Except that he was going to blow a hole in it.
Amos rode shotgun, his hands splayed wide on his knees, his head freshly shaved. From his place in the backseat, Holden mostly saw the back of the big man’s neck—white skin flecked with age spots but still muscular and hard. He didn’t need to see the amiable smile to know it was there, and how little it meant. A massive conduit wrench clanked at Amos’ feet. Katria drove with the studied boredom of someone who knew the consequences of drawing the attention of station security. Her hair was already in a tight bun, prepped for the null g of engineering. She tapped her palm against the side of the cart as if she were listening to music, so maybe she already had her earpiece in. Holden tried to lean back against the seat, but in the lower g, it just scooted him forward. The bomb rested on the bench beside him like a fourth person.
It wasn’t big. A square box, safety orange with scratches at the edges and corners, the marks of long use. He didn’t know exactly what was inside it, only that Katria was certain it would blow the right kind of hole into the pressure tanks and that the ruptured pressure tanks would blow the right part of the station apart. She also said that, in its present form, it was both hard for security to detect and stable enough to play football with if you didn’t mind a square ball. Still, Holden didn’t rest his elbow on it.
They were nearly at the top of the ramp when a line of carts stopped them, all heading the same direction as they were and all stuck waiting. At the entrance to the transfer point, three Laconian Marines in power armor were talking to a dark-skinned woman in a green jumpsuit.
“Checkpoint,” Holden said.
“Inconvenient,” Katria said. She sounded like it was an annoyance more than an immediate threat to all their lives and the safety of everyone in the underground who was counting on them. He really did admire the way she did that.
The raid had come two shifts before, when Holden had been in his sleep cycle. Between the time he’d curled up in the bunk and put his head on the thin pillow and when he’d opened his eyes again, a quarter of Saba’s people had been snatched up and a man named Overstreet was on all the screens in the station telling the rest of Medina about it. And the Typhoon was already past its flip-and-burn, braking now toward the other side of the Laconia gate. They weren’t saying exactly when it was supposed to arrive, but their data placed it at around ten days. And the news from Sol looked grim, even correcting for the fact that it was all coming through the state-run newsfeed.
The noose was drawing tight. And in order to have any chance of escaping it, they were about to at least risk the lives of, and most probably kill, a bunch of people who were on the engineering decks at the wrong time.
“Holden. Do you have to do that?” Katria asked.
“Do what?”
“Grunt.”
“Was I grunting?”
“Cap does that when he’s thinking about something he don’t like,” Amos said.
“He has a wide variety to choose from,” Katria said.
From the way they talked, Holden could almost believe that they wouldn’t kill each other, given the chance. Almost, but not enough that he was sorry to be there. Maybe Katria really didn’t hold a grudge about the fight that Amos had started. And maybe Amos wasn’t spoiling to start another one. Or maybe the bomb was the most stable thing in the cart.
“I’ll think happy thoughts,” Holden said. “Butterflies. Rainbows.”
“What the fuck is a butterfly?” Katria said.
The cart ahead of them shifted, and they followed. It took fifteen minutes to get to the guards and then a minute and a half to get past them. Their cover story—Holden and Amos were applying for on-station work permits since their ship was locked down, and Katria was taking them to an on-site test—never even came up. Katria drove the cart to its queue, strapped the bomb to her back, and led them into the engineering decks, moving from handhold to handhold with the unremarked grace of someone who’d spent a good portion of their life on the float. Amos followed with the conduit wrench in his fist like a club.
Once the drum was well behind them, Holden pulled the earpiece out of his pocket and turned on the contact microphone.
“—is clear,” Clarissa said. “Can you confirm?”
“Yup,” Alex replied, his voice slow in the way that meant he was concentrating. “I’m moving my little pixies through now. Gimme just a … All right, I’m through.”
“Turning the recycler back on,” Clarissa said.
Clarissa and her team were in the drum, tapped into the environmental controls through a back door that, if they were found out, Saba would never be able to use again. Alex was back in the underground’s galley, flying the drones with his hand terminal and several layers of encryption. Naomi and Bobbie were, he assumed, loitering outside the secure server room, ready to force their way in. It was strange hearing their voices as if they were with him. It made him feel like he was back on the Rocinante.
The engineering decks of Medina were a lesson in the way ships learned and changed over time. If he squinted, he could still see the bones of the original, unmodified space, but years and mission drift had altered everything. Here, a section of floor had a slightly different color where a bulkhead had been taken out. There, a set of conduits had been rerouted with the three-point welding style that Martians favored. The pipes along the walls were labeled in half a dozen languages and safety-regulation styles. History made physical. Even where the walls were had changed over the years, added extra reinforcement from when the docks had been built or taken away when the new generation reactors had been put in place. Katria led the way down a side corridor, moving from handhold to foothold to handhold. Amos followed close behind her, only crowding her a little, and she seemed not to notice. Or at least not to care. Their little triumvirate. Katria to place the charge, Amos to keep an eye on her, and Holden to keep an eye on him.
A young woman floated past them, coming the other way. She had an electrician’s rig strapped to her arm, and her hair was the same texture Naomi’s had been when they’d first met. She passed Katria, then Amos. When she and Holden landed at the same handhold, she smiled an apology and pushed quickly off. He wondered whether they were about to kill her. Seemed possible. He hated the thought.
“Alex?” Bobbie said. “You’re awfully quiet there, buddy. Everything all right?”
“Yeah, sorry. Just … there’s a little lag. It’s not bad, but it makes me paranoid. Last thing I want is one of these charges to go off in a vent someplace. Take the whole group out.”
“That would be bad,” Bobbie agreed.
“Jim?” Naomi said. “Are you on yet?”
“We’re here,” he said softly. “Past the checkpoint. Not at the pressure tank yet.”
“There was a checkpoint?” Bobbie said.
Amos’ voice was calm. “Nothing we couldn’t handle, Babs.”
“I’m coming up on the last turn here,” Alex said.
“There’s a carbon dioxide scrubber intake,” Clarissa said. “Don’t get caught in the draft. I’m accessing it now.”
Katria started whistling between her teeth, a tuneless sound that her mic didn’t pick up. They reached an access panel with caution placards in a dozen languages and half the colors of the rainbow. CAUTION HIGH PRESSURE SYSTEM. Katria plucked a knife from her boot and pried the panel open as casually as if she did it every day.
“Make sure no one’s coming,” she said.
“You got it,” Amos replied, sailing on a little farther down the corridor and slipping to the center of the narrow space so that anyone coming the other way would have a hard time getting past him and his massive wrench. Katria pulled the bomb off her back and popped the case open. The workings inside didn’t look like much. A cone of carbon-silicate lace, the same as a ship’s plating. A hand terminal. A pair of standard wires. It didn’t look like enough to do much damage. Certainly not enough to blow out the side of the station. But of course, it wasn’t. That was all coming from the pressure tanks on the other side of the bulkhead. This was just the pin that popped that balloon.
“Okay,” Clarissa said. “You’re good to go.”
“Heading through,” Alex said. “And we’re past. The vent for the server room should be just ahead. Looks … looks a little higher grade than I was expecting.”
“Do we have a problem?” Bobbie asked. He could hear the tension in her voice. The electrical technician he’d bumped into intruded into his memory, and with it the faint and compromised hope that maybe it would all go wrong and they’d have to abort the mission.