“Thank you,” Holden said. “I really appreciate this.”
Saba lifted a hand and two of his people ghosted in from the corridor and led Katria’s guard away. Standing by herself, she didn’t seem any less imposing. The door to the corridor slid shut, and the bolt clicked. It was as near to privacy as anyone on Medina could have.
“So,” Katria said. “What’s on your mind?”
Bobbie took a long breath, let it out between her teeth. The idea had been hers from the start, and she’d been mulling it over for days. She hadn’t slept as much as she’d wanted. Even when she hadn’t been reviewing it and looking for holes in the plan, she’d felt too jagged and amped up to sleep. Part of that had been thinking about how to make the approach she was going for now.
“There’s a single point of contact between the Laconian destroyer and Medina,” Bobbie said. “And we have a bug on it.”
Katria’s eyes went a degree wider. She glanced over to Saba, who nodded. It was true. Katria didn’t sit, but her weight settled into her hips a little. Bobbie had her attention. That was good.
“The encryption isn’t breakable,” she said. “Not from the outside. The Martian codes it’s based on are solid. We might be able to crack them if we had between now and about a decade on, but we’re down to a countable number of days. So we’ve got enough intelligence gathered to fill libraries that we can’t read. But I think we can fix that.”
She plucked her hand terminal out of her pocket, slaved it to Saba’s local system, and pulled up the schematic of Medina that she’d been using. The cavernous center of the drum, command and control on one end, engineering and the docks and the massive but quiescent engines on the other. The elevator shafts that ran between them outside the surface of the drum. And also the ships in the dock, including—highlighted in red—the Gathering Storm.
“The longer goal is that we find a way to disable the Storm, here, shut down Medina’s sensor arrays, and distract or isolate the security forces on Medina long enough to let all these ships get off station and out through the rings before their reinforcements from Laconia get here. The short-term goal”—she zoomed in on a small red mark inside Medina proper, near the docks—“is this.”
“And that is?” Katria asked.
“It used to be backup power storage,” Bobbie said. “But since our guests from Laconia got here, it’s been repurposed.”
“The thing is,” Alex said, breaking in, “these Laconian fellas? They were all Martians to start, or their leadership were anyway. And they were serving just a little after me and Bobbie here did our tours.”
He looked from Bobbie to Katria to Saba and then back. Bobbie nodded him on. Alex licked his lips.
“One of the things we trained on was how to go about securing an enemy station,” he said, which wasn’t true. It was something Bobbie had trained to do, not him. Storm and control the homes and communities of Belters. If there was going to be a sore spot, this would be it. It was why Alex was saying it instead of the woman who’d cleaned Katria’s clock and left her zip-tied to her friends. It seemed less likely to rub on Katria wrong that way. “You heard of air-gap encryption strong rooms?”
Katria’s eyes were brighter. She hadn’t, but she didn’t want to admit that. Alex licked his lips again, shot a look from Bobbie to Katria and back to Bobbie, then went on. “One thing that we did was maintain physical separation between whatever ship was taking control and the local systems. Lay in a pipe to one of our own boxes on the station, and send any commands we wanted for the base there. Communications, control protocols, everything. It gets unencrypted there, and set onto onetime physical media to walk over to the local system. No live connections at all.”
“Bullshit,” Katria said.
“It’s standard,” Bobbie said. “And it’s part of why no one was ever able to hack back into a Martian ship from a controlled station. And since the Laconians are basing their protocols on Martian ones, this is where that machine is.”
“But the lag time—” Katria shook her head. “That’s impressive.”
“The room is crewed by two people, always. The door is physically locked. Not connected to the security grid, no electronic interface. Old-school bolt and key, and no keyhole on the outside. Can’t be hacked into remotely, can’t be circumvented easily,” Bobbie said. “And a full complement of guards at shift change.”
Katria took control of the model, zooming farther in on the encryption vault. Her face was thoughtful, which was better than Bobbie had hoped. It made her nervous to talk about this.
“I see,” Katria said. “You can’t get in without making a lot of noise and calling in the cavalry. Is that why you need me? To blow the door?”
“No,” Bobbie said. “We have a way in. We need your help to cover it up once we’re done.”
Katria traced a slow circle with her fingers. Go on.
Clarissa picked up the thread. “The room is still connected to the environmental system. But if we put a team here”—she pulled the model back to a larger frame and touched the power junctions near engineering—“we can shut down the fans and open the carbon dioxide scrubbers and recycling systems.”
“Choke them out?” Katria asked.
Alex shook his head. “Make a path to pilot some little drones in. Half a dozen of ’em with point-blasting charges. Take down the two guards, then use the rest to pop the lock.” He made a little boom sound with his lips and opened two fists in the physical cartoon of an explosion.
Bobbie pointed toward Naomi. “She has a snapshot cloning deck. I’ll have a crowbar and a hammer. We get in, make a full-state copy of the encryption box, and get out to the hardened-radiation shelter”—Bobbie moved the model—“here. And then you come in.”
“If los security coyos know we stole their codes,” Saba said, leaning against the wall, “they change things up, yeah? Not just new crypt but new procedures. Everything we’ve got turns into a whole lot less. So they can’t know what we do, even after it’s done.”
Holden pulled the model out to show where the Storm was docked against the side of the station. “We need to give them a different story. The Storm’s parked here. And the primary liquid-oxygen storage tanks are … right here. If that blows out, it will look like we’re trying to blow up the Storm, but Tycho built this place well. Lots of redundancy and fail-safes. There’s an explosion-relief route that’ll vent the pressure blast out along this pathway here … which takes out the communications vault. And, y’know, a bunch of other stuff.”
“You want to blow our air out as cover?” Katria said. “I think you may owe us an apology. We’re usually the ones who are called extreme.”
“Not our air,” Saba said. “Theirs as soon as they came here. We’re breathing on their grace, us. Plus, those tanks are docked-ship refills. Not for the habitat.”
“And there will be plenty in the secondary and tertiary tanks,” Holden said. “Remember, lots of redundancy, lots of fail-safes. And Tycho’s original design remembers longer than the people living in it do.”
Katria went quiet for a long time. Bobbie felt the anxiety growing in her gut. It had been a mistake to bring the Voltaire Collective in on this. It didn’t matter how much Saba trusted them or how good they were with demolitions. She should have kept it just within her own crew, where she could control it. Where she was sure of everyone …
“I don’t like it,” Katria said, shaking her head. “A lot of moving parts. The more pieces there are, the more ways there are for it to break.”