Saba’s grin came again. “You’re forgetting whose man I am, que no? Drummer spends a little time talking about you behind your back, and that means to me.”
“Right, so … I was in the process of retiring when all this came down. Dropping off the Freehold guy was my last mission. Was going to be. The crew is really Bobbie’s, only then history got in the way, and now I’m sort of back in charge and sort of not. It’s awkward.”
“Savvy,” Saba said. “I’m there too.”
“Something wrong between you and Bobbie?”
“No, no, no. Only that Medina’s my home port, but the Malaclypse is my home. This came down, and I got put at the front because of my spouse and her job and the union. Plenty enough around here don’t like that. Do their own thing because it’s their own.”
“Like the bombing,” Holden said.
“Like that trap, yeah. Like the trying for the governor. Like a bunch of assholes I stopped who were looking to steal Laconian uniforms, beat up some of our own so they could start shit between, yeah?”
“That doesn’t seem productive,” Holden said.
“Not about productive,” Saba said. “About reaching for what can get done. Plenty of old OPA on Medina. When the Alliance turned into the union, it didn’t erase all the old factions. There’s Ochoa OPA and there’s Johnson OPA even when there’s no Ochoa or Johnson. Voltaire Collective set that bomb like they’d just been waiting for the chance, and maybe they were. Oldsters going at it like they were young again. Young ones trying to live up to the stories of the bad old days. Like pumping oxygen into a fire.”
Holden shook his head. “If we’re going to manage anything, we have to—”
The dumb terminal chirped, and one of the entries came up highlighted. Saba pulled the interface pad closer and scrolled back to the flagged entry. He cross-checked and opened the file. All the things a real system would have done for him automatically, if they could risk using one.
Saba clicked his tongue against his teeth.
“What’ve we got?” Holden asked.
“Traffic control plan update,” Saba said. “Got something slated as coming in through Laconia gate, but not right away.”
“How far out?”
“Forty-two days?” Saba said. He moved through the data as carefully as he could, checking the distribution stamps and time codes. It didn’t take him long to find the name and transit specs for the ship. The Typhoon. And from the mass and energy profile, it was huge. On a hunch, Holden had Saba match it with Laconia’s first transit. The two were the same. The Typhoon was another Tempest. Holden felt a tightness under his rib cage wondering how many more like it there were.
Saba cursed under his breath. A man’s voice came from behind them, somewhere in the warren of hidden corridors. A woman answered. The bulkheads, the exposed conduits and industrial decking, the thick air and the darkness. All of it was just the same as it had been when Holden sat down, except that now it seemed fragile.
Another warship from Laconia with more soldiers. The beginning of the permanent occupation. Not just the beginning of the end. The end.
Saba cracked his knuckles and smiled ruefully at Holden. “Well,” he said. “Leaves me wishing I could tell Drummer and the union. Kind of thing she’d want to know.”
“Yeah,” Holden said, trying to gather his wits. There was more than a little of him jumping around behind his own eyes like a panicked monkey, but this wasn’t the time for it. “All right. We still have some time. Whatever we decide to do, our obstacles are the Gathering Storm outside the station and something like two hundred, maybe two hundred and fifty power-armor-wearing Marines inside it.”
“And loose-cannon OPA factions firing off without warning,” Saba said. “When they hear about this, they’ll get worse. Complicate everything if they won’t coordinate.”
“So that too,” Holden agreed. His brain felt like it was stuffed with cotton ticking. He wanted to get all his people onto the Rocinante and run away. If there was anyplace that the Laconians wouldn’t just follow them and shoot them down. If there was anyplace in thirteen hundred systems that would be safe anymore. For them, or for anyone.
“Okay,” he said. “All right. Whatever goals we decide on, we have to take those three things into account. And we have to do it in the next forty-two days.”
“Because after that,” Saba said, “no more us, yeah?”
Chapter Twenty-Six: Bobbie
Bobbie, Alex, and Clarissa ate lunch together in a tiny compartment with ELECTRICAL SUPPLIES stenciled on the door in four languages. It had a few unlabeled crates in it that they could use as tables and benches, so they’d taken to calling it the Diner. The meal was the heavily spiced and deep-fried balls of bean paste that Belters called red kibble. On the side they had a few bits of dried fruit, and a thin seafood soup that tasted like the flavor came from having a fish swim through the broth.
“You know what I miss most about the Roci about now?” Alex said, poking at his kibble, which rolled around his plate. “My ship knows how to make Martian food. I’m so sick of this Belter shit.”
He was exaggerating his Mariner Valley drawl the way he always did when he spoke of the ship. Bobbie laughed at him, then noisily drank off the last of her broth.
“It’s good for you, boy,” she said, mocking his drawl.
“It keeps body and soul attached, and that’s about the best I can say for it.”
Clarissa smiled at their banter, but said nothing. She was picking up a single ball of kibble at a time, then carefully chewing it. It was like watching a bird eat in slow motion.
“I wonder if the Laconians still eat Martian food,” Bobbie said. “We could ask.”
Alex tossed his plate down onto their crate-table in disgust. “You know, I think what chaps my ass more than anything else about this shit? The guys who came out of the gate and started wreckin’ our shit and takin’ over aren’t some damn aliens. It’s fucking Martians. I bet there’re people on that Laconian ship I served with back in the day. Dollars to donuts, the top brass in the Marine detachment here are people you know, at least by name.”
Bobbie nodded, chewing the last of her kibble. “That’s actually an interesting idea. I mean, could that be useful? Find some people in their command structure that know us? Is that an in?”
“I ain’t talkin’ about how it’s useful, Bob,” Alex said, nearly knocking over Clarissa’s water glass with his angry hand gestures. “I’m talkin’ about the idea that people just like us, Martian patriots, picked up and ran off with this Duarte guy, and took about a third of the fleet with them.”
“You ever wonder if it could have been us?” Bobbie asked.
Alex lowered his brows at her. “You lost your mind?”
“No, really, think about it,” Bobbie said. “We were both out of the service when Duarte started making his move. You’d been retired for a decade at that point. I’d been out of the Corps for a couple years. But if we’d still been active duty, could we have fallen for his pitch? I mean, a lot of good people did.”
“A third of the stars of heaven,” Clarissa said, as if she were agreeing.
“Uh,” Alex replied, cocking his head in confusion.
“A third of the what now, honey?” Bobbie said.
“From the Bible. Revelation. When the devil fell from grace, he took a third of the angels with him. It’s described as the great dragon pulling a third of the stars of heaven down with its tail.”
“Huh,” Alex said like he had no idea what she was talking about.
“Why’d that pop into your head?” Bobbie asked.
“Whatever story Duarte was selling was compelling enough to get a big chunk of the Martian military to buy in. The devil’s story was freedom from the oppression of God’s rules, and it was good enough to win a lot of angels to his side. Whatever Duarte’s pitch was, it’s a good one. Don’t be so sure you wouldn’t have bought it.”
“Oh, I’m pretty fucking sure,” Alex replied with a snort.
Bobbie had to admit she wasn’t. A galaxy-spanning human civilization run the way the Martians, at their best, ran things. Organized, focused on a single overarching goal. Efficient, well planned, not wasting anything. She could see why that appealed to a lot of people when Mars was watching its dream of terraforming die. Duarte could step in and sell them a new dream that used all the same skills and attitudes that the old one had, but was even grander in scope. Bobbie recognized that there was a version of her that was fighting on the Laconian side right now, and it made her itchy.
Alex had started to gather up the plates and cups from their meal when Amos walked into the room. “Hey, Babs. Cap wants to see us about that thing.”
“Which thing?”
“The making-sure-no-more-bombs-go-off-we-don’t-know-about thing.”
“Oh, that thing. Be there in five,” she replied, and he shrugged and walked off without another word.
“Still kinda chafes, don’t it?” Alex said, his voice gentle.