“Jillian, escort the friendly up here,” Bobbie said. “Let’s get everyone into emergency suits and prep them for the ride over to the Storm. The rest of you, fan out and get an eyeball inventory. When the Storm arrives we’re going to want to take all the best stuff with us, and we won’t have much time. Get to it.”
“Copy that,” Jillian said.
“I think we win,” Bobbie said to Takeshi. He grinned back at her.
“Easy peas—” he started to say and then blew apart.
Bobbie knew intellectually that they must have taken a raking pass from someone’s PDCs. But from inside the ship it looked like the bulkheads on either side of the compartment decided to explode in several dozen places all at once. The room was full of glowing shrapnel bouncing off walls and panels, and the gray smoke of vaporized metal. Takeshi was a tangle of technology-wrapped body parts floating in a nebula of blood globes.
It didn’t look like anyone else was directly hit, but before Bobbie could even start to issue an order, the air in the room was just gone. Too many holes on both sides. One moment they were in a pressurized cabin, the next they were in vacuum. It happened so fast it barely ruffled the political officer’s Laconian blue suit jacket.
“Get them in suits!” she yelled, but it was already too late. She was a Martian. She’d started doing vacuum drills in grade school. Fifteen seconds and you lose consciousness. Anything that you needed to do had to happen in that first fifteen seconds or it didn’t happen at all. Any vacuum suit that is more than fifteen seconds away is a lifetime away.
All she could do was watch the partisan who’d helped them take the ship gasp out a cloud of mist that was her very last breath ever. The political officer, their whole reason for coming, died a moment later with a look of profound puzzlement on his face. A thousand facts and secrets that could have meant the difference between the underground thriving and all of them dying in a gulag evaporated as the man’s cells gave up.
Every panel on the ops deck that still worked was flashing red. The ship was dead too.
“Storm, this is strike team,” Bobbie said, opening the command channel. She heard only dead air and the faint hiss of background radiation. “Storm, come in.”
Nothing.
“Shit,” Jillian said. She came into the ops deck dragging their dead ally from the engineering deck with her. “Did we lose the Storm too?”
“Chama,” Bobbie said, pointing at one of her people. “Get outside and see if you can spot the Storm. Maybe line-of-sight comms will work. The rest of you, mission hasn’t changed. Get me that inventory. Get it ready for rapid transfer once we find the ship.”
“Or,” Jillian said, “get ready to fall into Jupiter and die because we’re way under orbital speed now and don’t have an engine.”
“Or that,” Bobbie agreed, surprised at how much she wanted to push across the room and punch Jillian in the face. “But until we do, we’ll stay on mission. Get the fuck out of here and make yourself useful packing cargo.”
On the radio, one of Jillian’s squad mates said, “Lots of stuff here, boss. Ammo, fuel, it’s the mother lode. Primary mission is fucked, but secondary is a win.”
“A moral victory, I guess,” Bobbie sighed.
“You know who talks about moral victories?” Jillian asked as she floated out of the room. “The team that lost.”
Chapter Eight: Naomi
Communication was a problem.
The ring gates created interference that made trading messages across them difficult and tightbeam between systems essentially impossible. Laconia controlled the repeaters on either side of the gates, and Medina Station in the center of everything, the guard at the great crossroads of the empire. They had eyes and ears in every system and pattern-matching algorithms combing through every frequency on the spectrum. Saba had been able to carve out a few holes here and there—tightbeam antennas with outdated or compromised security code that could drop incoming records out of the logs, newsfeeds that could be altered to carry messages hidden in the flux of the image signal. The same old tricks the OPA had been using since before either she or Saba had been born, but updated for the new circumstances. The danger was twofold: first that Laconian forces would intercept and understand their messages, and second that they’d track the signal back to its origin.
The first problem wasn’t trivial, but there were ways of making it difficult. Self-scrambling encryption, interference signatures, context-shifting linguistic encoding. Nothing was perfect, and even with the forensic work that Bobbie and her crew had done on the Gathering Storm, the full extent of Laconian military signal processing was three parts guesswork and one part hope for the underground. But Naomi was confident enough in it that she didn’t lose sleep.
The second problem—not having the signal traced back—was easier because of the bottles.
Naomi had never actually seen an ocean except through a camera, but language held on to things that were long gone. Tight-beams still had “lines” even though the physical wire that line referred to had been light for generations. Sol was still “the sun” even though there were thirteen hundred more like it, shining down on human heads. Message in a bottle held a whole host of nuances and expectations for Earthers that she could only inherit thirdhand—through jokes and cartoons and entertainment feeds. The actual bottles she used were the torpedoes that she kept in her container, each of them carrying a burst transmitter and an explosive payload large enough to turn the equipment into bright dust. She’d written the code herself, and she knew it was solid.
To get information in from Saba and the underground, all she had to do was listen. It was all there, screaming through the void and amplified on the networks, since she knew which feeds to look at. The gossip and the newsfeeds and the empty, fluting static where the notes had been tucked in. Even Laconian propaganda. Even, sometimes, the rebroadcast messages Duarte made Jim send out to her.
No matter what ship she was on, the information came in, passive and untraceable. She fed it into the local system in her couch and her hand terminal—more raw information than she could have read in a lifetime, and updating constantly. And the system filtered out the reports and information for her to work from.
She made her analysis, her recommendations, her arguments for what the forces opposing these new inners should do and how. And when she was ready—when time was short or she felt like she’d come to a natural break point—she would transfer the information into one of the missiles and signal her shipboard contact. Once the missile was dropped out an airlock, her code would kick in.
A randomized direction, a randomized number of turn-and-burns, a randomized length and power of thrust, and a randomized time before delivery. Sometimes she’d drop it off a day or two before she left the system, or after the shell-ship she’d come in on had moved on. Sometimes she wouldn’t. Patterns were the enemy, even patterns that were meant to cover her tracks.
When the time came, the bottle screamed out everything she’d told it in a single burst. Somewhere in the system, Saba would have an antenna listening just the way she did. Quietly, passively, undetectably. It was an act of cosmic ventriloquism, and it was how the underground passed information back and forth—slowly and imperfectly—while the enemy could send its own messages anywhere it chose to at the speed of light.
That was what being the underdog meant.
The hardest part was the time between sending the bottle out and when it detonated. Hours or days or, rarely, weeks of second-guessing herself. Poring over her own plans and suggestions, certain that she’d made a mistake she couldn’t stop before it rippled out through the systems. Listening to all the new information coming in that would have changed one aspect or another of what she’d already said and couldn’t take back.