“Make safe! Make safe! All you fucking bastards hold the work and make safe, yeah?”
The others all closed down the lines. Naomi did too. There wasn’t much choice.
The man who pulled himself past the yellow work barrier was dressed in a chief engineer’s uniform. Behind him, three soldiers in Laconian blues, one with a captain’s bars. Naomi hooked her foot into a wall handhold. Her heart was going fast, and a hint of nausea plucked at her that had nothing to do with the stink of coolant. The chief engineer motioned for them to take off their masks. The others started to comply. If she hesitated now, it would only call attention where she didn’t want it.
Naomi pulled off her mask.
“Was that discussed with senior staff?” the Laconian captain demanded, continuing whatever conversation they’d been having before they came in the room.
“No,” the chief engineer said. He was a younger man, but with a rough, scarred face that made him ageless. “Why would it be? Captain says it. We do it. That’s how it is. That a problem?”
One of the other Laconians held a hand terminal up to the face of her team foreman. The terminal chimed. Naomi felt a sick kind of peace descend over her.
“It’s an irregularity,” the Laconian captain said. “The political officer will want a full report when you reach the transfer station.”
“Political officer?” the chief engineer asked. Despite herself, Naomi’s ears pricked up. If this was related somehow to the mission in Sol—if Laconia was making a broad crackdown—maybe they weren’t here looking just for her. It was a thin hope, but it was something.
“New oversight regulations,” the Laconian captain said as the hand terminal tracked over Naomi’s face.
“Never heard of them.”
“You’re hearing about them right now,” the captain said.
The soldier frowned. “Sir? This one’s not on the crew list.”
I am Naomi Nagata. I would like to accept the invitation of High Consul Duarte. Please let him know. It was all she had to say. It would even be a relief, knowing that she’d done all that she could first. The chief engineer looked at her and shrugged. “Course she’s not. She’s on the apprentice program.”
The Laconian captain looked at her, uncertain. She kept the confusion off her face. No one on the ship but Emma was supposed to know she was there. Play along, she thought. Just play along.
“She’s old to be an apprentice,” the captain said.
“Had some trouble back home,” she said. “Trying to make something new.” The lie was easy.
“She needs to be on the crew rolls,” the Laconian captain said, turning away.
“Why?” the chief engineer asked. “She’s not crew. She’s an apprentice.”
“Apprentices are part of the crew,” the captain said, a note of exasperation in his voice.
“First I’ve heard of it,” the chief engineer said. “If I put her in, it starts counting her hours toward a benefits package like she was crew. That’s not how it works.”
“You can take that up with the political officer too,” the Laconian captain said. The last of the work crew was scanned and cleared.
As they left, the chief engineer looked back. His eyes met hers. There was a subterranean joy in them. “As you all were. Shit’s not going to maintain itself.”
“Yes, chief,” Naomi said, and put her mask back on.
They fell back into the familiar rhythms of labor, but Naomi’s mind was working on more than the lines. The others on the team didn’t seem to have noticed anything odd in the conversation. One of them—a thick-faced man called Kip—treated her a little worse, but that was probably just because he thought she was lower status now. Nothing odd about that. When the new exchange was in, the old one sealed, and the diagnostics all in optimal range, Naomi wanted nothing more than a shower and a meal. She didn’t have a cabin of her own, she didn’t know where the gang showers were, and she wouldn’t have a locker there. Even if she got to the right place, after she cleaned up, she’d have to put the same coolant-stinking jumpsuit back on. That seemed worse than not cleaning up in the first place.
She followed the others as they headed back to the crew decks. Lagging behind. She wanted to go to her container. The urge to check her incoming feeds itched as badly as her jawline where the swelling was just starting to go down. But it was gone. Months of habit had just become irrelevant, and she pulled herself along the off-white halls, moving from handhold to handhold with the feeling of having woken from a long dream to find herself in some foreign station where she didn’t belong.
The mess hall had six people in it, but it was built for thirty or more. She pulled herself to a dispenser, but couldn’t get food. It wanted an access code or ID match that she didn’t have. She went to a corner by herself, bracing on a wall-mounted foothold, and waited without knowing what exactly she was waiting for.
Her thoughts moved in the silence of other people’s conversations. When, after an hour or so, Emma appeared, Naomi was almost surprised to see her. The woman pulled a double share of food and brought it over.
“They’ve moved on,” Emma said quietly. “Docked, ran down the whole fucking ship stem to stern, told the captain that he’d need to talk to someone at the transfer station, and gone.”
“Political officer,” Naomi said. “I heard. We got word of one heading for the transfer station in Sol system too. Earth.”
“Well, looks like we have political officers now,” Emma said sourly.
Naomi nodded with one fist. The crackdown was broad, then. A tightening of control over the whole Transport Union. More than that, it might be a sign that Duarte and his machinery were starting to suspect the Transport Union’s role in smuggling the underground from system to system. Or had other plans that wanted loyal and trusted eyes beyond the governors and their staffs.
If they found the shell game, it could mean a serious retooling of their methods at best. At worst, the end of the underground. With Medina in control of the slow zone and their methods of transportation exposed, they were in real danger of becoming thirteen hundred fragmented, isolated movements, unable to support or help each other.
“No one checked you, though?” Emma said.
“Oh, they checked her,” a voice said behind them. The chief engineer floated over and took position beside them. “They caught her.”
Emma blanched. So apparently she hadn’t been behind that.
“I appreciate you covering for me,” Naomi said. “It might be better for you if we just kept it at that. I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“Are you kidding?” the chief engineer said. “That was the best thing that’s happened to me since I signed up for this haul. Seriously, it was my pleasure.”
“I appreciate your enthusiasm, but—”
He handed her a card. “Override access to a private cabin and a commissary account,” he said. “It’s off the books, so even if there’s an audit, it’ll just come back as unused and overages.”
Naomi looked at it, then at him. Never look a gift horse in the mouth, they said. But it was bad advice. “I’m guessing there’s something you’ll want in return? Because I think we’re going to need to be very, very clear what that is.”
“No,” the chief engineer said. “Nothing. You’ve already paid me out. I’m just glad I get the chance to hand some back.”
“Excuse me for being rude,” Naomi said, “but I’ve never really trusted the whole kindness-of-strangers bit.”
“You’re not a stranger,” the chief engineer said. “You’re the reason I’m an engineer. My dad was a kid on Ceres when the Free Navy stripped it. You and your crew? You put your hands out in peace in the middle of a civil war. You built the Transport Union. As far as I’m concerned, we should kick the captain out of his quarters and give them to you. You more than earned them.”
Naomi reached for her hair, trying to pluck it down over her face, but Emma’s haircut didn’t leave enough for that. “You know who I am, then.”
The chief engineer coughed out a laugh. “Of course I do. Anyone in the Belt’s going to know Naomi fucking Nagata. It’s just these Laconian fucks who can’t see what they’re looking at. And again, it’s a real honor.”
“Chuck,” Emma said, and her tone made the word a warning.
“I won’t say it again,” the chief engineer—Chuck—said, lifting a hand. “But don’t either one of you worry. I’ll get you shuttle access as soon as we’re close to port. You’re safe with me.”
Naomi nodded her thanks, and Chuck beamed. She saw now how young he was. His delight with himself made her heart ache a little. He’d gotten away with something, and his pride was bright enough to read by. She even had a sense of what she must look like through his eyes—a demigod. A figure from myth appearing in his life. A celebrity. God knew she’d seen enough people look at Jim with that expression. This must be what it had been like for him all those times.
It was a feeling she could easily learn to hate.
Chapter Sixteen: Elvi