“What? Hearing him go back to calling Holden ‘Cap’?” Bobbie said, ready to shrug it off. But something caught in her throat. “Yeah. I gotta admit it does. I might have a word with him on that.”
“Be gentle,” Clarissa said. “He’s fragile right now.”
Bobbie had no idea what the word fragile meant when applied to Amos. She wasn’t sure she wanted to learn.
Saba leaned against one wall in the larger storage space that they’d been using as their insurgent-cell meeting room. Someone had finally pushed all the crates and boxes up against the walls to serve as seating, and some enterprising thief on the crew had even managed to steal a few benches from one of the parks. About twenty members of their group were scattered around the space, including Holden, Naomi, and Amos.
On the wall screen behind Saba was a diagram of Medina, and a picture of a severe-looking woman with black hair and a lot of facial piercings. She stared at the camera with angry eyes, giving the picture a mug-shot feel. The name Katria Mendez floated beneath her photo.
“The Voltaire Collective,” Saba said, pointing at her. “Bomb throwers from ancient days.”
“Fighters,” someone in the room replied, making the word a term of respect.
“Sa bien,” Saba replied. “Now with Laconia? They go back to the old script.”
“Apart from the fact that their strategy doesn’t work anymore and it’s fucking our shit up, they seem like people we want in our team,” Holden said. “We should recruit them. Coordinate with them. Killing them or feeding them to the Laconians should be our last option.” He sounded a little scattered. Distracted. She wondered what was up with him. He knew something or suspected something that was eating up all his spare cycles. Bobbie had seen it before.
Saba nodded with one fist. “If we can, we should.” He pointed to a sublevel on the Medina map marked Water Reclamation. “Holed up here, them. I say we send our envoys to make them an offer of alliance.”
Holden turned on his bench to look back at Bobbie. She gave him a tiny nod. He stood up to take a spot next to Saba and said, “I think we should send Bobbie to speak for us. She can pass along our respects, tell them we need to join up, and if they get belligerent … well, she can handle that too.”
“Agreed,” Saba said. “How many you want with you?”
“Let’s keep this small,” Bobbie replied. “Just me and Amos for now. This should feel like natural allies reaching out. Not a war party.”
“Sabe bien,” Saba said. “But this ends with they don’t plant more bombs unless we say so. Our house gets in order now. One way or.”
“Yeah,” Bobbie agreed. “One way or, that’s where this ends.”
The shortest path to Water Reclamation included a short jaunt through the inner drum. Bobbie didn’t mind. Hiding out with her resistance-fighter buddies included an awful lot of sleeping and eating in tiny metal rooms. Getting out into the habitat space with open air and a dirt floor and the full-spectrum light on her face was a welcome change.
Even the ubiquitous Laconians didn’t ruin the mood. For the most part, their conquerors were easy to get along with. They acted like people who’d lived on Medina for years: eating in the restaurants, browsing the shops, making use of the entertainment districts. If you gave them a nod, they nodded back like old neighbors. Even the Marine patrols moving past in their exotic blue power armor looked alert, but not particularly threatening.
Bobbie had seen the other version of them during the assassination attempt on the governor, so she knew they could go from friendly and professional to full rock-and-roll at the flip of a switch. Easy to get along with or not, the Laconians were a military occupation. You forgot that at your peril.
“How are you doing?” Bobbie asked as they walked through a particularly lush section of park. The lovingly tended path curved through grass, patches of flowers, and even past the occasional tree. Insects buzzed about, still the best-designed pollinating system there was. Technology did a lot of things well, but evolution had it beat when it came to environmental systems.
“My feet hurt,” Amos said. “Kind of all the time now. Glad these Belters keep the rotation at a third of a g.”
“It’s quicker to list the shit that doesn’t hurt, these days,” Bobbie said. “But that’s not really what I meant.”
“Yeah?” Amos said. His tone didn’t change at all, but Bobbie had flown with him for a couple decades now. She could hear the tension that had crept in.
“Claire thinks maybe you’re having a tough time right now.”
“Does she.” Amos’ voice had gone so flat, it might have been a badly written computer simulation of him. He was checking out of the conversation. Pushing it farther wouldn’t help.
“Anyway,” Bobbie said, keeping it light. “You need anything, I’m up for whatever.”
“Yeah, I know, Babs,” Amos said. “But these Voltaire guys are no joke. We better get our game faces on.”
The Voltaire Collective occupied a dusty crawl space beneath and between half a dozen gigantic stainless-steel tanks. It was a good spot. Unless the piping sprang a leak, there was literally no reason for anyone to come down to the space. The Collective definitely still had some skill sets left over from their OPA resistance-fighter days. Katria Mendez in person was all hard angles and sharp edges, and her dark eyes burned with a constant low-level fury.
“You’re actually coming here to lecture us on how to run an occupied insurgency,” she said. Her voice was gentle and warm. The voice of a favorite teacher, or beloved aunt. A voice that asked if you wanted some lemonade with your cookies. It also had the precise diction and studied lack of accent that Bobbie associated with advanced education. Her Belter accent could have been measured in parts per billion.
“Not at all,” Bobbie started.
“Because,” Katria continued, “the Collective has been a militant branch of the OPA, resisting inner-planets control, for nearly a century.”
“I understand,” Bobbie said.
“Do you? Because it seems like you just showed up here and told us that we’re not allowed to run any resistance operations without your consent. Or did I misunderstand what you were telling me?”
Bobbie heard shuffling feet behind her, and turned around to see five members of Katria’s cell had taken up a loose semicircle at her back. None of them held weapons in their hands, but they all wore the loose-fitting jumpsuits of the Medina Station maintenance workers. Lots of big pockets that could be hiding anything from a hammer to a compact machine pistol. Amos, standing to her left, caught her eye without losing his smile. He took a half step back, managing to make it look casual.
“Look,” Bobbie said to Katria, stepping up and looking down at her from their half-meter height difference. “We didn’t come here to start a fight. As far as I’m concerned, we’re all on the same team. But if you force it to go the other way, we’re prepared for that, too. And I promise you it will not go the way you want.”
“Honestly, I’m just not sure why Saba didn’t come himself,” Katria said, not backing down at all. “Or why he thought sending a Martian and an Earther to tell Belters how to fight was the right message.”
Bobbie didn’t know any answer to that other than because we’re the most intimidating soldiers he’s got, now that walking through Medina with firearms has become a really bad idea. She winged it instead.
“Because maybe that is the message. Because this isn’t about Belters and inners and last century’s bullshit. Because now it’s about all of us versus the assholes who popped out of their gate thirty years into our game and decided they get to flip the table over.”
Katria nodded and smiled. “That’s actually not a terrible answer.”
“Then let’s ease down,” Bobbie said, taking a half step back again to give Katria her space. “Let’s find a place to sit and have a drink and chat about how all of us can work together to fuck these Laconian assholes up. Yeah?”
“You keep giving me that eye, boy, and I’m gonna pull it out of your head and hand it back to you,” Amos said, his tone so mellow and conversational that it took Bobbie a moment to recognize the threat was real. He was looking back at the semicircle of OPA toughs at their back, directing his empty gaze at them. But Bobbie saw a vein at his temple throbbing like he was at risk of a stroke. The muscles moved under his skin like taut cable dragging over his jawbone.
“Amos,” she said, and then she wasn’t talking anymore because she was in a fight.