They parted in the corridor. Caspar headed for the passage leading deeper below the moon’s surface, Alex off to the left and toward the docks and the coffin apartments for people on shore leave. People like him. He walked with his hands stuck deep in the flight suit pockets, his eyes on the ground ahead of him. Avoiding eye contact with the people walking in the same halls. The passage came to a Y intersection with a brushed steel sculpture that didn’t seem to know if it was a human or a transport shuttle. Above it, the ships and their berths were all listed. All but his.
When Alex had been a boy back on Mars, his great-uncle Narendra had come to stay with his family for a week once while his group home in Innis Shallows had been renovated. Alex still remembered his great-uncle walking through the corridors of Bunker Hill with a calm, bemused expression while he and Johnny Zhou explained the fine points of the game they had been playing. Alex felt the same expression on his own face now.
Maybe it was something that happened with every generation, this sense of displacement. It might be an artifact of the way human minds seemed to peg “normal” to whatever they’d experienced first and then bristled at everything afterward that failed to match it closely enough. Or maybe the change that Laconia’s conquest was ushering in was different in kind from what had come before. Either way, the Callisto shipyard didn’t feel like Sol system anymore, or at least not the one Alex knew. It felt like the first days of Laconian rule. The sense of fear and fragility like a ringing in his ears that never went away. Amos used to say that everywhere was Baltimore. That wasn’t true anymore. Now everywhere was Medina.
His coffin apartment was near the docks. It was one of the larger models, a little over a meter high so that he could sit up in it. The mattress was old, recycled crash couch gel, and the walls and ceiling were layered glass and mesh with lights embedded in them to create the illusion of space going out beyond the surface. Alex crawled in, closed the access door, and made himself comfortable. He had a couple new entertainment feeds he’d been thinking about checking out. Over the years, he’d made himself an expert on neo-noir crime thrillers, and there had been work coming out of Ceres even before the Laconian takeover that used Pilkey montage to do some interesting things. He wondered, though, if signing in through the coffin’s system would compromise him. If Laconia knew enough about Alex Kamal to put together the kind of movies he liked, the kind of food he ate, the way he walked, and whatever other data he’d left behind him to pierce the mask that Saba had given him. If he was too much himself, would it send security officers to his door? Did it make more sense to watch something popular and generic and stay at the center of the herd?
He pulled up his profile on the coffin system. A red icon showed a private connection from the Storm. There was a certain irony in the fact that he was more worried that Laconia would catch him out because he watched a certain kind of entertainment feed than he was that actual encrypted communications from the underground would give him away. But there it was. He’d made the decision to trust Saba’s old OPA techs when he got into this business. Didn’t make sense to start second-guessing them now. He opened the message, and his son looked back at him from the screen.
“Hey, Da,” Kit said with a grin that reminded him of Giselle. Kit looked more like his mother than like him. Thank God. “Weird to hear from you again so soon. Are you in-system? I mean, don’t tell me. I know we’re all hush-hush. But hey. Things are great this semester. I’m pulling top marks in three of my sections, and”—the smile turned rueful—“I’ve got a good tutor for the other two. And . . . ah . . . yeah. So I’m dating this girl, and I think it’s starting to look kind of serious. Her name’s Rohani. I haven’t told her about . . . um . . . you. But if there ever gets to be a chance for you to come meet her? Mom is talking to her family, and I think she may be your daughter-in-law pretty soon here. So it would be good, yeah?”
There was more to the message, and Alex listened to it with a warmth in his chest, and a sorrow. He wasn’t going to meet the girl. He wasn’t going to attend the wedding if there was one. Rohani would go on the list with Amos and Holden and Clarissa. Another loss. It was just another loss. He’d live with it. He had to.
His hand terminal chimed, and an alert popped up from the false ID that Saba used for high-priority messages. With dread in his gut, he opened it.
BE ADVISED THAT THE TEMPEST HAS BROKEN ORBIT AND IS MOVING TOWARD JUPITER.
“Well,” Alex said to himself. “Shit.”
“My little man’s getting married?” Bobbie said, but she kept looking at the supply crates while she said it. “Girl will be lucky if I don’t swoop in and carry him off first.”
The warehouse was on the edge of the complex. It didn’t use the station’s power grid, and the environmental system was a retrofit from an old rock hopper. It left condensation on the walls and ceilings, water discoloration like leopard spots. The larger gear, like torpedoes, was still on the Storm. But the smaller salvage from the Laconian freighter had been transferred onto four wide rows of pallets and moved to the warehouse. Bobbie had unpacked them, scattering the storage crates through the space as she did her own private inventory. Scorch marks darkened some of the boxes. The chalky smell of ceramic that had been heated until it flaked hung in the air.
“You’re taking the news that the largest battleship in the empire is heading toward us very calmly,” Alex said.
She took a deep breath, and kept her voice patient. “Jillian’s getting word to everyone. The Tempest is days out, and this work needs to be done one way or the other. I’m hoping by the time I’m done with it, I’ll have a plan.”
“How’s that working for you?”
“Nothing so far. I’ll let you know.”
Alex sat on one of the boxes. He felt heavier than the gentle gravity of the moon could explain. “Bobbie, what are we doing here?”
She paused, looked over at him. She had a lot of different expressions, and he’d come to know most of them. He knew when he was talking to his friend and when she was the captain. Right now, she was listening to him as the woman he’d been on the Roci with, back in the day. The one who had known him since before Io.
“Fighting the enemy,” she said. “Degrading their ability to bring force and influence to bear. Denying them the use of resources.”
“Sure,” Alex said. “But to what end? I mean, are we trying to get back to the Transport Union running things? Or are we trying to make it so that every planet is calling its own shots, and then seeing if it all works out?”
Bobbie crossed her arms and leaned against a stack of boxes. The work lights were harsh, and Alex could see all the roughness in her face and arms that decades of hard work and radiation had left. Age looked good on her. It looked right.
“I’m hearing you ask whether authoritarianism is necessarily bad,” she said. “Did I get that right? Because yeah, it is.”
“That’s not what I mean. It’s just . . . I don’t know what it is. I’m feeling overwhelmed. And maybe a little demoralized.”
“Yes,” Bobbie said. “Yes, we are.”
“You too?”
“We lost the target. That political officer might have given us something that could break these fuckers back to the Stone Age. I mean maybe not, but I’m not going to know now. So yeah, I’m a little grumpy. But I’m guessing that’s not exactly what’s biting you?”
“I don’t know what the win looks like.”
“Well, for me, it looks like dying with the knowledge that humanity’s a little bit better off than it would have been if I’d never been born. A little freer. A little kinder. A little smarter. That the bullies and bastards and sadists got their teeth into a few less people because of me. That’s got to be enough.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, but she kept going.
“I’m not a grand strategy girl. That’s for the eggheads. I’m a ground pounder, and I always will be. These people want every planet to be a prison where they get to pick who’s the guard and who’s the inmate.”
“And we’re against that,” Alex said. He heard the exhaustion and agreement in his own voice. “You ever think Naomi’s right? Maybe it’s better to try getting inside the system. Changing it that way?”
“She is right,” Bobbie said, turning back to her inventory. “It’s just I’m right too. Naomi wants there to be one way to fix this, and she wants it to be the one where there’s no blood.”
“But there’s two ways,” Alex said, thinking that he was agreeing.
“There’s no way,” Bobbie said. “There’s just pushing back with everything we’ve got and hoping we can outlast the bastards.”
“You know we’re on the clock here,” Alex said. “I’m thinking about Takeshi.”
“I sent a message to his people,” Bobbie said. “It’s always hard losing someone, and we’d been very lucky up to that point. It couldn’t last.”
“I’m thinking that he was one of your best, and he was damn near sixty. Jillian, Caspar, and a few others aside, our resistance is made up of old Belters. Old OPA.”