Alex raised his hand like a schoolboy answering a question. “I’m happy to keep an eye on the farm if y’all want to go over.”
“I think Amos should stay too,” Naomi said.
“Better if I came with,” Amos said. “Nothing happening over here Tiny can’t keep eyes on.”
Naomi hesitated, and Jim wondered for a moment what would happen if she told Amos he had to stay. Maybe Naomi had the same doubt. “All right,” she said. “Alex and Teresa stay here for now. The rest of us go make introductions.”
Naomi caught his eye and lifted one eyebrow. She meant that he didn’t have to go. He shrugged. He meant that he did.
“Works for me,” Amos said, hauling himself into the airlock. “And we got a seal, pressure, and an invitation.”
Jim followed Naomi into the airlock and felt it in his bones when it cycled shut behind them. His fear of Tanaka had shifted. Now some part of him expected the outer airlock door to open onto the void, for the air to flow out and death to rush in. Instead, there was a soft clank, a hiss of gas as soft as an exhalation, and the gangway. The Falcon’s outer airlock was already open, and the three of them launched across to it. The air smelled different. Bright and astringent.
When the Falcon’s outer door closed, its inner door opened, and Elvi Okoye was there. Fayez floated beside her with a black-eyed girl. Elvi smiled, but she looked terrible. Her skin had an ashy tone, and her arms and legs were visibly atrophied.
“Naomi, Jim,” she said, drifting toward them like an obscene parody of an angel. “It’s good to see you again. And Amos.” As she stopped herself with a handhold, Elvi’s gaze flickered across Amos, and for a moment there was something almost like hunger in her eyes. The focus of a taxonomist on an important new species. “I’d heard you changed like Cara and Xan. I would really love to do a few medical scans while you’re here. If that’s all right with you?”
“If it helps, Doc,” Amos said, then turned to the black-eyed girl. She had very different features from Amos, but the blackness of their eyes, the grayness under their skins, left Jim’s brain trying to see the similarity as a family resemblance. “Hey, Sparkles.”
The girl frowned and started to say something, then stopped.
“Well,” Fayez said. “This is just awkward as hell, isn’t it?”
Elvi shook herself and motioned them in. “Please come in. I’ve had a little welcoming party set up, and we have a lot we need to talk about.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Elvi
The Rocinante had come through the Adro gate, the gate had lit up like a radio and X-ray bonfire, and Elvi knew that the game had changed. She hadn’t known what it had changed into or what the consequences of the change would be, but without doubt, the ways she’d been operating were the old ways now.
The immediate response on the Falcon had been barely restrained panic. An enemy gunship was in the system. The Falcon was far from defenseless, but were they going to be in a battle? Had the underground come to drop nukes on the BFE the way they had the construction platforms? What had they done to change the ring gate? Elvi led by example at first. She didn’t panic, and it gave everyone else permission not to panic either. Then the first tightbeam from the Roci arrived, Naomi brought her up to speed, and Elvi had some decisions to make.
The first job, and the one that would shape what came after, was talking to Harshaan Lee.
The younger man floated in her office with his ankles crossed and his arms held behind his back in a way that opened his chest. He listened with the calm focus of a researcher taking in a new body of information. Only this was information that reframed his own life and his prospects for survival.
“I’m not going to apologize,” Elvi said. “Admiral Trejo knows very well how I feel about all the political and military wrangling in the face of this existential alien threat. If he finds out… When he finds out about this, he won’t be surprised. But he won’t be happy either.”
Dr. Lee let a long, slow breath out from between his teeth, half sigh and half deflation. “No, I see that he won’t.”
“If you’d like, I can incarcerate you,” Elvi said. “When this all comes out, you’ll be able to honestly say you couldn’t do anything about it.”
Lee was silent for a long moment, his gaze shifting as he thought. Elvi admired the man’s intelligence and professionalism. She didn’t know what he’d say or do, but if she did need to start moving down her chain of command until she found someone who’d toe her line, it was going to be a long, difficult day.
When he spoke, his voice was a mixture of resignation and amusement. “I am an officer of Laconia and a patriot. You are my commander and the head of the directorate in which I serve. Your collaboration is unorthodox. After San Esteban, unorthodox may be necessary. I understand your rationale. You may rely upon me.”
“Thank you,” Elvi said. “And Harshaan? I have access to the comms. And I have monitors on them not even the comms officers know about. Don’t fuck with me. I’m here to win.”
“Very much understood,” he said.
With his support, the rest of the crew shifted from fear to confusion. She wouldn’t have thought it, but there were some real advantages to working in a system that treated chain of command with an almost religious zeal. At least when she was the one with the authority.
Communication through the gate had always been spotty. In Sol system or Laconia—and increasingly in more developed colonies like Auberon and Bara Gaon—repeaters were plentiful enough for robust routing solutions. If one failed, the others would notice and track their signals around it. In Adro, there was a single thread of repeaters that the Falcon itself had dropped on the way out and the one at the ring gate that the underground or pirates or vandals occasionally destroyed. The new flood of radio pouring off the ring gates acted like a signal jammer and made the system even less reliable. But slowly, during periods of low activity and on frequencies the ring’s new activity seemed to ignore, a deeper picture of what had happened began to reveal itself to her. By the time the Rocinante arrived, she had as clear an understanding of the new status quo as anyone except possibly Ochida and Trejo. More than that, she had a plan. And getting Dr. Lee on board had been more straightforward than the risks she needed the Rocinante to shoulder.
She waited in the airlock with Fayez and Cara. She would have invited Dr. Lee and Xan, but they wouldn’t be coming to the briefing. There wasn’t enough space in her lab for all of them. She felt the anxiety in her chest like a spring wound up a quarter turn too tightly. Floating beside her, Cara fidgeted, clasping and unclasping her hands. Wringing them. Elvi had always thought that was just a figure of speech.
“Still time to back out of this,” Fayez said.
“No there isn’t,” Elvi said.
“No. You’re right.”
The airlock’s outer door cycled closed. There was a soft click as the inner door’s bolts came free. The door slid open, and they were there.
Naomi looked very different from the last time Elvi had seen her in person. They’d both been much younger then, and she remembered Naomi as a soft, almost retiring presence who had the habit of hiding behind the spill of her own dark, curling hair. The woman in her airlock had a harder face, hair the white of snowfall, and nothing reticent about her. The cameras did a great deal to disguise the gravity with which she held herself. Somehow, across the reach of decades, Naomi Nagata had become the kind of person Elvi could imagine sitting across a table from Anton Trejo. She wondered if Trejo knew that.