As soon as she crawled back into the ship, she showered. There were compounds in the life cycle of Freehold that irritated her skin if she didn’t wash them off. Then she pulled on a fresh jumpsuit, went to the galley, made herself a bowl of white kibble, and sat. A message was waiting for her from Bobbie, and she set her hand terminal on the table when she played it so she could use both hands to eat. The kibble was warm and peppery; the mushroom squeaked against her teeth just the way it was supposed to.
Bobbie looked exhausted and excited at the same time. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail the way she wore it when she was working on machinery, not the bun she had for workouts. Her eyes were bright and the suggestion of a smile teased her mouth without ever quite appearing. She looked ten years younger. More than that, she looked happy.
“Hey, Naomi. Hope things are going well down there. I think we’re making some real progress up here. I’m not positive, but I think I’ve found how the Storm manages its energy profiles. It’s a little screwy, same as everything on this rig. I was wondering if I could get you to take a quick skim through the new dataset I pulled. Maybe you’ll see something I didn’t?”
The embedded data was structured as environmental-control buffers, and it was half again the size of the Roci’s. Naomi popped it open and glanced at the gross index. A lot of familiar parts, yes, but some strangeness in the large-scale structure. If it was anything like the other bits of the Gathering Storm’s operating code they’d harvested for analysis, it would get weirder the deeper in she went. She dropped it to a secure partition in the Roci and started unpacking it with her favorite tools, converting the language of the ships into something with handholds that her mind could brace on.
She set her hand terminal to Record. “Dataset received and in process. It may take me a day or two, but I’ll let you know what I think. In the meantime, all is well down here. No need for rescue.”
It was the rule. Somewhere in the message she sent up the well, there was always the word rescue and always would be until she needed one. Bobbie’s word was progress. A message went back and forth every twenty-four hours at a minimum. Not that there was any real risk that Naomi could see, but protocol was protocol. The locals on Freehold had been at least willing to listen when they’d arrived with Payne Houston in tow, and there had been nothing but cautious goodwill since. Not that Naomi trusted that to last. The colony of Freehold would support her in her guise as a refugee and freedom fighter as long as it was convenient for them. She understood that having the only gunship in the system and a ring gate far enough away that she’d have a free hand how to use it for weeks before help could arrive figured into the local council’s calculus of the situation.
Bobbie’s improvised crew of Belters were with her on a little moon circling one of Freehold’s three gas giants, tucked in an ancient lava tube and showing no signs of mutiny. Bobbie as captain and Amos as acting XO would, Naomi thought, be more than enough to ensure discipline. It also gave Freehold another reason to play nice, and a spare set of eyes on the ring gate in case anything nasty came through.
The Storm was slow to give up its secrets, not because of the internal security—though that was an issue—as much as the profound unfamiliarity of some of its technology. Its reliance on calcium, for instance, was an order of magnitude more than Naomi had ever seen, and the vacuum channels it used instead of wiring still made her head ache a little if she thought about them too much. With enough time, though, she was certain they’d come to understand the ship. On her good days, she thought they’d be ready, even if she wasn’t sure yet what they were getting ready for.
While the Roci arranged the data for her and the kibble broke down pleasantly in her stomach, she lay back and let her eyes close for a few minutes. Her knees ached. Her spine ached. It wasn’t even the gravity of Freehold. This world was smaller than Mars, and only a little bit denser. She’d been on long burns worse than this. Part of the problem was that she wasn’t doing her exercises. She was doing work, and there turned out to be a suite of small, neglected muscles that had atrophied over the years and weren’t happy to be put into service clearing vegetation and crawling around the bottom of a gravity well.
There was also, she suspected, something of a placebo effect. She’d spent so many years equating life in free atmosphere on a planetary surface with a constant, grinding full g, that now even though the gravity was actually fairly mild, she was primed to notice the discomfort. She expected it, and so it was there.
