“We’ve got some time.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”
“Good,” he said, and stood up, ready to give her the room.
“Alex?”
“Yeah, Gunny?”
“Don’t take this wrong.”
“All right?”
“If you really believe we can’t win, you should think about whether you’re coming with me if I go.”
Chapter Eighteen: Naomi
It wasn’t the first time Naomi had found herself the new addition to a crew. Even under the best circumstances, there was an unsettled period. Anyone coming into the webwork of established relationships, enmities, and personal loyalties that was a ship’s crew needed time to find or create their own place. A time of isolation in the midst of a crowd.
In that sense, her appearance on the Bhikaji Cama was no different from other times. In the sense that she had appeared on the ship halfway through a run without stopping at a station or transferring over from another ship, it was a little weirder. And while they’d kept her identity hidden from Laconia, the small town’s worth of crew on the ship was corrosive to secrets. Even as the command staff made a point of not noticing her existence, everyone knew who she was.
Her presence was equal parts embarrassment to the Transport Union, threat to the crew, and the most interesting thing that had happened in the long weeks of transit. Pulling herself down the corridors or getting meals from the commissary, she felt the attention in the way people didn’t meet her eyes and the killing effect she had on conversations.
When they reached Auberon, she would need to vanish for a while and hope that her mysterious appearance was put down to rumor and myth. I was serving on a ship last year, and when the ship was searched, Naomi Nagata just showed up in with the crew. Stayed with us for the rest of the run. It was implausible enough that it might pass. Or it might be a problem. Either way, she had to touch base with Saba and see what her options were. The advantage of keeping the underground firewalled was that any single accident couldn’t bring down everything. The disadvantage was that she could never know what the big picture looked like. Even as one of Saba’s top-tier strategists, she only knew what he asked her to know. And it was possible—likely even—that he chose to be ignorant of some operations himself.
The commissary was wide enough to seat fifty at a time, but she tried to come at off-hours when the three rotating shifts were in the middle of work or sleep cycles. The tables were bolted to the floor, but on the float, no one used them anyway. The food dispensers were old, gray machines that decanted a nutritive slurry in eight different flavors directly into recyclable bulbs. Even the worst rock hopper in the Belt was more pleasant. Someone had painted bright flowers—daisies in yellow and pink and pastel blue—on the walls to make the place seem welcoming. Oddly, the effort halfway worked. Naomi ate the yellow curry flavored gruel with her feet hooked into footholds in the wall. But afterward, there was coffee that was a thousand times better.
Three environment technicians floated in a clump on the far side of the room, talking through a problem with the water purification system. The temptation to insert herself into the conversation was huge, but she held back. Hearing normal human conversation but not being part of it was like a starving woman smelling fresh food but not able to put it on her tongue. She hadn’t realized how badly she missed humans until she was among them again. And so when Emma pulled herself into the commissary, it was a relief to see her.
In the days of Naomi’s internal exile, she’d learned that Emma’s last name had been Pankara before she’d taken Zomorodi as a contract name with four other people. She had siblings on Europa in Sol system and Saraswati, one of the three habitable planets in Tridevi system. She’d been in private security before she joined up with the Transport Union. And she had a hookah designed to function anywhere between five gs and the float. She was also willing to talk to Naomi directly, which made her company more precious than gold. Now she pulled herself to a stop at the machines, took a bulb of something, and launched out to stop herself at Naomi’s side and in her orientation.
“All well?” Naomi asked.
Emma shook a flat hand in a gesture that meant yes and no. “Captain Burnham won’t talk to me and Chuck won’t stop.”
“I made things hard for you,” Naomi said.
“I made things hard for myself,” Emma said, cracking the seal on her food bulb. “You’re just when it blew up on me.”
“Fair,” Naomi said. It was astounding how good it felt to speak to someone in person and without light delay. Even when the conversation was banal. Maybe especially when it was. “Chuck seems like a decent person. He’s underground?”
Emma chuckled. “He’s not cut out for it. He worries too much. The only reason he’s not sucking down euphorics now is that he figures that no one will say anything to this political officer at the transfer station. Half of the people on the ship have something they’d rather not be looked at too close, and the other half have to work with them.”
“Seems tenuous.”
“Because it is,” Emma said. “But we work with what we have. Besides, that’s what the fight’s all about, isn’t it?”
“How do you figure?” Naomi asked.
Emma took a long, thick pull on the bulb, then shrugged as she swallowed. “The first ship I served on after I ditched Pink-water, the XO had a thing for one of the mechanics. They were both babies. More hormones than blood. The company had a nofraternization policy, but what can you do about it? The XO, she started being where the mechanic was. Started using the ship system to keep track of where people were, on shift and off. Mechanic didn’t love that. Got to where they had a screaming fight in the middle of the med bay. XO started crying. Didn’t come out of her cabin for two days. Good XO otherwise. Mechanic knew his job too. But both of them got fired. Rules, you know.”
“That’s how you see the underground?” Naomi said through a real smile. “Making the union safe for romantic drama?”
“Easy to make rules,” Emma said. “Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it’s the person’s fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that’s worth shit, we’ve done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people. Laconians making the same mistake as ever. Our rules are good, and they’d work perfectly if it were only a different species.”
“You sound like someone I know,” Naomi said.
“I’ll die for that,” Emma said. “I’ll die so that people can be fuckups and still find mercy. Not why you’re here?”
Naomi considered the other woman. The anger in her jaw and the pain in her voice. She wondered whether Emma had been the XO. It probably didn’t matter.
“We’re all here for our own reasons,” Naomi said. “What they are isn’t as important as the fact that we came.”
“True,” Emma said.
Naomi laughed, and it was a hard, bitter sound. “Anyway, I spent too much time already with people telling me they’d shoot me if I didn’t do what they said. That tank’s empty for this lifetime.”
“May it never refill,” Emma said.
A flat-faced man in a command uniform pulled himself into the commissary, glanced at them, and did a fast double take. The environmental techs looked from him to Naomi, then pushed off, shoving their spent bulbs in the recycler as they left. The officer went to the dispenser, pulled a drink of some sort—coffee, tea, maté—and left again without looking back at them. His disapproval made the air feel cooler.
“You’ve got what you need?” Emma asked, as if the man hadn’t been there at all.
The question had more weight than the words deserved. “I’m good,” Naomi said. “When we get to port, though—”
“We’ll get you out safe,” Emma said. “After that . . .”
“I know,” Naomi said. After that, she was still a criminal. Still a fugitive. Still a mouse looking for a safe hole. That would come. “Saba may have something for me.”