“Why don’t we go over this from the start?” the boy said.
It went on for hours, it felt like. No hand terminal. No screens that he could see. All Vandercaust had to judge by was the animal rhythms of his body. How long it was before he got thirsty again. Hungry. When he started feeling sleepy. When he needed to visit the head. He walked the boy through his whole night before the attack. Where he’d been. Who else had been there. What he’d drunk. How he’d gotten back to his quarters. Over and over, pushing at anything he said a little different from another time, pushing him to remember things he didn’t really remember and then coming at him when he got some detail wrong. The boy asked about Roberts, Salis, Jakulski. He asked about who else Vandercaust knew on Medina. Who he knew on the Sol side of the ring. What he knew about Michio Pa and Susanna Foyle and Ezio Rodriguez. When he’d been at Tycho Station. At Ceres. At Rhea. At Ganymede.
They showed him images of the attacks. The ships emerging through the gates all around the great sphere of gates. He watched them die as tactical images. As telescopic records of real people, really dying. Then they talked more, and showed it all to him again. He had a sense that the readouts were subtly different the second time out—another attempt to catch him out on something—but he couldn’t say what the changes were.
It was exhausting. It was meant to be exhausting. After a while, he stopped trying to keep his answers safe. He’d known enough about interrogation to see that this—wearying and harsh and dull though it was—was on the gentler end of that spectrum. He had no reason to protect his friends beyond the vague tribalism of being on a workgroup with them. If they were innocent, the truth would have to be armor enough. For them, and for him too.
They took him back to his cell. No beating this time. Just a hard shove through the door that left him sprawling and knocked his cheek against the wall hard enough to split it. He slept for a while, woke in darkness, slept again. The second time he woke, there was a bowl of beans and mushrooms congealing beside the door. He ate them anyway. No way to know how long he’d be there. How long it would all go on. Whether it would get worse.
When the door opened again, five people in Free Navy uniforms came in. The brown-eyed boy wasn’t among them, and for a moment, that made Vandercaust very nervous. Like looking for a friend and not finding them. The leader of the new group was laughing with one of her subordinates, checked her hand terminal by holding it up beside his face without paying much attention to him, tapped her screen.
“You should go, pampaw,” she said, walking out. “Late for your shift, you.”
They left the door open behind them, and after a moment, Vandercaust walked out of the cell, out of the security station, into the wide corridors of the drum. His body felt like a rag used for too long. He was certain that he smelled like sick primate and old sweat. The guard had been right. It was almost time for his shift, but he still went back to his hole, showered, shaved, changed into new clothes. He spent a few long minutes admiring the bruises on his face and sides. On a younger man, they could have been badges of endurance. On him, they just looked like an old man who’d caught the toes of a few too many boots. So he was late. He had reason to be. Little rebel, him.
He found Salis and Roberts deep in the service passageways, testing flow on the sewage intake for the backup recycling plant. Roberts’ eyes lit up as he approached, and she threw her arms around him.
“Perdíd,” she breathed against his ear. “Are you okay? We were worried.”
“Es dui?” Salis said, reaching across the table for the wasabi-flavored soy nuts. “They beat you up à nothing?”
The shift done, the three had retired to their usual bar. The breeze from spinward was as it always was. The thin line of sunlight stretched above them. Vandercaust pushed the bowl toward Salis’ fingers. “Security is police, and police are the same everywhere.”
“Still,” Roberts said. “Why bother pushing off the inners if it’s just to have a Belter foot stepping on our necks instead?”
“Wouldn’t talk like that,” Vandercaust said, then drank. Water tonight. Might be some time before he went for a long, solid drunk again. “Anxious times, these.”
“Talk how I want to talk,” Roberts said, but softly. She turned to her hand terminal. He could see the green and silver of the station feed, same colors it had been before the Free Navy took over. He wondered why they hadn’t changed it. A way to give a sense of continuity, maybe. Anything on the feed would have been vetted, of course. The power of Medina Station was that it was so much not a part of any of the systems on the far sides of the gate. The price of it was that information came from a single source. Back in Sol system, there would be any number of feeds and subfeeds. Some broadcast, some left in storage to be queried and mirrored. Hard to control what got out. Maybe impossible. Medina, one set of jammers blocked every unlicensed receiver and transmitter at once.
The server came with his gyro—textured fungus and soybean curd instead of lamb and beef. Cucumber yogurt. A sprig of mint. He reached out for it with a little grunt and a sudden ache. It wasn’t the worst beating he’d ever suffered, but he’d still be sore for days.
“Why they set you out?” Salis asked. “Sprecht el la?”
“No, they didn’t say,” Vandercaust replied. “Or that they wouldn’t be back. Maybe they just needed someone to keep you two on schedule.”
He’d missed two full shifts and come in during the middle of the third. Three days, almost, lost in the darkness of the security cell. No lawyer, no union representative. He could have asked for one—should have, by the rules and customs—but the certainty was solid as steel that it would have only meant more bruises. Maybe a broken bone. Vandercaust knew enough of history and human nature to know when the rules weren’t the rules anymore. He took a bite of his sandwich, then put it down while he chewed. After this, he’d go home. Sleep in his own bed. Sounded like the promise of paradise. He traced fingertips over the split circle on his wrist. It had been a statement of rebellion once. Now, maybe it only made him seem old. Still taking sides in the last generation’s fight.
“My friend in comms?” Salis said. “You know what they say? Found a hidden dump in the data core. Walled off. Think it was what they used to coordinate with the colonies. Confirmations came in from all the gates just before the attack hit. Only funny thing? Two ships didn’t come through.”
Salis cranked his eyebrows up toward his hairline.
Vandercaust grunted. “Were asking me about how many ships came through. Like they wanted a number.”
“Probably why. See if you knew how many came through or how many were supposed to, yeah? Trip you up if you were in on.”
“But didn’t have nothing,” Vandercaust said, tapping his forehead with two fingers. “Bon besse for me.”
Salis put a hand on his arm. The young man looked pained. Aching, but not in the muscles and joints. Not the way he was. “You should let me buy you a drink, coyo. You had a shit week.”
Vandercaust shrugged. He didn’t know how to explain himself to Salis or Roberts. They were young. They hadn’t seen the things he’d seen. Hadn’t done the thing he’d done. Being picked up by security, locked away, beaten, interrogated. They didn’t scare him in themselves. They scared him for what they said about how it came next. They scared him because they meant that Medina Station wasn’t a new beginning in history. It was and would be as red in the gutter as everyplace else humanity had set its flags.
Roberts sat up, her eyes going wide. “They got!”
Salis let his hand drop, turned to her. “Que?”