Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Eight: Naomi

Communication was a problem.

The ring gates created interference that made trading messages across them difficult and tightbeam between systems essentially impossible. Laconia controlled the repeaters on either side of the gates, and Medina Station in the center of everything, the guard at the great crossroads of the empire. They had eyes and ears in every system and pattern-matching algorithms combing through every frequency on the spectrum. Saba had been able to carve out a few holes here and there—tightbeam antennas with outdated or compromised security code that could drop incoming records out of the logs, newsfeeds that could be altered to carry messages hidden in the flux of the image signal. The same old tricks the OPA had been using since before either she or Saba had been born, but updated for the new circumstances. The danger was twofold: first that Laconian forces would intercept and understand their messages, and second that they’d track the signal back to its origin.

The first problem wasn’t trivial, but there were ways of making it difficult. Self-scrambling encryption, interference signatures, context-shifting linguistic encoding. Nothing was perfect, and even with the forensic work that Bobbie and her crew had done on the Gathering Storm, the full extent of Laconian military signal processing was three parts guesswork and one part hope for the underground. But Naomi was confident enough in it that she didn’t lose sleep.

The second problem—not having the signal traced back—was easier because of the bottles.

Naomi had never actually seen an ocean except through a camera, but language held on to things that were long gone. Tight-beams still had “lines” even though the physical wire that line referred to had been light for generations. Sol was still “the sun” even though there were thirteen hundred more like it, shining down on human heads. Message in a bottle held a whole host of nuances and expectations for Earthers that she could only inherit thirdhand—through jokes and cartoons and entertainment feeds. The actual bottles she used were the torpedoes that she kept in her container, each of them carrying a burst transmitter and an explosive payload large enough to turn the equipment into bright dust. She’d written the code herself, and she knew it was solid.

To get information in from Saba and the underground, all she had to do was listen. It was all there, screaming through the void and amplified on the networks, since she knew which feeds to look at. The gossip and the newsfeeds and the empty, fluting static where the notes had been tucked in. Even Laconian propaganda. Even, sometimes, the rebroadcast messages Duarte made Jim send out to her.

No matter what ship she was on, the information came in, passive and untraceable. She fed it into the local system in her couch and her hand terminal—more raw information than she could have read in a lifetime, and updating constantly. And the system filtered out the reports and information for her to work from.

She made her analysis, her recommendations, her arguments for what the forces opposing these new inners should do and how. And when she was ready—when time was short or she felt like she’d come to a natural break point—she would transfer the information into one of the missiles and signal her shipboard contact. Once the missile was dropped out an airlock, her code would kick in.

A randomized direction, a randomized number of turn-and-burns, a randomized length and power of thrust, and a randomized time before delivery. Sometimes she’d drop it off a day or two before she left the system, or after the shell-ship she’d come in on had moved on. Sometimes she wouldn’t. Patterns were the enemy, even patterns that were meant to cover her tracks.

When the time came, the bottle screamed out everything she’d told it in a single burst. Somewhere in the system, Saba would have an antenna listening just the way she did. Quietly, passively, undetectably. It was an act of cosmic ventriloquism, and it was how the underground passed information back and forth—slowly and imperfectly—while the enemy could send its own messages anywhere it chose to at the speed of light.

That was what being the underdog meant.

The hardest part was the time between sending the bottle out and when it detonated. Hours or days or, rarely, weeks of second-guessing herself. Poring over her own plans and suggestions, certain that she’d made a mistake she couldn’t stop before it rippled out through the systems. Listening to all the new information coming in that would have changed one aspect or another of what she’d already said and couldn’t take back.

It was what she was doing now.

Her box had left the Mosley for another ship, almost its twin, called the Bhikaji Cama. They were on a quarter-g burn for Auberon with mining equipment salvaged on the cheap from Mars. The hum of the drives was familiar enough by now that she didn’t hear it unless they were making some adjustment to speed or trajectory, and then it was only when the vibrations hit a harmonic and made something ring. The rations she’d gotten as a farewell gift from the Mosley were Earth-made. Rice and vegetable protein and curry sauce that might almost have been Belter food, except for the added raisins. She set her system to local, not tying into the Cama’s computers at all unless there was something she could only get there. She had music—soft mambo cereseano like she’d danced to when she was a girl—and as many newsfeeds as she could stand. She’d arranged her space so that there was room to stretch and exercise, and she made herself keep to a schedule religiously, pushing herself to a sweat twice a day. She slept to schedule too, dimming the lights for eight hours, no more and no less, never sleeping in. Never taking naps. Routine was what kept the darkness at bay, when anything did.

And in between, she studied her data again and waited for her most recent bottle to break.

The monitor showed a schematic of Bara Gaon Complex with both the existing settlement and the newly proposed expansion. Bara Gaon was one of the most successful of the new human systems, with three planets already boasting self-sustaining cities, an independent mining cooperative surveying a particularly rich asteroid belt, and bases on two moons of the system’s only gas giant. The map of humanity’s presence in the system looked like the first growth of a leaf: pale, elegant, thin, and promising a greater strength still to come. The initial waves had been led by an agricultural corporation based on Ganymede and a progressive Muslim community out of the Greater Terai Shared Interest Zone. The two had managed a functional partnership that drew five more waves of settlement in under two decades.

It was a fraction of Sol system, but it wouldn’t be for long. The expansion plan had been trapped in negotiations for years before Laconia had rolled through, and now Duarte’s will was kicking it forward.

Five new cities had been proposed, two each on the planets nearer to their sun, one on the cooler outlier. A high-end sensor network that would be able to map the system over the course of the next six years. Eighteen new exploratory missions. An increased civil infrastructure rolled out in two-year increments, with an emphasis on scientific and cultural support. If it worked, Bara Gaon would eclipse Sol system in under a century. It was as ambitious as any plan Naomi had ever seen, and it might even be possible.

That ambition was also the underground’s best hope. Her best hope.

She flicked through the lists of project proposals. She’d been over all of them a hundred times. Every phase had its own requirements. The sensor network alone was slated to hire a hundred and thirty engineers and subject specialists. And while the network’s primary function was mapping, it didn’t take a genius to see its potential as system surveillance. It would make the underground’s covert operations in Bara Gaon Complex easier if between 10 and 20 percent of those engineers and specialists also answered to Saba.

She’d put together her own map of the project. Not impeding the expansion, but taking control of it from within. The Personnel Directorate of Bara Gaon was her first target. They were already putting out requests for applications, beefing up the bureaucracy that would be evaluating new hires. Naomi had identified seven critical positions and built candidate profiles that Saba could use to flood the job openings with his allies. It was important that the people not be false identities, but actual people with real histories and qualifications. If they managed to get two of the seven positions now, it would be enough to give them an edge on later ones. Three, and they’d be able to cover their own tracks well enough that prying them out would be difficult even if Laconia became suspicious. Five, and Saba would effectively control the Bara Gaon Complex expansion.

She’d also identified problem issues. The chief administrator of Zehanat province on Bara Gaon-6—the planet they called Al-Halub—was a close friend of Carrie Fisk and openly supportive of Laconian rule. It was important that the projects based there be deprioritized and his personal influence undermined. Labor unions on the gas giant’s moons had ties to an old inner planets hate group and still fought against everything the Transport Union did with the zeal of the self-proclaimed oppressed. Saba would need to create other allies there. The local government had a communitarian faction that was growing more vocal about armed resistance against Laconia that would bring more scrutiny without gaining any useful ground if it wasn’t reined in.

You can’t fight a shooting war armed with paper clips, Bobbie said in Naomi’s imagination.

“Watch me,” Naomi answered. Her voice echoed with the music in the container. A pinch of annoyance bothered her. She closed down her files and pushed the monitor aside. In the time since she’d left Sol system, she’d hoped that their last conversation would have lost some of its power, but like a splinter under her skin, it bit a little every time she touched it.

When two people get in a fight, and only one has a gun and the will to use it? That’s a short damned fight.

Only it wasn’t Bobbie’s voice that said it this time. It was Amos’. A few decades flying the same ship together had built little versions of her family in her head. Made some part of them a part of her, even when she didn’t particularly want them to be. Even when the little mirrors of them only told her that their conversation wasn’t finished.

She hauled herself up out of the couch, the gimbals hissing as she shifted. She turned the music to a brighter selection with a clearer, faster beat. Something to push her. It was early in her day for a workout, but she needed to move. As if working the long muscles of her arms and legs and back could relieve a tension between her and people not present.

“It’s never a short fight,” she said as she hooked resistance bands to the top of her container. The fasteners had been painted gray when she’d first stepped into her little box. They were bright raw steel now. “Last time I fought it, it was generations old before I even stepped in the ring. We can’t shoot our way to peace.”

Peace isn’t the only good victory condition. How about just shooting our way to freedom or justice?

Naomi sank her feet into the floor loops, braced herself, locked the bands in place, and pulled. It was hard work. It hurt a little, but hurting a little was the point. The voice in her imagination wasn’t Amos’ now, but Jim’s.

That’s the thing about autocracy. It looks pretty decent while it still looks pretty decent. Survivable, anyway. And it keeps looking like that right up until it doesn’t. That’s how you find out it’s too late.

“I am fighting,” she said, then grunted and pulled down hard again. “The quiet work’s still a fight. It’s a better one. It’s one we can win.”

Not in our lifetimes, Bobbie said. And that was the point, really. That was the deep, true thought that Naomi was working her own way through with all the beloved voices in her head.

Sweat was pooling at her hairline, the quarter g not quite enough to pull it down her face. Her arms were trembling with every pull. She made herself go slowly, watching her form. It made the work harder, which she liked. And it made her less likely to injure herself, which was critical. Slow, careful, focused. Avoiding damage.

Feels like it ought to be a metaphor for something, Jim’s voice said, and she laughed at his joke.

Growing older was a falling away of everything that didn’t matter. And a deepening appreciation of all the parts that were important enough to stay.

She had unhooked the bands and started repositioning them to work her back when the alert came, chirping on her couch monitor and her hand terminal at the same moment. She wound the bands up and put them away. She’d finish later. The monitor had a single notification up. The Cama had picked up an encrypted message that matched her confirmation signature. Out in the depths below Auberon’s ecliptic, the bottle had broken and its data had all spilled out. She grabbed a copy out of the ship buffer and had her system run a comparison. There would be some degradation. There always was. But there was also repetition in the signal and checksums along the way. It would take terrible luck or a very high-radiation event to swamp her work past the point of recovery. She only made sure because it was the right thing.

All the files and reports opened from the copy as they had from the original files. The system’s final verdict popped up with a click like someone snapping their fingers.

NO UNRECOVERABLE LOSS

So that was done. Another round of analysis, a new set of orders and recommendations released to the wild. She had, of course, already started on the next one. She enjoyed the sense of accomplishment all the same.

She shifted to the newsfeeds, purging the unflagged copies local to her couch and replacing them again like dipping a cup into a fountain that never ran dry. Tapping her finger against the screen, she paged through the items the system thought most likely to pertain to her. A minor election on Sanaang had gone unexpectedly to the second-ranked candidate, a move she had recommended in her bottle before last. A code farm on Mars had partnered with Medina Station to build a new security infrastructure, which wasn’t what she’d wanted, but had been on her list of acceptable fallbacks. A security alert had gone out in Sol system. A red flag, but without the details to say what it was.

Except that whatever it turned out to be, she knew what it was. Bobbie’s war. The one with guns.

Somewhere out there, far enough away that even lightspeed meant hours, Bobbie and Alex were risking their lives. Maybe losing them. There was nothing she could do. Frustration washed over her. Or maybe she just became aware of what was always there.

She’d chosen her role. She’d picked her place, helped with designing the little dried shell-game pea that she lived in. There had been a dozen other ways she could have worked with the underground. Thousands of ways she could have made a new life without them. She was here because she had chosen to be here. The container had felt like solitude, not isolation. A refuge where she could wait for the mud in her heart to settle and her mind to become clear.

It had seemed like a good plan at the time. It had seemed to work. Now, her fingertips hovering over the security alert, she wasn’t sure it did anymore.

With a tap like she was killing an insect, she shut the newsfeeds. Her data analysis was still up behind it, cheerfully reporting

NO UNRECOVERABLE LOSS

“Seems like that should be a metaphor for something,” she said, and imagined Jim’s laughter beside her. Trading the same joke back and forth between them like they had in better days.

Then, a moment later, “God damn, but I have to get out of this fucking box.”