“You can tap the brakes if you want to,” Naomi said. “But if there’s unfriendly company in the ring space, it’ll just make us easier to hit.”
“I want to charge up the rail gun,” Alex said. “But you won’t let me, so I’m sublimating.”
“You could recheck the torpedoes and PDCs.”
“Amos and Teresa are doing that already. I don’t want to seem like I don’t trust them.”
“You could arm the hull charges and be ready to blow the disguise plates off.”
Alex was silent for a long, slow breath. Across the little room, Jim gave her an approving thumbs-up.
“Yeah, I’ll do that,” Alex said. “Really want my rail gun up, though.”
“When we’re on the other side, you can charge it to your heart’s content,” Naomi said.
“Promises, promises.” A click said that Alex had dropped the connection. The magnification on the ring gate continued its slow fall. Naomi called up a little inset window pointing back. The noise from their drive cone made the image blurry, grainy, and approximate, but even so, she could see that the Black Kite wasn’t moving toward them.
“I’m not seeing a repeater,” Jim said. “They blew ours up, but it doesn’t look like they dropped one.”
“I noticed that. They aren’t worried about coordinating with anyone on the other side. So there’s at least a chance we aren’t burning straight into a trap.”
“Yay!”
Ten minutes remained.
“Ready?” Naomi asked. In answer, Jim pulled himself to a wall handhold and pushed off toward the central lift. Naomi opened a connection to Amos. “We’re taking stations on the ops deck. Not that we’re expecting any trouble, but if there is some . . .”
“I hear you, Boss. I’ve already got the pup in her kennel. In case we bang around a little.”
Bang around a little meaning evade incoming fire. “And Teresa?”
There was one of his odd pauses before he answered. “We’re strapping down in engineering. You have a need, just say the word.”
Naomi dropped the connection and followed Jim. The lift was at the bottom of the shaft, locked down until someone called it, and they swam through the empty air of its shaft until they reached ops. They went to their usual stations, pulled the straps across their bodies, shifted the screens to the controls they would each take if the transit landed them in danger. The combination of fear and familiarity turned it into a ritual, like brushing her teeth before sleep. The ring persisted, but the lensing of the telescopy put fewer stars around it now.
“Ready in ops,” Naomi said.
“Flight deck,” Alex said.
“Yeah,” Amos said. “We’re good. Do your thing.”
The counter reached zero. Jim took a sharp breath. The gate blinked to the grainy trailing image—the same structure, but behind them now and receding. The stars all went out at once.
“And we are through,” Alex said. “No threats on the board so far as I can see, but shit howdy, are there too many people in here. I’m flipping us around and putting the brakes on until we know where we’re headed.”
The thrust gravity warning went on even though he’d just said it, and after a moment of vertiginous rotation, up and down returned. The gel of the couch pressed into Naomi’s back. She had already brought up the tactical map.
The ring space—what she still thought of as the slow zone even though there hadn’t been the hard limit on velocity here since Jim and a protomolecular echo of Detective Miller had turned it off decades ago—was a little smaller than the sun in Sol system. A million Earths could have fit in it, but the only things it contained now were 1,371 ring gates, the single enigmatic station at its center, and fifty-two ships including the Roci, all of them on transits of their own. Alex was right. It was too many. It was dangerous.
“How many do you think we’ve lost?” Jim asked. When she looked over, he had the same screen open before him.
“Just underground ships?”
“No, I mean the big we. Everyone. Laconian. Underground. Civilians just trying to get supplies where they’re needed. How many do you think we’ve lost?”
“No way to know,” she said. “No one’s keeping track anymore. There’s a war on.”
She set the Roci to identify the ships by transponder, drive signature, thermal profile, and silhouette, to note any discrepancies and flag any ships that were known to be associated with the underground or the Laconian Empire. It took the ship system three seconds to produce a compiled list with cross notations and a navigable interface. Naomi started the human work of paging through. The ships most closely allied with Laconia were a freighter called Eight Tenets of Bushido that operated out of Bara Gaon and a long-range explorer called the Flying Buffalo that was based in Sol but owned by a corporate network that had embraced Duarte’s rule the moment Earth and Mars had surrendered. Neither were warships, and both struck Naomi as being allies of convenience more than true believers in the Laconian cause. They weren’t part of the official Laconian hierarchy, anyway.