She’d put together her own map of the project. Not impeding the expansion, but taking control of it from within. The Personnel Directorate of Bara Gaon was her first target. They were already putting out requests for applications, beefing up the bureaucracy that would be evaluating new hires. Naomi had identified seven critical positions and built candidate profiles that Saba could use to flood the job openings with his allies. It was important that the people not be false identities, but actual people with real histories and qualifications. If they managed to get two of the seven positions now, it would be enough to give them an edge on later ones. Three, and they’d be able to cover their own tracks well enough that prying them out would be difficult even if Laconia became suspicious. Five, and Saba would effectively control the Bara Gaon Complex expansion.
She’d also identified problem issues. The chief administrator of Zehanat province on Bara Gaon-6—the planet they called Al-Halub—was a close friend of Carrie Fisk and openly supportive of Laconian rule. It was important that the projects based there be deprioritized and his personal influence undermined. Labor unions on the gas giant’s moons had ties to an old inner planets hate group and still fought against everything the Transport Union did with the zeal of the self-proclaimed oppressed. Saba would need to create other allies there. The local government had a communitarian faction that was growing more vocal about armed resistance against Laconia that would bring more scrutiny without gaining any useful ground if it wasn’t reined in.
You can’t fight a shooting war armed with paper clips, Bobbie said in Naomi’s imagination.
“Watch me,” Naomi answered. Her voice echoed with the music in the container. A pinch of annoyance bothered her. She closed down her files and pushed the monitor aside. In the time since she’d left Sol system, she’d hoped that their last conversation would have lost some of its power, but like a splinter under her skin, it bit a little every time she touched it.
When two people get in a fight, and only one has a gun and the will to use it? That’s a short damned fight.
Only it wasn’t Bobbie’s voice that said it this time. It was Amos’. A few decades flying the same ship together had built little versions of her family in her head. Made some part of them a part of her, even when she didn’t particularly want them to be. Even when the little mirrors of them only told her that their conversation wasn’t finished.
She hauled herself up out of the couch, the gimbals hissing as she shifted. She turned the music to a brighter selection with a clearer, faster beat. Something to push her. It was early in her day for a workout, but she needed to move. As if working the long muscles of her arms and legs and back could relieve a tension between her and people not present.
“It’s never a short fight,” she said as she hooked resistance bands to the top of her container. The fasteners had been painted gray when she’d first stepped into her little box. They were bright raw steel now. “Last time I fought it, it was generations old before I even stepped in the ring. We can’t shoot our way to peace.”
Peace isn’t the only good victory condition. How about just shooting our way to freedom or justice?
Naomi sank her feet into the floor loops, braced herself, locked the bands in place, and pulled. It was hard work. It hurt a little, but hurting a little was the point. The voice in her imagination wasn’t Amos’ now, but Jim’s.
That’s the thing about autocracy. It looks pretty decent while it still looks pretty decent. Survivable, anyway. And it keeps looking like that right up until it doesn’t. That’s how you find out it’s too late.
“I am fighting,” she said, then grunted and pulled down hard again. “The quiet work’s still a fight. It’s a better one. It’s one we can win.”
Not in our lifetimes, Bobbie said. And that was the point, really. That was the deep, true thought that Naomi was working her own way through with all the beloved voices in her head.
Sweat was pooling at her hairline, the quarter g not quite enough to pull it down her face. Her arms were trembling with every pull. She made herself go slowly, watching her form. It made the work harder, which she liked. And it made her less likely to injure herself, which was critical. Slow, careful, focused. Avoiding damage.
Feels like it ought to be a metaphor for something, Jim’s voice said, and she laughed at his joke.
Growing older was a falling away of everything that didn’t matter. And a deepening appreciation of all the parts that were important enough to stay.
She had unhooked the bands and started repositioning them to work her back when the alert came, chirping on her couch monitor and her hand terminal at the same moment. She wound the bands up and put them away. She’d finish later. The monitor had a single notification up. The Cama had picked up an encrypted message that matched her confirmation signature. Out in the depths below Auberon’s ecliptic, the bottle had broken and its data had all spilled out. She grabbed a copy out of the ship buffer and had her system run a comparison. There would be some degradation. There always was. But there was also repetition in the signal and checksums along the way. It would take terrible luck or a very high-radiation event to swamp her work past the point of recovery. She only made sure because it was the right thing.
All the files and reports opened from the copy as they had from the original files. The system’s final verdict popped up with a click like someone snapping their fingers. NO UNRECOVERABLE LOSS.
So that was done. Another round of analysis, a new set of orders and recommendations released to the wild. She had, of course, already started on the next one. She enjoyed the sense of accomplishment all the same.
She shifted to the newsfeeds, purging the unflagged copies local to her couch and replacing them again like dipping a cup into a fountain that never ran dry. Tapping her finger against the screen, she paged through the items the system thought most likely to pertain to her. A minor election on Sanaang had gone unexpectedly to the second-ranked candidate, a move she had recommended in her bottle before last. A code farm on Mars had partnered with Medina Station to build a new security infrastructure, which wasn’t what she’d wanted, but had been on her list of acceptable fallbacks. A security alert had gone out in Sol system. A red flag, but without the details to say what it was.
Except that whatever it turned out to be, she knew what it was. Bobbie’s war. The one with guns.
Somewhere out there, far enough away that even lightspeed meant hours, Bobbie and Alex were risking their lives. Maybe losing them. There was nothing she could do. Frustration washed over her. Or maybe she just became aware of what was always there.
She’d chosen her role. She’d picked her place, helped with designing the little dried shell-game pea that she lived in. There had been a dozen other ways she could have worked with the underground. Thousands of ways she could have made a new life without them. She was here because she had chosen to be here. The container had felt like solitude, not isolation. A refuge where she could wait for the mud in her heart to settle and her mind to become clear.
It had seemed like a good plan at the time. It had seemed to work. Now, her fingertips hovering over the security alert, she wasn’t sure it did anymore.
With a tap like she was killing an insect, she shut the newsfeeds. Her data analysis was still up behind it, cheerfully reporting NO UNRECOVERABLE LOSS.
“Seems like that should be a metaphor for something,” she said, and imagined Jim’s laughter beside her. Trading the same joke back and forth between them like they had in better days.
Then, a moment later, “God damn, but I have to get out of this fucking box.”
Chapter Nine: Teresa
Carrie Fisk was the president of the Association of Worlds. It was, Teresa knew, a measure of how important she was that President Fisk was allowed to meet with her father over breakfast. Teresa sat at her father’s right at the little table, and Fisk sat opposite him, so Teresa felt a little like she was watching table tennis listening to them talk.
“A trade compact between Auberon and the five-world group does have some real advantages,” Fisk said. “By picking a handful of systems to really focus on, we can make progress quickly. Auberon or Bara Gaon can bring another three to five systems up to self-sufficiency in seven to ten years, then each of those systems can take on clients. The geometric growth model brings all the systems up much faster than having every individual colony be an equal priority.”
Her father nodded slowly. It was a gesture she recognized. He glanced over to her and raised an eyebrow. A little gesture of complicity. Teresa could feel Fisk squirming a little. The woman was so anxious for her father’s approval it was a little embarrassing. Teresa shrugged. Just a few millimeters of movement that meant Do you want me to ask? Her father nodded.
“What about corruption?” Teresa said.
Fisk laughed. “Auberon’s reputation precedes it. Governor Rittenaur assures me that it’s under control. There were a few bad apples, but that’s to be expected in an unregulated colony. Now that it’s under Laconian supervision, the problem is being addressed.”