Holden shifted in his bunk. If he lay on his side with one arm raised and his head resting on it like a pillow, he could block that ear, then put a hand over the ear that was pointed up at the bunk above him. It was almost enough to block out Alex’s snoring. But it also made his shoulder ache after a while, and his hand fell asleep before he did. He could track down a set of earplugs, but that meant getting out of bed. Half-awake as he was, that seemed like a lot of trouble. Anyway, no one else in the bunks seemed to be bothered. He also knew—half knew—that if he woke up enough to fix the problem, he’d be too awake to sleep again. Admitting that age and anxiety had turned him into a light sleeper felt vaguely shameful in a way that probably wouldn’t have stood the scrutiny of a fully conscious mind. Years of living with his crew had built habits and norms that they were violating in these new circumstances, and it was weird.
Clarissa made an uncomfortable sound halfway between a whine and a growl. In the bunk across from him, Naomi shifted. By the dim orange glow of the safety light, he could just make out the curve of her shoulder, the shape of her hair spilling out over her pillow.
Which meant his eyes were open.
Which meant he was awake.
He tried closing his eyes again, willing himself back down to sleep, but Alex coughed above him, and Holden shifted his arm. The pins and needles started in his fingers. The last wisps of dream and oblivion thinned and vanished out of his brain. As quietly as he could, he rolled to the edge of the bunk, let himself down to the deck, and slipped out the door, leaving the others to get the rest he couldn’t.
The web of unmonitored space that Saba and his people had carved out of the flesh of the station was tighter than living on any ship Holden had crewed. Keeping the power low enough to avoid detection meant thick air and rationed water. The murmur of voices speaking in musical Belter Creole was as present as the hum of the air recyclers. Holden made his way to the head—an emergency cut-in to the processing system with a seat about the right size for a five-year-old. He had to wait for the woman already there to finish. By the time he stepped back into the access hall, he was fully awake, hungry, and a little grumpy.
Naomi slouched down the hall toward him. Her undershirt was stained with sleep sweat and use. The top of her half-undone jumpsuit gathered at her hips like humanity’s worst bustle. Her hair and face still had the shape of her pillow to them.
She was beautiful. She made everything better than it would have been without her.
“You’re up,” she said.
“I am.”
“Me too.”
“Sucks, right?”
“Oh yeah,” she said, then gestured toward the head. He shifted out of her way.
“Want to risk breakfast out in the world?” she asked as she passed him.
Holden let the question sit in his chest while he was alone in the corridor. When they were in the secret passageways of the underground, they were safe in that they were unmonitored. The Laconian-controlled station was dangerous, but it was also open. Fresh air, better food, and as far as Holden knew, they still weren’t on security’s shit list.
And there were things they could learn by being there that they’d never get if they only ever stayed where it was safe.
When Naomi emerged, he took her arm like they were stepping out to a formal affair, and together they walked to one of the security hatches, and from there into Medina Station. The transition points were the most dangerous. Moving from the unmonitored spaces into public without seeming to pop into existence out of nowhere meant timing their passage in places that were only intermittently watched, or else getting secondary entrances into showers, locker rooms, and toilets, where privacy gave them cover.
When they reached the open sections of the station, it was moving from one kind of oppressive environment into another. The halls were bright and open, the air fresh and if anything a little cool. Screens and monitors showed the locally produced Laconia-approved news: propaganda about the stability and security of the station mixed with whatever pop-culture feeds from outside the slow zone made it past their censors. Holden and Naomi walked through it like refugees at a shopping complex, trying not to blink into the too-bright lights.
They weren’t alone. The crews of all the other ships and the citizens of the station all had the same dazed look to them, though at different intensities. People were still scrounging for quarters or camping on the inner face of the dome. The docks were still locked down, and that showed no sign of changing. Any normal hand terminals were still blocked from sending messages off Medina or gathering data that wasn’t locally stored and vetted. There was a way that being in Saba’s underground felt like being buried alive. And there was a way that being outside of it made being buried alive seem like not such a bad thing. It was cozy, anyway.
They stopped at a café two levels below the open air of the drum’s interior. He got a bulb of genuinely third-rate coffee—overroasted to hide the shitty beans in the taste of the char, and a chalky cream substitute—and Naomi got tea and a corn muffin that they could split. They sat at a little table as far away from the public passage as they could get and still have a good view of the foot traffic passing by. Two men, smoking pipes that looked like they’d been made of decking ceramic. A group of schoolchildren in matching gray-green uniforms. A busker with a marionette trying to amuse passersby with her antics. It could have been any station in human space. And as they watched, they talked about things that weren’t dangerous if anyone were to overhear.
In the public corridor, a security team walked past. Two figures in the blue power armor bristling with weapons. The carts and foot traffic moved around the pair like a stream flowing around rocks. Their presence wasn’t intimidating people as much now, or at least not in the same ways. On a screen across the corridor, Carrie Fisk of the newly renamed Laconian Congress of Worlds was being interviewed by a pretty young man with a military haircut. Holden wondered what she was saying, but the café had their system set to a light, friendly saidi list that shifted from one melody to the next without ever pausing in between. The same music, Holden guessed, that they’d played before Laconia came knocking.
It was all becoming normal. He could see it in the way the clerk served up the terrible, terrible coffee. He could hear it in the conversations at the nearby tables. It showed on the screens and in the gaits of the people walking by. Panic and alarm were exhausting. He was exhausted by them, and Medina was exhausted too. It was already shifting into its new routine. Checkpoints, yes. Armed security, yes. All the theater of dominance and control and nothing to undercut that narrative.
Just to look at it, you wouldn’t guess there’d been a bombing.
Saba hadn’t known it was coming either, and they’d only heard about it through him. A small explosion, but the unofficial reports said at least one Laconian had been killed. The official reports, apparently, were that it hadn’t happened at all. That was a change. The assassination attempt had been used to justify the crackdown. Now the crackdown was just another day, and highlighting the attacks on the structures of power wasn’t useful. Nothing had to be justified anymore. Governor Singh in his offices was trying to project a sense of normalcy and inevitability. And as far as Holden could tell, it was working.
“Kind of quiet,” he said, meaning They think they’re winning.
Naomi tugged her hair down over her eyes. “Right?” she said. It meant I think they’re winning too.
Back in the underground, Holden found Saba sitting at a dumb terminal. Even in full light, Saba’s hair and skin were nearly the same color. In the backsplash from the screen, he almost seemed like a cartoon of himself. He nodded at Holden and shifted a few centimeters on his bench to give him room. Holden sat.
“Checking on the Storm dump?” Holden asked, nodding toward the screen. The log entries spooled up. The information they were intercepting from the Laconians was encrypted on a variety of levels, and using more than one schema.
“Dui,” Saba said. “Everything between the station and the Storm is coming in, but until we get access to the server that decrypts it, it’s just noise. Plenty more irons in that fire, though. Medina comms got more compromised than we thought. Turns out Golden Bough bought a tech eighteen months ago, got a backdoor into the system we never noticed.”
“Really?” Holden said. “How’d you find it now?”
“Coyo told us,” Saba said, flashing a grin. “Patriotism is weird shit.”
Holden chuckled. “Whatever works, I guess.”
They sat for a moment in near silence. Saba scratched his arm and pointedly didn’t look at Holden when he spoke again. “Big coya seems like she’s got a little stone in her throat. Any trouble with your crew?”
“Nope,” Holden said. And then, “I mean, yeah, but nothing that’ll cause a problem.”
“Don’t guess you want to say what? Make me feel better to know.”
Holden leaned forward. The logs spooled past, storage filling with traffic that might be everything to them. Or nothing. Bobbie wasn’t something he’d talked about before. He wasn’t sure he wanted to start now, but he was living in Saba’s rooms, eating the man’s food, coordinating on his operations.
“It’s not exactly my crew,” Holden said. “I had some trouble with the union before all this happened.”