“Hey,” he said, trying to sound bright and cheerful. “Imagine meeting you here.”
“You saw the message then?”
“Yup. Yes. Indeed I did.”
“I was hoping you were still asleep. I should have come here first.”
“No,” he said, “I’m fine. Just processing a little old trauma. Thinking about what to have for dinner. The usual. What did I miss?”
“We don’t have to talk about this now.”
“It won’t help,” he said, and squeezed her fingers in his. “Not talking about it? It won’t help. If you’re here, I’ll be fine. Getting it out will help me even. Promise.” He didn’t know that was true, but he didn’t know that it wasn’t.
He could see it when she decided to believe him.
“He’s surrendering,” Naomi said.
“Only if he gets to be your police force,” Jim said. “That’s not what surrendering means.”
“I read the agreement he sent,” she said. “He really has seen my traffic control protocol. It’s almost word for word in some places. And it puts his ships at my command.”
“All right.”
“He wants to make the underground into a new Transport Union. We’d be responsible for setting policy. We’d be independent of the Laconian hierarchy. We’d have the authority to deny passage to Laconian ships.”
“And you’re thinking?”
“That it smells like bullshit. Sounds too good to be true,” she said. “But . . . How else do peace treaties get made? That happens, doesn’t it? History’s full of wars that ended because people chose to end them. We hurt Laconia badly. We broke the construction platforms, and they’re not coming back. Not anytime soon. Duarte was the architect of the whole thing, and he’s off the board. The glitches where people turn off or the rules of physics change? They’re the threat.”
“They are,” Jim agreed.
Naomi shook her head once. “Everything in me says the offer’s a trap, but if it isn’t, and I turn away? If this isn’t the opening I was looking for, I’m not sure what our goal is with them.”
The door to the little common room opened, and Alex’s and Teresa’s voices mixed, talking over each other. Muskrat barked once, a low conversational woof. Naomi leaned close, pressing her forehead to his like they were both wearing helmets and she wanted to say something only he could hear.
“I’ll be okay,” he said. “I’m better. I’m fine.”
“Hey, back there,” Amos said. “You talking about the thing?”
“We’ll be right out,” Jim said, loud enough to carry.
She put a hand on the top of his head, like she was gently hugging it, and then they walked out together. Alex and Teresa were leaning against the walls, Amos sitting on the floor idly scratching Muskrat’s neck. The dog smiled her soft, canine smile, looking from Amos to Teresa and back.
“How’s the resupply going?” Naomi asked.
“Good,” Alex said. “We have a good pit crew here. Always have had.”
“I keep forgetting how long this was home for you,” Jim said. “I missed that part.”
“These are good people,” Alex said. It occurred to Jim how many families Alex had gathered on his path through life. His time in the navy, his first wife, the crew of the Canterbury. He might not be good at marriage, but he had a talent for making homes. Or finding them.
“Repairs are something different,” Amos said. “They’ll take longer, and some of them, if we start we’ll be grounded until they’re complete. That could take longer than the folks on Freehold have got. I thought we should hold off until we were sure.”
Naomi nodded and pressed her thumb against her lower lip the way she did sometimes when she was thinking. She looked old, which was fair. They were both old. But more than that, she looked hard, and Jim wasn’t sure they were hard. Only that they’d had to act that way so many times in so many situations. They’d gotten good at it, her and him both.
“And that brings us back to the thing, doesn’t it?” Jim said.
“It does,” Amos said.
“What do you think?” Naomi asked, as if Amos were the same man he’d been before.
“I think he didn’t say what happens if you turn him down. I’m guessing it’s pretty much where we’re at now.”
“In that case, we’ve got a little over two days before the Derecho starts killing people,” Jim said. “We’ve got a little more than that before we need to leave here, assuming that our cover isn’t totally shredded.”