The man at the front of the room wasn’t the one who’d summoned her, but his boss. Onni Langstiver was the head of the security forces and so, for the length of her mandatory temporary contract, technically her boss. He wore a Medina Station uniform like it was a mech driver’s undersuit. Dandruff dotted his shoulders.
“The biggest thing is we don’t want to seem aggressive,” Langstiver said, “but we don’t want to look passive either.”
In her peripheral vision, the others nodded. Bobbie tried to crack her knuckles, but she’d already done it twice since she sat down and her joints were silent. Langstiver went on.
“We’ve got the rail-gun emplacements on the hub station, same like always, sa sa? So that anyone tries anything, we spark those up and—” The director of station security for the Transport Union cocked his fingers into little gun shapes and made pew-pew noises. “Probáb they come through like any ambassador. Dock, talk, and los politicos do their dance. But if they come through with ideas, we’re ready. Not starting, but not a clean shot too, yeah?”
A general murmur of assent.
“You have to protect the guns,” Bobbie said. “The rail-gun emplacements on the hub station? If they get a force onto the surface—”
“Savvy, savvy,” Langstiver said, patting the air. “This is the Tori Byron, yeah?”
“What we need is intelligence about what’s coming through that gate before it comes through,” Bobbie said, knowing as the words passed her lips that she wasn’t going to be thanked for them. Still, now that she’d started …“A dozen probes going through the gate now could relay back whether we’re looking at a Donnager-class battleship or a few gunships or just a shuttle. How we get ready for any of those should be different—”
“Yeah, thought of that,” Langstiver said. “Don’t want to be provocative, though, yeah? And anyway, we’re not going to act much different no matter what. Working with what we’re working with.”
“So send a ship through with a fruit basket,” Bobbie said. “Greet them on their territory and get a report back.”
Langstiver stopped and stared at her. She stared back. The room was quiet for a long breath. Then another. He looked away first. “Can’t send a manned ship through. Union rules. Is in the work agreement, yeah? So we put Tori Byron up like an honor guard. The Rocinanate in Medina’s shadow, make sure no one lands that isn’t welcome. Everyone else in dock or cleared out enough to put a clear path between Laconia gate and Medina. Everyone that gets delayed, the union picks up the fees. Tori Byron gets full security contract schedule. Rocinante gets three-quarters for support role. Standard.”
Bobbie wondered what Holden would have done in this moment. Made an impassioned speech about how the union rules were restricting them past the point of tactical competence? Smiled his I-don’t-actually-like-you-very-much smile, then gone back to the ship and done whatever the hell he wanted to do anyway? Or sucked it up as a battle that wasn’t worth fighting?
Only it was her battle now, and while she was very clear that she was in the right, it was also evident that her position wasn’t going to help her change Langstiver’s plan. She couldn’t beat sense into a stone. Not even when it seemed fun to try.
“Understood,” Bobbie said.
All the way back to the dock, her jaw was clenched. It was just people. They were the same everywhere. She’d dealt with bureaucracy when she was in the service and when she’d done her veteran’s outreach work. She’d run up against it when Fred Johnson had the idiotic plan to make her kind of an ersatz Martian ambassador during the constitutional crisis. And when she’d taken her place on the Rocinante, she’d been happy to let Holden or sometimes Naomi take point on the bullshit diplomatic dance-and-kiss charade.
It wasn’t even that she was worried about the outcome of this particular encounter. It was that there was a better approach, she’d told them what it was, and they weren’t going to do it. And her ship—her people—were going to shoulder some part of the unnecessary risk. There was no scenario ever that was going to make that okay with her.
As a generation ship, the Nauvoo hadn’t expected to berth a lot of ships. As a battleship, the Behemoth’s needs had been minimal. What hadn’t been there, time and necessity had added. The major docks on Medina Station were outside the drum, down near the engineering decks and the long-quiescent drive that had been designed to launch the ship on a centuries-long voyage to the stars. A smaller dock had been built on the far end of the drum, near the command decks, but it was used more for private shuttles and diplomatic meetings. The Rocinante was berthed in the main docks, not far from the Tori Byron, and Bobbie cycled into the airlock with her sense of rage starting to fade. A little. She could hate it and still do the job. That was all she could do, really.
“Welcome back,” Alex said over the ship comms as the inner doors of the airlock cycled closed. “There a plan?”
“Plan is to hang back and see if the new Laconian ambassador needs to show everyone how big his dick is,” Bobbie said. “The Tori Byron and the rail-gun emplacements are taking point. We’ll hang back and splash any boarding teams that get close.”
She pulled herself past the lockers, out to the lift, and up toward ops. Alex’s voice shifted from the comms to his actual voice as she got close.
“Well, good that we won’t be the first ones getting shot at. I mean, assuming anyone gets shot at all. Got to admit I’m a little bit hoping they try something.”
“You mean because Duarte and his people are a bunch of traitors to the republic who all deserve to hang for treason?”
“And theft. Don’t forget theft. And not warning anyone when the Free Navy was looking to kill a few billion people. I mean, I’m all for forgiveness and bygones being bygones, but it’s easier to stomach that after the assholes are all dead.”
Bobbie strapped herself into a crash couch. “This may not even be Duarte’s people. For all we know, he got stabbed in his bathtub fifteen years ago.”
“A man can hope,” Alex agreed. The dimness of the ops deck meant most of the light on his face was splashing up from the monitor. “I shifted the Roci back to a four-person-crew configuration.”
“It’s not enough,” Bobbie said. “We need more crew.”
“We did it this way for years before you and Claire joined up. It works better than you expect. Hey … Look, since there’s a chance that someone might be trying to poke holes through Medina Station, would you mind if I kept Holden and Naomi on the ship’s channel? Just in case?”
Bobbie hesitated. Part of her bridled at the prospect of having personnel who weren’t on the operation still be in the communications chain. But it was Holden and Naomi, and cutting them out also felt strange. Alex was waiting for an answer. She made a gesture as if she’d been thinking of something else.
“Of course not,” Bobbie said. “They’re family.” Alex’s faint smile meant he’d known she’d say it, and was glad she’d said it that way. She opened a connection to Amos and Clarissa. “Okay, everyone. Preflight checks. Let’s get ourselves into position.”
The slow zone—gates, Medina Station, and the alien hub station with the rail guns—was only tiny if compared to the vastness of normal space. The whole volume was smaller than the sun, and with the guesses she’d seen about how much energy it took to hold the gates open and stable, probably equally energetic, but controlled by forces they were still struggling to make sense of. And between the gates, a darkness that matter and energy slipped into, but from which nothing ever came back. The not-emptiness past the gates left her feeling a little claustrophobic, with only a sphere a million klicks across to move in.