She thought about sending a message out to Trejo, calling for more Laconian reinforcements. The message would take hours to reach him, hours to get back, and by the time any ships he sent made it there, it was just as likely they wouldn’t be answering to Trejo or Naomi anymore. Better to play the cards she had. She wasn’t going to win, but she could take a long time losing.
She ran solutions through the Roci’s system, shifting from scenario to scenario like a football coach preparing for a complicated game. Here are my players. Here are their players. Here’s the field of play. The hurt and the horror and the grief were still there when she thought to turn to them, but they lived at a distance. She felt herself slipping into the version of herself that she’d made during Jim’s captivity: the Naomi who lived in secret and met the world with her intellect because her heart was still too raw.
She wondered whether this was how Camina Drummer had survived as the last president of the Transport Union, or Michio Pa as the first. Or Avasarala, back on Earth when Earth had been the center of the human race and not just the oldest planet among thousands. The Indefatigable and the Yunus Emre would intercept the Blackberry when it transited the Xicheng gate. She queried the Yunus Emre about the models of torpedo and PDCs it had and set the Roci to checking for ships with compatible loadouts.
When Jacob died, it had been just the same. It had been just weeks until their fortieth anniversary, and the children were all coming back from university for the party. She’d found him in the bathroom. Dead of a stroke, the doctors said. She’d spent twenty-eight hours straight cleaning the apartment, and she wouldn’t have stopped then except Hannah came early and—
Naomi stopped, her hands raised and her heart beating triple-time. She looked around the ops deck as if examining it would make it more solid, more real, more concrete. She checked the time. It was still half an hour before her next dose of the drugs was due. She took them anyway. The peach-colored tabs were bitter, and the taste lingered at the back of her throat. She waited a few minutes, watching her own cognition, waiting for memories of lives she hadn’t lived to sneak back into her.
“Fuck that very, very much,” she said to the empty air, then opened a connection to Elvi. “How long before we can get this going?”
“Tanaka’s on her way now,” Elvi said. “We’re putting Jim in a Laconian suit. She thought it might make Duarte feel better than his Roci gear. And… it’s just more likely to keep him alive. You know, until…”
“I’m starting to get intrusive thoughts.”
“I know,” Elvi said. “A lot of people are. The data from before says it shouldn’t get too bad as long as you keep on the medication schedule. But we’re only muffling them. We’re not shutting them all the way up.”
“Are they getting information from me?”
The Roci chirped an alert. Naomi pulled it up as Elvi replied. “Maybe, but it’s all still pretty haphazard. My guess is that any intelligence that slips through is going to be lost in the clutter. That’s just a guess, though.”
“Not sure the data’s going to support that.”
“Why not?”
“The repeaters at the gates? All the ones that were still working? They just went offline. Kill codes from the system sides of the gates.”
Elvi hesitated. “All at the same time?”
“Within a few seconds of each other.”
“That’s… more coordinated than I like.”
Naomi stretched her shoulders. She could feel her strategies shifting. Reconceptualize everything she’d just designed. Still coaching the game, but now it was a game she wasn’t allowed to watch being played…
“Let me know as things progress,” she said. “I’ll be here.”
She pulled up the tactical map. The four most critical gates were Earth, Laconia, Auberon, and Bara Gaon. She found the ships closest to each. It took five minutes to calculate the flight solutions she wanted for each of them: hard burns that started braking well inside the ring space. Just enough velocity to make the transit, gather telescopic data, and duck back in. And the point of transit randomized, so that even if the enemy had a back door into their heads, they couldn’t line up a torpedo or a rail-gun strike on the ship.
She was gratified that none of the captains questioned the orders or pushed back at the mission. She set tracking indicators on each of them—tiny red cones that showed the distance the ships had traveled without giving her a precise lock on their actual position. While they moved, she ran simulations on the transit times for the first dozen ships due to pass into the ring space, and what changes to their paths were physically possible. The intercepts that had been certain became clouds of time and place…
She was almost annoyed when the connection request came and broke her concentration.
“Hey,” Jim said, and all the control and distance she’d bent herself to building blew away on his breath. Grief slammed into her like a rogue wave, blowing her off her feet and trying to drown her.
“Hey,” she murmured.
“So, we’re about a hundred meters from the surface of the station, and we’re heading in.”
She took down the tactical display and pulled up the Roci’s external camera. It didn’t take a second for the ship to find them. Three dashes silhouetted against the glowing blue of the station. Tags appeared as the Roci marked their positions and velocities. Naomi cleared them. It was enough to see them. Watching was more important than knowing the details. The details didn’t matter.
“I’ve got you,” she said, and the ways that both was and wasn’t true stung. “I’ve got you, Jim.”
“Teresa wants you to make sure Muskrat’s in her crash couch in case you have to do any tricky maneuvering.”
“I’ll see to it.”
One of the little dashes nodded, so that one was Jim. An alert came up from the ship that had peeked into Auberon, and then the one in Laconia. She closed them. It didn’t look like the three of them were moving at all. They were just there, against the blueness. The little egg of Duarte’s ship appeared and grew larger. They were almost there.
“Okay,” Jim said. “We’ve got an entrance. We have a way in.”
“We’ll give you as much time as we can.”
“It’s going to be okay.” The oceanic optimism would have been a lie in anyone else. Or maybe a prayer.
“Good hunting, love,” she said, and the three dots passed into the blue and vanished. She waited for a moment, but nothing changed. The station remained its enigmatic self. A third alert came, this one from Sol gate. She turned off the external cameras and pulled her tactical map back up.
There were many, many more ships coming now. Hundreds of them, and while most were on fast burns, it would still take them days to reach the gates.