“More critical than their pet journalists usually are,” Caspar said.
“You can still see the censor’s arm up her ass working her lips,” Jillian said. “If we had a free press, they’d be tearing these bastards eight new assholes an hour until we got an explanation.”
An old man in a collarless shirt appeared on the screen with the dark-haired newsfeed host. He was smiling as anxiously as if the camera were mugging him. There was a chyron identifying him and his credentials, but the screen was too far away and the print too small for Bobbie to make them out, except she thought his first name was Robert. She leaned forward, trying to hear better.
“What can you tell us about these events, Professor?” the host asked.
“Well, yes. Yes. The first thing, of course, is that it’s a mistake to use the plural, yes? Events plural. What we’re seeing is better understood as a single, nonlocal event. Which fits with everything we’ve learned about the . . . I don’t like to say alien life. Too many presumptions. Call it the previous tenants and their enemies.” The old man’s smile grew a little warmer, amused by his own joke. Bobbie thanked the good angels that she’d never taken a university course from him.
Jillian sneered. “They just lost one of their battleships, the central traffic control for the ring gates, a shitload of ships, and two whole fucking gates, and they want to talk about the limits of locality?” She pointed to the screen with a pale bone that had recently been wrapped in rib meat. “These people are idiots.”
Caspar shrugged. “We just lost the underground coordination from Medina and we’re having beer and barbecue.”
“We’re idiots too,” Jillian said.
“You are, anyway,” Caspar said, but he smiled when he said it.
The announcement that the Sol gate was closed for business until further notice had been bad. No one on her crew had said anything to her directly, but they hadn’t had to. No ships in or out of the system didn’t make the shell game impossible. They might still be able to escape. Sneak off Callisto and find a Transport Union ship to hide in. But even if they did, that ship wouldn’t be going anywhere until the quarantine was lifted. Any hope of slipping out to a different system, hiding on some undeveloped moon until the attack in Sol system blew over was lost. Instead, they’d be trying to hide from the tiger without leaving its cage.
Then things got worse.
Bobbie was asleep when it happened. It had been getting harder and harder to get any rest. She’d pull herself onto her cot in what had been a warehouse office, kill the lights, and her mind would launch into scenarios of escape or capture or violence, running through every combination of circumstances she could invent. She felt lucky to get five full hours in a cycle, so when she woke up groggy and confused, she’d thought it was just exhaustion finally catching up. It wasn’t until her hand terminal chirped to let her know that everyone from her crew to the Callistan emergency service to the top newsfeeds in the system had been trying to get her attention that she understood something deeper had happened.
“The important thing to understand,” the old man said, looking into the camera like he was everyone’s kind uncle, “is that while these incidents can be very upsetting and certainly they have caused some accidents when people were in the middle of sensitive or dangerous activities when they came, they pose no real threat in and of themselves.”
“Can you explain that?” the host asked.
“These spells have not been shown to have any long-term effects. There is no indication that they are more than an inconvenience, really. It’s important, of course, to keep in mind they may happen, at least until the Science Directorate understands the cause and . . . ah . . . control of them. Until then, we should all make sure fail-safes are engaged on our vehicles and equipment. But that’s good advice in any case, yes?”
Caspar roughened his voice, mimicking the old man. “And don’t concern yourself with the fact that it destroyed gates and battleships. Oh my, no. Don’t worry your pretty little heads about that.”
“Where’s Alex?” Bobbie asked.
“He was heading home last time I saw him,” Jillian said.
Home meant the Gathering Storm. The window for their escape was coming soon. That might have been the reason he’d gone to the ship. Or he might have been avoiding her. She’d pushed him harder than usual last time they’d talked, and she knew he avoided conflict when he could. She’d never have said it aloud, but she wished Amos or Naomi were still with them. Or even Holden. She was always a little worried that she’d break Alex without meaning to.
“I’m out,” she said, then left the shitty bar and the Laconian propaganda channel behind. Everyone else stayed behind to finish their beer and gossip. They could sense she wasn’t looking for company.
She walked through the public corridors of the station, her hands deep in her pockets, her eye on the floor ahead of her. Between her physical size and training almost from the cradle to control the space she occupied, it wasn’t easy for her to back down and look unremarkable. But it was important. They’d already been on Callisto longer than she liked, and she saw that the crew was getting used to it. They were developing favorite shitty bars, favorite brothels, barbers and coffee shops and pachinko parlors. It was normal to fit in after a while. Normal to make a life wherever you found yourself. But it was dangerous for them, because it was also how you became known, and being known too well meant they were all in prison or the pens or the grave.
At the turnoff, she used her hand terminal to unlock the service passage and ducked down into the infrastructure of the shipyard. It was a long walk through poorly heated hallways to the old OPA smugglers’ den. Her footsteps echoed along with the unsteady drip of condensate and the hum of the air recyclers. The graffiti on the walls here was ancient, much of it written in Belter creole or cipher. What little she could make out was wishing ill on the UN and the MCR. The hatreds of the past seemed almost quaint now. Just being authentic made it better than Laconia.
What are my victories? Will I leave the universe a better place than I found it?
When she was a girl, she’d thought she understood what the future would be. Improvement. Progress. She expected to serve her nation, protect the terraforming effort from the resentful Earth and the feral Belt. She knew from the time she could speak that she wouldn’t live to see humanity walking freely on the surface of Mars, but she believed she would die on a world with the spreading green of engineered moss and the aurora of a magnetosphere. The life she’d actually lived was unrecognizably different from the dream she’d had. More astounding, and more disappointing. And her sense of having a place in it was gone. She had her role, first on the Rocinante, now on the Storm. She had her people and her duty. It was Mars that had changed and darkened. It had metastasized into an empire and a grand project she wanted no part of.
She still had decades in her, if she kept her treatments and exercise regimen up. The universe she died in might still be better than the one she lived in now, but she had a hard time believing it would be better than the one she’d been born into. Too much had been lost, and what wasn’t lost was changed beyond her ability to understand it.
Her hand terminal chimed. A message from Jillian, still back at the bar. Bobbie looked at it with distrust. Jillian was a smart woman and a good fighter. Another couple decades of life might eventually convince her to build up her team instead of undermining them. The way she felt at the moment, Bobbie wasn’t sure she was in the mood to hear whatever Jillian was about to say. But she was captain, and Jillian was her XO. She thumbed the connection open. The recording had a tag that read THOUGHT YOU’D WANT TO SEE THIS. Bobbie started playing it.
The screen from the bar jumped to life. The refresh rate of the image there and the recording made a moiré pattern over the newsfeed host’s face, but not so badly that Bobbie couldn’t make her out. Or the man in the window beside her. The old man was gone, and a familiar face had replaced him. Admiral Anton Trejo of the Tempest, de facto governor of Sol system.
Bobbie stopped walking.
“—planned for months,” Trejo said.
“So your return to Laconia isn’t related to the events in the ring space?” the host asked.