“I don’t suppose there’s any way an old Marine could try one of those suits out, is there?” Bobbie said, ratcheting the smile up a notch. I don’t use sex as a weapon, she thought to herself. But I’d love to get my hands on your outfit.
The Laconian started to reply, then got a distant look on his face that Bobbie recognized. Someone on the group comm was talking in his ear.
“Move along, citizen,” he said to her, the smile gone.
“Thanks for the time,” she said, then pulled herself to the back of her line.
The wait was long and uncomfortably warm. The others there with her had flight-suit patches from a dozen other ships, and the same hangdog expression. It was like they were being treated this way because they’d done something to deserve it. Bobbie tried not to look like that.
The dockmaster’s office was small and harshly lit. She identified herself and her ship, and before she could give any context, the new dockmaster cut her off.
“As a military vessel, the Ceres-registered ship called Rocinante is now impounded by the Laconian Naval Command.” He was a small, dark man in a Laconian naval uniform, and the look on his face was the mix of boredom and irritation shared by all natural-born bureaucrats. A screen on the wall listed all the ships in the slow zone and their statuses: LOCKDOWN in red, over and over again like it was a mantra. The counter in front of him glowed with the name CHIEF PETTY OFFICER NARWA.
“Okay,” Bobbie said. She’d waited in line for nearly two hours to get up to the window, and she certainly hadn’t done it to be told things she already knew. Behind her, the press of bodies was enough to give the office a little extra warmth, the air a little too much closeness. “I understand that. But I have questions.”
“I feel like I’ve told you everything you need to know,” Narwa said.
“Look, Chief,” Bobbie said, “I just need to get a few clarifying details and I’m out of your hair.”
Narwa gave her a delicate shrug of his shoulders. If there had been any spin gravity, he’d have leaned on the counter. He looked like a guy who ran a noodle shop in Innis Shallows. She wondered if they were related.
“I own that ship,” Bobbie continued. “Is this a permanent impound? Are you commandeering it? Will I be paid any compensation for the loss of the ship? Will I or my crew be allowed on board to get our personal effects if the ship is being confiscated?”
“A few points?” Narwa said.
“Just those,” Bobbie agreed. “For now.”
Narwa pulled something up on the counter and flicked it over to her. She felt her hand terminal buzz in her pocket.
“This is the form you can fill out to file for return of property or compensation for the loss of the ship. We are not thieves. The navy will provide one or the other.”
“What about our stuff,” Bobbie asked. “While the naval wheels of justice slowly turn?”
“This form,” Narwa said, and her terminal buzzed again, “is to get an escorted pass onto the ship to get your personal items off it. They’re usually processed within forty-eight hours, so you shouldn’t have to wait long.”
“Well, thank—” Bobbie started, but Narwa was already looking at the person behind her in line and yelling, “Next.”
“Any word from Holden and Naomi yet?” Alex asked.
“Not yet,” Amos said, tapping his hand terminal with a thumb. “System’s pretty loaded up right now, though. May be getting stuck in queue.”
“They have it in lockdown,” she said. “There’s not going to be free comms on Medina that aren’t getting scanned by their systems.”
“Sounds like that could add some time to delivery,” Amos said.
“Standard occupation protocols care a lot more about security than convenience,” Bobbie said. “Message tracking, air-gapped encryption, pattern-based censorship, human-review censorship, throttled traffic. You name it.”
It fit with everything else that was suddenly changed and beyond her control. She couldn’t have her ship. She couldn’t get her people back together. She had to ask permission and an escort to let her retrieve her own clothes. So of course their messages were getting stuck in Medina’s system. They’d found a bar on the inner face of the drum. The long ramp from the transfer point at the center of spin had been thick with carts and people on foot, some heading up toward the docks, and many—like them—coming back down. The grim expressions had been the same both ways.
“I was captain for about a week,” Bobbie said, the beer in her cup sloshing dangerously as she jabbed at the air with it. “I mean, depending on if you count from when Holden offered it to me. Or when we did the paperwork. The paperwork came later, so officially, I guess. Houston clocked as much time in control of the Rocinante as I did.”
“You’re drunk,” Alex said, gently pushing her beer hand back down to the table. He was sitting next to her at a long, faux-wood table. Amos and Clarissa sat across the table from them. Amos had a beer in his hand and half a dozen empties on the table and didn’t appear impaired in the slightest. Clarissa had a plate of cold, soggy french fries in front of her and was using them to push ketchup into spiral art.
“I’m a little drunk,” Bobbie agreed. “I was just starting to like the idea of being captain of my own ship and these Laconian assholes took it away.”
She punctuated the word Laconian by jabbing her glass toward one of their Marines walking past the bar. Beer splashed across the table and into Clarissa’s fries. She didn’t seem to notice or care. Bobbie plucked up her napkin and dabbed the worst of it away anyhow, with only a little pang of guilt.
“And that’s why you need to ease down on the brews, sailor,” Alex said, just taking the glass away from her now. “We need to skip past this grief stage and get on to the kickin’-ass and gettin’-our-ship-back stage.”
“You got a plan?” Amos asked. His tone said he found this dubious.
“Not yet, but that’s what we need to be doing,” Alex shot back.
“Cuz, a couple hundred Marines, one destroyer in the docks, and one whatever the fuck that flying violation of the laws of physics is,” Amos said, pausing to sip his beer and smack his lips. “That’s gonna be one hell of a plan. I gotta get in on that action.”
“Hey, asshole,” Alex said, half standing up from his chair. “At least I want to do something more than feel sorry for myself.”
“This here?” Amos said. He pointed at the Marine outside, the security drones that now hovered over every part of Medina’s drum, the people in Laconian Navy uniforms everywhere. “I’ve seen this before. This is us getting paved over. All we can do now is try to find some cracks to grow through.”
“Cracks?” Alex said, then sat back down with a thump. “How long I known you? Half the time I still got no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“No one is doing anything,” Bobbie said. “Not till I give the order. We get this pass to get our stuff off the Roci, maybe we can start making a strategy from there. I may not have a ship, but I can sure as hell still have my crew.”
“Be nice to sneak a gun or two off the ship,” Amos agreed.
“Be nicer to find a way to get Betsy off,” Alex said to her. “If that’s possible.”
“So until then, we wait,” Bobbie said, then started pressing on the table trying to order another beer. “I just wish I understood what this Duarte asshole wants.”
“They haven’t started killing people,” Amos said. “I mean, it’s still early days. Lots of room for shit to go pear-shaped.”
“But why now?” Bobbie waved her arms around at the bar, at Medina, at all of human space beyond them. “We were just starting to figure this shit out. Earth and Mars working together, the colonies talking out their problems. Even the Transport Union turned out to be a pretty good idea. Why come kick the table over? Couldn’t he have just pulled up a chair with the rest of us?”
“Because some men need to own everything.”
The voice was so quiet, it took Bobbie a moment to realize Clarissa had spoken. She was still making ketchup art with her french fries and not looking at any of them.
“What’s that, Peaches?” Amos said.
“Some men,” Clarissa replied, louder and looking up at them now, “need to own everything.”
“Hell, I met this Duarte guy,” Alex said. “I don’t remember him being—”
“This sounds like personal experience,” Bobbie said, cutting him off. “What are you thinking, Claire?”
“When I was a little girl, I remember my father deciding to buy up a majority share in the largest rice producer on Ganymede. Rice is a necessity crop, not a cash crop. You’ll always sell everything you can grow, but the prices aren’t high, because it’s easier to grow than a lot of other things. And at that time, his companies had an annual revenue in excess of one trillion dollars. I remember an advisor telling my father that the profits from owning rice domes on Ganymede would add a one-with-five-zeroes-in-front-of-it percent to that.”