“I’m not seeing a repeater,” Jim said. “They blew ours up, but it doesn’t look like they dropped one.”
“I noticed that. They aren’t worried about coordinating with anyone on the other side. So there’s at least a chance we aren’t burning straight into a trap.”
“Yay!”
Ten minutes remained.
“Ready?” Naomi asked. In answer, Jim pulled himself to a wall handhold and pushed off toward the central lift. Naomi opened a connection to Amos. “We’re taking stations on the ops deck. Not that we’re expecting any trouble, but if there is some…”
“I hear you, Boss. I’ve already got the pup in her kennel. In case we bang around a little.”
Bang around a little meaning evade incoming fire. “And Teresa?”
There was one of his odd pauses before he answered. “We’re strapping down in engineering. You have a need, just say the word.”
Naomi dropped the connection and followed Jim. The lift was at the bottom of the shaft, locked down until someone called it, and they swam through the empty air of its shaft until they reached ops. They went to their usual stations, pulled the straps across their bodies, shifted the screens to the controls they would each take if the transit landed them in danger. The combination of fear and familiarity turned it into a ritual, like brushing her teeth before sleep. The ring persisted, but the lensing of the telescopy put fewer stars around it now.
“Ready in ops,” Naomi said.
“Flight deck,” Alex said.
“Yeah,” Amos said. “We’re good. Do your thing.”
The counter reached zero. Jim took a sharp breath. The gate blinked to the grainy trailing image—the same structure, but behind them now and receding. The stars all went out at once.
“And we are through,” Alex said. “No threats on the board so far as I can see, but shit howdy, are there too many people in here. I’m flipping us around and putting the brakes on until we know where we’re headed.”
The thrust gravity warning went on even though he’d just said it, and after a moment of vertiginous rotation, up and down returned. The gel of the couch pressed into Naomi’s back. She had already brought up the tactical map.
The ring space—what she still thought of as the slow zone even though there hadn’t been the hard limit on velocity here since Jim and a protomolecular echo of Detective Miller had turned it off decades ago—was a little smaller than the sun in Sol system. A million Earths could have fit in it, but the only things it contained now were 1,371 ring gates, the single enigmatic station at its center, and fifty-two ships including the Roci, all of them on transits of their own. Alex was right. It was too many. It was dangerous.
“How many do you think we’ve lost?” Jim asked. When she looked over, he had the same screen open before him.
“Just underground ships?”
“No, I mean the big we. Everyone. Laconian. Underground. Civilians just trying to get supplies where they’re needed. How many do you think we’ve lost?”
“No way to know,” she said. “No one’s keeping track anymore. There’s a war on.”
She set the Roci to identify the ships by transponder, drive signature, thermal profile, and silhouette, to note any discrepancies and flag any ships that were known to be associated with the underground or the Laconian Empire. It took the ship system three seconds to produce a compiled list with cross notations and a navigable interface. Naomi started the human work of paging through. The ships most closely allied with Laconia were a freighter called Eight Tenets of Bushido that operated out of Bara Gaon and a long-range explorer called the Flying Buffalo that was based in Sol but owned by a corporate network that had embraced Duarte’s rule the moment Earth and Mars had surrendered. Neither were warships, and both struck Naomi as being allies of convenience more than true believers in the Laconian cause. They weren’t part of the official Laconian hierarchy, anyway.
The only ship on her known underground contacts was an independent rock hopper out of Sol that was flying as the Caustic Bitch but was listed in the registry as PinkWink. There was probably a story there, but Naomi wasn’t sure she wanted to know what it was.
There was also a bottle on the float.
“One of yours?” Jim asked.
“Hope so,” Naomi said. “We’ll see.”
Once, humanity’s comm network had been a fairly robust thing. In-system radio signals hit repeaters at the ring gates that were either strong enough to shout over the interference in the gates or actually physically penetrated them with transceivers on both sides. Medina Station, at the heart of the ring space, had maintained them and monitored the comm traffic. For decades, a message from Earth could reach Bara Gaon and receive an answer back within a day even if the signal queuing was swamped. But with the death of Medina and the rise of the underground, that was gone.
Now the thirteen hundred worlds communicated in a shifting patchwork of relays, ships carrying messages, and the modified torpedoes she called bottles. This one in particular was an advanced design, set to wait and gather incoming messages from the underground that were meant for her and keep them until it was triggered. It was an imperfect system, and she was certain she’d lost more than a few along the way, but it was easy to verify, difficult to fake, and difficult if not impossible to trace.
She pulled up the Epstein drive controls and dropped in a slightly altered feed pattern. To anyone besides the bottle, it would be unremarkable—well within the range of normal drive fluctuations. To the sensor array on the surface of the bottle, it would match a pattern.
It did.
The bottle shouted a dense blip of tightly packed data, putting it out broadcast for any ship in the slow zone to hear. A tightbeam would have pointed a finger if anyone had caught backscatter from it. This could be meant for any of the dozens of ships that could hear it. And every now and then, the underground set false bottles to sneak into the slow zone or a gate to spit out faked data and confuse the patterns.
The Roci’s system sucked in the radio burst and set quietly to work decrypting it, while at the edge of the ring space the bottle lit its own drive and zipped out through one of the gates. Naomi’s underground knew to watch for its detonation as the sign to place another one when they could. If the Laconians saw it—even if they knew what it meant—there still wasn’t anything for them to do about it.
It was all run like an OPA cell writ large, and Naomi was the one who’d designed it. The sins of her past, finding a use.
“Well, that could have gone a lot worse,” Jim said. “I guess the question now is where we go next.”
“That will depend on what’s in the data,” Naomi said. “I don’t like spending more time in the ring space than we have to.”
“I would also hate to be eaten by forces from beyond space and time before it was my turn.” The lightness and humor she’d always known were still there, but there was an emptiness behind it. Not nihilism, she thought. Exhaustion.
“If we need to,” she began, “there’s always—”
Teresa’s voice cut in on the ship-wide comms. “I need help. In the machine shop. I need help now.”
Jim was unstrapped before the girl had finished speaking. All the weariness was gone from him. He didn’t wait for the lift to engage, dropping down the handholds in the shaft like climbing down a ladder. Naomi was barely behind him. Some part of her was almost relieved to see him moving with certainty again. Like catching a glimpse of the Jim from before. Even if a lot of him was in hiding, he was still in there.