“Word from a coyo on the cleaning crew is Holden’s alive. Locked down tight, but not dead.”
A tightness released in Bobbie’s gut. Whatever else happened, she hadn’t killed him. And more than that, when she found Amos, she’d have it on her side. She felt a deep gratitude that she’d run into Saba before he’d found him. She had to let Alex know. And Naomi. And everyone. The relief was profound.
“That’s … Okay. What’s the worrying?”
“Message from the union. From the spy repeater.”
“Wait,” Bobbie said, following him as he walked toward his cabin. “We’ve got communications lines open? I thought we shut that down.”
“Turned it back on for this,” Saba said. “It ate a missile right after. Drummer thought it was worth burning the channel for.”
“Something big, then?”
“Come see.”
Saba had Drummer’s message up on his cabin’s monitor. The change in her face was shocking. It wasn’t only that the president looked tired and thinner. She looked older, like the last few weeks had been measured in years instead of days. Saba didn’t speak, but started the message from the beginning. Bobbie listened until the end, then played it again, making sure she understood. The loss of Pallas, and the loss of time.
“Well,” she said. “Holy shit.”
“Yeah,” Saba said. “Got my people going through all the information we intercepted. All that’s finished decrypting, anyway. Nothing about lost time or boiling up the vacuum.”
“Even if we found something, it’s not like we can sneak a message back if the repeater’s dead.”
“Not sneak one, no,” Saba agreed. “Can shout, though. If it was the right time. Medina’s not home anymore. Not for us. When we scatter, maybe send something back down to People’s Home. Tell them what we’ve got to tell them. If we get anything.”
“Fair point,” Bobbie agreed. “And that is the plan now, right? Clear a path and evacuate as many as we can before the new ship gets here?”
“Already putting out the word to the underground,” he said. He sounded as tired as she was. “Just the ones we trust. Saying to get ready. Window opens, and get to the ships and go. Everyone someplace different. Harder to kill us if we’re not in one place.”
“Even better if they don’t know who went where,” Bobbie said. “I’d love to find a way to take out Medina’s sensor arrays when we go.”
“Would be sweet,” Saba said, his voice dull.
“You holding up okay?” Bobbie asked.
Saba shrugged toward the image of Drummer still on the screen. “That woman is my heart, and I lost her. Lost my ship. Lost my place for my people. Got an enemy ship killing my cities and stations, and now it can turn off minds in a whole system at once. Got another one like it braking toward me. Got all those Marines in power armor ready to shoot me and mine through the brainpan, and the loosest mouth on a thousand worlds is in the enemy’s jail. So given so, I’m all right.”
“Holden won’t rat us out. He’s given a lot of unvetted press releases over the years, but that’s not the same as this.”
“They have him, they’ll have us. Not talking him down, but these people were Mars before they were this. Ask anyone in the OPA from the old days. Martian interrogation, it’s a question of how long until the break. Never if. Better that he’d died.”
“We can move,” Bobbie said. “Do you have any holes that Holden didn’t know about?”
“Few,” Saba said, reluctantly. “But fewer now. My people are moving now. Still room for you and yours, but there won’t be. Not for long. And …”
He shook his head.
“And what,” Bobbie said. “If there’s something more, I need to know.”
Saba shrugged and nodded at the screen. “When it comes, if it comes, the one system we can’t go to? Sol. Anyplace else, I can try for. Anyplace else, I can go. But no matter where it is, she won’t be there. Wasn’t so bad when the repeater still was, but with it gone, it feels …”
A tear tracked down Saba’s brown cheek. Bobbie looked away.
It was so easy to forget all the others. Not just Saba, but all of them. The crews of all the ships trapped in the dock beside the Roci. The children in Medina’s schoolrooms, the medical staff in the clinics. The artists playing music live outside the cafés out of love of doing it. Medina Station had been the nearest thing to a void city before the void cities were built. It was a home for a generation of people, and every one of them was carrying something now that made their days harder. She thought of the prisoners in the public jail, the angry man who’d come to watch them. Who had he lost back on Sol? What was keeping him awake in the nights?
There were so many families, so many crews, parents and children, lovers and friends, whose lives had been changed past recognition since Laconia gate had opened. It wasn’t just her and the Roci crew. It wasn’t just Saba. Everyone was dancing on this same landslide, and no one knew how to make it end well.
She wanted to say something comforting, but she couldn’t bring herself to lie. The best she could think of was to change the subject.
“When we get out,” she said. “Not if. When. We’re going to need a plan. If every ship just bolts off on its own, we’ll lose contact. They shouldn’t know where we went, but we should. At the very least, we should have a record of who went where. This every-man-for-himself-and-God-against-all shit’s romantic, but we have to plan for something past just this.”
Saba nodded. In the distance, voices and footsteps.
“Not just encrypted but in code,” Saba said. “Something where only we know what it means.”
“We?”
“Ou y mé,” Saba said. “Leaders of the underground, us. First among dissidents.”
Bobbie chuckled. “Well, there’s a fucking job title.”
The footsteps came faster now, and coming closer. Saba looked up like an animal smelling smoke. Fuck, Bobbie thought. Not something else. It’s too much already. We can’t carry something else.
The woman who appeared in Saba’s doorway was older, white hair pulled back in a tight braid. Her body was long and thin, her head a little too large for her shoulders. The classic build of someone who’d grown up without gravity to hold her down. She even had the split circle of the OPA tattooed on her arm. She should have looked ancient, but the brightness in her eyes belonged on a woman a third her age. She looked from Saba to Bobbie and back with something like triumph in her eyes.
“Maha?” Saba said. “Que?” And then to Bobbie, “Maha one of our best communications techs. Had her hands in the codes since before I was born, yeah?”
“And I know all their secrets,” she said in a weirdly accented voice. She held out a dumb terminal that wasn’t connected to Medina’s system. “The new decryption run turned over some stones. And look you what was squirming under one.”
Bobbie was closer. She took the handheld terminal and flipped through the file there. It was titled MEDINA STATION SUPPLEMENTARY SECURITY REVIEW AS REQUESTED BY GOVERNOR SANTIAGO SINGH. The file’s creator was listed as Major Lester Overstreet. She checked the file length and whistled.
“Que?” Saba said.
“This is way too long to just be an incident report,” Bobbie said. “It’s …”
The section headings were Materials, Procedures, Personnel, Protocols, Audit Summary, Recommendations. She recognized the style of paragraph marking from when she’d trained back on Olympus Mons. It looked like an MMC security report, but twice as long. Maybe three times. She shifted through one after another, her head starting to swim a little.
“I think … Saba, I think this is everything,” she said.
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Alex
His back hurt. Of all the thousand things that were jacked up and wrong in his life right now, the one that chose to make him crazy was that. His back hurt, just below his rib cage where it clicked for a couple days after they’d been on the float for a while. Now it clicked and ached a little. Just time and age catching up with him, but it made him crazy. Probably anything that he couldn’t fix was going to make him crazy right now.
He walked down the tight hallway, his shoulder brushing the conduits and pipes, and told himself that things were getting better. Not losing Holden. That was still a long way from better. But the rest of it. The rest of them. Whatever else happened, he still had Bobbie.