Expanse: Nemesis Games Part 15

"It needs to carry a crew no larger than twenty."

"How long would you need it?"

"I don't know."

"Would it be hauling cargo?"

"No."

The man's eyes lost their focus for a moment. The gla.s.ses were an interface, then. Naomi crossed her arms.

One in a hundred, she thought, I show up with my own warship ready to carry people off Ceres. One in twenty, I know how to find someone who will. She wondered what the one-in-five plan was. What was the sure thing.

The man's focus came back to her.

"I think we may be able to help," he said.

Chapter Fifteen: Alex.

The ride to the hospital was a thing out of a nightmare. As the transport sped through the corridors, the painkillers started to take effect. The combination of ache and sharpness in his body shifted into a deep and troubling sense of simply being wrong. Once, when they were near the emergency admitting entrance, time stuttered as his consciousness slipped away and back again. None of the medics paid him much attention.

They were all focused on Bobbie.

The big woman's eyes were closed, and a pale plastic tube came out of her mouth, keeping her jaw open. From where he rode, Alex could make out only parts of her gurney's readout, and he wasn't sure how to interpret what he was seeing. The medics' voices were clipped and tense. Words and phrases like attempting to reinflate and stabilizing and maintaining pressure pushed Alex toward the edge of panic. Bobbie's body, what he could see of it, was limp. He told himself she wasn't dead. If she were dead, they wouldn't be trying to save her. He hoped that was true.

At the emergency ward, he found himself wheeled into an automated surgical bed not that different from the ones on the Rocinante. The scan probably took a minute and a half, but it seemed to go on forever. He kept turning to the side, looking for Bobbie, then remembering she was in a different room now. Even then he didn't understand how much his injuries and painkillers had compromised his mind until the police came and he tried to explain what had happened.

"So how did the woman with the power armor fit into it?" Bobbie asked.

She was sitting up in her hospital bed. Her gown was thick, disposable paper with Bhamini Pal Memorial Hospital printed on it like a pattern, dark blue over light. Her hair was pulled back into a loose bun, and deep bruises darkened her left cheek and her knuckles. When she shifted, the movement was careful. It was the way Alex moved after he'd worked out too hard and felt a little sore. He hadn't been shot twice once through her left lung, once in her right leg and he'd seriously considered taking a wheelchair to go between his room and hers.

"I meant you," Alex said. "I was having trouble coming up with your name."

Bobbie chuckled. "Yeah, they're going to want to talk to you again. I think the version they got was a little muddled."

"Do you think... Should we not be talking?"

"We're not under arrest," Bobbie said. "The only one of the other guys that's still breathing lawyered up before he got here. I'm pretty sure they're not going to be looking at us if they want to throw someone in jail."

"What did you tell them?" Alex asked.

"The truth. That a bunch of thugs broke into my rooms, tied me up, and started taking turns between kicking the s.h.i.t out of me and asking why I was meeting with Alex Kamal."

Alex pressed his thumb against his upper lip until it ached a little. Bobbie's smile carried a load of sympathy.

"I don't know why that is," he said. "I don't have any enemies on Mars. That I know of."

Bobbie shook her head and Alex noticed again that she was a remarkably attractive woman. He coughed and mentally filed the thought under horrifically inappropriate given the circ.u.mstances.

"My guess," Bobbie said, "is that it was less about who you are than who you're connected to."

"Holden?"

"And Fred Johnson. And maybe they can even put the two of us together with Avasarala. She shipped on the Rocinante for a while."

"For about a minute and a half, years ago."

"I remember. I was there," Bobbie said. "Still, one way or another, the most plausible scenario I've got is that they thought I was reporting something to you or you were reporting something to me. And, even better, the idea scared them."

"Don't mean to look a gift horse in the mouth, but that definition of even better has got some mighty long teeth," Alex said. "Did you tell them about your investigation?"

"No, I'm not ready to do that."

"But you think this was related."

"Oh, h.e.l.l yes. Don't you?"

"It's what I'm hoping for, actually," Alex said with a sigh. Across the hallway, someone shouted words Alex couldn't make out. A nurse stalked by, scowling. "So what are we goin' to do about it?"

"Only thing we can do," Bobbie said. "Keep digging."

"Fair enough. So. What exactly are we looking at?"

Bobbie's expression sharpened. The problem, she said, was ships. The Martian Navy was the newest, best set of ships in the solar system. Earth had more ships, but her Navy was aging, with tech in them that was either generations old or retrofitted, shoehorning more recent designs into older frames. Both fleets had taken heavy losses in the last few years. Whether you called Avasarala's influence prompting or putting her on a mission, Bobbie had started looking, and what she'd found was interesting.

The seven big Donnager-cla.s.s ships were easy to keep track of, but the fleet of corvettes that they carried, ships like the Rocinante they were slippery. Bobbie had started by going back to review the battle data from Io, from outside the Ring, from the incident in the slow zone. Really, when it came to damage reports, there was an embarra.s.sment of riches.

At first, the numbers had seemed to match up. Half a dozen ships lost here, a handful there, the transponder codes decommissioned. But as she looked more deeply, she started running into discrepancies.

The Tsuchi, a corvette a.s.signed to the Bellaire, had been decommissioned and sc.r.a.pped after Io. A year later, it appeared in a small-group action report near Europa. The supply ship Apalala had been retired from service, and then seven months later, picked up a shipment headed to Ganymede. A load of medical supplies lost to accident appeared briefly on a loading schedule bound for Ceres and then disappeared again. Weapons lost in the fighting around what was now Medina Station appeared in an audit at Hecate Base once and not again.

Someone, Bobbie reasoned, had gone back through the records and doctored the old reports, forging the deaths of ships and then erasing them from the later records, or trying to. She'd found half a dozen hiccups in the data, but any ships that had been successfully erased, she wouldn't see. That meant someone had to be involved high enough up the naval chain of command that they had access to the files.

There was protocol, of course, that laid out who was supposed to have access to the records, but she'd been in the process of looking into how that actually played out in practice when Alex had dropped her a line and suggested dinner.

"If you're up for it," Bobbie said, "that's what I'd want you to look at. Just who could have changed the information. Then I can start looking at them."

"Keep going down the road you were already on," Alex said.

"Only with maybe some friends in the Navy."

"That's one way we can go. It ain't the only one, though."

Bobbie sat forward, caught her breath, and leaned back. "What else are you thinking?"

"Someone hired the gentlemen who messed us up. Seems like findin' out what we can about them might also be worth our time."

Bobbie grinned. "That was the part I was planning to do."

"Well, all right, then," Alex said, and a man stepped into the doorway. He was huge. His shoulders brushed the doorframe on both sides, and his face was thick and heavy with a distress that could have been fear or anger. The bouquet of daffodils in his hand seemed tiny, and would until they were in a vase.

"Hey," he said. "I was just..."

"Come in," Bobbie said. "Alex, this is my brother Ben. Benji, this is Alex Kamal."

"Good to meet you," the ma.s.sive man said, enfolding Alex's hand in his grip and shaking gently. "Thank you for everything you've done."

"Betcha?" Alex said.

The bed creaked as Bobbie's brother sat at its foot. He looked sheepishly at his sister. Now that she'd said the words, Alex could see the resemblance in them. Bobbie wore the look better.

"The doctor says you're doing well," Ben said. "David wanted me to tell you he's thinking of you."

"That's sweet, but David doesn't think about anything but terraforming and b.o.o.bs," Bobbie said.

"I've cleaned out the guest room," Ben said. "When they release you from the hospital, you're coming to stay with us."

Bobbie's smile grew sharper. "I don't actually see that happening."

"No," her brother said. "No, this isn't a discussion. I told you from the beginning that Innis Shallow was a dangerous place, especially for someone living by herself. If Alex hadn't saved you -"

"Not sure I was actually saving anyone," Alex said, but Ben scowled and kept right on going over the words.

"- you could have been killed. Or worse."

"Worse than killed?" Bobbie said.

"You know what I mean."

Bobbie leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. "Yes, I do, and I think that's bulls.h.i.t too. I am in no more danger in Innis Shallow than I would be up in Breach Candy."

"How can you even say that?" her brother demanded, his jaw slipping forward. "After what you've just been through, it should be obvious that..."

Alex sidestepped toward the door. Bobbie caught his eye, and the brief smile, gone as soon as it was there, was eloquent. I'm sorry and Thank you and We'll talk about the important stuff when he's gone. Alex nodded and retreated to the hallway, the buzz-saw tones of siblings lecturing each other following after him.

When he got back to his recovery bed, the police were waiting, and this time he gave a statement that was, at least, coherent. Even if he left some of the background issues vague.

For the most part, family was a metaphor on long-haul ships. Now and then, there'd be a group that was actually related by blood, but that was almost always Belters. On military and corporate a.s.signments, there might be a handful of married couples, and now and then someone would have a baby. People would wind up on the same ship who were cousins. They were the exception, and the rule was that family was a way of talking about need. The need for friendship, the need for intimacy, the need for human contact that ran so deeply into the genome that anyone without it seemed not entirely human anymore. It was camaraderie writ large, a synonym for loyalty that was stronger than the concept it echoed.

Alex's experience of real family of blood relations was more like having a lot of people who had all wound up on the same mailing list without knowing quite why they signed up for it. He'd loved his parents when they were alive, and he still loved his memory of them. His cousins were always happy to see him, and he was glad of their welcome and their company. Seeing Bobbie and her brother together and feeling even in that brief moment the deep and unbridgeable mismatch of character between them drove something home to Alex.

A mother could love her daughter more than life itself the way the stories told, or she could hate the girl's guts. Or both. A sister and brother could get along or fight each other or pa.s.s by in a kind of uncomfortable indifference.

And if real relationship-by-blood shared descent could mean any of those things, maybe family was always a metaphor.

He was still thinking about it when he got to Min's hole. Her boys and the girl that she and her husband had adopted were all there, sharing a meal of fish and noodles when he arrived, and they all greeted him like they knew him, like his injuries were important to them, like they cared. He sat at the table for a little bit, making jokes and minimizing the a.s.sault and its aftermath, but what he wanted to do what he did as soon as his sense of etiquette allowed was excuse himself and head back to the guest room they'd set aside for him.

A message was waiting for him from the Roci. From Holden. Seeing the familiar blue eyes and tousled brown hair was weirdly displacing. Alex felt like part of him was already on the way back to the Rocinante, and he was a little surprised not to be there already.

"Alex. Hey, hope things are going well out there, and that Bobbie is good."

"Yeah," Alex said to the playback. "Funny you'd ask."

"So, I've been looking into this thing with missing ships? And there's a suspicious. .h.i.t out at 434 Hungaria. Any chance you have access to a ship? If you need to rent one, feel free to pull the funds from my account. I'd like you to go see if a ship named the Pau Kant is sitting out there parked and dark. Specs on the transponder code attached to this message."

Alex paused the playback, the skin at the back of his neck tickling. Missing ships was turning into a motif to his day, and it made him uneasy. He played the rest of Holden's message, rubbing his chin as he did it. There was a lot less to it than he wanted to know. The records on the Pau Kant didn't show it as a Martian vessel, or anything else in particular. Alex set his hand terminal to record, saw what he looked like in the display, combed his fingers through his hair, and started the message.

"Hey, Captain. Got your thing about the Pau Kant. I was wondering if I could get a little more information about that. I'm sort of in the middle of somethin' a mite odd myself."

He described what had happened to him and Bobbie in lighter tones than he actually felt. He didn't want to scare Holden when there was nothing the man could do to protect him or Bobbie. Apart from saying that the attackers seemed to have been spooked that Alex had appeared on the scene, he left out the details of Bobbie's investigation and Avasarala's. It might have been paranoia, but transmitting that information without another couple levels of encryption seemed like asking for trouble. He did ask what other ships were supposed to have gone missing, and how it might relate to Mars before he signed off.

Maybe whatever Holden was looking into was just coincidence. Maybe the Pau Kant and the missing Martian warships were totally unrelated. Wasn't where Alex would put his money, though.

He checked to see if there was anything from Amos or Naomi, and felt a little let down when there wasn't. He recorded brief messages for the both of them and sent them out.

In the main room of the apartment the kids' voices were loud, three conversations going on at the same time, each fighting to be heard over the others. Alex ignored them, accessing the local directory and looking up old names. People he could think of from his time in the service. There were dozens. Marian Costlow. Hannu Metzinger. Aaron Hu. He checked the directory against them, old friends and acquaintances and enemies, looking for who was still on Mars, still in the Navy, still someone who might remember him well enough to go out for a few beers and talk.

By the end of the evening, he had three, and he sent messages to each of them, then requested a connection to Bobbie. A few seconds later, she appeared on his screen. Wherever she was, it wasn't the hospital. She had on a shirt with a green collar instead of the blue patient's gown, and her hair had been washed and braided back.

"Alex," she said. "Sorry about my brother. He means well, but he's kind of a d.i.c.k."

"Everybody's related to someone," he said. "You wind up at his place or your own?"

"Neither one," she said. "I need to hire a cleanup crew to get the blood off my floor, and I'm doing a solid security audit to figure out how they got in."

"Yeah. Wouldn't feel safe until that's done," Alex agreed.

"Right? And if there is a follow-up attack, I'm sure as h.e.l.l not staying where it's going to catch Ben and his wife in the crossfire. I popped for a hotel room. They've got their own security, and I can pay for extra surveillance."

Min's voice rose in the background, calling for calm. There was laughter in her tones, and he heard it echoed in the protests of her children. A tightness like a hand closed over his heart. He hadn't thought about a follow-up attack. He should have.

"They got a spare room at that hotel?" he asked.

"Probably. You want me to find out?"

"Nah, I'll just pack up and head over, if that's all right. They don't, someone will." And whoever it is, it won't be Min, he thought but didn't say. "I got a few people I thought I'd try chatting up in the next few days. See if anything seems likely."

"I really appreciate this, Alex," Bobbie said. "We should talk about how to manage that safely. I don't want you walking into a trap."

"Wouldn't make me happy either. Also, you don't have access to a ship, do you?"