The grappling line and the leash that connected the grappling gun to her suit snapped taut and pulled her in a fast arc around the maintenance shaft, dragging Clarissa helplessly behind. Bobbie started up the winch, pulling them closer as the speed of their arc increased. Just before impact, she bent her knees and activated her mag boots. The landing was going to hurt a bit.
She hit the metal surface of the maintenance shaft like the tip of a whip being cracked, and let the impact fold her knees up into her abdomen. Clarissa slammed into her back, and it felt like someone dropping a bag of cement on her from a couple stories up. Bobbie rolled with it, slapping the decking with her hands to activate the glove magnets, and hung on.
A few punishing seconds later, they were on the side of the maintenance shaft, all the violence of their motion gone, having been converted into lightly sprained knees and a collection of bruises.
“Ouch,” Bobbie said, and floated motionless for a few seconds, tethered to the shaft by only one gloved hand.
“Yeah,” Clarissa replied, faintly, through the helmet she had against Bobbie’s back.
Bobbie pushed her helmet against Clarissa’s. “It’s a long climb, but at least there’s no gravity to fight. You up for this?”
Clarissa answered by unhooking the tether, and pulling herself up the flat gray wall of the shaft.
“Alrighty, then,” Bobbie said, and followed.
Two hours and an O2 bottle change later, they floated near the massive Medina comm array. A bewildering cluster of antennae, dishes, and radio broadcast towers, and at its heart sat a laser powerful enough to send messages back to Earth from a hundred light-years away. It had never been used.
“I remember when that almost ended all human life,” Clarissa said, pressing her faceplate to Bobbie’s. “It doesn’t look so scary now.”
“I’ve heard that story,” Bobbie replied. “Wish I’d been here to back you guys up in that fight.”
Clarissa shrugged. “The story’s more fun than the actual experience was. You didn’t miss much.”
Clarissa pulled herself over the rigging of the comm array, coming to a stop next to an oversized receiver dish. She pointed at an access panel below it, then flashed the Belter sign for This one.
Bobbie nodded with one hand, then tapped the side of her helmet. Now we wait for word from Holden. She turned on the small emergency radio in her suit, already tuned to the channel Holden would be using to call Daphne Kohl up in station ops, and waited. Clarissa stared at her across the vacuum between them, motionless and patient as a hunting cat.
The minutes dragged. When her radio crackled to life, Bobbie found herself grinning. “Medina control, this is workcrew kilo alpha, do you copy?”
Bobbie could only hear Holden’s side of the conversation, so there was a long pause and then his voice again. “Copy that. Can I get Chief Kohl on the line? Gotta route some repairs though her office.”
Office was their code that meant Ramez was outside of ops, waiting for permission to enter, so the plan was proceeding, and waiting only on Kohl’s cooperation.
“Hey, Chief. Good to hear your voice again,” Holden said, hitting the words hard. He hadn’t identified himself by name, and he wouldn’t. If Daphne Kohl didn’t pick up on what was going on, they’d scrub the mission. If she raised the alarm … Well, that would be an interesting problem. “Working with Saba down here in electrochemical. Tracking a grid problem that Laconian death ray caused, and we’d love to pull a panel up there to really nail it down.”
And here’s where the most dangerous part of the plan happened. It wasn’t flying through space on a tether, or climbing up the outside of a massive station wearing the thinnest and crappiest vacuum suits. It wasn’t even going to be later, when they climbed down to the Laconian ship to hook in their signal sniffer, hoping no one was watching the outside of the dock. It was here, where Holden was counting on his voice, Saba’s name, and the mention of Laconians to signal Kohl that they were up to no good and needed her help.
And more than that, counting on her Belter pride being stronger than her fear of execution by their Laconian masters. Because if any of those things weren’t true, Kohl could refuse them, and that was the end of the plan. Or worse.
Bobbie waited a very tense minute of radio silence, and then Holden said, “That’s great. I’ve got a tech heading to ops to pull that panel, if you can let him in. He’ll take a gander at our glitch and get out of your hair.”
Gander. Code for Go in five.
“Copy that, Chief. We appreciate the patience while we sort this out.”
Bobbie gave Clarissa a thumbs-up, then flashed her five fingers. Clarissa nodded with her fist, then started pulling tools out of the mesh bag at her hip.
First thing down, Bobbie thought. Just a two-kilometer climb aft and planting a bug on a Laconian destroyer without getting caught left to go.
With Medina Station functionally motionless in the slow zone, it was less of a climb than a mag-booted shuffle down the two-kilometer length of the maintenance shaft. Bobbie pulled the blocky module containing the field-strength sensor on a short leash behind her. It didn’t have much mass, but she’d taken it without conversation when she’d looked through Clarissa’s visor and seen the technician’s complexion going a sickly gray. Other than jumping out of a rotating airlock, they hadn’t done anything particularly taxing, but it was pretty clear that Claire was already running on fumes.
As they got closer to the engineering-and-docking-bay section of Medina, the Laconian ship came into view around the curve of the station. Bobbie couldn’t help but whistle her appreciation of the beauty of the thing. Say what you would about Laconian authoritarianism, their engineering included a lot of aesthetic beauty in its design.
The destroyer—Holden had called it the Gathering Storm—looked like a natural crystal formation that someone had chipped into a knife. The colors were all translucent pinks and blues, faceted like a gem. She spotted something at the tail that probably served as the ship’s drive cone but didn’t look anything like the UN or Martian designs she was familiar with. The nose of the ship ended in a pair of sharp projections, like a dagger point with a channel cut down the center that left her almost certain it was a rail gun. If the ship had torpedo launchers or PDCs, she couldn’t see them.
The ship was so strange, so unlike anything humans had ever designed or flown before, that if it had docked and green three-eyed aliens had walked off, it would have felt more appropriate than the humans that actually flew her.
Clarissa stopped and turned, so Bobbie yanked the sensor array to a stop on its leash, then pushed their two helmets together.
“There,” Clarissa said, pointing to a maintenance access hatch that looked exactly like a hundred they’d already passed. “That’s the router that feeds from the dock into the station network.”
“You’re sure?” Bobbie said, looking around at all the other hatches.
Clarissa didn’t answer, just rolled her eyes and took the leash. She pulled the sensor array down and attached it to the hull, right next to the hatch. She pulled a few leads from the box and plugged them into slots inside the hatch, then stuck a hand terminal on the side of the array and spent several minutes going through what looked like menus. Bobbie replaced both of their air bottles while she worked.
A few minutes later, Clarissa stood up and gave her the thumbs-up. Bobbie looked over at the massive blade of the Laconian destroyer. If anyone on it had seen them working, the ship itself gave no hint. Clarissa walked over holding her hand terminal and touched it to the side of Bobbie’s helmet. Her HUD snapped on, and a wall of text rolled past. The signal traffic between the destroyer and the local decrypt facility, complete with routing flags and timestamps. It was still locked behind military encryptions, but everything that the Gathering Storm sent down to Medina and everything it got back was here, and the underground was skimming a copy of all of it.
“Huh,” Bobbie said to no one. “I honestly thought that would be harder.”
Chapter Twenty-Three: Drummer
The ship came through the ring like an old video of a whale breaching the surface of the sea. The thousand kilometers of the ring gate was tiny in the scale of the solar system, huge by human measure, and the Laconian battleship fit between the two—too large to be comfortable in one, too small to fit well in the other. Its design seemed to come from the same uncomfortable place, neither the now-familiar eeriness of the protomolecule nor the history of human manufacture, but both and neither. Drummer watched the observations feed again and again, and it made her skin crawl a little every time.