Elvi knew that she was perfectly safe in the same room with the catalyst, but she shuddered every time she entered anyway.
The infected woman looked at her with blank eyes and moved her lips in a soundless whisper. She smelled mostly of the solvent bath she received every day, but under it was something else. A morgue stink of decaying flesh.
It was normal to sacrifice animals. Rats, pigeons, pigs. Dogs. Chimpanzees. Biology had always suffered the cognitive push-pull of proving that humans were just another kind of animal while at the same time claiming to be morally different in kind. It was okay to kill a chimp in the name of science. It wasn’t okay to kill a person.
Except, apparently, when it was.
Maybe the catalyst had agreed to this. Maybe it was this or some other, more gruesome death. Whatever that would be.
“I’m sorry,” Elvi said to her, as she did every time she came into the catalyst chamber. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know that they did this. I would never have agreed to it.”
The woman’s head lolled on her neck, nodding forward as if in mock agreement.
“I won’t forget that they did this to you. If I can ever make this right, I will.”
The woman pushed at the floor with her hands as though she wanted to stand up, but her arms lacked the strength, and her hands flopped bonelessly. It was just reflexes. That’s what she told herself. Instinct. The woman’s brain was gone, or at least changed into something that wasn’t by any sane definition a brain. There wasn’t anyone really alive in that skin. Not anymore.
But there had been once.
Elvi wiped her eyes. The universe was always stranger than you expected. Sometimes it was full of wonders. Sometimes full of horrors.
“I won’t forget.”
Chapter Two: Naomi
Naomi missed the Rocinante, but then she missed a lot of things these days.
Her old ship and home was still parked on Freehold. Before they’d left, she and Alex had found a cavern system on the edge of Freehold’s southernmost continent with a mouth big enough to edge the ship into. They’d put it down in a dry tunnel and spent a week running seals and storage tarps that would keep the local flora and fauna out. Whenever they got back to the Roci, it would be there, ready and waiting. If they never did, it would be there for centuries. Still waiting.
Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, she’d take herself through it. She still knew every centimeter from the top of the cockpit to the curve of the drive cone. She could think her way through it on the float or under thrust. She’d heard about ancient scholars back on Earth making palaces of memory that way. Imagine Alex in the cockpit, holding an hourglass for time. Then down to the flight deck, where Amos and Clarissa were tossing a golgo ball with the numeral 2 painted on it back and forth for initial and final velocities divided by two. Then down to her cabin, and Jim. Jim by himself. Jim who meant displacement. A simple kinematic equation, three things that were all the same, easy to remember because they all stung her heart.
That was one reason she’d agreed to the shell-game plan when Saba and the underground had reached out to her. Memories were like ghosts, and as long as Jim and Amos were gone, the Roci would always be a little bit haunted.
And it wasn’t only Jim, though he had been the first. Naomi had also lost Clarissa, who would have died from the slow poisons in her implants if she hadn’t chosen to die by violence. Amos had taken a high-risk mission from the underground, deep in enemy territory, and then gone silent, missing pickup window after pickup window until they all stopped expecting to hear from him again. Even Bobbie, healthy and well, but in the captain’s seat of her own ship now. They were all lost to her, but Jim was the worst.
Freehold, on the other hand, she didn’t miss at all. The experience of being under a vast and empty sky had its charm for a while, but the unease lasted longer than the novelty. If she was going to live as a fugitive and outlaw, she could at least do it in something where the air was held in by something visible. Her new quarters—spare and terrible as they were—at least had that going for them.
From the outside, her bunk looked like a standard cargo container made to transport a low-yield planetary fusion reactor. It was the kind colonists in the thirteen hundred new systems would use to power a small city or a medium-sized mining station. With its actual cargo gone, there was enough room for a gimbaled crash couch, an emergency support recycler, a water supply, and half a dozen modified short-burn torpedoes. The crash couch was her bed and her workbench. The support recycler was her power and food and her waste disposal. The kind of thing that would keep the crew of a stranded ship alive for weeks, but not in anything like comfort. The water supply was for drinking, but also part of the stealth, connected to small evaporation panels on the exterior of the container to bleed off her waste heat.
And the torpedoes were how she spoke to the larger world.
Except not today. Today she was going to see actual people. Breathe their air, touch their skin. Hear their living voices. She wasn’t sure if she was excited about that, or if the energy stirring in her belly was foreboding. The one could seem so much like the other.
“Permission to open?” she said, and the crash couch’s monitor hesitated, sent the message, and then a few breaths later came back with CONFIRMED. DEPARTURE AT 18:45 STANDARD. DON’T BE LATE.
Naomi unstrapped herself from the couch and pushed to the inner door of the container, securing the helmet on her suit as she went. When the suit showed solid seals, she double-checked them anyway, then cycled the air in the container into her emergency recycler, bringing the interior down to near vacuum. When the pressure reached the efficiency limit of the unit and stopped dropping, she popped the container doors and pulled herself out into the vastness of the cargo hold.
The Verity Close was a converted ice hauler acting as a long-haul shipping vessel for the colonies. The hold around her was as wide as the Freehold sky, or it felt that way. The Rocinante and eleven more like her could have fit in it and not touched the sides. Instead, thousands of containers like Naomi’s were locked into place and ready to be hauled out from Sol to any of the new cities and stations that humanity was building. Taming the new wilderness of planets that didn’t know humanity’s genetic codes or tree of life. And most of the containers were what they claimed—soil, industrial yeast incubators, bacterial libraries.
And then, like hers, a few were something else.
This was the shell game.
She didn’t know if Saba had come up with the idea, or if his wife, the figurehead president of the Transport Union, had found some covert way to tell him. With Medina Station and the slow zone firmly under Laconian control, the greatest obstacle the underground faced was moving ships and personnel from one system to another. Even something as small as the Roci couldn’t hope to pass by Medina’s sensor arrays unnoticed. Traffic control through the gate network was too important to ever let that happen.
But as long as the Transport Union was still in charge of its own ships, the records could be forged. Cargo containers like hers could be moved from ship to ship, making it difficult if not impossible to track her communications—or Saba’s or Wilhelm Walker’s or any of the other organizing heads of the underground—to any one vessel.
Or, if the reward seemed to justify the terrible risk, something larger could be smuggled. Something dangerous. Something like the captured warship Gathering Storm could be snuck into Sol system. And with it, Bobbie Draper and Alex Kamal, who she hadn’t seen in over a year. And who, right now, were waiting for her at a private rendezvous.
She launched herself along the row of containers, skimming past them with accuracy born of a lifetime’s practice. The guide lights blinked at the containers’ edges, marking the ever-changing maze of access and control and leading her toward the crew hatch. The actual crew space was probably smaller than the Rocinante’s. Her secret cargo container, as spacious as the crew cabins.
She didn’t know the crew of the ship that had carried her for the last months. Most of them weren’t aware she was there. Saba arranged things that way. The fewer people knew, the less they could say. The old Belter term for it was guerraregle. War rules. It was how she’d lived as a girl, back in the bad old days. It was how she lived now.