Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Twenty-Three: Naomi

The plume of energy that came from the ring gate was invisible to the naked eye. An optical telescope would have seen at most a few flares of brightness where bits of matter caught in it glowed for a moment as they were ripped apart. Moving at the speed of light, it flared into the space where ships coming into Auberon or preparing to leave it were most likely to be, widening like a wave with distance, hundred thousand kilometers after hundred thousand kilometers, spreading out like a cone. If it became less powerful as it spread, it wasn’t enough to help the San Salvador. The Transport Union ship had been slow moving out of the restricted zone, and almost instantaneously, it and everyone aboard it became a cinder.

Naomi sat in the commissary and played the newsfeed of its loss in a loop, watching the ship flare white and die so quickly the frame rate couldn’t quite make sense of it. She had spent very nearly her whole life on ships and stations. She’d been on six ships that had suffered micrometeorite hits, two that had lost atmosphere from them. Once, she’d had to drop core to keep her reactor from blooming out like a tiny, brief sun. She’d jumped between ships without a suit, and the feeling of breathing vacuum still came to her in nightmares decades after the fact. She would have said she was intimately aware of all the dangers life outside an atmosphere could hold.

This one was new.

“Did they do this, you think?” Emma asked, hunched over her bulb of morning tea. The Bhikaji Cama was in its braking burn now. The one-third g had felt strange until Naomi realized she’d never been in the crewed parts of the ship when there was up and down before. After that it still felt strange, but she knew why.

“They Laconia or they Saba’s people?”

Emma lifted her eyebrows. “I meant the first, but either.”

The crew clumped around the commissary in quiet groups of two or three, and they treated each other with the brittle courtesy of a funeral. Some of them had likely known the crew of the San Salvador, but even if they didn’t it had been a ship like theirs. Its death reminded them of their own, still somewhere down the line, but coming.

“I don’t know,” Naomi said. “The point of having the Typhoon in with Medina was always that they could defend every gate at once. Hit the station with its magnetic field projector and all the gates bake anyone that’s too close, but …”

“I saw the data from when they did that. It wasn’t this big.”

“It wasn’t even close,” Naomi agreed.

Emma sipped from her bulb, hunched in a degree more, and lowered her voice. “Did we make a play? Did we try to take the slow zone?”

“If there was an attack planned, I didn’t know about it,” she said, but with a knot in her gut. She didn’t think Saba would have put together something that audacious without her, but maybe he would. She had been arguing for restraint and less violent, longer-term strategies. If all she’d managed was to cut herself out of the loop … She imagined Bobbie and Alex and the Gathering Storm burning in toward the gate with a ragged and improvised fleet. They couldn’t have been that stupid. But even if they had, the gamma burst from the gate had been so much more powerful …

“Can you find where we put my system?” Naomi asked. “If I can rebuild it, I might be able to find Saba’s signals. Get a report.”

“Could hunt it down, maybe,” Emma said. “But we’re putting you on a shuttle for Big Moon in four hours, get you out before we’re in range of the transfer station. Doesn’t leave much time.”

“So we hurry.”

Finding all the spare parts of her former cell was harder now that thrust had changed the nature of the architectural space, but Naomi didn’t need all of it. The physical hardware had some built-in security that made finding the hidden messages easier, but without the keys and information that she kept only in her own memory, they’d have been useless. Her records from the long passages in the storage container were wiped. Even if the Laconians had found the devices, they wouldn’t have been able to pull the secrets of the underground from them. But neither could Naomi.

Emma drove a loading mech, shifting the heavy pallets that they’d moved before, and Naomi found the pieces she needed—the signal processor from her crash couch, a monitor different from the one she’d had but close enough, a hand terminal interface. They set up in a workroom by the machine shop. Neither of them had said it, but they both knew that everything would be broken down again and hidden away when they were done.

The workroom was small and grimy, with long, discolored patches on the fabric walls. The tool racks had been used for so many years that the ceramic was wearing through and the titanium bones glittering under it. It smelled like oil and sweat, and Naomi liked it better than anyplace she’d been on the Cama before.

She looked through all the usual places where Saba hid communications for the underground, but most of them weren’t there at all. Not just empty of hidden messages, but whole channels missing. The Transport Union’s coordination feed—the running record of ship locations and vectors—was just a repeating standby message. The entertainment feed from Medina of a young man talking breathlessly about the three-factor philosophy of design for hours on end wasn’t transmitting at all. Medina’s communications channels were closed for business, covert or otherwise.

“That a good thing, or bad?” Emma asked.

“I don’t know what it is,” Naomi said.

“Got to get you to a shuttle soon.”

“Just another few minutes.”

Emma shifted her weight, trying not to show her impatience. It wasn’t just the time pressure on the shuttle. Everything about the situation itched.

Naomi was almost ready to resign herself to failure when she found the message. It was hidden in false-static fluctuations under a navigation beacon for the repeaters that ferried comm signals across the interference of the gate. The encryption was key based, and it took her six tries to find the right one. When it popped onto the monitor, it was text. No voice, no picture. Nothing to show that it had come from Saba apart from the fact of its existence.

MAJOR INCIDENT IN THE SLOW ZONE. SUSPEND ALL OPERATIONS AND SHELTER DOWN. NO IMMEDIATE THREAT TO THE ORGANIZATION, BUT ENEMY SURVEILLANCE HIGH. NO TRANSITS IN OR OUT OF ANY GATE BY ORDER OF

LACONIA. TWO GATES LOST. UPDATE TO FOLLOW

“ ‘Two gates lost’?” Emma said. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Be patient and find out, sounds like,” Naomi said. She shut down her system, the words blinking into darkness.

The shuttle was a two-couch model. No Epstein drive, but an efficient teakettle good enough for orbital transits that didn’t take more than a month or two. She wasn’t going to be on it for more than a couple of days. It was the kind of thing a new prospector would rent for claim surveys or an old couple for a long, slightly adventurous vacation. Naomi felt Jim’s absence even though he’d never been on board it. As the Bhikaji Cama dropped away behind her and she did her first sustained burn toward Auberon’s lunar outpost, she checked the transponder output. A day ago, the shuttle had been a maintenance and safety vehicle for the Transport Union. Today, it was a rental craft registered to Whimsy Enterprises and had been for the last year and a half. The ship didn’t care what story they told about it. It worked just as well either way.

She set the local censored newsfeed to play for a while, using the thin-faced, cheerful man spouting the Laconian official positions as a kind of white noise while she thought. In the hours she let it play, neither he nor the dour and serious woman who took his place mentioned Medina or the Typhoon or the gamma radiation burst. Or how someone could lose two ring gates. She tried to reassure herself that, whatever was going on, it at least wasn’t Bobbie and Alex charging into the teeth of a Magnetar-class battleship and dying. There was even the chance that the crisis, whatever it was, would open some opportunities for the underground. With her bottles gone, she’d have to find another way to get messages back to Saba.

Auberon was one of the success stories of the new systems. A wide, lush planet with clean water, hundreds of viable microclimates, and a tree of life that coexisted with Earth’s biochemistry in a kind of mutual indulgent neglect. The story was that a farm on Auberon could grow native plant analogs and Terran crops side by side, with each acting as fertilizer for the other. It sounded like an exaggeration, but there was a seed of truth there. Food and water weren’t a struggle on Auberon the way they had been on so many of the other worlds. It had twelve cities with populations over a million and a wide scattering of smaller towns, farms, and research stations. A lunar station that fed cargo and supplies through the near asteroids and a handful of dwarf planets big enough to have civilian populations. It had almost one-tenth of a percent of Earth’s population at its height, and it had been self-sustaining for over two decades.

Naomi found the place a little creepy.

The docks, when she reached them, were cleaner than any she’d seen in a lifetime traveling through Sol system. It wasn’t just the eerie perfection she disliked, though. The void cities that had been, for a time, the dream of Belter culture made real had been as new and shining and optimistic as Auberon’s lunar base. But they had been rooted in history. Everything in Sol system, from the great port of Ceres to the rock hoppers digging ore and water from asteroids that were hardly more than a hold’s volume of gravel, had come from a shared past. Yes, the expansion into the void had been bloody and cruel and filled with as much violence as cooperation, but it had been real. Authentic.

There were no old levels in the station, because there was no old. On Ceres, there were neighborhoods built in the excavations where the great engines that had spun the asteroid up had been housed. On Ganymede, there were levels of tunnels that had been abandoned in the war and never recovered. On Earth, there were cities built on the ruins of the cities before them, layer after layer back through millennia. Auberon was a theme park version of itself. A prefabricated culture that could have been assembled anywhere with equal cheerfulness. It didn’t feel human.

The Whimsy Enterprises office was a closet-sized door between an ice cream shop and a land claims lawyer. Inside, the air smelled like hydroponics tanks and fresh plastic. A woman her own age with close-cut hair stood at the kind of desk Naomi expected to get takeaway food from.

“Hello,” the woman said with a barely repressed grin.

“I have a ship I’ve brought back,” Naomi said.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” the woman said. “Not your fault. It was a long time ago. I crewed your ship.”

“My ship?”

“The Rocinante, under Captain Holden. Back in the bad old days, when the rocks fell. You were busy at the time, sa sa que? With that fucker Inaros. Looked like you’d been through a recycler when we pulled you off that racing pinnace.”

Naomi’s brain stripped away the years, filled in the woman’s cheeks, undid the gray of age. She was a pilot. She’d worked for Fred Johnson on Tycho. “Chava Lombaugh?”

“Welcome to Auberon,” Chava said. “You can talk freely in here. I sweep for surveillance every other day, and I made a special pass when I heard you were coming.”

Naomi walked to the desk and leaned against it. “Thank you for that. Do you know what’s going on?”

“Not in specific,” Chava said, “but I can say that the Laconian security forces have been shitting themselves boneless since that first no-transit alert came. We haven’t been able to decrypt their feeds, but the volume of traffic has been huge. Governor Song was pushing like hell to get every ship she could out of the slow zone before the gamma bursts, and now she’s not letting anyone in or out.”

“Do you have a way to reach Saba?” Naomi asked.

“The Laconians have been updating the security on the repeaters,” Chava said. “I still have a couple back doors, though.”

“Are you sure they’re secure?” Naomi asked, and her voice echoed strangely, like she was hearing more of it than usual. Undertones and overtones rippling against each other as the vibrations touched the hard surfaces of desk and floor and wall and rebounded to make new complexities. She stepped back as Chava’s eyes widened. She could see the wetness in them, the tiny dark dot of her tear duct, the river pattern of blood in the whites of her eyes like a map of an unknown world.

“Fuck,” Chava said, and it was a symphony. Overwhelming and complex. Naomi felt herself falling into the sound and the wide, full, complicated air—

When she came back to herself, her head was pressed against the abrasive industrial carpeting. Chava was still at the desk, her face bloodless. She looked around the room, trying to focus, trying to find Naomi. It took a few seconds.

“What … ,” Chava said. “What was …”

“It’s the same thing that happened in Sol system when they killed Pallas. How long have we been unconscious?”

“I … don’t …”

“Do you keep logs? Security tapes?”

Chava nodded, working up from barely a tremor until she was bobbing her head so much it seemed like it would be hard to stop. She opened a screen on her desk display. Nothing inside the room, but a view of the front door from outside. As she rolled it back until Naomi appeared, an alert tone came over the station’s public speaker loud enough to hear even inside the office. This is a public security announcement. Please remain where you are. If you are in need of assistance, use the emergency alert on your hand terminal, and government responders will come to you. Do not seek help on your own. Do not leave your homes or places of business.

“Three minutes,” Chava said. “It’s like time just blinked out.”

“Is there a Magnetar-class battleship in Auberon? That’s the only thing I know that does that … or almost the only thing.”

“No, nothing like that.”

“We have to risk your back doors on the repeater. We have to get a message to Saba. Something’s going on here, and if it’s related to whatever happened that got Laconia worried, he may need to know about it.”

Chava gestured for Naomi to come around the desk. “Follow me,” she said.

Chava’s office was small, with white, generic furniture of ceramic and steel, but it was well equipped. Naomi sat at the other woman’s desk and built a short message, typing fast and not worrying about errors. The Auberon gate had a fifty-five-minute light delay from the planet. Even if Saba wrote back at once, it would be two hours before she heard, and it might take him longer.

In the long wait, Chava made them chamomile tea from the office supplies. The sweetness cloyed, but Naomi drank it anyway. It was something to do. The security alert came off an hour and thirty-five minutes after it started. The station is safe and secure. Please return to your normal activities. It seemed optimistic to the point of being naive.

Chava Lombaugh’s system chirped ten minutes shy of the two-hour mark, and she slapped open the new message like it had stung her. As she read it, she bared her teeth.

“What is it?”

“It’s nothing,” she said, and shifted the monitor for Naomi to see.

TRANSMISSION ERROR. REPEATER NOT RESPONDING. MESSAGE QUEUED FOR LATER DELIVERY

“The repeater’s down?” Naomi said.

“Theirs is,” Chava said. “The one inside the ring. The Auberon-side repeater generated this message, but the two aren’t talking to each other. We might be able to do something else, though. Ring gate interference is a bitch, but it’s not impossible to punch through. I have some ships in the rental fleet with tightbeams, and if I got one close …”

Naomi shook her head. “No. Nothing obvious. I want him briefed, but not at the risk of exposing the organization. Saba can get the message when he can get the message. He knows how to find us once he does.”

Chava made a frustrated sound at the back of her throat and slammed down the last of her tea. “Let me take you to the safe house, then. At least we can chew our nails someplace comfortable. Laconia takes the repeaters seriously. Whatever the issue is, getting the communications network back up will be high on their to-do list.”

“Thank God for the efficiency of the enemy,” Naomi said, making it a joke. Chava even laughed at it a little.

But a day later, the repeater was still down. And the day after that. It was almost a week before a high-speed probe made the long journey to the ring gate and through it, and sent back the images that even the censor’s office couldn’t keep a lid on.

Auberon system—Naomi and Chava and the crew of the Bhikaji Cama included—saw the swirling colors that had replaced the darkness between the ring gates. They found out why the repeater on the slow zone side of the gate wasn’t responding. It was gone, and so were all the other repeaters like it. And the Eye of the Typhoon. And Medina Station and all the ships that had been quarantined inside the ring space. Only the alien station at the center remained, glowing bright as a tiny sun.

Naomi looked at it all until she was on the edge of vertigo, then looked away and had to go back to check that it was real. Over and over again, locked in a cycle of disbelief.

All human existence in the small artificial universe between the gates had been wiped away as if it had never been there at all, leaving no sign of what had killed it.