we let them.”

Bone grinned. His left upper canine had been decorated to look like it was made from stone. Fashion never stopped. It was one of many things Naomi was pleased that age allowed her not to care about anymore. She smiled back.

The public park was another sign of Auberon’s wealth and success. The designers of the lunar base had built in common areas and open space. The dome above them was still under the lunar surface, but light panels made it seem as open and airy as a resort on Titan. Children skipped in the thin gravity, hopping from bar to bar of a climbing structure that rose almost half the height of the Roci. At a full g, a slip and fall would be fatal. Here, they might get bruised.

A drip fountain beside them filled the air with white noise as the tiny drops drifted down from the ceiling and tapped an inclined slate, flowing slowly down to a fish-filled reservoir. It was beautiful. She didn’t feel like she belonged there.

“The repeaters,” she said, bringing them back to the issue at hand.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bone said. “We got your design out. Bottle network is on its way. Nice thing about it? Cheap. Any union ship close to a ring gate can slip something out the lock.” Bone made a pushing gesture so graceful it was almost dance and then snapped his fingers. “We’ll be trading fresh gossip before you know.”

“Sol and Bara Gaon are the priorities.”

“Already got bottles through to them. They know we’re here and what we’re doing. This can only spread.”

“And Laconia?”

Bone shrugged. “Got to figure they’re putting up new repeaters, but we don’t got one yet, and Auberon has money. So …”

So they should have been a priority. Maybe they were, and other cells in the underground were breaking them. The bottle network was slow compared to the light-speed transmission they had all become accustomed to, but it was also hard to stop. Repeaters at the gates were static or nearly static targets. Easy to identify and easy to destroy. The thing that had made them safe and stable all these years had been the eyes of Medina in the slow zone, the certainty that any action against them would be identified and traced back. With no eyes left in the slow zone, impossible things were suddenly practical.

“Our local network?” Naomi said. “It’s unbreakable?”

“Everything’s breakable,” Bone said. “But we’ll make them work for it, and it fails in sections, so we can shut it down before everyone’s compromised.”

It was the right answer. If he’d said they were safe, she’d have trusted him less. “Bien alles,” she said, and rose. Bone followed her lead, holding his hand out to shake hers with a nervousness that looked like hero worship. She took his hand. Whatever the future brought, Bone could go through it remembering that he’d shaken hands with Naomi Nagata. She didn’t like this sense of wearing a mask that everyone else had put on her, but it was the price she paid to do what needed doing.

“I’ll be in touch,” she said, and they walked away, taking different paths out of the common space.

The corridors and passages of the base were wide and had low ceilings for someone her height. White tile glittered the same on the walls as the floor. Thirty people could have walked abreast. She put her hands in her pockets, kept her eyes down, inviting everyone she passed to overlook her. Walking helped her think.

Her problem—and her enemy’s—was the scale of it all. Millennia of human history had played out on the surface of a single planet. Mere centuries in the wide void between worlds. And all of that had happened before her own birth. The universe she’d known had always had stations around Saturn and Jupiter, rock hoppers eking out livelihoods in the Belt. Almost every gate led to another system that wide and complex, but without humanity. Without history. Without the infrastructure of everything humans took for granted and relied on.

It had seemed smaller when there was a hub to the wheel. Now, anyone could transit anywhere, and there was no one to coordinate or record it. The more she thought about it, the more untenable the idea of rebuilding inside the slow zone seemed. Medina and the Typhoon and the fleet of Transport Union ships that had been caught there were proof that the nature of the space itself there wasn’t benign. Putting a crewed base there was risking the death of everyone involved. An automated one was a statement of faith in their computer security that history didn’t justify. Holding and protecting over thirteen hundred gates from their starward faces was an entirely different prospect from holding one strong position in the center. It would take the largest fleet humanity had ever built just to watch the gates, and that didn’t take policing the vastness of their solar systems into account.

Duarte had come in with the strategy of permitting local governments autonomy so long as they followed his rules. It had seemed like a kind of magnanimity at the time. It looked more like necessity now.

And deeper even than that, the eerie words two gates lost.

There had to have been a moment when they could have refused. When she and Jim and maybe a handful of other people could have looked at the ring gates and the vastness beyond them, seen the danger, and tiptoed away. All the signs had been there. A civilization had built all this vast and unimaginable power and still been scattered like knucklebones. What had made them think it was safe for them? That it was worth the risk?

She took the tube to Chava’s block as if she belonged there. The crowd on the platform was a mix. Bright-eyed, tea-drinking third-shifters on their way to work. Weary second shift just coming home or heading out to dinner. A handful of youths in outlandish fashion burning the first-shift midnight oil. Naomi stayed quiet and apart, and she appreciated the beauty of it all. And the innocence. A hundred people, more or less, waiting for a tube car on a moon above a planet that circled a sun that hadn’t born them, and jockeying to be the first ones through the door so that they could get a good seat. Maybe the most human thing possible.

A young man in a brown collarless shirt scowled at her for staring, as if maybe she was mocking him. She nodded her apology and looked away.

Her life as Chava’s guest was pleasant. Waking in a real bed, showering with water that didn’t recycle twice while she was under it, eating food that had more than one taste. The long months Naomi had spent in her container felt more and more like a spiritual pilgrimage, a journey she had gone through and emerged from changed. It hadn’t seemed like that at the time.

Their schedules had drifted, and she was awake long after Chava had gone to bed. Naomi stayed quiet while she worked, but she worked. The underground in Auberon was well developed, but until she decided it was time to throw the governor and his political officers into a hole, her options were limited. Entrench. Develop more holes in their security. Compromise the enemy further. But there was nothing of Laconia’s grand strategy to be learned. They were as cut off as she was.

And then, only days after her own messages had slipped out through the rings, the bottles began to return. They came in one at a time, a trickle of data that snuck into the system. Reports, requests, and messages encrypted with the most recent ciphers. Bara Gaon was on lockdown, but the exploration sites were still autonomous. New Albion had taken the opportunity to sabotage the Laconian transfer station and were now being hunted by the local security forces. Transport Union ships had started making emergency transits to systems like Tabalta and Hope where local populations were in danger of collapse. It was like slowly beginning to recover her eyesight after being nearly blind.

The message from Sol system originated on Callisto, the data passed covertly to a datafarm on Ceres and repackaged into a bottle on a Transport Union ship near the Sol gate. It was routed to her.

On the screen, Bobbie looked tired and grim. A grayness had come into her features, and the thick muscles of her neck had begun to look wiry. A decryption artifact locked a corner of the image like part of her shoulder was frozen in time while the rest of her was free to move.

“Hey there,” Bobbie said into the camera, and a loneliness Naomi hadn’t known she felt swamped her for a moment. She felt the memory of that last hug before she’d left Sol, and it was more alive and real to her than the last time she’d seen Jim. “I have something. An opportunity, I think. Alex wants me to run it past you.”

Naomi listened as Bobbie laid out the situation. The Storm trapped in Sol, first by the catastrophe in the slow zone, and now by the Tempest’s presence. The antimatter.

She felt herself sliding into the same analytic mind-set that had been her whole life in the container. She’d hardly been out—a few weeks on the Bhikaji Cama and now here with Chava—and slipping back already felt cold and constraining. Her mind ticked through the implications of Bobbie’s plan: the exposure of the Storm, the scrutiny that would fall on the Jovian moon bases, the symbolic and practical effects of Duarte’s losing a second Magnetar-class ship.

And as she did, a quiet part of her mourned.

The day she’d gone into the container and committed herself to living as a pea in a shell game had been the day she left the Rocinante behind. It felt like relief at the time. Like her soul had been rubbed raw, and the container was her bandage. Her whole life, she’d survived the unsurvivable by falling back and getting small. And every time, she had come back healed. Scarred, sometimes. But healed.

All it had taken was a handful of human interactions to show her that the Naomi who had fled into the container wasn’t the one who’d come out. Time had passed, and she had found what peace she was going to find.

When she’d taken up Saba’s role, it had been from necessity, but it had also been because she was ready to. It was only after the fact that she was starting to see what leaders were. The price the position required.

The water started hissing, and a door opened and closed from back in Chava’s bedroom. She was awake and taking a morning shower. It would be time for Naomi to go to bed soon. It was also safe to respond to Bobbie without being an impolite guest. Funny how that still seemed to matter.

She set her hand terminal up with the camera pointing to her, then used the security filter to strip out the background. If the signal was intercepted, there wouldn’t be artifacts leading back to Chava. It left Naomi looking like she was floating in a featureless void. She started the recording.

“Hey, Bobbie. Your plan … looks solid. I know that’s not the argument I was making the last time we spoke, but the situation’s changed. Several situations have. I still maintain that working through political means to a peaceful endgame is critical. But if there is a chance to do that without a Magnetar-class ship keeping its boot on Sol system’s throat, it’ll be easier. If it was just a ship, I think I might still have some reservations, but you’re right. Duarte made the Tempest a symbol. We don’t often get the chance to kill the enemy’s story about itself.

“Good hunting. I love you.”

She closed the message, fed it into the local encryption, and queued it to be sent to Bone and his system network. It might take days for it to get onto a bottle and through the gates. She tapped the table with her fingertips, wanting to call it back. There was still time to stop it. Soon there wouldn’t be.

“Hey,” Chava said as she stepped in from her bedroom. She was already dressed for her shift. Sharp, professional clothing, hair neat. “What are you up to this fine morning?”

“Second-guessing myself,” Naomi said. “And I think it’s my evening. I did make you coffee, though.”

“You are a kind and thoughtful woman,” Chava said as she poured herself a cup. The drift of the coffee to the cup was like watching the slow fountain. “You’re going to have traffic analysis problems, though.”

“You mean the way that vastly more bottles come into and out of Auberon than any other system?” Naomi said. “Yes, that’s an issue. Is it a hint? I know you weren’t looking for a roommate.”

“You can stay as long as it’s the smart move. But maybe not after?” Chava’s smile faded. “What’s wrong?”

Naomi chuckled. “You mean apart from maybe having sent two of the people I care about most to their deaths?” She wiped her eyes. “Shit.”

Chava put down her cup. She took Naomi’s hand in hers. The feeling of fingers against her own was almost more than Naomi could stand, and she held on like Chava was a tether.

“I spent a lot of my life trying not to be a particular kind of person,” Naomi said. “Trying not to make certain kinds of decisions. But here I am all the same.”

They were silent together for a moment. When Chava spoke, her voice was light. Almost conversational. “When I was in my apprenticeship, back in the day? The hardest thing I had to do was manual docking. Every time the qualification run came, it didn’t matter how much I’d practiced. I’d take the controls, override the system so I had control. The only thing in my head was Don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up. And then I’d fuck up. I focused so hard on the thing I was afraid of, I ran straight into its arms every single time.”

“Are you trying to make me feel better?”

“No,” Chava said. “We’re too old for that. I’m trying to make you feel like you aren’t alone in it. That’s all I’ve got.”

Something in Naomi’s chest shifted. A titanic emotion breaking free. She braced herself for sobs, but all that came out was a profound sigh. The dream had been there all along, never quite given up. She would find a way to bring her family back together. They would all survive the meat grinder of history. Everything would somehow be well.

There had been a moment. It hadn’t been that long ago. All she’d had to do was announce herself, accept Duarte’s invitation, and leave all the struggle behind. She couldn’t remember quite how she’d decided on this path, but she saw that she had. There was no one to blame but herself. She conjured up the dream of waking up beside Jim. Drinking coffee with him. Hearing Alex and Amos joking with the subtle hum of the Rocinante behind them. She let it go.

She squeezed Chava’s hand and let that go too.