They talked for another twenty minutes, Bobbie laying out her plan in enough detail that he could introduce it. He asked a few questions, but he didn’t need many. The sense of working together with her had a weird nostalgia. As if the gap between arriving at Medina and now had been years instead of days.
Large, sudden events did that. They changed the way time passed. Not technically, maybe, but as a measure of who he and Bobbie were to each other. And to themselves. A month before, Laconia had been one background issue among thousands. Now it was the environment. A truth as profound as the EMC or the union. More, maybe.
Back in the meeting room, the food had arrived. Recycled wheatpaper bowls filled with rice noodles and chopped mushroom bacon and fish sauce. It smelled better than it should have. Bobbie went to sit by Alex and Clarissa, folding herself gracefully down beside them. Holden felt the impulse to go sit there too, to be part of the family again. And he could have, except he also sort of couldn’t. Would he be doing it to help or to hinder? Because he couldn’t do both. For the first time, he felt what stepping back from the
And still, he couldn’t regret it.
“All well?” Naomi asked, snaking her arm around his waist. “You look thoughtful. Are there thoughts?”
“There were a few, yeah,” he said. “Mostly that I’m a tool, but in a useful way.”
Naomi sat with that for a moment. Saba caught sight of them and waved them over. Two bowls with forks and bottles of beer were waiting on the low table for them.
“Should I be offended on your behalf?” Naomi said.
“Nope,” Holden said. “You should come eat.”
Saba leaned forward as Holden sat. “This is good. One thing we can say about Medina, the ingredients are always fresh.”
“True,” Holden said. “But they’re usually still fungus and yeast. Vat-grown bacon is … well, it’s just its own thing. So, Saba, I had an idea I want to talk to you about …”
“We can’t place a physical monitor on the data connection to the Laconian ship,” Holden said, just the way she’d told him to. Saba had chosen the people to be briefed, selecting them by some means Bobbie didn’t know and didn’t care to guess. They were watching Holden intently. It felt weird that the role of the great James Holden, come to lead them to glory, was being played by the Holden she knew. Apart from the coincidence of naming, the two didn’t have much in common. “We need to passively monitor incoming and outgoing signal without detection. Mirror the data.”
“For for?” a tall, stick figure of a man said. His name was Ramez and he was in Medina Station’s technical support department. According to Saba, he had the run of the ship, their insider on this mission. Bobbie didn’t like him. “Alles la thick with encrypt. Better off reading their coffee grounds.”
“Decrypting it is a later problem,” Holden said, not giving too many details of the plan away to any one person. Bobbie had a decent idea, but she was still working out the details of how to get the decryption codes. The fewer people knew the details, the less likely it was to get out before she was ready. “Right now we just want to get as much as we can so that we can decrypt it when the time comes. The important aspect right now is that we get the signal without anyone knowing it’s happening.”
“Gotta look inside the pipe without touching the pipe. Que pensa?”
“I’ve brought along my team leader and technical expert to explain the how of the thing,” Holden said, nodding to Bobbie and Clarissa. “Captain Draper?”
Bobbie gave him a wink only he could see. Say what you would about the man, he did take to the role of meaningless figurehead with panache.
Bobbie walked to the front of the room and pulled up a volumetric map of Medina on the wall display behind her.
“The
“Fuck is a ‘no view’?” a Belter woman asked. The others chuckled.
“Read some fucking history once,” Saba said to her, then nodded to Bobbie to continue.
“They knew she’d be picking up signals from farther away than anything had ever needed to before,” Bobbie said. She zoomed in on Medina’s comm array. “So the comm system is massively overpowered,
Ramez nodded and shrugged expansively with his long hands. “We don’t even use most of that shit. No one talking from far away in here.”
He meant inside the slow zone, and he was right. Nothing was ever more than half a million klicks from Medina. The physical boundaries of the space prohibited it.
“True, but the equipment is still there. And up on that comm array is a signal sniffer sensitive enough to track a single photon through a fiber bundle a meter thick,” Bobbie said, zooming in on the technical map behind her. “But we can’t just steal it. Claire?”
