Saba stepped forward, Holden at his side, and greeted them, waved them forward with smiles and Belter salutes. He let them check him for weapons first as a kind of social courtesy, and Holden did the same. The old phrase from back in the day came to Bobbie’s mind: There’s OPA and there’s OPA. Same now as it had been then. It was always a little eerie to see how comfortably the men and women of the Transport Union fell back into being criminals. And how well she and the crew of the Roci fit in with them when they did.
Amos stretched his shoulders and neck.
“I know,” Bobbie said. “I don’t like it either.”
“Don’t recognize the one with the nose,” Amos said, pointing with his chin toward Katria’s bodyguard. “The other ones, I’m pretty sure we danced with.”
Bobbie considered their faces. The one Amos was talking about stood in the rear, just behind Katria. He had olive skin, close-cropped hair, and a long nose that had been broken a couple times and not set right. A white scar marked one nostril like someone had slit it for him once. She was pretty sure she’d have remembered him if she’d run into him before. The others, she wasn’t as certain. Katria, obviously, and two of her guards at the front all seemed familiar enough.
“Maybe we’ll get to know him,” Bobbie said.
“Now you’re just flirting with me, Babs. Promising a good dustup when everyone else is here for talking.”
“Yeah, well,” Bobbie said. “A girl can dream.”
The banter felt almost normal, but she wasn’t easy with it. Not yet. She was plenty willing to play along for the moment, though. Katria caught her eye and nodded. Bobbie smiled, her cheek pulling at its new scab, and nodded back. It could have been respect between equals or the handshake at the start of a fight. Bobbie figured they’d all find out which soon enough.
The meeting space was new to her. A long, thin room that had been part of the water-recycling system recently enough that it still smelled a little bit of wet plant and sewage. Twice as long as it was wide, there was enough space for the Roci crew, Saba, and a half dozen of his most trusted crew. The ones who already knew the plan. It wasn’t a pleasant spot, but the cartography of the underground’s borders were shifting now, more and more often. The Laconian surveys had been finding the holes in the system surveillance, denying them free access to the corridors and units they’d made their own. They’d been spending more and more of their time in the monitored public spaces. Part of that had been reconnaissance for her plan. Part of that had been that there were fewer and fewer spaces left on Medina where they could speak freely.
All through the station, there were soldiers and crowd-suppression drones. It didn’t bother her, passing the people with haunted eyes, walking like the deck might be too fragile to support their mass. She understood them. The others, the ones who were laughing and talking and listening to music loud enough that she could hear the bass, bothered her more. They were acting like the open-air prisons and the power-armored Marines, the communications control and shift curfews were normal. And because of that, they were.
It wouldn’t be long before the Laconians started shipping through the slow zone again. Maybe she and the others would be allowed back on the Roci when that happened, but Bobbie found it hard to believe there wouldn’t be monitors placed in there too. It could take Naomi and Clarissa days or weeks to purge them all and make their ship fully their own again.
And by then, it would be too late anyway. Every day, every hour, brought the Typhoon’s arrival closer. And once it had cleared the Laconia gate, staying ahead of the occupying forces became orders of magnitude more difficult. Which was the optimist’s way of saying “impossible.” Bobbie felt the pressure of time slipping away like she was watching a door close, with her on the wrong side of it. If it hadn’t been for the time pressure, she wouldn’t have gone along with Saba’s suggestion to reach out to the Voltaire Collective. Or at least not so soon after she and Amos had kicked their asses.
The only good thing was that Katria and her people were just as screwed as Saba and Bobbie and Holden, and by the same things.
“So,” Katria said once the requisite sniffing was done, “I’m surprised at having so civil a meeting. I have to think you need something from me you can’t manage by yourselves?”
Saba smiled, but waved his hand twice sharply. “Too many ears, sa sa? Come sit with me and mine, have a drink, and we’ll talk about what we talk about.”
Katria crossed her arms.
“It’s not you,” Holden said. “It’s just that the fewer people know about this, the less chance someone gets picked up by security. You can’t tell anyone what you don’t know, right?”
Katria Mendez looked from Saba to Holden and then, pointedly over to where the Roci crew were sitting. Not just Bobbie and Amos, but Naomi and Alex and Clarissa besides. “So none of mine but all of theirs?”
“All of theirs already know,” Saba said. “They’re who wants to talk with you most.”
“They have strange ways of showing it,” Katria said.
“This is my house,” Saba said. “My salt on it, yeah? Parley. And if it’s nothing, it’s nothing. But we’re under the same thumb, you and me. Not asking you to love anyone. Just listen to.”
For a moment, Katria hesitated. Her scowl bit into her cheeks like it was going for bone. Bobbie had a brief flash of certainty that the whole Voltaire Collective was about to turn and walk away without even hearing her pitch, and she was more than a little relieved at the idea.
“Esá es bullshit,” the one with the nose spat. “They’re just trying to get you on your own, que? Make you not be here, that’s all. It’s all of us or none!”
“It’s my call, Jordao,” Katria snapped. “Not yours.”
The one with the nose—Jordao, apparently—stepped back, sulking. Holden was smiling like a salesman, as if his radiant goodwill could warm up every other interaction in the room. It left him looking more than a little ridiculous, but damned if Katria didn’t consider him for a long moment and chuckle.
“If I refuse, then we all took a long walk for nothing,” she said. Holden beamed. Bobbie wasn’t sure how he did it. The way he could disarm a situation with his almost palpable guilelessness astonished her every time.
“Thank you,” Holden said. “I really appreciate this.”
Saba lifted a hand and two of his people ghosted in from the corridor and led Katria’s guard away. Standing by herself, she didn’t seem any less imposing. The door to the corridor slid shut, and the bolt clicked. It was as near to privacy as anyone on Medina could have.
“So,” Katria said. “What’s on your mind?”
Bobbie took a long breath, let it out between her teeth. The idea had been hers from the start, and she’d been mulling it over for days. She hadn’t slept as much as she’d wanted. Even when she hadn’t been reviewing it and looking for holes in the plan, she’d felt too jagged and amped up to sleep. Part of that had been thinking about how to make the approach she was going for now.
“There’s a single point of contact between the Laconian destroyer and Medina,” Bobbie said. “And we have a bug on it.”
Katria’s eyes went a degree wider. She glanced over to Saba, who nodded. It was true. Katria didn’t sit, but her weight settled into her hips a little. Bobbie had her attention. That was good.
“The encryption isn’t breakable,” she said. “Not from the outside. The Martian codes it’s based on are solid. We might be able to crack them if we had between now and about a decade on, but we’re down to a countable number of days. So we’ve got enough intelligence gathered to fill libraries that we can’t read. But I think we can fix that.”
She plucked her hand terminal out of her pocket, slaved it to Saba’s local system, and pulled up the schematic of Medina that she’d been using. The cavernous center of the drum, command and control on one end, engineering and the docks and the massive but quiescent engines on the other. The elevator shafts that ran between them outside the surface of the drum. And also the ships in the dock, including—highlighted in red—the Gathering Storm.
“The longer goal is that we find a way to disable the Storm, here, shut down Medina’s sensor arrays, and distract or isolate the security forces on Medina long enough to let all these ships get off station and out through the rings before their reinforcements from Laconia get here. The short-term goal”—she zoomed in on a small red mark inside Medina proper, near the docks—“is this.”
“And that is?” Katria asked.
“It used to be backup power storage,” Bobbie said. “But since our guests from Laconia got here, it’s been repurposed.”
“The thing is,” Alex said, breaking in, “these Laconian fellas? They were all Martians to start, or their leadership were anyway. And they were serving just a little after me and Bobbie here did our tours.”