That two Laconian frigates and a freighter carrying a critically important political officer had been destroyed in Sol system was listed precisely nowhere.
Or at least nowhere he could see without searching the news-feed indexes. And since Saba had it on good authority that Laconia was keeping a close eye on search terms, Alex was stuck browsing and hoping for something. Anything. But …
“Nope,” he agreed. “Nothing.”
Caspar took bit of bread and scooped up a bite of his tagine. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad one.”
“When I was your age,” Alex said, “it would have been on every feed. Earth and Mars would have had official responses, and there would’ve been eighteen different mainline feeds analyzing every word they said from different perspectives. The Belt would have had a thousand different pirate broadcasts with at least a dozen of them taking credit for it personally, and at least one saying it was all a Jesuit conspiracy.”
Caspar grinned. One of his eyeteeth was a little yellowed. Alex had never noticed that before. “Sounds like you miss it, grandpa.”
Alex looked up, questioning. Caspar put on a comic frown and an exaggerated drawl. “When I was your age, we had to make our own water from scratch every morning and dinosaurs roamed Mariner Valley.”
Alex felt a little stab of annoyance, but he pushed it back and laughed. “There was some variety at least.” He gestured toward the feeds spooling through on the tabletop monitor. “Everything on this feels like it’s been vetted by the same bureaucrat on Luna. It’s all got the same voice.”
“Probably was.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, shutting it off. “It probably was.”
Caspar stretched like a cat waking up from a nap, then tapped the monitor. The newsfeeds vanished and the restaurant’s interface popped up.
“We can split this,” Alex said.
“You buy next time,” Caspar said. “Anyway. Not like it’s real money, right?”
All the Storm crew on Callisto had false identities generated by the underground and slipped into the systems. Including biometrics and bank accounts. It was an uncomfortable way to live, knowing that everything was brittle. Alex’s fake records could all be exposed if the Laconian security system raised a red flag. He could spend tonight and then the rest of his life in a jail cell. Everything could fall apart at any moment.
Which, to be fair, had always been true. It was just harder to forget now.
“I’m meeting some of the engineering crew down on the third level. There’s a bar that has open mic comedy and half-price whiskey. Enough karaoke, and a pretty boy like me might even find someone to take him home tonight.”
“Drink one for me, and don’t make any mistakes you can’t regret the next morning,” Alex said, rising from his cushion. “I’ve got some things of my own to do.”
“Fair enough,” Caspar said. “See you when I see you.”
They parted in the corridor. Caspar headed for the passage leading deeper below the moon’s surface, Alex off to the left and toward the docks and the coffin apartments for people on shore leave. People like him. He walked with his hands stuck deep in the flight suit pockets, his eyes on the ground ahead of him. Avoiding eye contact with the people walking in the same halls. The passage came to a Y intersection with a brushed steel sculpture that didn’t seem to know if it was a human or a transport shuttle. Above it, the ships and their berths were all listed. All but his.
When Alex had been a boy back on Mars, his great-uncle Narendra had come to stay with his family for a week once while his group home in Innis Shallows had been renovated. Alex still remembered his great-uncle walking through the corridors of Bunker Hill with a calm, bemused expression while he and Johnny Zhou explained the fine points of the game they had been playing. Alex felt the same expression on his own face now.
Maybe it was something that happened with every generation, this sense of displacement. It might be an artifact of the way human minds seemed to peg “normal” to whatever they’d experienced first and then bristled at everything afterward that failed to match it closely enough. Or maybe the change that Laconia’s conquest was ushering in was different in kind from what had come before. Either way, the Callisto shipyard didn’t feel like Sol system anymore, or at least not the one Alex knew. It felt like the first days of Laconian rule. The sense of fear and fragility like a ringing in his ears that never went away. Amos used to say that everywhere was Baltimore. That wasn’t true anymore. Now everywhere was Medina.
His coffin apartment was near the docks. It was one of the larger models, a little over a meter high so that he could sit up in it. The mattress was old, recycled crash couch gel, and the walls and ceiling were layered glass and mesh with lights embedded in them to create the illusion of space going out beyond the surface. Alex crawled in, closed the access door, and made himself comfortable. He had a couple new entertainment feeds he’d been thinking about checking out. Over the years, he’d made himself an expert on neo-noir crime thrillers, and there had been work coming out of Ceres even before the Laconian takeover that used Pilkey montage to do some interesting things. He wondered, though, if signing in through the coffin’s system would compromise him. If Laconia knew enough about Alex Kamal to put together the kind of movies he liked, the kind of food he ate, the way he walked, and whatever other data he’d left behind him to pierce the mask that Saba had given him. If he was too much himself, would it send security officers to his door? Did it make more sense to watch something popular and generic and stay at the center of the herd?
He pulled up his profile on the coffin system. A red icon showed a private connection from the Storm. There was a certain irony in the fact that he was more worried that Laconia would catch him out because he watched a certain kind of entertainment feed than he was that actual encrypted communications from the underground would give him away. But there it was. He’d made the decision to trust Saba’s old OPA techs when he got into this business. Didn’t make sense to start second-guessing them now. He opened the message, and his son looked back at him from the screen.
“Hey, Da,” Kit said with a grin that reminded him of Giselle. Kit looked more like his mother than like him. Thank God. “Weird to hear from you again so soon. Are you in-system? I mean, don’t tell me. I know we’re all hush-hush. But hey. Things are great this semester. I’m pulling top marks in three of my sections, and”—the smile turned rueful—“I’ve got a good tutor for the other two. And … ah … yeah. So I’m dating this girl, and I think it’s starting to look kind of serious. Her name’s Rohani. I haven’t told her about … um … you. But if there ever gets to be a chance for you to come meet her? Mom is talking to her family, and I think she may be your daughter-in-law pretty soon here. So it would be good, yeah?”
There was more to the message, and Alex listened to it with a warmth in his chest, and a sorrow. He wasn’t going to meet the girl. He wasn’t going to attend the wedding if there was one. Rohani would go on the list with Amos and Holden and Clarissa. Another loss. It was just another loss. He’d live with it. He had to.
His hand terminal chimed, and an alert popped up from the false ID that Saba used for high-priority messages. With dread in his gut, he opened it.