Alex had been a navy boy for twenty years before he’d become the pilot of the Rocinante. He’d always been reliable under pressure. But something had happened when they met with Naomi this last time. Or maybe it was the idea of his kid getting married. Or maybe it was that he was a little smarter than she was, or a little less angry, or a little more realistic. Maybe it was that he’d seen a little sooner than she had why the fight was unwinnable. The underground was held together with spit and baling wire even at the best of times. Saba did what he could to help the old OPA fighters keep the Laconians uncomfortable where they could, but the simple truth was that the Storm was their only meaningful asset. The ship, and by extension her strike team, were the resistance’s only real weapon against Laconia. The Transport Union didn’t have gunships, and the void cities had been disarmed as part of the treaty negotiations. The Earth-Mars Coalition fleets couldn’t help even if they wanted to now that they all had Laconian flag officers on them reporting directly to Admiral Trejo.
If Alex was losing heart, Bobbie didn’t believe for a second he was alone. The failure to capture the political officer combined with the looming threat of the battleship might be enough to get her crew wondering why they were still risking their necks fighting an unbeatable foe.
And as much as she disliked it, Alex was right.
The old-guard OPA attitude of resistance for resistance’s sake would only keep them going so long. Part of what she should be doing was training up the next generation of fighters. Only so far, they weren’t waiting in the wings to step in. Duarte and his people were smart. They kept things from getting bad too quickly. They made the right speeches about respect and autonomy. They let people believe that government by a king would never go wrong. And by the time it did, and things got bad enough to inspire a younger resistance, she and Alex and the old-school OPA would be off the board. Then who would be left to fight? Why would they think there was any hope in it?
Recruitment wasn’t her job. It belonged to Saba or Naomi or one of the other secret leaders of the underground, but she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Alex had opened the issue. Now it itched.
Bobbie finished her check of the fuel cell crates and moved on to something the manifest listed as sensor components. The team had grabbed it off the freighter because any repairs the Storm needed were done in-house and on the fly. Spare parts were always at a premium.
Inside the crate was a sealed gray ceramic box about the size of a toaster with seven input ports on its side. Bobbie used her terminal to look up the serial number on the case. It was listed as an active sensor array control node—the little processing station that coordinated data coming in from the radar and ladar sensors, did first-level analysis, and acted as the hindbrain between the main computer and the sensors themselves. An expert pattern-matching system about as smart as a pigeon. If they were sending a new one to the Tempest, it might mean that they’d lost one in the fight for Sol. It was a nice idea, anyway. That the big dreadnought had taken some damage in the fight it couldn’t just heal for itself. And it made sense. The weird hulls and reactors and engines of the ships might heal like the ship was a living thing, but they were protomolecule technology. The sensors and computers on the Laconian ships were human tech. Anything built by humans had to be hand repaired or replaced. It was one of the few weaknesses of the hybrid ships.
And if she had the replacement parts, it might mean there was a hole in the Tempest’s sensor package. If they could figure out where it existed, maybe they could get close to the big ship before detection. They could … fire one meaningless torpedo before the big bastard swung around and ripped them into atoms. Paint something rude on the hull. Pee on it. Jillian’s crack about moral victories was annoying, but that didn’t make her wrong.
Bobbie put the sensor node back into its case and marked the box as one to definitely keep for themselves. An hour later, she’d finished going through the pallet of spare parts and tagged them all as keepers. Her terminal was playing a little three-dimensional game of “fit all the loot.” Every time she marked a crate, the program shuffled everything in the Storm’s storage compartments looking for a place to put it. At some point, they’d have to start storing things in the staterooms and hallways, and that point wasn’t far off.
She opened a crate of protein flavorings for the galley food processor and marked it DO NOT KEEP. She started to close it, then sighed and changed it to KEEP. The terminal played its little space-shuffling game. An army marches on its stomach, the ancient saying went, and people who were risking their lives for the cause should probably be able to have a tasty meal every now and then.
It was interesting, though, that the Tempest was coming after them. It felt good to know she’d hit the enemy hard enough to sting. Maybe it was just pride. Admiral Trejo angry that a pirate would dare act in his solar system. Or maybe the political officer had been close enough to someone high in command that this was a personal vendetta now. Or maybe they just really wanted their protein flavoring back. Whatever it was about the raid that made Laconia jump, she hoped they were as bothered and itchy as she was.
She reached the end of her row of pallets, which meant her work was half-done. A few more hours digging through boxes, and she could sneak off to one of those old bars at the port and drink her troubles away. Or at least distill them down to nausea and a hangover. And maybe she’d get a steak. She felt like Saba and the resistance could afford to buy her a steak. Her stomach rumbled at the thought. So maybe she called it a day now, and came back to finish tomorrow.
A small pile of high-impact crates had been set off to the side, away from the main rows of pallets. They had a variety of warning labels on them, so her crew had put some space between them and the rest of the supplies. All right. Go through the dangerous stuff now, then call it a day.
The top crate in the pile had a caustic chemical warning, and was filled with spray cans of degreaser. Not exactly a threat to life and limb. She moved the crate over to the regular supplies. Beneath it was a crate marked HIGH EXPLOSIVE that had reloads for the rocket launchers the Laconian power armor could attach. She marked that one as definitely keep and set it aside.
Under that was a large metal crate. The label said MAGNETIC CONTAINMENT EXPLOSIVE DANGER. That was odd. None of those words seemed to go together in a way that made sense to her. She checked the serial number on the side of the crate with her terminal, and it came back ID not found.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Nothing on the crate indicated that opening the latches was hazardous, so Bobbie popped them and lifted the lid. It was much heavier than it looked. Lead lined, maybe. Inside, cradled by enough foam to keep a robin’s egg intact during high-g maneuvers, were four metallic spheres about the size of Bobbie’s two fists held together. All four had cables running to a massive power cell that gave off a low hum of high electricity. The power cell’s indicator showed that it was at 83 percent charge. Each sphere had its own indicator where a cable from the power cell connected to it. They all showed 100 percent.
Bobbie very carefully lifted her hands away from the box and took a step back. Nothing in the box itself looked all that dangerous. Just four big metal balls and a high-capacity battery. But every hair on her body was standing straight up. It was all she could do to stop herself from running away.