“Yes, chief,” Naomi said, and put her mask back on.
They fell back into the familiar rhythms of labor, but Naomi’s mind was working on more than the lines. The others on the team didn’t seem to have noticed anything odd in the conversation. One of them—a thick-faced man called Kip—treated her a little worse, but that was probably just because he thought she was lower status now. Nothing odd about that. When the new exchange was in, the old one sealed, and the diagnostics all in optimal range, Naomi wanted nothing more than a shower and a meal. She didn’t have a cabin of her own, she didn’t know where the gang showers were, and she wouldn’t have a locker there. Even if she got to the right place, after she cleaned up, she’d have to put the same coolant-stinking jumpsuit back on. That seemed worse than not cleaning up in the first place.
She followed the others as they headed back to the crew decks. Lagging behind. She wanted to go to her container. The urge to check her incoming feeds itched as badly as her jawline where the swelling was just starting to go down. But it was gone. Months of habit had just become irrelevant, and she pulled herself along the off-white halls, moving from handhold to handhold with the feeling of having woken from a long dream to find herself in some foreign station where she didn’t belong.
The mess hall had six people in it, but it was built for thirty or more. She pulled herself to a dispenser, but couldn’t get food. It wanted an access code or ID match that she didn’t have. She went to a corner by herself, bracing on a wall-mounted foothold, and waited without knowing what exactly she was waiting for.
Her thoughts moved in the silence of other people’s conversations. When, after an hour or so, Emma appeared, Naomi was almost surprised to see her. The woman pulled a double share of food and brought it over.
“They’ve moved on,” Emma said quietly. “Docked, ran down the whole fucking ship stem to stern, told the captain that he’d need to talk to someone at the transfer station, and gone.”
“Political officer,” Naomi said. “I heard. We got word of one heading for the transfer station in Sol system too. Earth.”
“Well, looks like we have political officers now,” Emma said sourly.
Naomi nodded with one fist. The crackdown was broad, then. A tightening of control over the whole Transport Union. More than that, it might be a sign that Duarte and his machinery were starting to suspect the Transport Union’s role in smuggling the underground from system to system. Or had other plans that wanted loyal and trusted eyes beyond the governors and their staffs.
If they found the shell game, it could mean a serious retooling of their methods at best. At worst, the end of the underground. With Medina in control of the slow zone and their methods of transportation exposed, they were in real danger of becoming thirteen hundred fragmented, isolated movements, unable to support or help each other.
“No one checked you, though?” Emma said.
“Oh, they checked her,” a voice said behind them. The chief engineer floated over and took position beside them. “They caught her.”
Emma blanched. So apparently she hadn’t been behind that.
“I appreciate you covering for me,” Naomi said. “It might be better for you if we just kept it at that. I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“Are you kidding?” the chief engineer said. “That was the best thing that’s happened to me since I signed up for this haul. Seriously, it was my pleasure.”
“I appreciate your enthusiasm, but—”
He handed her a card. “Override access to a private cabin and a commissary account,” he said. “It’s off the books, so even if there’s an audit, it’ll just come back as unused and overages.”
Naomi looked at it, then at him. Never look a gift horse in the mouth, they said. But it was bad advice. “I’m guessing there’s something you’ll want in return? Because I think we’re going to need to be very, very clear what that is.”
“No,” the chief engineer said. “Nothing. You’ve already paid me out. I’m just glad I get the chance to hand some back.”
“Excuse me for being rude,” Naomi said, “but I’ve never really trusted the whole kindness-of-strangers bit.”
“You’re not a stranger,” the chief engineer said. “You’re the reason I’m an engineer. My dad was a kid on Ceres when the Free Navy stripped it. You and your crew? You put your hands out in peace in the middle of a civil war. You built the Transport Union. As far as I’m concerned, we should kick the captain out of his quarters and give them to you. You more than earned them.”
Naomi reached for her hair, trying to pluck it down over her face, but Emma’s haircut didn’t leave enough for that. “You know who I am, then.”
The chief engineer coughed out a laugh. “Of course I do. Anyone in the Belt’s going to know Naomi fucking Nagata. It’s just these Laconian fucks who can’t see what they’re looking at. And again, it’s a real honor.”
“Chuck,” Emma said, and her tone made the word a warning.
“I won’t say it again,” the chief engineer—Chuck—said, lifting a hand. “But don’t either one of you worry. I’ll get you shuttle access as soon as we’re close to port. You’re safe with me.”
Naomi nodded her thanks, and Chuck beamed. She saw now how young he was. His delight with himself made her heart ache a little. He’d gotten away with something, and his pride was bright enough to read by. She even had a sense of what she must look like through his eyes—a demigod. A figure from myth appearing in his life. A celebrity. God knew she’d seen enough people look at Jim with that expression. This must be what it had been like for him all those times.
It was a feeling she could easily learn to hate.
Chapter Sixteen: Elvi
The ships were old transports that had been hauling people and supplies around Sol system’s asteroid belt for a generation before the first gate opened. Elvi watched them being positioned near the surface of the Tecoma ring gate with the Falcon’s highest-power optical telescopes, and the images were still fuzzy. Both vessels were at most a few dozen meters top to bottom, and they were almost a billion kilometers away. If the Falcon’s sensor arrays hadn’t been orders of magnitude more sensitive than her eyes, they wouldn’t have been anything close to visible. But she could make out the mechs and drones crawling over them, making the automated checks and last-minute verifications. Maneuvering thrusters bloomed and vanished as they shifted along the plating and drive cones, checking and double-checking that nothing would go wrong. There was deep irony in that, but if she thought about it too much, she just got angry.
“Hey, sweetie,” Fayez said from the doorway. “Can I get you anything?
“Still no. Just like three minutes ago,” she snapped. She grunted, regret jumping into her throat just behind the words. “Sorry. That was shitty.”
“No, I see where you’re coming from,” her husband and intellectual companion of decades said. “I’m hovering. Look.”
He let go of the handhold and floated free for a moment, grinning at his own physical pun. She laughed more at the grin than the joke.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Really. Perfectly fine.”
“Good. That’s good. Because some people, when they almost die from being semidrowned in half-alien goo while under a sustained high-g burn, get a little rash. Or zits. Near death can really do terrible things for acne.”
“I’m sorry I scared you,” she said. “I didn’t mean to. Really. But I’m fine now.”
Fayez pulled himself into the room, twisting ungracefully to hook his ankles around the wall footholds and absorb the momentum with his knees. He stood on the wall beside her, looking down at the images on her screen.