She and Naomi waited for a gap in the flow of bodies, then ducked into a public restroom. Clarissa sat on the couch built into the wall. She felt a little nausea haunting the back of her throat, but it wasn’t bad. Naomi went to the sink and washed her hands slowly, not to make them clean but to make it look like they weren’t just loitering in the place should anyone from station security come in.
The plan—their part of it anyway—was simple enough. Or at least it was from Clarissa’s perspective. She’d tried to walk Alex through it once, and she was pretty sure he’d only followed about half. The sensor arrays on the Medina were all linked to the main system, but they all had their own backup batteries. Shutting down the power would keep Medina from seeing where the ships went in real time, but it wouldn’t clear the local caches in all the sensor arrays. As soon as the power grid came back, the arrays would check in, reconnect, and deliver everything they’d saved.
And that process right there had a vulnerability in it. When the arrays checked in to reconnect, the system could request a diagnostic run. The arrays would take about twenty seconds to cycle through their diagnostics and return the results with a fresh check-in. During those twenty seconds, no new data came in. And if the array check-in requests got routed to a false system that only replied with diagnostic requests, they could keep doing that until some poor bastard figured out where the false route was coming from or else physically went out to the arrays and ran a new dedicated line.
When she’d gotten to about this point in the description, Alex’s eyes had lost their focus, and she’d simplified. Make a fake traffic card. Put the fake traffic card in at the secondary power junction. Blow the primary power junction to reset all the arrays. Arrays don’t come back on without a lot of tedious work. She’d gotten a thumbs-up from him then. It had been cute.
It was always strange to remember that she knew things that other people didn’t. Not just about power-and signal-routing protocols. What it was like to murder someone who’d only ever been kind to you. How it felt when the people you’d dedicated your life to killing took you in as family. Even though she knew better, she always defaulted to the idea that her life wasn’t singular. That whatever she’d done must not have been that odd, because after all, she’d done it.
The door opened and the bomb guy came in carrying a ceramic toolbox. Jordao. He nodded to Clarissa and then to Naomi. Between the hunch in his back and his ashy skin, he looked like a sample picture of “furtive possible terrorist.” If we’re going to pull this off, that guy’s going to have to calm the fuck down.
“Hey,” Clarissa said.
“Hoy,” he responded. “Bist bien?”
“No problems so far,” Naomi said. “But we’ve been out of touch. You heard anything?”
“Unauthorized launch,” Jordao said as he set the toolbox beside the sink and opened it. “Nos ew b??”
“Yes, that’s one of ours.”
“Perdíd,” he said, forcing a grin. “How many plays playing in one day?”
“One less if we don’t move,” Naomi said.
Jordao opened the case and tossed earpieces to her and Naomi before fitting his own. “Katria, she didn’t parle ero que la, right? They’re going to be down on us hard after this. Alles la preva? Look like we were in a kids’ school.”
“If this works the way it’s supposed to, that won’t be a problem,” Clarissa said, shifting the earpiece so it was a little more comfortable. “Just stick with us, and you’ll be fine.”
Naomi dried her hands, pulled her hand terminal out of her pocket, checked it, put it back. “We should go,” she said.
Jordao closed the toolbox, hoisted it onto his hip, and followed Naomi out. Clarissa brought up the rear. The shakes were a little better. A little less. That was sort of a good thing, because she hated the shakes. It was sort of bad, because the exhaustion came next, and she needed to get through the mission. At least enough not to slow Naomi down.
Outside, the halls were emptier. This is an emergency alert. Report to shelters immediately and await official instructions. Naomi turned toward the ramp leading down toward the outside of the station. Clarissa put her hands in her pockets and tried to look bored. Her mind divided itself gracefully between rehearsing the steps that she’d need to take to swap traffic cards and watching for security patrols. When Saba broke the silence, it startled her.
“Evacuation teams are at the docks. Waiting for clear sign, yeah?”
Naomi put a hand to her ear. Hearing her through the earpiece and in person at the same time gave her words a little echo. Like they had more weight than they should have.
“Message received,” she said. “We’re going in.”
It would only take a couple of minutes to swap the card and set the charges. After that, they’d get to the docks if Saba’s people could hold them that long, or if Laconian security retook them, an airlock. Naomi paused at an access panel, checked her hand terminal, and nodded. This was the one. Jordao was sweating and pale. He looked worse than she did.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “We have a surprising amount of experience with weird situations.”
Naomi leaned against the access panel. A security drone passed through the intersection behind them, but didn’t turn their way. Clarissa felt a little surge of adrenaline, but it only served to highlight the growing torpor in her muscles. Do this, she thought. Get this done. You can rest when you’re dead.
The access panel clicked and slid down.
“What are we doing here?” Jordao said. “Got to go, us.”
“We’re doing the thing that makes the next part matter,” Naomi said, then stepped aside. The guts of the ship would have looked chaotic to anyone who didn’t know the things she did. For her, there was a simple logic in every weld, every conduit, every connector. She took the doctored traffic card out of her pocket, plucked the old one out, and slotted hers in. The fault indicator barely blinked to amber, and then went back to a flickering, happy green.
“Okay,” she said, sliding the panel back into place. “Let’s go set the charges.”
But when she started walking, she knew it was going to be harder than she thought. If they moved fast enough, they’d be done before she ran out of energy. That was why Naomi was here, after all. Because none of them thought she could do it by herself. Because they weren’t necessarily wrong.
The worst part was that she’d done it to herself. The damage to her body, the wear and the weariness, were all products of conscious, determined choices made by a girl she hadn’t been in decades. She carried the weight of those decisions like a sack of bones. Like a toolbox full of them.
Some sins carried their own punishment. Sometimes redemption meant carrying the past with you forever. She’d gotten used to that over the years, but it was still pretty fucking inconvenient.
“Down here,” Jordao said, waving them on.
“I know,” Naomi said.
The door to the primary power junction was reinforced. A red border was painted around the frame, with warnings in half a dozen languages that all meant Please be careful. There’s a lot of things in here that we’ll have to fix after they finish killing you.
Jordao opened the door, and Naomi stepped past him into the maintenance way beyond—
And then stepped backward, her arms rising. Running footsteps came from behind her, sudden and loud. A young man in the blue uniform of Laconian security stepped out from the red door, a pistol leveled at Naomi’s stomach. Rough hands grabbed Clarissa by the shoulder and threw her to the floor. Jordao leaned against the wall and sank down to sitting.
“There a problem, sir?” Naomi asked, her voice the perfect echo of innocence.
“Knees,” the pistol man said. “And keep your arms up while you do it.”
Naomi looked down at her. Clarissa saw no sorrow in her eyes, only calculation. And then a conclusion. Naomi sank to her knees. Jordao’s head was leaned back, looking at the ceiling and taking deep gulping breaths. He still had the toolbox under his arm, and she thought he might be about to set off the charges and turn them all to paste, until he started laughing. It wasn’t mirth or gloating, but it was relief. Even before he spoke, Clarissa understood they’d been sold out. She laid her head against the rubber matting on the deck as someone put a knee in the small of her back and started pulling her arms behind her. The exhaustion was coming on stronger now. The deck felt almost comfortable.
“There’s a thing,” Jordao said. “A thing they put behind an access panel. No savvy mé que, but I can show you where, yeah?”
“What was it?” the pistol asked Naomi.
Naomi shook her head ruefully. “Afraid you’re going to have to go fuck yourself, coyo.”
He hit her, stepped forward. Clarissa felt the zip tie going around her right wrist while the guy fumbled with her left. She rolled her head. Five of them, all told. All with guns drawn. The pistol came down, ready to end Naomi where she lay.
“You’re sure you can find whatever it is?” the man said.
“’Course I am,” Jordao said. “Where are your Marines? You said there’d be Marines.”