She found the airlock into the ship and cycled through. Her contact was waiting for her. She was a young woman, not more than twenty years old, with pale skin and wide-set dark eyes. Her shaved head was probably meant to make her look tough, but it just reminded Naomi of baby fuzz. Her name might not have been Blanca, but that was how Naomi knew her.
“You’re clear for twenty minutes, ma’am,” Blanca said. She had a good voice. Musical and clean. A Martian accent that reminded Naomi of Alex. “After that, I’m off shift. I can stay around, but I can’t keep the next guy from coming on.”
“More than enough,” Naomi said. “I just need to get to the habitation ring.”
“Not a problem. We’re going to be transferring your container to the Mosley in berth sixteen-ten. It’s going to take a few hours, but the work order’s already been approved.”
The pea slipping into a different shell. By the time Naomi was ready to send out her next set of orders and analysis, the Verity Close would be past the Sol gate and off toward some other system. And Naomi would be in her same little hole, sleeping on her same little couch, but traveling with a different ship. Blanca would be replaced by her new contact waiting for her at the docks. Naomi had lost track of how many times she’d done this. It was almost routine.
“Thank you,” she said, and started to pull herself through toward the dockside airlock.
“It’s been an honor, ma’am,” Blanca said, spitting the words out quickly. “Meeting you, I mean. Meeting Naomi Nagata.”
“Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I appreciate it more than I can say.”
Blanca braced. It felt like theater, but Naomi saluted the girl all the same. It meant something to the girl, and for Naomi to treat it with anything less than equal seriousness would have been rude. Worse, it would have been cruel.
Then she pulled herself into the cramped green corridor of the Verity Close and left Blanca behind. She didn’t expect ever to see her again.
Deep Transfer Station Three lived between the orbit of Saturn and Uranus, locked in position with the Sol gate. Its architecture was familiar: a large spherical dock capable of accepting several dozen ships at maximum capacity and a habitation ring spinning at one-third g. It was both a critical central hub for traffic in and out of Sol system and a glorified warehouse complex. Ships from across the system brought cargo here ready to send out to the colony worlds or came to pick up incoming packages. At any given time, there were probably more alien artifacts on the transfer station than anyplace else in the system.
All told, the station could hold twenty thousand people, though the traffic rarely if ever demanded full capacity. A permanent staff and the crews of whatever ships came and went, along with contractors to run the hospitals, bars, brothels, churches, stores, and restaurants that seemed to follow humanity everywhere it went. It was a base where crews from across the system and from the other systems on the far sides of the rings could get away from each other for a few days, see unfamiliar faces, hear voices they hadn’t lived with for months, climb into bed with someone who didn’t feel like family. It created a constant fraternization that had led to the station’s ring getting the unofficial name “Paternity Row.”
Naomi liked the place. There was something reassuring in the stability of human behavior. Alien civilizations and galactic empire, war and resistance: They were there. But also drinking and karaoke. Sex and babies.
She walked through the public corridor of the habitation ring with her head bowed. The underground had a false identification for her in the station system so that her biometrics wouldn’t raise an alarm, but she kept from making herself too obvious all the same in case a human might recognize her.
The rendezvous was a restaurant in the lowest and outermost level of the ring. She’d expected to be ushered into a storeroom or freezer, but the man at the door led her back to a private dining room. Even before she stepped though the doorway, she knew they were there.
Bobbie saw her first and stood up, grinning. She wore a nondescript flight suit without identifying tags or patches, but she wore it like a uniform. Alex, rising with her, had an older cut. He’d lost weight, and his remaining hair was trimmed close. He could have been an accountant or a general. Without words, they stepped into each other, arms raised. A three-way embrace with Naomi’s head on Alex’s shoulder, Bobbie’s cheek against hers. The warmth of their bodies was more comforting than she wanted it to be.
“Oh, God dammit,” Bobbie said, “but it is good to see you again.”
The embrace broke, and they moved to the table. A bottle of whiskey and three glasses waited, a clear and unmistakable sign of bad news to come. A toast to be made, a memory to be honored, another loss to carry. Naomi asked her question with a glance.
“You heard about Avasarala,” Alex said.
The relief came in a little rush followed by chagrin at feeling relief. It was only that Avasarala had died. “I did.”
Bobbie poured out shots for each of them, then raised one. “She was a hell of woman. We won’t see her like again.”
They touched glasses, and Naomi drank. Losing the old woman was hard—harder for Bobbie, probably, than any of the rest of them. But they weren’t mourning Amos yet. Or Jim.
“So,” Bobbie said, putting down her glass, “how’s life as the secret general of the resistance?”
“I prefer ‘secret diplomat,’ ” Naomi said. “And it’s underwhelming.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Alex said. “Can’t talk without food. It’s not family unless there’s a meal.”
The restaurant did a good Belt/Mars fusion menu. Something called white kibble that was related to the real thing, but with fresh vegetables and bean sprouts. Rounds of vat-grown beef-pork hybrid cooked in the shape of a Petri dish and touched with a sweet hot sauce. They leaned on the table here the way they had on the Rocinante in their previous incarnations.
Naomi hadn’t realized how much she missed Bobbie’s laugh or Alex’s way of sneaking another small helping onto her plate when she was almost finished eating. The little intimacies of living in close quarters with someone for decades. And then not living there anymore. It might have made her sad if it weren’t for the pleasure of being there in the moment with the two of them.
“The Storm’s crewed up pretty well,” Bobbie was saying. “I was worried for a while that it would be straight Belters. I mean, that’s where Saba’s bench is the deepest. Two Martian vets running a crew full of folks who still call us inners?”
“Could have been a problem,” Naomi agreed.
“Saba pulled a whole sheet of UNN and MCRN vets,” Alex said. “Young ones too. Weird being around people who were the age I was when I mustered out. They look like babies, you know? All fresh-faced and serious.”
Naomi laughed. “I know. Anyone under forty looks like a child to me now.”
“They’re good,” Bobbie said. “I’ve been running drills and simulations the whole time we’ve been parked.”
“There’ve been a couple fights,” Alex said.
“It’s just nerves,” Bobbie said. “When this mission’s done, that shit will evaporate.”
Naomi took another bite of white kibble so that she wouldn’t frown. It didn’t work, though. Alex cleared his throat and spoke in his changing-the-subject voice. “I’m guessing there’s still no word from the big guy?”
Two years before, Saba had found a chance to slip an operative onto Laconia itself with a pocket nuke and an encrypted recall-and-retrieve transmitter. A long-odds mission to get Jim back, or destroy Laconia’s rule by cutting off its head. Saba had asked Naomi who she would trust with something that important. That dangerous. When Amos heard about it, he’d packed his bags in the same hour. Since then, Laconia had built new defenses. The underground had lost most of its presence in Laconia system, and Amos had gone silent.
Naomi shook her head. “Not yet.”
“Yeah, well,” Alex said. “Soon, probably.”
“Probably,” Naomi agreed, the same way she did every time they had this conversation.
“You two want any coffee?” Alex asked. Bobbie shook her head at the same time Naomi said Not for me, and Alex popped up. “I’ll go settle up, then.”
When the door closed behind him, Naomi leaned forward. She wanted to leave the moment where it was—a reunion with family. A bright spot in the darkness. She wanted to, and she couldn’t.
“A mission with the Storm in Sol system is a hell of a risk,” she said.
“It stands a real chance of getting some attention,” Bobbie agreed, not making eye contact. Her tone was light, but there was a warning in it. “It’s not just me, you know.”
“Saba.”
“And others.”
“I keep thinking about Avasarala,” Naomi said. There was still some whiskey in the bottle, and she poured herself a finger. “She was a hell of a fighter. Never backed down from anything, even when she lost.”
“She was one of a kind,” Bobbie agreed.