“Hard times,” she said, because the drones might be listening.
She walked away, heading north along the drum. The straight line of sun above her, the ruins of the engineering decks far away at her back. Being out in public like this left her feeling exposed. The Laconians were everywhere, the checkpoints twice as thick as they’d been before, and everywhere she looked, faces shaped by fear. The Laconians’ fear that their control over the station hadn’t been enough to stop the underground. The locals’ fear of Laconian reprisals. Her fear that she’d be found out, or that she’d broken something she wasn’t going to be able to mend.
Saba’s network had managed to get the warning out pretty well. The death toll in the explosion was low. She’d heard a dozen, and most of them Laconian, but it was hard to know what was true. It was as deep in the culture of the Belt as bones in their bodies that you didn’t fuck with the environmental systems. She hadn’t thought about the symbolic meaning of her plan, or what it took for Saba and Katria to agree to it. To Bobbie, they’d been getting important intelligence and covering their tracks. To the Belters, they’d been saying that they would be free of Laconian rule, even if the only freedom was death. If not everyone on the station signed on for that, she couldn’t blame them.
A swath of green grass lawn on her right had a classroom’s worth of children, a teacher talking about insects and soil. A man on a bicycle rode past her, whistling to let people know he was coming, and to clear the path. All the things that had happened before Duarte and Trejo and Singh. She couldn’t guess how many of the people she was walking past would have turned her in to the authorities if they’d known. How many would have applauded her. There was no way for her to ask.
That was the trick of living under the thumb of a dictator. It broke every conversation, even the private ones. The invasion had wounded everyone, one way or another. Herself very much included.
Her hand terminal chimed, and she plucked it out of her pocket with a sense of dread. The message was from Alex, and all it said was WHEN YOU HAVE A MINUTE. The underground was still using encrypted back channels. The security forces wouldn’t see the message in their logs. But if Bobbie got picked up, or someone looked over her shoulder, the words would be innocuous. Saba’s cramped halls and corridors were the only place they could speak freely. Everywhere else on Medina had become the land of subtext.
She found an escalator and let it carry her down into the body of the drum. It wasn’t far to the entry to Saba’s alternate station, but they all had to be careful to see they weren’t followed. Their bubble of freedom was fragile, and once it popped, it wouldn’t come back.
Alex was waiting for her when she ducked into the access corridor. The flesh under his eyes looked ashy and his shoulders slumped like he was under a higher gravity than they were. He smiled, though, and that her friend seemed pleased to see her counted for a lot. For more than it should have, even.
“How’s the weather out there?” he asked as they made their way down toward the makeshift galley.
“Stormy,” she said. “Get the feeling it’ll get worse before it gets better too.”
“That was a given.”
In the galley, half a dozen of Saba’s people sat at the tables, talking. The air smelled like noodles in black sauce, but the food was gone. Bobbie wasn’t hungry anyway. One of Katria’s men, a crook-nosed guy named Jordao, nodded to her, smiling a little too widely. She nodded back with a sense of dread. This was not a time she wanted someone hitting on her.
“Any word?” she asked, her voice low even though security wouldn’t hear her. She wasn’t afraid of being found out here, but the wounds were fresh. Some things didn’t need to travel outside the family.
“On Holden, no,” Alex said.
“Okay,” Bobbie said. It cut her a little every time there was nothing, and she welcomed it. If it came back that she’d killed him, the hurt would be a million times worse. Every little wound was a good thing because it wasn’t the killing blow.
“That stuff Naomi pulled off the encryption machine? It’s working. Saba’s folks are able to dig through a bunch of stuff we intercepted before. Of course, the Storm’s not talking to Medina anymore since we blew the channel, so we’re not getting anything new. But it makes it rough for the bad guys that they can’t have their ship talk to the station without radio or tightbeam, so …”
He trailed off like his words were running out of pressure.
“So we won,” she said. “Go us.”
“Doesn’t feel like it, does it? I keep asking myself what the hell happened.”
“We lost Holden.”
Alex shook his head, tapped four fingertips on the table. “Yeah, and that’s hard, but something happened before that. We’ve faced all kinds of bad before now, and it never split up the family. It was always everyone else, never us. Now Naomi’s off in her room, and Amos is wherever the hell Amos is. You’re going for long walks. We used to be a crew. Now it’s me and Claire playing cards and worrying about everyone.” She heard the accusation in his voice, and she wanted to push back at him. Only he was right. Something deeper was wrong. Had been wrong.
In the hallway, Saba’s voice. A woman replied. It was all too quiet to make out the words. The people at the other table laughed about something. Bobbie hunched forward, her scowl deep enough to ache.
“Holden’s not just Holden,” she said, knowing it was an evasion but saying it anyway. “He’s the face of the Rocinante. He’s been on newsfeeds since before I joined up. He’s the special man. We pulled this thing off, and we lost one person in the operation. That’s a win. If it had been you or me or Claire that got caught, we’d still be celebrating, but it was Holden. Now it feels like we lost our good-luck charm.”
“Feels like that to them, sure,” Alex said, pointing to the others with his thumb. “But we lost him before, and it didn’t break us. Him and Naomi retiring was sad. And then he didn’t go away, and that was weird.”
“Yeah. The whole Captain Draper thing might have worked if he’d actually been out of the picture—”
Alex leaned forward, talking over her.
“But we know better. Whatever’s going on with Amos and you, it didn’t start when Holden left. Or when he came back. It was when that big-ass ship steamed through the gate from Laconia and fucked everything sideways. And now Naomi’s curling up in her bunk while everything’s still on fire.”
“She’s not helping with the decrypt?”
Alex shook his head once, sharply.
“She can’t pull back,” Bobbie said. “She’s the best tech on the station. Saba’s people are fine, but she’s better. She can’t just stop working because …”
Because her lover’s dead. Or worse. Bobbie felt the hurt and the guilt again.
“We need her,” Alex agreed. “I’ll have a talk with her if you want. Unless you want to be the one who kicks her butt?”
“I really don’t.”
“Good, because I don’t want to be the one who tells Amos to get his shit together. So that one’s on you.”
To Bobbie’s surprise, she smiled. For a moment, she could pretend the cramped little galley was the Rocinante. That she and Alex were burning between the gates and the stars. She put a hand on his arm, grateful that her friend was there. And that however shitty things got, the plan was still to fix them.
Alex’s smile was enough to show he understood everything she hadn’t spoken. “Right?” he said.
“You’re Naomi. I’m Amos. Then if Holden’s still alive, we find him, crack him loose, and get the hell out of Dodge before the next big-ass ship comes through that gate.”
“See? Now you’re talking sense,” Alex said. He sighed. “Which is good, because I thought I was going to have to tell you to stop sulking, and I really wasn’t looking forward to the part where you punched me in the mouth.”
Saba stood at the wider part of the hallway where an access panel had been taken out and never replaced. He held his arms above his head, bracing against the ceiling with the unconscious ease of someone ready for a ship that might move unexpectedly. He lifted his chin as Bobbie came close.
“Hey, I’m looking for Amos,” she said.
“Problem?”
“Tell you when I find out,” she said. “He’s not answering his comms.”
Saba’s brow furrowed. “Que shansy que he’s after Holden?”
“I wouldn’t put the odds high that he’d go on an extraction by himself,” Bobbie said. Then, a moment later, “I mean not zero, but not high.”
“See it stays, if you can,” Saba said. “We’re carrying plenty enough already, and more rolling down, yeah?”
Something in his voice caught her. “More news?”
Saba hesitated, then shifted his head. Come this way. “You looking for yours, me looking for you. You want the good word first, or the worrying?”
“Good,” Bobbie said. “I’m looking for good.”