Naomi dried her hands, pulled her hand terminal out of her pocket, checked it, put it back. “We should go,” she said.
Jordao closed the toolbox, hoisted it onto his hip, and followed Naomi out. Clarissa brought up the rear. The shakes were a little better. A little less. That was sort of a good thing, because she hated the shakes. It was sort of bad, because the exhaustion came next, and she needed to get through the mission. At least enough not to slow Naomi down.
Outside, the halls were emptier.
“Evacuation teams are at the docks. Waiting for clear sign, yeah?”
Naomi put a hand to her ear. Hearing her through the earpiece and in person at the same time gave her words a little echo. Like they had more weight than they should have.
“Message received,” she said. “We’re going in.”
It would only take a couple of minutes to swap the card and set the charges. After that, they’d get to the docks if Saba’s people could hold them that long, or if Laconian security retook them, an airlock. Naomi paused at an access panel, checked her hand terminal, and nodded. This was the one. Jordao was sweating and pale. He looked worse than she did.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “We have a surprising amount of experience with weird situations.”
Naomi leaned against the access panel. A security drone passed through the intersection behind them, but didn’t turn their way. Clarissa felt a little surge of adrenaline, but it only served to highlight the growing torpor in her muscles.
The access panel clicked and slid down.
“What are we doing here?” Jordao said. “Got to go, us.”
“We’re doing the thing that makes the next part matter,” Naomi said, then stepped aside. The guts of the ship would have looked chaotic to anyone who didn’t know the things she did. For her, there was a simple logic in every weld, every conduit, every connector. She took the doctored traffic card out of her pocket, plucked the old one out, and slotted hers in. The fault indicator barely blinked to amber, and then went back to a flickering, happy green.
“Okay,” she said, sliding the panel back into place. “Let’s go set the charges.”
But when she started walking, she knew it was going to be harder than she thought. If they moved fast enough, they’d be done before she ran out of energy. That was why Naomi was here, after all. Because none of them thought she could do it by herself. Because they weren’t necessarily wrong.
The worst part was that she’d done it to herself. The damage to her body, the wear and the weariness, were all products of conscious, determined choices made by a girl she hadn’t been in decades. She carried the weight of those decisions like a sack of bones. Like a toolbox full of them.
Some sins carried their own punishment. Sometimes redemption meant carrying the past with you forever. She’d gotten used to that over the years, but it was still pretty fucking inconvenient.
“Down here,” Jordao said, waving them on.
“I know,” Naomi said.
The door to the primary power junction was reinforced. A red border was painted around the frame, with warnings in half a dozen languages that all meant
Jordao opened the door, and Naomi stepped past him into the maintenance way beyond—
And then stepped backward, her arms rising. Running footsteps came from behind her, sudden and loud. A young man in the blue uniform of Laconian security stepped out from the red door, a pistol leveled at Naomi’s stomach. Rough hands grabbed Clarissa by the shoulder and threw her to the floor. Jordao leaned against the wall and sank down to sitting.
“There a problem, sir?” Naomi asked, her voice the perfect echo of innocence.
“Knees,” the pistol man said. “And keep your arms up while you do it.”
