He looked from Bobbie to Katria to Saba and then back. Bobbie nodded him on. Alex licked his lips.
“One of the things we trained on was how to go about securing an enemy station,” he said, which wasn’t true. It was something Bobbie had trained to do, not him. Storm and control the homes and communities of Belters. If there was going to be a sore spot, this would be it. It was why Alex was saying it instead of the woman who’d cleaned Katria’s clock and left her zip-tied to her friends. It seemed less likely to rub on Katria wrong that way. “You heard of air-gap encryption strong rooms?”
Katria’s eyes were brighter. She hadn’t, but she didn’t want to admit that. Alex licked his lips again, shot a look from Bobbie to Katria and back to Bobbie, then went on. “One thing that we did was maintain physical separation between whatever ship was taking control and the local systems. Lay in a pipe to one of our own boxes on the station, and send any commands we wanted for the base there. Communications, control protocols, everything. It gets unencrypted there, and set onto onetime physical media to walk over to the local system. No live connections at all.”
“Bullshit,” Katria said.
“It’s standard,” Bobbie said. “And it’s part of why no one was ever able to hack back into a Martian ship from a controlled station. And since the Laconians are basing their protocols on Martian ones, this is where that machine is.”
“But the lag time—” Katria shook her head. “That’s impressive.”
“The room is crewed by two people, always. The door is physically locked. Not connected to the security grid, no electronic interface. Old-school bolt and key, and no keyhole on the outside. Can’t be hacked into remotely, can’t be circumvented easily,” Bobbie said. “And a full complement of guards at shift change.”
Katria took control of the model, zooming farther in on the encryption vault. Her face was thoughtful, which was better than Bobbie had hoped. It made her nervous to talk about this.
“I see,” Katria said. “You can’t get in without making a lot of noise and calling in the cavalry. Is that why you need me? To blow the door?”
“No,” Bobbie said. “We have a way in. We need your help to cover it up once we’re done.”
Katria traced a slow circle with her fingers. Go on.
Clarissa picked up the thread. “The room is still connected to the environmental system. But if we put a team here”—she pulled the model back to a larger frame and touched the power junctions near engineering—“we can shut down the fans and open the carbon dioxide scrubbers and recycling systems.”
“Choke them out?” Katria asked.
Alex shook his head. “Make a path to pilot some little drones in. Half a dozen of ’em with point-blasting charges. Take down the two guards, then use the rest to pop the lock.” He made a little boom sound with his lips and opened two fists in the physical cartoon of an explosion.
Bobbie pointed toward Naomi. “She has a snapshot cloning deck. I’ll have a crowbar and a hammer. We get in, make a full-state copy of the encryption box, and get out to the hardened-radiation shelter”—Bobbie moved the model—“here. And then you come in.”
“If los security coyos know we stole their codes,” Saba said, leaning against the wall, “they change things up, yeah? Not just new crypt but new procedures. Everything we’ve got turns into a whole lot less. So they can’t know what we do, even after it’s done.”
Holden pulled the model out to show where the Storm was docked against the side of the station. “We need to give them a different story. The Storm’s parked here. And the primary liquid-oxygen storage tanks are … right here. If that blows out, it will look like we’re trying to blow up the Storm, but Tycho built this place well. Lots of redundancy and fail-safes. There’s an explosion-relief route that’ll vent the pressure blast out along this pathway here … which takes out the communications vault. And, y’know, a bunch of other stuff.”
“You want to blow our air out as cover?” Katria said. “I think you may owe us an apology. We’re usually the ones who are called extreme.”
“Not our air,” Saba said. “Theirs as soon as they came here. We’re breathing on their grace, us. Plus, those tanks are docked-ship refills. Not for the habitat.”
“And there will be plenty in the secondary and tertiary tanks,” Holden said. “Remember, lots of redundancy, lots of fail-safes. And Tycho’s original design remembers longer than the people living in it do.”
Katria went quiet for a long time. Bobbie felt the anxiety growing in her gut. It had been a mistake to bring the Voltaire Collective in on this. It didn’t matter how much Saba trusted them or how good they were with demolitions. She should have kept it just within her own crew, where she could control it. Where she was sure of everyone …
“I don’t like it,” Katria said, shaking her head. “A lot of moving parts. The more pieces there are, the more ways there are for it to break.”
Bobbie shrugged. “If the time wasn’t so short, I’d do something simpler.”
“All we need is the right bomb, the right place,” Saba said. “You give us those, and we take the mission from there.”
“No,” Katria said. “You need the charges, you need someone to put the charges in the right places at the right time. And need someone on the remote switch who doesn’t panic and throw it a little too early and take out your team. And even if they don’t, do you think someone in a rad shelter’s going to live through that blow?”
Naomi cleared her throat. “They’re rated for it. But you’re right. We can’t know until we try.”
“What’s the evac plan once your little Armageddon is over?” Katria asked.
It was more than Bobbie had wanted to say. There should be some parts of the plan that weren’t being shared. Saba paused, weighing whether to bring Katria that far in. When he spoke, his voice was surly. He didn’t like having his hand forced any more than Bobbie did. “Vac suits in the shelter. Go out through the hole. Same airlock we used to bug the line the first time, we use it to get back in.”
Katria took control of the model again, turning it, moving through the lower reaches of Medina deck by deck. “It’s going to kill people,” she said. “When the engineering decks start breathing vacuum, not everyone’s going to make it to the shelters.”
“Savvy,” Saba said. “Has a price.”
“Is it one you’d pay?”
“Is,” Saba said, but Holden’s expression had a distance to it. Bobbie could tell what was in his mind. There could be innocent people on the decks when the time came. At best, their plan would risk them. At worst, some would be killed. If Saba and Katria were bothered by the idea, they didn’t show it. Holden was bothered by it. She wondered if he’d stand on principle and scrub the whole thing. It was even money, knowing him.
“Demolition team goes here,” Katria said. “Plant the charges, then fall back to the shelter and wait for the team with the stolen data to arrive, then blow it. Everyone leaves together, or no one does. It’s not my first time on an op like this. You’ll need a couple more vac suits, is all.”
Bobbie didn’t catch the important word until Clarissa spoke, her voice gentle and questioning. But Bobbie heard the sharpness under it. “Your first time on an op like?”
“Who else?” Katria said. “If you want it done right, you get the best to do it. I’m the best. I make the charges, I place the charges, and it’s my steady hand holding the detonator.”
The room was quiet apart from the soft hiss of the air recyclers and the soft, harmonic thrum of the ship. The hint of old sewage smelled a little worse. Saba had only wanted the Voltaire Collective involved for material support. They weren’t looking for another player when the operation took place. But telling Katria she couldn’t be active in the field … would it insult her? And if it did, would that be enough to get her to turn on them?
“Sounds good,” Amos said. “You and me on the demo team, Miss Kitty.”
His smile was placid and empty. Bobbie felt a shock of alarm. She met Holden’s gaze and shook her head a millimeter. This is a very bad idea. Holden swallowed, nodded, forced himself to smile as well.
“All right, then,” Holden said. “Clarissa leads the support team on environmental controls for Alex. Alex pilots in the drone swarm. Bobbie and Naomi take care of the server, and Katria, Amos, and I will set the charges to cover it all up afterward.”
Bobbie leaned back, a lump forming in her gut. Adding Holden in was not a better solution.
“This’ll be great,” Holden said.
Chapter Thirty: Singh