“Fuck is a ‘no view’?” a Belter woman asked. The others chuckled.
“Read some fucking history once,” Saba said to her, then nodded to Bobbie to continue.
“They knew she’d be picking up signals from farther away than anything had ever needed to before,” Bobbie said. She zoomed in on Medina’s comm array. “So the comm system is massively overpowered, and much more sensitive than anything on a commercial or military vessel.”
Ramez nodded and shrugged expansively with his long hands. “We don’t even use most of that shit. No one talking from far away in here.”
He meant inside the slow zone, and he was right. Nothing was ever more than half a million klicks from Medina. The physical boundaries of the space prohibited it.
“True, but the equipment is still there. And up on that comm array is a signal sniffer sensitive enough to track a single photon through a fiber bundle a meter thick,” Bobbie said, zooming in on the technical map behind her. “But we can’t just steal it. Claire?”
Clarissa pushed herself out of the corner she’d been hiding in and came to stand next to Bobbie. She wore a mechanic’s jumpsuit with the name TACHI on the back, and had her hair pulled into a tight bun. With her gaunt cheeks and sunken eyes, it made her look severe and impatient.
“Even though this array isn’t in use,” Clarissa said without preamble, “it’s still hooked to the primary comm system. If we start unplugging things, alarm bells are going to go off up in ops. So we need to put the circuits into a diagnostic shutdown before we physically yank the parts.”
“Fuckonians all over in ops now, ninita,” Ramez said. “Watching everything all the time, them.”
Clarissa nodded her agreement, then said, “And that’s where you come in. We need to get you onto the ops deck to shut down the panel long enough for us to do our work,” she said. “And also if you call me ‘little girl’ again, I will hurt you.”
“Is that right, ninita?” Ramez said, his grin turning condescending.
“No,” Bobbie said, stepping toward him. “No, that’s not right. Pulling that gear will be delicate work. I can’t risk her damaging her hands before we get out there.” Bobbie took another step into Ramez and stared down at him. “So I’ll hurt you. Mao’s my second on this. Don’t make me beat some respect into you, ninito.”
She glanced over at Holden. He looked shocked, and maybe a little sad. She wondered how he would have handled it, back before. It was so strange to be doing all this in the same room with each other.
Ramez threw a look to his buddies on the crates. No one stepped up to back him up. Saba was smiling and making a Let’s get on with it circular motion with his hand.
“Sabe,” Ramez said, looking to the side the way abashed primates had since the Pleistocene. “Just for fooling, que?”
“Sa sa,” Bobbie replied, then switched the screen from the volumetric map over to her mission plan. “Here’s the rundown, including precise times for each thing to happen. Mao and I will be on the outside of the station for most of this, and we can’t afford to do any broadcasting out there, because the Laconian sniffers will almost certainly pick it up.”
“I’ll be calling up to ops using an unlocked hand terminal that Ramez here will get for me,” Holden said, nodding at the man as an invitation for him to nod back. “We’re picking a time when Daphne Kohl is the duty officer. She knows me now, and I’m thinking she’ll understand what we’re trying to do without me having to explain it. Comm discipline is in full effect, the assumption is everything is heard by everyone.”
“So that call between Kohl and Holden is what we’re all listening to,” Bobbie said. “We’ll pass out a list of code words Holden will use during the call as signals. This is our only method of coordinating the action, and there’s no way for us to signal an abort or call for help. Our backup plan is everyone does this right the first time so we don’t need a backup plan. Understood?”
“Lot of risk for a dump of gibberish we can’t make sense of,” Ramez said.
Bobbie felt a little flush of annoyance at the man. “The more we have, the more likely we find what we need in it when the encryption problem gets fixed,” she said. “We start where we can, and that’s this. Are we all clear?”
A murmur of dui and sabe and sa sa rippled through the room.
“Outstanding,” Bobbie said. “Let’s get to work.”
The slow zone or the ring space or the gate network. No matter what you called it, it was fucking weird.
Bobbie and Clarissa exited the drum section of Medina Station using an old maintenance airlock that Saba swore wasn’t monitored from ops. They were wearing emergency vac suits, the so-thin-they’re-barely-there type whose only purpose was keeping the wearer from dying of asphyxia before help could arrive. They were bright orange and yellow to make the wearer easy to find in smoke or against the black of space. They had large flashing lights on the helmet and shoulders to aid rescue workers, but Bobbie had smashed those with a wrench before they put them on. Bad enough to be a brightly colored blob climbing up the outside of the station. No reason to flash a distress signal too. Under normal circumstances, going outside a ship or station wearing the emergency suits was asking to be cooked by radiation. The cheap throw-away suits had almost no shielding to them.
But the slow zone was fucking weird.
There was literally no radiation in the ring space that humans didn’t bring in with them. No background radiation, no solar wind, nothing. Just a massive, unnaturally black void all around, defined only by the distant and faintly glowing rings equally spaced around it and the blue sphere of the alien station at the center where they’d had the rail-gun emplacements.
Bobbie and Clarissa rode the outside of the massive, spinning drum section of Medina inside the old airlock. The indicator of their motion being the occasional distant ring moving past the black window of the outer airlock door, and the fact that something kept trying to shove them out the door at a third of a g. Bobbie had them both tethered to a clip inside the airlock so they wouldn’t be hurled into the strange non-space outside.
A large rectangular structure whipped past the outer airlock door. Bobbie pressed her helmet to Clarissa’s and yelled so that sound would conduct directly. “That’s one of the exterior elevators. We go for the next one.”
Clarissa nodded, wide-eyed, and braced for the jump. Outside of the drum section of Medina, two structures ran the entire length of the ship from the engineering deck aft of the drum to the ops deck in the bow. They housed machinery, conduit, and a pair of elevators for moving from one zero-g section to the other without passing through the drum itself. Bobbie and Clarissa planned to use one of them to climb the station up to the comm array on the nose, and back down to the Laconian ship docked at the stern.
Bobbie opened the mesh bag at her hip, checking again that she had everything the same way she had a dozen times before. Spare air bottles for herself and Clarissa. They’d be outside for hours making the long climbs. A magnetic grappling gun with high-tensile cable and a winch. And finally, a fat black recoilless handgun that one of the Belters had managed to hide from the Laconian weapon sweeps. If they actually needed to use it, the mission was fucked anyway, but there was a dignity in going down fighting that appealed to Bobbie’s romantic notions.
She hooked the emergency cable on her suit to a loop at Clarissa’s waist, then unhooked herself from the airlock. The station tried to throw her out the door, but she grabbed the lip of the outer airlock with one hand and held on. In the other hand, she held the grapple gun. Behind her, Clarissa had one hand on her shoulder, and one hand on the bulkhead.
“Three, two, one, go!” Bobbie shouted, hoping enough sound would travel up Clarissa’s arm. She launched herself out the outer airlock door by releasing her grip on it, and was shooting off into the void at 3.3 meters per second.
The massive rectangular structure of the maintenance shaft rushed toward her, and she fired the magnetic grapple into it as she passed. If the grapple failed to connect, they’d keep flying off into the empty space of the slow zone until they ran out of air and their lifeless bodies eventually flew into the eerie curtain of black at the edge of the alien space. Dangerous, but no more so than a challenging free climb back on Mars. She didn’t even think about it. Her eye spotted the place she wanted the grapple to go, her hand and arm did the rest. The grapple landed less than half a meter from the spot she was aiming for. Like riding a bike.