It wasn’t big. A square box, safety orange with scratches at the edges and corners, the marks of long use. He didn’t know exactly what was inside it, only that Katria was certain it would blow the right kind of hole into the pressure tanks and that the ruptured pressure tanks would blow the right part of the station apart. She also said that, in its present form, it was both hard for security to detect and stable enough to play football with if you didn’t mind a square ball. Still, Holden didn’t rest his elbow on it.
They were nearly at the top of the ramp when a line of carts stopped them, all heading the same direction as they were and all stuck waiting. At the entrance to the transfer point, three Laconian Marines in power armor were talking to a dark-skinned woman in a green jumpsuit.
“Checkpoint,” Holden said.
“Inconvenient,” Katria said. She sounded like it was an annoyance more than an immediate threat to all their lives and the safety of everyone in the underground who was counting on them. He really did admire the way she did that.
The raid had come two shifts before, when Holden had been in his sleep cycle. Between the time he’d curled up in the bunk and put his head on the thin pillow and when he’d opened his eyes again, a quarter of Saba’s people had been snatched up and a man named Overstreet was on all the screens in the station telling the rest of Medina about it. And the
The noose was drawing tight. And in order to have any chance of escaping it, they were about to at least risk the lives of, and most probably kill, a bunch of people who were on the engineering decks at the wrong time.
“Holden. Do you have to do that?” Katria asked.
“Do what?”
“Grunt.”
“Was I grunting?”
“Cap does that when he’s thinking about something he don’t like,” Amos said.
“He has a wide variety to choose from,” Katria said.
From the way they talked, Holden could almost believe that they wouldn’t kill each other, given the chance. Almost, but not enough that he was sorry to be there. Maybe Katria really didn’t hold a grudge about the fight that Amos had started. And maybe Amos wasn’t spoiling to start another one. Or maybe the bomb was the most stable thing in the cart.
“I’ll think happy thoughts,” Holden said. “Butterflies. Rainbows.”
“What the fuck is a butterfly?” Katria said.
The cart ahead of them shifted, and they followed. It took fifteen minutes to get to the guards and then a minute and a half to get past them. Their cover story—Holden and Amos were applying for on-station work permits since their ship was locked down, and Katria was taking them to an on-site test—never even came up. Katria drove the cart to its queue, strapped the bomb to her back, and led them into the engineering decks, moving from handhold to handhold with the unremarked grace of someone who’d spent a good portion of their life on the float. Amos followed with the conduit wrench in his fist like a club.
Once the drum was well behind them, Holden pulled the earpiece out of his pocket and turned on the contact microphone.
“—is clear,” Clarissa said. “Can you confirm?”
“Yup,” Alex replied, his voice slow in the way that meant he was concentrating. “I’m moving my little pixies through now. Gimme just a … All right, I’m through.”
“Turning the recycler back on,” Clarissa said.
Clarissa and her team were in the drum, tapped into the environmental controls through a back door that, if they were found out, Saba would never be able to use again. Alex was back in the underground’s galley, flying the drones with his hand terminal and several layers of encryption. Naomi and Bobbie were, he assumed, loitering outside the secure server room, ready to force their way in. It was strange hearing their voices as if they were with him. It made him feel like he was back on the
