“Fuck.”
She undid the restraint with one hand and hauled herself up. Maybe an hour in the Storm’s gym would get her past the worst of her insomnia. But on the way out toward the hangar, she stopped at the desk, checking again the way she did fifty times a day. The map was broken into two frames. The smaller one showed the relative positions of the major bodies in Sol system, tracking the inevitable and predictable change in cartography like an orrery. The larger showed the Jovian system in great detail with data copied from the traffic control logs. On the small screen, Jupiter and its moons looked calm and serene, passing through the vastness of space with the tranquil beauty of the inevitable. Closer up, it was like a beehive. Hundreds of ships from ancient rock hoppers and mining skiffs to the Tempest and everything in between.
It was the Tempest that drew her.
Trejo had transferred out of the system on one of the fast Laconian shuttles, burning hard back to Laconia to deal with the crisis in the slow zone. The Tempest, on the other hand, had been sniffing around the Jovian moons like a dog searching for its lost antimatter. It had been in a complex orbit near Ganymede most of the time, though once it had darted out to Europa. It would come to Callisto eventually and force her hand. Until then, the best she could do was take comfort in imagining the fresh new Laconian vice admiral losing sleep in his cot because a moon-killing load of antimatter had gone missing and it was his job to find it.
She tapped the red dot on the map that was the Tempest. “Anything you can do, I can do better.”
An alert popped up. A newsfeed from Ceres Station with a breaking report. She opened it, and a young man with a Lunar accent looked earnestly up at her from the desk.
“This is Davis Myles with Ceres Beat, and behind me you can see station security in cooperation with Laconian state intelligence agents securing a cell of criminal separatists here at the heart of Ceres Station in what is being called the biggest bust since the coalition joined the Laconian Association of Worlds.”
Bobbie felt the tightness across her back get worse. It wasn’t only that every loss to the underground was more risk to her and hers. She hated the way history was being rewritten before her eyes. Sol system joined the Association of Worlds was a hell of a way to say, Laconia trucked in a half-alien warship and killed the shit out of everyone until we showed them our bellies.
The time was coming when, even if she didn’t hear from Naomi, she was going to have to make the ancient human decision again: fight or flight. As the reporter enthused about how many guns and enemy soldiers had been captured, she cracked her knuckles. She had three options. Take on the Tempest, run for the gate, or destroy the Storm and let her crew dissolve into the civilian population. Every option was its own kind of bad.
“The cell was exposed by the discovery of an encryption package running on a public system,” the reporter said, and the feed kicked over to a wide-faced woman with a pattern of moles on her cheeks that looked like paint spatter.
“The activity of the decryption package coincided with a data drop from known separatist elements earlier today,” she said, and Bobbie killed the feed.
She made a connection to Jillian. Her second in command accepted like she’d been expecting her. Before Jillian could speak, Bobbie asked, “Did a bottle come through?”
“It did,” Jillian said. “We got a full copy of the data. I was going to let you sleep until the decryption run was finished.”
“We’re running the decrypt on our own system, yeah?”
“You saw the thing on Ceres,” Jillian said. It wasn’t a question. “Those yokels were stupid and so they’ll die. Good riddance. We’re not stupid. We won’t die.”
“How long before the data’s clean?”
Jillian shrugged. “Another hour, maybe.”
“I’ll be in the gym,” she said. “The minute it’s done, I know it. Understood?”
“Yeah, okay,” Jillian said, and Bobbie dropped the connection. Any hope of sleep was gone now. Her nerves were as bright as stars. She pulled the tactical map back up. The red dot of the Tempest was still near Ganymede. She stared at it for a long moment as if the commander might be able to feel her attention, might be scared by it. She closed its display and went to the Storm.
The gym was bright and clean. All the equipment was Martian design strained through Laconian technology. Bobbie threw herself into the effort like it could help her forget, and it did at least a little bit. She’d been in the resistance gel for forty minutes when Jillian’s message came through. The bottle had been from Auberon. From Naomi. It was the reply she’d been hoping for. Bobbie, panting and wet from exertion, opened the message file.
The background filter made Naomi look like she was in a featureless white room. Like she was an angel, delivering her message from some abstract heaven. Naomi tipped her head forward unconsciously before she spoke, the way she did when she was delivering bad news.
“Hey, Bobbie,” she said. “Your plan . . . looks solid.”
Bobbie grinned until her cheeks ached.
In his last days, her grandfather talked sometimes about how weirdly clear his early memories had become. He might not quite remember the name of his nurse or when the man had last been to check on him, but the details of his childhood were vivid and immediate. Like the past was growing stronger as his present and future wore thin. He told the story about seeing a living cat for the first time, and how strange it had felt to hold it, with the same awe in his voice every time. Bobbie’s memory hadn’t done that, not yet. But maybe there was something. When she called the crew back to the Storm for her briefing, all she could think of was when she’d been back in the service on Mars.
The leader of her first fire team had been Sergeant Huk. He’d been about half a head shorter than she was, with a terrier-thin face and a receding hairline. She’d never known anyone before or since who could command her loyalty or instill fear in her the way he had. When she’d been right out of boot and as green as they come, he’d turned her into an actual Marine. Before every mission briefing, he had found a way to acknowledge her. A nod, a touch on her shoulder or arm. Something that meant that no matter what was coming next, she wasn’t going into it alone. He never humiliated her by saying it aloud, and he never left it unsaid. After he retired, she’d found out he’d done the same for everyone.
Now, as her people returned to the ship, she did something similar. She stood in the airlock, seeing each of them as they boarded. Timon Coul, with his old OPA split-circle tattoo smudged by time until it was just a bluish blotch on the back of his hand. Liese Chou, with her pale-gray hair. Caspar Asoau, looking like a teenager surrounded by his grandparents. Denise Lu. Skaldi Austin-Bey. Ian Freeman. And almost last, Alex Kamal. Alex, her oldest friend, and the man she’d traveled with for what felt like half a dozen lifetimes now.
He looked weary, like she’d woken him from his sleep. Maybe she had. He wouldn’t have complained. He paused in front of her, and for a moment, it was like they were back on the Rocinante together. Like they were home. She touched his hand, and he nodded to her like he understood perfectly. Probably he did.
When the crew was all assembled in the galley, she pulled up her map of the system. It filled the wall. Someone in the back coughed, and she realized she’d been looking at it for several long seconds. And that she was enjoying herself.
“All right,” she said. “We have word from on high. New mission. High risk. High reward.” She shifted to an image of the Tempest. As strange as the Storm was in its particulars, its architecture was essentially the same design language that Martian ships had been for decades before the starving years. The Tempest was something else. Pale, asymmetrical, with protrusions and curves more like some monstrous vertebra. “We are going to kill that.”
She waited for a moment, half expecting mutiny on the spot. The Tempest had put its boot on Sol system’s neck without seeming to break a sweat. She could have said We’re all going to turn ourselves inside out and become seagulls and it might have seemed about as realistic. No one objected. Looking into their faces, she saw interest. Anticipation. She saw hope, and she knew she’d been right to want this.
“We have a small payload that will do the trick,” she said, nodding to Rini Glaudin at the back.
“Payload of what?” someone asked.
“The Magnetars run on antimatter,” Bobbie said. “The Tempest’s resupply was on that freighter we took.”