“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 …”
Chapter Twenty-Two: Bobbie
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 Nauvoo was intended as a generation ship,” she started.
“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, and much more sensitive than anything on a commercial or military vessel.”
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?”
Clarissa pushed herself out of the corner she’d been hiding in and came to stand next to Bobbie. She wore a mechanic’s jumpsuit with the name TACHI on the back, and had her hair pulled into a tight bun. With her gaunt cheeks and sunken eyes, it made her look severe and impatient.
“Even though this array isn’t in use,” Clarissa said without preamble, “it’s still hooked to the primary comm system. If we start unplugging things, alarm bells are going to go off up in ops. So we need to put the circuits into a diagnostic shutdown before we physically yank the parts.”
“Fuckonians all over in ops now, ninita,” Ramez said. “Watching everything all the time, them.”
Clarissa nodded her agreement, then said, “And that’s where you come in. We need to get you onto the ops deck to shut down the panel long enough for us to do our work,” she said. “And also if you call me ‘little girl’ again, I will hurt you.”
“Is that right, ninita?” Ramez said, his grin turning condescending.
“No,” Bobbie said, stepping toward him. “No, that’s not right. Pulling that gear will be delicate work. I can’t risk her damaging her hands before we get out there.” Bobbie took another step into Ramez and stared down at him. “So I’ll hurt you. Mao’s my second on this. Don’t make me beat some respect into you, ninito.”
She glanced over at Holden. He looked shocked, and maybe a little sad. She wondered how he would have handled it, back before. It was so strange to be doing all this in the same room with each other.
Ramez threw a look to his buddies on the crates. No one stepped up to back him up. Saba was smiling and making a Let’s get on with it circular motion with his hand.
“Sabe,” Ramez said, looking to the side the way abashed primates had since the Pleistocene. “Just for fooling, que?”
“Sa sa,” Bobbie replied, then switched the screen from the volumetric map over to her mission plan. “Here’s the rundown, including precise times for each thing to happen. Mao and I will be on the outside of the station for most of this, and we can’t afford to do any broadcasting out there, because the Laconian sniffers will almost certainly pick it up.”
“I’ll be calling up to ops using an unlocked hand terminal that Ramez here will get for me,” Holden said, nodding at the man as an invitation for him to nod back. “We’re picking a time when Daphne Kohl is the duty officer. She knows me now, and I’m thinking she’ll understand what we’re trying to do without me having to explain it. Comm discipline is in full effect, the assumption is everything is heard by everyone.”