She glanced down. The override light flickered in her eyes like a candle flame. “Huh. All right. Brush teeth, pee, and spring into action?”
“That’ll work,” he agreed, and hauled himself up out of the bed. The way it worked out, he was brushing his teeth when the door clicked over to red—locked, but under his control. The relief and resentment at the relief came packaged together.
The hallways in the residential deck were no busier than usual. The checkpoint they’d passed through earlier was gone, relocated to some other intersection of hallways. Keeping the surveillance unpredictable and visible, he assumed. If the security systems were in Laconian control, the guards and checkpoints were all theater anyway. A show of force to keep the locals scared and in line. The transport was down—no lifts, no carts. If anyone wanted to go anywhere, the only option was to walk.
In the drum, the false sunlight was as warm as ever. The fields and parkland, streets and structures, curved up and around the same way they always had. Holden could almost forget that it was an occupied station until they interacted with anyone.
The man they paused to get bowls of noodles and sauce from gave them extra packets of peanuts and a twist of cinnamon sugar candy, on the house. An older woman they walked past as they headed aft toward engineering and the docks smiled at them, then stopped and stroked Naomi’s shoulder until little tears appeared in the older woman’s eyes. A group of young men heading the other way made room for them to pass long before they needed to and nodded their respect. It wasn’t, Holden decided, that people recognized him and deferred to his celebrity. All the citizens of Medina were treating each other like everyone was made from spun sugar. Likely to shatter if you breathed on them too hard. He recognized it from being on Luna after the rocks had fallen on Earth. The deep human instinct to come together in crisis. To take care of each other. In its best light, it was what made humanity human. But he also had the dark suspicion that it was a kind of bargaining. Look, universe, see how kind and gentle and nice I am? Don’t let the hammer fall on me.
Even if it was only grief and fear, he’d take it. Anything that helped them all treat each other well.
Beside a little café that served tea and rice-flour cakes, a dozen people in Laconian uniforms were building something—a wall made from cubes two and a half meters to a side, eight wide, and three high, with steel walls and backs and wide mesh doors facing the pathway. Like kennels. Half a dozen locals stood watching, and Naomi went to stand beside them. A young woman with mud-brown hair and a scattering of freckles across her cheeks made a little space for them. Another small kindness, like a coin in a wishing well.
“Are they expecting prisoners, then?” Naomi asked the woman as if they were friends. As if everyone who wasn’t Laconian was part of the same group now.
“That’s the thought,” Freckles said, then nodded a greeting to Holden. “Making a show of it. Supposed to keep us all in line, isn’t it?”
“That’s how it works,” Holden said, trying to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Show everyone what the punishment is. Enough fear, and we’ll all be obedient. They’ll train us like dogs.”
“That’s not how you train dogs,” Freckles said. She made a little, deferential bow when he looked at her, but she didn’t back down. “You train dogs by rewarding them. Punishment doesn’t actually work.” Tears glistened in her eyes, and Holden felt a lump in his own throat. They’d been invaded. They’d been taken over. They could kill everyone on the station, and no one would be able to stop it. This couldn’t be happening, and it was happening.
“I didn’t know that,” he said. Banal words, the closest he could offer to comfort.
“Punishment never works,” Naomi said, her voice hard. Her face was unreadable. She shifted her weight like she was looking at sculpture in a museum. The spectacle of power considered as art. “Not ever.”
“Are you from here?” Freckles asked. She hadn’t recognized them.
“No,” Holden said. “Our ship’s in the dock. Or our old ship anyway. The one we came in on. And the crew we flew with.”
“Mine’s in lockdown too,” Freckles said. “The Old Buncome out of New Roma. We were slated to go home next week. I don’t know where we’re going to stay now.”
“Not on your ship?”
She shook her head. “The docks are off-limits. No one’s allowed on their ships without escort. I’m hoping we can find rooms, but I’ve heard we may have to camp out here in the drum.”
Naomi turned, and he saw everything that he was thinking mirrored in her face. If the docks were off-limits and the crews turned out, the others wouldn’t be on the Roci. And with the network down, they couldn’t put through a connection request. They didn’t have any way of contacting Bobbie or Alex or Amos. Or Clarissa. Counting each deck and the inner surface of the drum, it was something over fifty square kilometers of hallways, cabins, access tubes, and warehouses. Recycling plants. Hydroponic farms. Air storage. Medical bays. A maze the size of a small city, and somewhere in it, four people he needed to find.
Holden coughed out a small, harsh laugh. Naomi tilted her head.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just not very long ago I was thinking how small Medina felt.”
Chapter Eighteen: Bobbie
A rope defined the line to the ships. Two and a half, maybe three hundred people, each with their fist on it, went the length of the dock and switched back twice. Men and women in the jumpsuits of dozens of different companies jostled in place in the dock’s microgravity, inching forward along the line as if registering their silent impatience would make the whole operation move faster. Laconian guards floated along the perimeter, rifles drawn and ready for violence. If it came to that, Bobbie thought, it wouldn’t be surgical. Not in a mob like this. If anyone started anything, the air recyclers would be spitting out blood clots for months. She hoped everyone else knew that too. She hoped they cared.
Every now and then, a team of Laconian military escorts came, took the people from the moored end of the line, checked their authorization, screened them for weapons, and led them off to their ship. Everyone on the rope would pull a little forward, grabbing on another half meter closer to their turn, feeling the weave of the strands, the grease from all the palms before their own. The unmoored end floated free, waiting for the next hapless crew to join the waiting horde.
They were lucky, Bobbie told herself. Most of the ships had full crews of twenty or thirty people. The Roci just had the four of them. They could all go aboard at once. Small blessings indeed. Almost too small to see.
The guards led away another group. They moved down the rope again, that much closer.
“How you holding together, Claire?” Bobbie asked.
Clarissa took a long, shuddering breath and nodded. When she spoke, the words came just a little too fast, and all the consonants had sharp edges. Like she was trying to rein them in and couldn’t. “It would be very nice to get to the med bay. But right now, it’s just euphoria and nausea. Nothing I can’t handle.”
“That changes,” Amos said, “you let me know.”
“Will,” she said. Bobbie wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that. There weren’t many actions Amos could take that would make the situation better. If putting their heads down and enduring wasn’t enough to get Clarissa to her medications, the options got bad fast.
“Anyone else think it’s cold in here?” Alex said.
“It is,” Clarissa said. “I think the pressure’s a little low too. The environmental systems are all off.”
“That doesn’t sound like a good thing,” Alex said.
“Belters,” Bobbie said. “We trained for this.”
“You trained for low air pressure?” Amos asked. He sounded amused. That was better than sounding frustrated.
“We trained for occupying Belter stations. One of the base tactics that Belters used was throwing environmental stasis off just enough that we’d have to keep bumping it up our priority queue. Someone somewhere on the station is trying to make it harder for these folks.”
“Huh,” Amos said. “That’s pretty ballsy.”
“It only works if the occupying force isn’t willing to just kill everyone and start over. So yeah. There’s an element of playing chicken.”
The group in front them on the rope wore gray-black jumpsuits with CHARLES BOYLE GAS TRANSPORT logos in green on the back. The one floating nearest them looked back over his shoulder, catching Bobbie’s eye almost shyly. She nodded, and the man nodded back, hesitated, tilted his head a centimeter forward.
“Perdó,” he said, nodding toward Clarissa. “La hija la? She’s sick?”