They’d all been true, and none of them had. Looking back now, she saw that she’d left because staying would have been worse. She hadn’t let herself feel the loss of Jim too deeply. Or of Amos. Or Clarissa. Bobbie had invited her to join the crew of the Storm, but Naomi hadn’t accepted, and Bobbie hadn’t pressed the issue.
Now, strapped into the spiderlike framework of a salvage mech and burning for the ring with her two transmitters and the spool of wire, she looked back at the ship—her ship—and it still ached. But it was bearable. She had taken her grief and locked herself away with it because she’d been skinless. It had been the best way she could find at the time to keep every new day from feeling like a little more salt on the wound. But that had been a different version of her. She’d grieved, but more than that, she’d changed. The woman she was now wasn’t quite the one she’d been on the day that Jim left. Or even on the day she’d chosen not to accept Duarte’s invitation. Between the loss of Saba and Bobbie’s defeat of the Tempest, Naomi had been reborn so quietly she’d hardly even noticed. The only real evidence was that she could be on the Rocinante again. She could come home.
“You’re almost there,” Alex said. “How’s it look?”
“Big,” Naomi said.
The gate was only a thousand kilometers across. This close to the surface, it might as well have been half of the universe. This far from the sun, the mech’s HUD needed to add some false color augmentation so that she could see more clearly what she was dealing with. She made her braking burn. She only had a little time before her orbit slid past her, but the transmitters were already wired together. She tapped through the initialization codes, and the compressed nitrogen thrusters took it from there. The primary transmitter shot out through the ring, and the secondary took up a stationary position relative to the ring gate except for a slow drift that would eventually snuggle it up against the physical surface of the ring itself. As repeaters went, it was about the simplest version there was—one step up from cans and string. But it didn’t have to last long.
“How’s it looking?”
“I’m watching,” Alex said. “I’ve got sync from the local side. I’m waiting for a response from . . . Yeah, okay. We’re looking good. Come on back.”
“Copy that. I’m heading in,” Naomi said. “So much for the easy part.”
“Taking what I can get.”
Naomi turned back toward the Rocinante and started her burn. The mech had enough power in the thrusters that she could have worked out there for a few hours without any risk, but she was just as happy not to. The cooling on the unit wasn’t what it had been, or else she was less tolerant of being overheated.
By the time she’d gotten back to the ship, cycled through the airlock, packed the mech safely away, and floated up to the flight deck, the transmitter had been working for a little under three hours. The first cycle was passive, looking for signals coming from any ships in the ring space and identifying as many as they could. It looked like there were about a dozen at the moment, but all of them were recognizable as Transport Union or smugglers. Nothing had the comm signal or drive signature of a Storm-class destroyer, and nothing was the Whirlwind. No ships at all would have been better, but this was as good as Naomi could have reasonably hoped.
The connection request signal was the first real risk she was taking. If there were Laconian sensors in the ring space, this was going to give away what gates had active cells of the underground behind them. If things went the way she hoped, that information wouldn’t matter much. It was a calculated risk.
For almost a minute, there was no reply. The farthest gate was only a little under a million klicks. The light delay should have been nearly trivial. Naomi had a sinking feeling—What if they were the only ones? What if the plan had already fallen apart?—and then the connections started coming through. First just one, then a handful, then a small flood. Fifty-three answers in all. Fifty-three systems with their full supply of ready warships, out of retirement and at her command. Easily hundreds of ships.
“Not bad,” Alex said from his couch.
“It’s excellent until you do the math,” Naomi said. “Then it’s ninety-six percent no reply.” But she smiled when she said it.
Her plan, long since sent out via bottle and echoed from system to system, was larger than Laconia. Larger than the fifty-three systems that had sent ships for the fight. Even as she’d been setting out her makeshift repeater, an alert was going off at the transfer station on Nyingchi Xin. A pirate was breaking into Laconian warehouses on the largest moon of the smallest gas giant in Sanctuary system. A massive data breach was being reported from the new shipyards in Yasamal system. Hopefully dozens of other small actions and issues, anyplace that a Storm-class destroyer was in the system. After the death of the Tempest, Laconian forces and the factions that had thrown their lot in with them had to be nervous. That was her handle on them. It let her and her people distract them and draw them thin. They had to look strong now in every corner of the empire, because they already looked weak.
The next phase lost the anonymity and safety of the bottles. With a sensation like walking off her ship under an unfamiliar sky, Naomi chose the first of the connection requests and opened it. There was a hiss of static and the compression of sound that the multiple layers of encryption left behind.
“Nagata here,” Naomi said.
“Zomorodi back to you,” Emma’s familiar voice replied a few seconds later. “We’ve got the Cama, a half dozen rock hoppers with rail guns mounted on ’em, and ten antipirate gunships recently liberated from the governing council’s shipyard at Newbaker.”
“Ammunition?”
The lag was present, but not so bad that she had to trade recorded messages. The immediacy felt almost intimate.
“Oh, damn. Knew I forgot something,” Emma said, and Naomi heard the teasing in her voice. “Of course we’re loaded up. The Cama’s got a full hold too. Anyone needs resupply, we’ll be there. Unless they kill us all. Then, not so much.”
“Fair enough. Send me the specs and transponder codes. And what happened to Captain Burnham?”
“Early retirement,” Emma said. “Cashed out and bought part of a medical clinic.”
“Probably smarter than all of us put together.”
“I’m leaning toward coward.”
“Good to hear from you, Emma. Keep drives ready. I’ll be sending a flight plan as soon as I have everyone.”
“Standing by until then, Admiral.”
Naomi dropped the connection and took the next. Eight ships with old-style stealth composites and internal heat sinks. They’d have been the kings of space a couple generations back, but they weren’t bad even now. The next group had a Donnager-class battleship they were pulling out of mothballs. A quarter million tons of pieces smuggled to an empty moon and welded back together like a child’s model kit with a one-to-one scale. If she was lucky, there would be three or four more like it. Building them had been a pet project of Saba’s.
Saba, who’d started it and hadn’t lived to see it through. These people she talked with, whose lives she was now in a position to risk at best, spend outright at worst, were Saba’s network. They were the sword he’d dropped on the battlefield that she had picked up.
Fifty-three systems. Four hundred and eighteen ships with five Transport Union supply ships and three Donnager-class battleships among them, and the Storm—still compromised, but able to fly, still on her way. The best hammer that the underground could put together.
And it still wasn’t half the size of the force the Tempest had killed in Sol. Hopefully, if she’d done this right, it would be enough. If she’d been fooling herself, they’d all pay the price. But she was pretty sure she was right.
Once she had all the specs, she started sorting through by drive model, ship mass, and total energetic profile. Alex showed up with a tube of spiced lentils and a bulb of cold tea. She didn’t know she was hungry until she started eating it, and then she was ravenous. She put the monitor aside, rolling the tube and pressing to get out every bit of the spicy, rich mush. When it was gone apart from a burning aftertaste and a pleasant pressure in her gut, she sighed.
“Just like old times,” Alex said. “You never could remember to eat when you had a good problem to solve.”
“My old problems were never like this. It was more how to make sure we get to the next port safely.”
“That’s not what we’re doin’?” Alex asked with a grin.
“Nothing about this has any relationship to safety. This is exactly what I never wanted to be doing. Fighting? Getting people killed? I never even carried a gun.”
“I knew that,” Alex said, and the grin had turned into something softer. “There’s still time. Call this off, head back to port. Go back to getting our people elected into the Association of Worlds.”
Naomi was silent, her mind and her heart at odds the way they so often were. Alex misunderstood.