The only ship on her known underground contacts was an independent rock hopper out of Sol that was flying as the Caustic Bitch but was listed in the registry as PinkWink. There was probably a story there, but Naomi wasn’t sure she wanted to know what it was.
There was also a bottle on the float.
“One of yours?” Jim asked.
“Hope so,” Naomi said. “We’ll see.”
Once, humanity’s comm network had been a fairly robust thing. In-system radio signals hit repeaters at the ring gates that were either strong enough to shout over the interference in the gates or actually physically penetrated them with transceivers on both sides. Medina Station, at the heart of the ring space, had maintained them and monitored the comm traffic. For decades, a message from Earth could reach Bara Gaon and receive an answer back within a day even if the signal queuing was swamped. But with the death of Medina and the rise of the underground, that was gone.
Now the thirteen hundred worlds communicated in a shifting patchwork of relays, ships carrying messages, and the modified torpedoes she called bottles. This one in particular was an advanced design, set to wait and gather incoming messages from the underground that were meant for her and keep them until it was triggered. It was an imperfect system, and she was certain she’d lost more than a few along the way, but it was easy to verify, difficult to fake, and difficult if not impossible to trace.
She pulled up the Epstein drive controls and dropped in a slightly altered feed pattern. To anyone besides the bottle, it would be unremarkable—well within the range of normal drive fluctuations. To the sensor array on the surface of the bottle, it would match a pattern.
It did.
The bottle shouted a dense blip of tightly packed data, putting it out broadcast for any ship in the slow zone to hear. A tightbeam would have pointed a finger if anyone had caught backscatter from it. This could be meant for any of the dozens of ships that could hear it. And every now and then, the underground set false bottles to sneak into the slow zone or a gate to spit out faked data and confuse the patterns.
The Roci’s system sucked in the radio burst and set quietly to work decrypting it, while at the edge of the ring space the bottle lit its own drive and zipped out through one of the gates. Naomi’s underground knew to watch for its detonation as the sign to place another one when they could. If the Laconians saw it—even if they knew what it meant—there still wasn’t anything for them to do about it.
It was all run like an OPA cell writ large, and Naomi was the one who’d designed it. The sins of her past, finding a use.
“Well, that could have gone a lot worse,” Jim said. “I guess the question now is where we go next.”
“That will depend on what’s in the data,” Naomi said. “I don’t like spending more time in the ring space than we have to.”
“I would also hate to be eaten by forces from beyond space and time before it was my turn.” The lightness and humor she’d always known were still there, but there was an emptiness behind it. Not nihilism, she thought. Exhaustion.
“If we need to,” she began, “there’s always—”
Teresa’s voice cut in on the ship-wide comms. “I need help. In the machine shop. I need help now.”
Jim was unstrapped before the girl had finished speaking. All the weariness was gone from him. He didn’t wait for the lift to engage, dropping down the handholds in the shaft like climbing down a ladder. Naomi was barely behind him. Some part of her was almost relieved to see him moving with certainty again. Like catching a glimpse of the Jim from before. Even if a lot of him was in hiding, he was still in there.
“What’s going on?” Alex asked from the flight deck.
“Something’s happening to Amos,” Teresa said. She had the tense calm of an emergency responder.
“We’re on our way,” Naomi said. Jim didn’t respond at all. When they reached the engineering deck, Naomi heard something. A voice, Amos’ voice, but not with words in it. It was a low wet sound, half growl, half gargle. Something about it reminded her of drowning. She and Jim strode down to the machine shop together.
Teresa was sitting on the deck, her legs crossed and cradling Amos’ wide, bald head in her lap as he jerked and shuddered. A pale foam dripped from his mouth, and the pure black eyes were wide and empty. A sickening smell—as much metallic as organic—filled the air.
“He’s having a seizure,” Jim said.
Teresa’s voice trembled when she spoke. “Why? Why is this happening?”