Naomi took a quick breath, let it out. Like someone ripping off a bandage that had adhered a little too much to her skin. A quick pain, and then over with. “Thank you. It’s not … what I was expecting.”
“Yeah,” Clarissa said. “It seems like there’s always the way we wanted things to go, and there’s what actually happens.”
A warning tone sounded through the drum, echoing with the distance and the free air. An artificial voice reassured them with its tone while it repeated,
“Listen,” Naomi said. “They’re playing our song.”
“Oh my,” Clarissa said, laughing. “We have lived our lives wrong, haven’t we?”
Naomi took her arm, half as a joke and half to give her support if she needed it, and they started toward the rendezvous. Clarissa’s body twitched and shuddered as she walked. Once they went below, into the corridors and halls of the drum, the traffic thickened. The alert sounded from every corner. Businesses closed their doors. Kiosks shut down. Everywhere, people moved quickly, some shouting and angry, but most with a kind of deathly focus. They’d had too many explosions and too much violence for any joking around. The illusion that life was normal for any of them vanished.
She and Naomi waited for a gap in the flow of bodies, then ducked into a public restroom. Clarissa sat on the couch built into the wall. She felt a little nausea haunting the back of her throat, but it wasn’t bad. Naomi went to the sink and washed her hands slowly, not to make them clean but to make it look like they weren’t just loitering in the place should anyone from station security come in.
The plan—their part of it anyway—was simple enough. Or at least it was from Clarissa’s perspective. She’d tried to walk Alex through it once, and she was pretty sure he’d only followed about half. The sensor arrays on the Medina were all linked to the main system, but they all had their own backup batteries. Shutting down the power would keep Medina from seeing where the ships went in real time, but it wouldn’t clear the local caches in all the sensor arrays. As soon as the power grid came back, the arrays would check in, reconnect, and deliver everything they’d saved.
And that process right there had a vulnerability in it. When the arrays checked in to reconnect, the system could request a diagnostic run. The arrays would take about twenty seconds to cycle through their diagnostics and return the results with a fresh check-in. During those twenty seconds, no new data came in. And if the array check-in requests got routed to a false system that only replied with diagnostic requests, they could keep doing that until some poor bastard figured out where the false route was coming from or else physically went out to the arrays and ran a new dedicated line.
When she’d gotten to about this point in the description, Alex’s eyes had lost their focus, and she’d simplified. Make a fake traffic card. Put the fake traffic card in at the secondary power junction. Blow the primary power junction to reset all the arrays. Arrays don’t come back on without a lot of tedious work. She’d gotten a thumbs-up from him then. It had been cute.
It was always strange to remember that she knew things that other people didn’t. Not just about power- and signal-routing protocols. What it was like to murder someone who’d only ever been kind to you. How it felt when the people you’d dedicated your life to killing took you in as family. Even though she knew better, she always defaulted to the idea that her life wasn’t singular. That whatever she’d done must not have been that odd, because after all, she’d done it.
The door opened and the bomb guy came in carrying a ceramic toolbox. Jordao. He nodded to Clarissa and then to Naomi. Between the hunch in his back and his ashy skin, he looked like a sample picture of “furtive possible terrorist.”
“Hey,” Clarissa said.
“Hoy,” he responded. “Bist bien?”
“No problems so far,” Naomi said. “But we’ve been out of touch. You heard anything?”
“Unauthorized launch,” Jordao said as he set the toolbox beside the sink and opened it. “Nos ew bû?”
“Yes, that’s one of ours.”
“Perdíd,” he said, forcing a grin. “How many plays playing in one day?”
“One less if we don’t move,” Naomi said.
Jordao opened the case and tossed earpieces to her and Naomi before fitting his own. “Katria, she didn’t parle ero que la, right? They’re going to be down on us hard after this. Alles la preva? Look like we were in a kids’ school.”
“If this works the way it’s supposed to, that won’t be a problem,” Clarissa said, shifting the earpiece so it was a little more comfortable. “Just stick with us, and you’ll be fine.”
