The plate came free. She scooped up the handset, checking its charge. The batteries were nearly full. Connection read good. She didn’t know which circuit was the broadcast and the first one she tried threw an error code. Cursing musically under her breath, she set it to diagnostic mode and started querying. It seemed to take forever before it came back. She cycled through the report with her thumb until she found it. Channel eighteen was a comm array using the D4/L4 protocols that the Rocinante did for broadcast. She thumbed in the override code that would let her send thirty seconds of diagnostic tones out, then deleted the file that held the tones. When the error came up, she told it to override to manual. She was almost weeping now. Her right foot slipped, and she grabbed for the open access panel. Her knuckles scraped something sharp and toothy. She grunted in pain and put her annoyance aside. No time.

“If you receive this,” she said, pressing the handset close to her lips, “please retransmit. This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. Message is for James Holden. The software controlling the magnetic bottle has been sabotaged. Do not start the reactor without reloading the hardware drivers from a known good source. If you hear this message, please retransmit.”

Halfway through the last word, the handset chirped that the thirty seconds were up and returned to the base menu. She let the handset go, let herself go, floated back from the wall. She spread her arms wide and let the Allen wrench go. She hoped it had worked. It was the middle of a battle. There could be jamming to contend with if Marco wanted to keep what was happening unclear, but it was just as likely he was enjoying being a spectacle. And if she was right, if they were going after the Martian prime minister, the data coming off the battle would be gone over by the best intelligence services that still existed.

Jim wasn’t safe, not yet. She knew it, but for a moment, she didn’t feel it. The darkness would come back; the bone-crushing anxiety, and the guilt and the fear. She didn’t doubt that, but now, right now, she felt only light. She’d made her plan, and it had worked. Her warning would reach him or it wouldn’t. Either way, there was nothing more she could do. And on the bridge, right now, Marco was figuring out what exactly she’d done. The laughter that came boiling out of her throat felt like victory.