“I’ll light you a candle. Meantime, if you need something, better me than Chuck, maybe,” Emma said, then sucked the last of the paste out of the bulb, smacked her lips, and launched for the door. Naomi floated alone in the commissary for a few minutes more. She felt a little guilty taking a bulb of tea back to her cabin, but only a little.
The Bhikaji Cama was a massive ship. Three quarters of a kilometer long and wide enough to look squat in the schematics. It had been built decades earlier to ferry enough people and supplies to one of the outlying worlds that a self-sustaining colony could arrive all at once. Buildings and recyclers and soil and reactors and fuel. Everything that humanity needed to make a toehold in an unfriendly alien ecosphere except a sense of fashion and guidelines on how to woo your mechanics. The halls were a drab green with hand-and footholds that hadn’t been scrubbed in a few too many weeks. The ship conserved water jealously, using passive radiators to shed heat instead of evaporative feeds, and it left the air hotter than she liked.
Her cabin was tiny. Not just smaller than her storage container had been, but smaller than some supply closets she’d had on the Roci. The crash couch was cheap, with gel that stank a little, and there wasn’t enough room for her to stretch her arms in it. The design was called albuepartir back in the Belt, because if your arm drifted off the edge in your sleep, a sudden deceleration could break it. Some previous tenant had illustrated the anti-spalling cloth with a complex and violent firefight between two sets of stick figures, one with colored-in circles for heads, and the other pale and empty. Naomi strapped herself into the couch, pulled up the system and the false record Chuck had given her, and got back to work.
The ironic thing was that, with the access she had now, she could actually reach more information than with the passive feeds she’d relied on before. She tried to be careful about it, not abuse her access in a way that would raise any more red flags than were already flying. But she had requests out to the union database mirror about political officers and changes to Laconian transfer point regulation. It was the sort of thing that anyone on a ship like the Cama might be—and probably was—looking into. It was only her perspective on the information coming back that made it different.
Thinking that the political officer in Sol system had meant something specifically about Sol was the mistake she’d made. That they’d all made. There was also one on Auberon, and that changed the scope. Now that she knew to look for the pattern, it was there. Freighters diverted to Medina on their transits or held. Environmental audits on ships that were running close to their theoretical maximum load.
It still wasn’t confirmation. Nothing so overt as that. But if there had been a massive wave of Laconian bureaucrats being quietly repositioned throughout the colony worlds—a new level of infrastructure being put in place without fanfare or warning—this was what it would look like. One political officer going to Earth was an opportunity. Two political officers being set in place in Sol and Auberon were a threat. A new Laconian mandarinate covertly set to keep eyes on the transfer points was an escalation. If Laconia continued the trend and put officers on the ships themselves, it was the end of the shell game.
She flicked through the data, looking for places where she might have been wrong. Where her interpretations could have been mistaken or where another interpretation could have fit the same data. She was reaching for hope the way a patient might by holding a doctor’s hand and saying, But it might not be terminal, right?
Emma accepted her connection almost as soon as she requested it.
“I need to send a message,” Naomi said.
“Where to?” Emma asked over the gabble of other voices.
“Upstairs,” Naomi said. “Do you want me to say the name?” Emma was silent for a moment. Then, “Can you find your way to ops?”
“I’ll meet you there,” Naomi said, and dropped the call.
She moved through the ship faster when her mind was on something else. As if her body, freed from thinking about her place in the rhythms of the ship, found them automatically. She composed the message as the decks passed by her, what she could say to make the situation clear to Saba but obscure to anyone intercepting the tightbeam either here or at the repeaters that bridged the interference through the gates.
She heard Emma’s voice before she reached the ops deck. Her tone was high and rough as a decking saw. Naomi pulled herself onto the deck and grabbed a handhold to stop. Emma was on the float by the comms station, her arms folded and her jaw jutting out. A man with a salt-and-pepper beard longer than his close-cropped hair looked away from her long enough to recognize Naomi, then back at Emma in disgust. His uniform identified him as Captain Burnham. The comms tech was between them like a mouse at a catfight.
“The answer was no before,” Burnham said, then pointed toward Naomi with his chin. “Now that this one is on my deck, the answer’s go fuck yourself.”
“It’s nothing,” Emma said. “Five-minute tightbeam to Medina? No one would even blink at it. It’s trivial.”
“It’s already too much.” He turned to look at Naomi. “Don’t say anything, you. I know who you are, and I know what you are, and I have extended my unrequested hospitality to you out of grandmotherly fucking kindness.”
“You have as much to hide as she does,” Emma said. “Everyone knows about the sealed cabins.”
The comms tech pulled himself down into the gel of his crash couch like he could disappear into it. Naomi considered the captain of the Bhikaji Cama with all the calm and dignity she could manage. “I appreciate that my presence puts you and yours at greater risk. I wouldn’t have chosen this if there were a better way, but there isn’t. If things had gone the way I hoped, you’d never have known I was here. That’s not the way it happened, though. And now I need five minutes with your tightbeam.”
Burnham lifted his hands to her, palms out. Stop. “Ma’am, I am not a partisan, but I know a lot of my crew are. I’m the kind of man that kens when to shut up and mind my own business. I’m not turning you over to the political officer, but don’t mistake that for loyalty. I’m trying to get my ass out of a crack, and I’m getting more and more convinced that locking you in a cabin and welding the door shut might be an easier path than the one I’ve chosen.”
“It’s important,” Naomi said.
“It’s my ship. The answer is no.” His eyes were hard, but it was as much fear as anger. Naomi waited a moment, seeing what her gut said. Push or back down. Emma sighed, and the captain’s beard shifted as his jaw went tighter.
“I understand,” Naomi said. She met Emma’s eyes for a fraction of a second, and then they moved to the bulkhead together. Emma fumed silently until they made the turn into the lift shaft.
“Sorry about that,” Emma said. “He’s an asshole.”
“I did stow away on his ship and put him at risk of a Laconian interrogation room,” Naomi said. “Expecting him to take orders from me along with it might be too much to ask. I’ll find another way.”
“I can help unbox some of those communication torpedoes,” Emma said. Her tone made it an apology.
“I’d rather find another way to use the tightbeam. Time may be important. But Emma, you have to be more careful.”
“He’s not going to fold,” Emma said. “I’ve shipped with that man long enough to tell when he’s at his edge. There’s a thing he does with his lips. I can clean him out playing poker too.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Naomi said. “You said five minutes talking to Medina.”
“They were going to know where the message was going anyway,” Emma said. “They had to.”
“I didn’t know Saba was on Medina Station, and I do now,” Naomi said. “Now if they catch me, it compromises him.”
Emma pressed her lips tight. “Sorry. I assumed that . . . Sorry.”
“We’ll tell him. I’m sure he has plans to shift locations if he needs to.”
Emma nodded, then muttered fuck under her breath. Even as she thought about other ways to get comm access, Naomi spared a moment to feel sympathy for her.
Emma’s hand terminal sounded at the same moment that hers did. Another chime sounded from down a corridor. A ship-wide alert. Or something bigger. Naomi thumbed the notification open.
ALL UNION SHIPS: TOP PRIORITY. ALL TRAFFIC THROUGH ALL GATES IS SUSPENDED BY ORDER OF LACONIAN MILITARY COMMAND. NO SHIPS PERMITTED THROUGH ANY GATE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. ALL TRANSITS ARE ON HOLD. ALL SHIPS ON APPROACH ARE TO EVACUATE THE LANE TO .8 AU IMMEDIATELY.
Emma was moving through data fast, flipping from one interface to another, and so intent on her hand terminal that she didn’t notice she was drifting. Naomi caught her elbow and pulled her to the wall.
“What happened?” Naomi asked.
“Don’t know,” Emma said, shaking her head. “Something big.”
Chapter Nineteen: Elvi