“So, chaff,” Chen said. “Cannon fodder.”
“We’re not putting people on all of them,” Avasarala said. “Even the OPA’s not that suicidal.”
Souther went on. “A fraction—the best ships—will carry a ground-attack group, whose mission will be to take control, not of Medina but of the rail-gun emplacements themselves. Once our forces control those, we expect Medina Station to capitulate. And since the rail guns were intended to defend Medina from more than thirteen hundred gates, and we’re only going to focus on the Sol and Laconia gates, we have reason to expect a relatively strong defensive position, which we can reinforce not only from Sol but with the colony ships that have already passed through and are willing and able to come to our assistance.”
“All right,” Chen said.
“You sound skeptical,” Avasarala said.
“No offense, ma’am,” Chen said. “But I’m looking at this, and it doesn’t square. If Inaros has been trying to tempt the fleet into overreach—spreading our forces too thin—then this run out to the edge of the system seems like his dream scenario. Unless you’re planning to send it unescorted, in which case you might as well not send it at all.”
“The escort will be a salvaged Martian corvette with a keel-mounted rail gun of its own,” Souther said. “The Rocinante is already burning on an intercept course. It’s going from Tycho Station, so it’s in the neighborhood. Relatively speaking.”
“There are also advantages to having that particular asset in place on Medina when we take it,” Avasarala said.
Chen’s laugh was thin and despairing. Avasarala stretched her right leg, feeling the ache in it. It would be worse in the morning. Lifting weights was an argument against a benign God. As if that needed more evidence.
“Why bother, then?” Chen asked. “A single escort ship and an old ice hauler heading out to the most sensitive strategic position in the system? I don’t mean to be rude, but I have to think you don’t like the people in those ships very much. They’re going to have the whole Free Navy chasing them out and turning them to slag before they’re a million klicks from the ring gate.”
“That,” Souther said, “remains to be seen.”
If Chen had been a dog, his ears would have gone up just then. Avasarala saw it in his face and the set of his shoulders. “This,” she said, “is why we need to talk. In private. Securely. I need assurances, Mr. Chen, that the rot at the heart of your navy was well and truly burned out. I trust Emily Richards to look out for her own best interests and Mars’ too. In that order. And I’ve done a deep background check on you.”
“You’ve… excuse me?”
Avasarala put out her hands, palms facing each other about a meter apart. “I’ve got a report on you this thick. I know every pimple you’ve popped since your voice broke. Everything. Praiseworthy, shameful, indifferent. Everything. I have violated your privacy in ways you can’t imagine.”
Chen went white, then red. “Well,” he said.
“I don’t give a shit about any of it,” she said. “The only thing I cared about was whether you had the stink of Duarte on your fingers. You don’t. It’s why you’re in this room. Because I trust you to take this back to Richards and no one else. And I need to know if you trust Mars.”
The silence in the room was profound. Chen pressed his fingers to his lips. “With this? Maybe. I get the sense you’re making some kind of request here. You should be very clear and explicit if that’s the case.”
“I want Richards to instruct the remnants of the Martian Navy—the ships in the consolidated fleet and the ones you have in reserve as well—to coordinate closely with Earth and the OPA and the fucking pirate fleet.”
“To do what?”
“Run a distraction campaign,” Souther said.
Avasarala waved him back, leaned in toward Chen, a smile on her lips. “Inaros isn’t going to chase after the Giambattista and Rocinante, because he’ll be distracted by the largest and most aggressive fleet action in history kicking his balls up into his throat. By the time he understands what we were really after, it’ll be too late for him to do anything but hold his dick and cry. But I need to know that you’re in.”
Chen blinked. His reserve cracked, just a little.
“Well,” he said, “when you put it like that.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Naomi
The Rocinante burned, but not straight for the ring gate. That would have been too obvious. The intention was to rendezvous with the Giambattista in an ambiguous orbit, leaving it unclear to anyone watching whether they were looking to position themselves in a long burn spinward toward Saturn, turn out toward the science station on Neptune, or make for the gate. Let Marco wonder a little bit, and be in position when the distractions started pulling his attention away. Assuming he was even watching where the Roci went.
Naomi assumed Marco was watching where the Roci went. She assumed everyone was. She understood how much her old friends hated her now.
Even in this moment of relative calm, Jim was spending ten- and twelve-hour shifts on the comms. When he wasn’t sending out or receiving messages, he’d watch newsfeeds. The Free Navy presence was growing on Ganymede and Titan. The consolidated fleet splitting its forces in order to send guard ships to Tycho. Angry voices coming off Pallas to denounce the traitors who’d colluded with the inner planets; not just Michio Pa and her pirate fleet anymore but also the OPA factions that Fred Johnson had put together. It was how Jim tried to have control over something he couldn’t actually control. The messages he watched and sent out were a kind of prayer for him, though he wouldn’t have said it that way. Something that brought peace and the illusion that what they were caught up in wasn’t so massively bigger than their own individual wills and hopes and intentions.
So even though it set her teeth on edge, she let him go on with it. She got used to falling asleep to the musical voices of Earth newsfeeds, waking up to the hard cadences of Chrisjen Avasarala and Michio Pa in her cabin.
“We will burn after we see the consolidated fleet commit,” Pa said, her distant, muted voice sliding into Naomi’s half-dream. She sounded so weary, it made Naomi want to go back to sleep in sympathy. “I understand that’s not a popular decision, but I’m not interested in having my people be the worm on Earth’s hook.”
“I never understood that,” Naomi said. Jim closed his hand terminal display and settled the earphones down around his neck, his expression guilty. Naomi shifted, and the crash couch swung under them like one of the hammocks she’d grown up sleeping in. “How do hookworms figure into catching fish, anyway?”
“Not hookworms,” Jim said. “Worms, like earthworms. Or insects. Crickets. You’d put them on metal hooks with a barb on the end, tie a really thin line to the metal hook, and throw the whole thing out into a lake or a river. Hope that a fish would eat the worm, and then you could haul the fish out with the hook that was caught in its mouth.”
“Sounds inefficient and needlessly cruel.”
“It really sort of is.”
“Do you miss it?”