Saba hadn’t known it was coming either, and they’d only heard about it through him. A small explosion, but the unofficial reports said at least one Laconian had been killed. The official reports, apparently, were that it hadn’t happened at all. That was a change. The assassination attem
pt had been used to justify the crackdown. Now the crackdown was just another day, and highlighting the attacks on the structures of power wasn’t useful. Nothing had to be justified anymore. Governor Singh in his offices was trying to project a sense of normalcy and inevitability. And as far as Holden could tell, it was working.
“Kind of quiet,” he said, meaning They think they’re winning.
Naomi tugged her hair down over her eyes. “Right?” she said. It meant I think they’re winning too.
Back in the underground, Holden found Saba sitting at a dumb terminal. Even in full light, Saba’s hair and skin were nearly the same color. In the backsplash from the screen, he almost seemed like a cartoon of himself. He nodded at Holden and shifted a few centimeters on his bench to give him room. Holden sat.
“Checking on the Storm dump?” Holden asked, nodding toward the screen. The log entries spooled up. The information they were intercepting from the Laconians was encrypted on a variety of levels, and using more than one schema.
“Dui,” Saba said. “Everything between the station and the Storm is coming in, but until we get access to the server that decrypts it, it’s just noise. Plenty more irons in that fire, though. Medina comms got more compromised than we thought. Turns out Golden Bough bought a tech eighteen months ago, got a backdoor into the system we never noticed.”
“Really?” Holden said. “How’d you find it now?”
“Coyo told us,” Saba said, flashing a grin. “Patriotism is weird shit.”
Holden chuckled. “Whatever works, I guess.”
They sat for a moment in near silence. Saba scratched his arm and pointedly didn’t look at Holden when he spoke again. “Big coya seems like she’s got a little stone in her throat. Any trouble with your crew?”
“Nope,” Holden said. And then, “I mean, yeah, but nothing that’ll cause a problem.”
“Don’t guess you want to say what? Make me feel better to know.”
Holden leaned forward. The logs spooled past, storage filling with traffic that might be everything to them. Or nothing. Bobbie wasn’t something he’d talked about before. He wasn’t sure he wanted to start now, but he was living in Saba’s rooms, eating the man’s food, coordinating on his operations.
“It’s not exactly my crew,” Holden said. “I had some trouble with the union before all this happened.”
Saba’s grin came again. “You’re forgetting whose man I am, que no? Drummer spends a little time talking about you behind your back, and that means to me.”
“Right, so … I was in the process of retiring when all this came down. Dropping off the Freehold guy was my last mission. Was going to be. The crew is really Bobbie’s, only then history got in the way, and now I’m sort of back in charge and sort of not. It’s awkward.”
“Savvy,” Saba said. “I’m there too.”
“Something wrong between you and Bobbie?”
“No, no, no. Only that Medina’s my home port, but the Malaclypse is my home. This came down, and I got put at the front because of my spouse and her job and the union. Plenty enough around here don’t like that. Do their own thing because it’s their own.”
“Like the bombing,” Holden said.
“Like that trap, yeah. Like the trying for the governor. Like a bunch of assholes I stopped who were looking to steal Laconian uniforms, beat up some of our own so they could start shit between, yeah?”
“That doesn’t seem productive,” Holden said.
“Not about productive,” Saba said. “About reaching for what can get done. Plenty of old OPA on Medina. When the Alliance turned into the union, it didn’t erase all the old factions. There’s Ochoa OPA and there’s Johnson OPA even when there’s no Ochoa or Johnson. Voltaire Collective set that bomb like they’d just been waiting for the chance, and maybe they were. Oldsters going at it like they were young again. Young ones trying to live up to the stories of the bad old days. Like pumping oxygen into a fire.”
Holden shook his head. “If we’re going to manage anything, we have to—”
The dumb terminal chirped, and one of the entries came up highlighted. Saba pulled the interface pad closer and scrolled back to the flagged entry. He cross-checked and opened the file. All the things a real system would have done for him automatically, if they could risk using one.
Saba clicked his tongue against his teeth.
“What’ve we got?” Holden asked.
“Traffic control plan update,” Saba said. “Got something slated as coming in through Laconia gate, but not right away.”
“How far out?”