“There are always problems,” Dawes said, then after a brief hesitation, “but there have been more of them.”
The cart lurched, turned toward a wide ramp leading up into the station. The mildly adhesive wheels made a sound between a hiss and crackling as they rolled away from the docks. Pa looked back toward the Connaught’s berth. Maybe she should have brought guards of her own with her. Carmondy’s men were still all back on the Hornblower, but Bertold and Nadia were both combat trained. Too late now.
The administration levels were out nearest the skin of the station where the Coriolis was least pronounced. The old tunnels and corridors had been redone since the OPA claimed the station, but there was still a sense of age. Dawes made small, inane conversation intended to put her at ease, and his skill was such that it worked. If they were really talking about which restaurants made the best sausage and black sauce and what had happened when a religious convocation was booked in the same halls as a ra? music festival, the situation couldn’t be that dangerous. She knew it was an illusion, but she appreciated it all the same. Neither of them mentioned the reason they were there. Inaros’ name didn’t come up.
The meeting itself was in a garden in the administrative level. A wide, arching ceiling glowed with full-spectrum light. Devil’s ivy draped columns and walls, and wide ferns spread massive fronds like herons about to take flight. The air smelled of hydroponic plant food and wine. She heard Sanjrani’s high, reedy voice before she turned the corner. Without a solid inventory of the fertilizer base on every station, a nitrogen-based currency is going to be swamped by illegal inputs. Another variation on his constant theme. It was almost good to hear it again. Dawes touched her elbow, gestured down a path between a small fountain and a spiral fern, and then they were there. The five leaders of the Free Navy. Nico Sanjrani, looking more like a middle-aged shopkeeper than the chief economist of a budding empire. Rosenfeld Guoliang, with his dark, pebbled skin and his too-ready smile, general of the second fleet and industrial czar. And sitting in a chair of woven cane, Marco Inaros, the man behind it all.
Victory suited him. His hair flowed down to his shoulders, and he held his body with an animal ease. When he rose to greet her and Dawes, she felt an echo of his pleasure in her own heart. Whatever else the man was, he had a charm that could coax the venom out of snakes. It was, she presumed, the gift that had put him in position to trade with the Martians for their ships, their munitions, all the material that allowed them to stage their revolution. The only other person there was Inaros’ skinny, crazy-eyed son, Filip. Pa made a point of not looking too closely at the boy. There was something about him that bothered her, and it was easier to stay aloof than to engage.
“The brilliant Michio Pa!” Marco said. “Excellent! We’re all here now. The founders of our nation.”
“Do you have stats on the new acquisitions?” Sanjrani asked, either unaware that he was stepping on Marco’s moment or at least unconcerned. “I need to get a complete accounting.”
“Carmondy’s working on that,” Pa said.
“Soon, though.”
“Nico, my boy,” Rosenfeld said. “Don’t be an ass. Say hello to Captain Pa first.”
Sanjrani scowled at Rosenfeld and then at Inaros, and finally turned back toward her and nodded curtly. “Hello.”
“Now that the inner circle’s all here,” Dawes said, “perhaps we could hear what’s brought us all together? Not that being in one room isn’t a pleasure in itself, but …”
Marco smiled as his son, behind him, fidgeted with the holster of his pistol. “We’ve broken Earth and beaten Mars. Johnson’s OPA is shown up as the collaborationist sham that it was. Everything we set out to do, we’ve done. It’s time to begin the third phase.”
Everything we set out to do except kill Smith and Fred Johnson, Pa thought but didn’t say. The silence from the others wasn’t about that, though.
When Dawes spoke, his voice was carefully light and conversational. “I didn’t know you had a third phase in mind.”
Marco’s grin could have been anger or pleasure, rage or satisfaction. “Now you do,” he said.
Chapter Six: Holden
Ifeel like we should be whispering,” Holden said. “Going around on tiptoes.”
“We’re on the float,” Naomi said.
“Metaphorical tiptoes.”
The ops deck was dark apart from the backsplash glow of their monitors. Alex was sleeping in his cabin, leaving the monitoring to Holden and Naomi. Last he’d seen them, Bobbie and Amos were touring the ship, testing everything but the comms—PDCs, thrusters, the keel-mounted rail gun, the environmental systems. Ever since the mission had begun, Bobbie had been careful not to make Holden feel like she was taking over the ship, but her deference didn’t extend so far that she wouldn’t refamiliarize herself with every centimeter of the Roci before the fighting started. Even if it was just running through how Amos had rerouted the water feeds to the galley, watching the two of them always felt like listening to a conversation about weapons. The serious, professional talk between people who understood that they were working with equipment that could get people killed. It left him feeling like he’d been a little too casual about the ship up to now.
Clarissa … he didn’t know where Clarissa was. Ever since the last hard burn, he’d only caught fleeting glimpses of her, like she was a spirit they’d picked up that couldn’t bear being seen straight on. Most of what he heard about her—that she was building up her strength, that her black market implants were making her less nauseated, that she’d tracked down the bad coupler that was making the machine shop lights dim—he heard from the others in the crew. He didn’t like it, but at least he didn’t have to talk to her.
The plan was simple. The Azure Dragon wasn’t a gunship, but a geological surveyor. The protection she had was that space was vast, the ship was small, and her orbit kept her far enough away from Earth and Luna that she could burn hard back out to the Belt or the Jovian moons if anyone started coming for her. All of her active systems—transponder, radar, ladar, radio—were shut down to keep her from announcing herself. She couldn’t stop the light from bouncing off her hull, and she couldn’t hide her waste heat, but she could run as quietly as possible. It limited her to passive sensors and tightbeam. Enough for her to do the work of coordinating the stones thrown at Earth, but still half-blind.
And that was what Bobbie was counting on.
They’d laid in a course that would put them close to the Azure Dragon, then arranged for a shifting of the combined fleet that would hide the flare of their burn. It was a balance of getting to the enemy quickly but not being able to make the classic halfway-point flip-and-burn. They only built up enough velocity that they could shed it when they got close, and then the Roci went dark and drifted. With no active sensors, the Azure Dragon would have to see them visually—a tiny point in the vastness—and identify them as a threat without radar or ladar.
And they would, eventually. But by then, if it all went the way Bobbie intended, it wouldn’t make a difference.
It was a slower approach than Holden remembered making to anything in all the time they’d had the Roci, and it left him antsy and impatient.
The voices came from the lift: Bobbie serious, sharp, and professional; Amos cheerful and amiable. They floated up into the deck, first Bobbie and then Amos. Bobbie grabbed a handhold and pulled herself to a stop. Amos tapped the deck with his ankle as he passed it and killed his own momentum by planting his feet on the ceiling and absorbing it with his knees. He floated upside down. The Roci usually ran at less than full g to conserve reaction mass and for Naomi’s benefit, but they almost always had a consistent down. Going totally on the float was weird.
“How’s it going?” Bobbie asked.