Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Eighteen: Naomi

It wasn’t the first time Naomi had found herself the new addition to a crew. Even under the best circumstances, there was an unsettled period. Anyone coming into the webwork of established relationships, enmities, and personal loyalties that was a ship’s crew needed time to find or create their own place. A time of isolation in the midst of a crowd.

In that sense, her appearance on the Bhikaji Cama was no different from other times. In the sense that she had appeared on the ship halfway through a run without stopping at a station or transferring over from another ship, it was a little weirder. And while they’d kept her identity hidden from Laconia, the small town’s worth of crew on the ship was corrosive to secrets. Even as the command staff made a point of not noticing her existence, everyone knew who she was.

Her presence was equal parts embarrassment to the Transport Union, threat to the crew, and the most interesting thing that had happened in the long weeks of transit. Pulling herself down the corridors or getting meals from the commissary, she felt the attention in the way people didn’t meet her eyes and the killing effect she had on conversations.

When they reached Auberon, she would need to vanish for a while and hope that her mysterious appearance was put down to rumor and myth. I was serving on a ship last year, and when the ship was searched, Naomi Nagata just showed up in with the crew. Stayed with us for the rest of the run. It was implausible enough that it might pass. Or it might be a problem. Either way, she had to touch base with Saba and see what her options were. The advantage of keeping the underground firewalled was that any single accident couldn’t bring down everything. The disadvantage was that she could never know what the big picture looked like. Even as one of Saba’s top-tier strategists, she only knew what he asked her to know. And it was possible—likely even—that he chose to be ignorant of some operations himself.

The commissary was wide enough to seat fifty at a time, but she tried to come at off-hours when the three rotating shifts were in the middle of work or sleep cycles. The tables were bolted to the floor, but on the float, no one used them anyway. The food dispensers were old, gray machines that decanted a nutritive slurry in eight different flavors directly into recyclable bulbs. Even the worst rock hopper in the Belt was more pleasant. Someone had painted bright flowers—daisies in yellow and pink and pastel blue—on the walls to make the place seem welcoming. Oddly, the effort halfway worked. Naomi ate the yellow curry flavored gruel with her feet hooked into footholds in the wall. But afterward, there was coffee that was a thousand times better.

Three environment technicians floated in a clump on the far side of the room, talking through a problem with the water purification system. The temptation to insert herself into the conversation was huge, but she held back. Hearing normal human conversation but not being part of it was like a starving woman smelling fresh food but not able to put it on her tongue. She hadn’t realized how badly she missed humans until she was among them again. And so when Emma pulled herself into the commissary, it was a relief to see her.

In the days of Naomi’s internal exile, she’d learned that Emma’s last name had been Pankara before she’d taken Zomorodi as a contract name with four other people. She had siblings on Europa in Sol system and Saraswati, one of the three habitable planets in Tridevi system. She’d been in private security before she joined up with the Transport Union. And she had a hookah designed to function anywhere between five gs and the float. She was also willing to talk to Naomi directly, which made her company more precious than gold. Now she pulled herself to a stop at the machines, took a bulb of something, and launched out to stop herself at Naomi’s side and in her orientation.

“All well?” Naomi asked.

Emma shook a flat hand in a gesture that meant yes and no. “Captain Burnham won’t talk to me and Chuck won’t stop.”

“I made things hard for you,” Naomi said.

“I made things hard for myself,” Emma said, cracking the seal on her food bulb. “You’re just when it blew up on me.”

“Fair,” Naomi said. It was astounding how good it felt to speak to someone in person and without light delay. Even when the conversation was banal. Maybe especially when it was. “Chuck seems like a decent person. He’s underground?”

Emma chuckled. “He’s not cut out for it. He worries too much. The only reason he’s not sucking down euphorics now is that he figures that no one will say anything to this political officer at the transfer station. Half of the people on the ship have something they’d rather not be looked at too close, and the other half have to work with them.”

“Seems tenuous.”

“Because it is,” Emma said. “But we work with what we have. Besides, that’s what the fight’s all about, isn’t it?”

“How do you figure?” Naomi asked.

Emma took a long, thick pull on the bulb, then shrugged as she swallowed. “The first ship I served on after I ditched Pink-water, the XO had a thing for one of the mechanics. They were both babies. More hormones than blood. The company had a nofraternization policy, but what can you do about it? The XO, she started being where the mechanic was. Started using the ship system to keep track of where people were, on shift and off. Mechanic didn’t love that. Got to where they had a screaming fight in the middle of the med bay. XO started crying. Didn’t come out of her cabin for two days. Good XO otherwise. Mechanic knew his job too. But both of them got fired. Rules, you know.”

“That’s how you see the underground?” Naomi said through a real smile. “Making the union safe for romantic drama?”

“Easy to make rules,” Emma said. “Easy to make systems with a perfect logic and rigor. All you need to do is leave out the mercy, yeah? Then when you put people into it and they get chewed to nothing, it’s the person’s fault. Not the rules. Everything we do that’s worth shit, we’ve done with people. Flawed, stupid, lying, rules-breaking people. Laconians making the same mistake as ever. Our rules are good, and they’d work perfectly if it were only a different species.”

“You sound like someone I know,” Naomi said.

“I’ll die for that,” Emma said. “I’ll die so that people can be fuckups and still find mercy. Not why you’re here?”

Naomi considered the other woman. The anger in her jaw and the pain in her voice. She wondered whether Emma had been the XO. It probably didn’t matter.

“We’re all here for our own reasons,” Naomi said. “What they are isn’t as important as the fact that we came.”

“True,” Emma said.

Naomi laughed, and it was a hard, bitter sound. “Anyway, I spent too much time already with people telling me they’d shoot me if I didn’t do what they said. That tank’s empty for this lifetime.”

“May it never refill,” Emma said.

A flat-faced man in a command uniform pulled himself into the commissary, glanced at them, and did a fast double take. The environmental techs looked from him to Naomi, then pushed off, shoving their spent bulbs in the recycler as they left. The officer went to the dispenser, pulled a drink of some sort—coffee, tea, maté—and left again without looking back at them. His disapproval made the air feel cooler.

“You’ve got what you need?” Emma asked, as if the man hadn’t been there at all.

The question had more weight than the words deserved. “I’m good,” Naomi said. “When we get to port, though—”

“We’ll get you out safe,” Emma said. “After that …”

“I know,” Naomi said. After that, she was still a criminal. Still a fugitive. Still a mouse looking for a safe hole. That would come. “Saba may have something for me.”

“I’ll light you a candle. Meantime, if you need something, better me than Chuck, maybe,” Emma said, then sucked the last of the paste out of the bulb, smacked her lips, and launched for the door. Naomi floated alone in the commissary for a few minutes more. She felt a little guilty taking a bulb of tea back to her cabin, but only a little.

The Bhikaji Cama was a massive ship. Three quarters of a kilometer long and wide enough to look squat in the schematics. It had been built decades earlier to ferry enough people and supplies to one of the outlying worlds that a self-sustaining colony could arrive all at once. Buildings and recyclers and soil and reactors and fuel. Everything that humanity needed to make a toehold in an unfriendly alien ecosphere except a sense of fashion and guidelines on how to woo your mechanics. The halls were a drab green with hand-and footholds that hadn’t been scrubbed in a few too many weeks. The ship conserved water jealously, using passive radiators to shed heat instead of evaporative feeds, and it left the air hotter than she liked.

Her cabin was tiny. Not just smaller than her storage container had been, but smaller than some supply closets she’d had on the Roci. The crash couch was cheap, with gel that stank a little, and there wasn’t enough room for her to stretch her arms in it. The design was called albuepartir back in the Belt, because if your arm drifted off the edge in your sleep, a sudden deceleration could break it. Some previous tenant had illustrated the anti-spalling cloth with a complex and violent firefight between two sets of stick figures, one with colored-in circles for heads, and the other pale and empty. Naomi strapped herself into the couch, pulled up the system and the false record Chuck had given her, and got back to work.

The ironic thing was that, with the access she had now, she could actually reach more information than with the passive feeds she’d relied on before. She tried to be careful about it, not abuse her access in a way that would raise any more red flags than were already flying. But she had requests out to the union database mirror about political officers and changes to Laconian transfer point regulation. It was the sort of thing that anyone on a ship like the Cama might be—and probably was—looking into. It was only her perspective on the information coming back that made it different.

Thinking that the political officer in Sol system had meant something specifically about Sol was the mistake she’d made. That they’d all made. There was also one on Auberon, and that changed the scope. Now that she knew to look for the pattern, it was there. Freighters diverted to Medina on their transits or held. Environmental audits on ships that were running close to their theoretical maximum load.

It still wasn’t confirmation. Nothing so overt as that. But if there had been a massive wave of Laconian bureaucrats being quietly repositioned throughout the colony worlds—a new level of infrastructure being put in place without fanfare or warning—this was what it would look like. One political officer going to Earth was an opportunity. Two political officers being set in place in Sol and Auberon were a threat. A new Laconian mandarinate covertly set to keep eyes on the transfer points was an escalation. If Laconia continued the trend and put officers on the ships themselves, it was the end of the shell game.

She flicked through the data, looking for places where she might have been wrong. Where her interpretations could have been mistaken or where another interpretation could have fit the same data. She was reaching for hope the way a patient might by holding a doctor’s hand and saying, But it might not be terminal, right?

Emma accepted her connection almost as soon as she requested it.

“I need to send a message,” Naomi said.

“Where to?” Emma asked over the gabble of other voices.

“Upstairs,” Naomi said. “Do you want me to say the name?” Emma was silent for a moment. Then, “Can you find your way to ops?”

“I’ll meet you there,” Naomi said, and dropped the call.

She moved through the ship faster when her mind was on something else. As if her body, freed from thinking about her place in the rhythms of the ship, found them automatically. She composed the message as the decks passed by her, what she could say to make the situation clear to Saba but obscure to anyone intercepting the tightbeam either here or at the repeaters that bridged the interference through the gates.

She heard Emma’s voice before she reached the ops deck. Her tone was high and rough as a decking saw. Naomi pulled herself onto the deck and grabbed a handhold to stop. Emma was on the float by the comms station, her arms folded and her jaw jutting out. A man with a salt-and-pepper beard longer than his close-cropped hair looked away from her long enough to recognize Naomi, then back at Emma in disgust. His uniform identified him as Captain Burnham. The comms tech was between them like a mouse at a catfight.

“The answer was no before,” Burnham said, then pointed toward Naomi with his chin. “Now that this one is on my deck, the answer’s go fuck yourself.”

“It’s nothing,” Emma said. “Five-minute tightbeam to Medina? No one would even blink at it. It’s trivial.”

“It’s already too much.” He turned to look at Naomi. “Don’t say anything, you. I know who you are, and I know what you are, and I have extended my unrequested hospitality to you out of grandmotherly fucking kindness.”

“You have as much to hide as she does,” Emma said. “Everyone knows about the sealed cabins.”

The comms tech pulled himself down into the gel of his crash couch like he could disappear into it. Naomi considered the captain of the Bhikaji Cama with all the calm and dignity she could manage. “I appreciate that my presence puts you and yours at greater risk. I wouldn’t have chosen this if there were a better way, but there isn’t. If things had gone the way I hoped, you’d never have known I was here. That’s not the way it happened, though. And now I need five minutes with your tightbeam.”

Burnham lifted his hands to her, palms out. Stop. “Ma’am, I am not a partisan, but I know a lot of my crew are. I’m the kind of man that kens when to shut up and mind my own business. I’m not turning you over to the political officer, but don’t mistake that for loyalty. I’m trying to get my ass out of a crack, and I’m getting more and more convinced that locking you in a cabin and welding the door shut might be an easier path than the one I’ve chosen.”

“It’s important,” Naomi said.

“It’s my ship. The answer is no.” His eyes were hard, but it was as much fear as anger. Naomi waited a moment, seeing what her gut said. Push or back down. Emma sighed, and the captain’s beard shifted as his jaw went tighter.

“I understand,” Naomi said. She met Emma’s eyes for a fraction of a second, and then they moved to the bulkhead together. Emma fumed silently until they made the turn into the lift shaft.

“Sorry about that,” Emma said. “He’s an asshole.”

“I did stow away on his ship and put him at risk of a Laconian interrogation room,” Naomi said. “Expecting him to take orders from me along with it might be too much to ask. I’ll find another way.”

“I can help unbox some of those communication torpedoes,” Emma said. Her tone made it an apology.

“I’d rather find another way to use the tightbeam. Time may be important. But Emma, you have to be more careful.”

“He’s not going to fold,” Emma said. “I’ve shipped with that man long enough to tell when he’s at his edge. There’s a thing he does with his lips. I can clean him out playing poker too.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Naomi said. “You said five minutes talking to Medina.”

“They were going to know where the message was going anyway,” Emma said. “They had to.”

“I didn’t know Saba was on Medina Station, and I do now,” Naomi said. “Now if they catch me, it compromises him.”

Emma pressed her lips tight. “Sorry. I assumed that … Sorry.”

“We’ll tell him. I’m sure he has plans to shift locations if he needs to.”

Emma nodded, then muttered fuck under her breath. Even as she thought about other ways to get comm access, Naomi spared a moment to feel sympathy for her.

Emma’s hand terminal sounded at the same moment that hers did. Another chime sounded from down a corridor. A ship-wide alert. Or something bigger. Naomi thumbed the notification open.

ALL UNION SHIPS: TOP PRIORITY. ALL TRAFFIC THROUGH ALL GATES IS SUSPENDED BY ORDER OF LACONIAN MILITARY COMMAND. NO SHIPS PERMITTED THROUGH ANY GATE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. ALL TRANSITS ARE ON HOLD. ALL SHIPS ON APPROACH ARE TO EVACUATE THE LANE TO .8 AU IMMEDIATELY

Emma was moving through data fast, flipping from one interface to another, and so intent on her hand terminal that she didn’t notice she was drifting. Naomi caught her elbow and pulled her to the wall.

“What happened?” Naomi asked.

“Don’t know,” Emma said, shaking her head. “Something big.”