“I can take care of them. Don’t you worry about it.”
He turned and headed for the lift shaft.
“Alex?”
When he looked back, they only locked their gazes for a moment. She didn’t know what she’d meant to say, and whatever it was, he already knew it.
“I got this part,” he said. “You take care of yours.” She started the work, and at first it felt impossibly large. She was overwhelmed by the scope and complexity, but she told herself that it didn’t matter whether it was possible, only that she do it. She started small and specific. The Tullus Aufidius—a mercenary gunship with roots in Freehold—was slated to pass through the St. Anthony gate in sixteen hours. It had been coming to her call as part of the underground, but hadn’t responded to connection requests from the repeater at the gate since Amos’ psychic dive into the ring station went so wrong. So that was the first problem. She found a solution. The Kerr, the Vukodlak, and the Dhupa—two Laconian fighters and one underground supply ship with some torpedo racks welded on the outside—would intercept it. Any of the three that survived the encounter could join the Armando Guelf at the Hakuseki gate and intercept the Brother Dog.
She thought about sending a message out to Trejo, calling for more Laconian reinforcements. The message would take hours to reach him, hours to get back, and by the time any ships he sent made it there, it was just as likely they wouldn’t be answering to Trejo or Naomi anymore. Better to play the cards she had. She wasn’t going to win, but she could take a long time losing.
She ran solutions through the Roci’s system, shifting from scenario to scenario like a football coach preparing for a complicated game. Here are my players. Here are their players. Here’s the field of play. The hurt and the horror and the grief were still there when she thought to turn to them, but they lived at a distance. She felt herself slipping into the version of herself that she’d made during Jim’s captivity: the Naomi who lived in secret and met the world with her intellect because her heart was still too raw.
She wondered whether this was how Camina Drummer had survived as the last president of the Transport Union, or Michio Pa as the first. Or Avasarala, back on Earth when Earth had been the center of the human race and not just the oldest planet among thousands. The Indefatigable and the Yunus Emre would intercept the Blackberry when it transited the Xicheng gate. She queried the Yunus Emre about the models of torpedo and PDCs it had and set the Roci to checking for ships with compatible loadouts.
When Jacob died, it had been just the same. It had been just weeks until their fortieth anniversary, and the children were all coming back from university for the party. She’d found him in the bathroom. Dead of a stroke, the doctors said. She’d spent twenty-eight hours straight cleaning the apartment, and she wouldn’t have stopped then except Hannah came early and—
Naomi stopped, her hands raised and her heart beating triple-time. She looked around the ops deck as if examining it would make it more solid, more real, more concrete. She checked the time. It was still half an hour before her next dose of the drugs was due. She took them anyway. The peach-colored tabs were bitter, and the taste lingered at the back of her throat. She waited a few minutes, watching her own cognition, waiting for memories of lives she hadn’t lived to sneak back into her.
“Fuck that very, very much,” she said to the empty air, then opened a connection to Elvi. “How long before we can get this going?”
“Tanaka’s on her way now,” Elvi said. “We’re putting Jim in a Laconian suit. She thought it might make Duarte feel better than his Roci gear. And . . . it’s just more likely to keep him alive. You know, until . . .”
“I’m starting to get intrusive thoughts.”
“I know,” Elvi said. “A lot of people are. The data from before says it shouldn’t get too bad as long as you keep on the medication schedule. But we’re only muffling them. We’re not shutting them all the way up.”
“Are they getting information from me?”
The Roci chirped an alert. Naomi pulled it up as Elvi replied. “Maybe, but it’s all still pretty haphazard. My guess is that any intelligence that slips through is going to be lost in the clutter. That’s just a guess, though.”
“Not sure the data’s going to support that.”
“Why not?”
“The repeaters at the gates? All the ones that were still working? They just went offline. Kill codes from the system sides of the gates.”