Expanse: Nemesis Games Part 29

"We didn't have to do that," Holden said.

"Yes we did," Fred said. "After a loss, the most important thing for a leader to do is be seen. And be seen walking under their own d.a.m.ned power. Sets the narrative."

"Still."

"It's something I can still do," Fred said. "I'm sure as h.e.l.l going to do it."

Fred's old office was still being repaired. Until its walls and floor didn't open on vacuum, Drummer had set up a s.p.a.ce for him near the overfull brig. It was a smaller s.p.a.ce, less comfortable and less imposing. Holden couldn't be in it without feeling like Fred had given himself a demotion. Or had accepted without complaint the one the universe had handed to him.

Fred settled in behind his desk and rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. "The truth is that almost everything we do here won't even be a footnote in the history books."

"You don't know that. You're just feeling discouraged," Holden said, but Fred was already pulling up his work on the desk monitor.

"I had two messages last night. Well, more than that, but two that were interesting. The first was from Earth. Avasarala was on Luna when it happened, and she's putting together a response."

"A response?"

"A diplomatic conference. The Martian prime minister was already en route. She wants me to be there too. To 'represent the slightly less bats.h.i.t wing of the OPA.' If humanity really rests on that woman's diplomatic skills... well, that'll be interesting."

"What's the worst that could happen? War?"

Fred coughed out a grim laugh. "I've already talked with Drummer. She's ready to take over operation of Tycho in my absence."

"You're going to go, then?"

"I don't know if I'll go there, but I won't stay here. There's something else I wanted you to see."

Fred opened a message, and gestured Holden toward it. A pale-skinned man with close-cut white hair and the wrinkles of early age competing with acne scars of long-past youth. The date stamp at the lower left corner said it had been sent from Pallas Station.

"Anderson Dawes," Fred said. "You've heard of him?"

"Big mover and shaker in the OPA, isn't he?"

"The man who reached out to me, back in the day. Made me into the inward-facing figurehead of the Belt. Instrumental in the transition of Ceres to OPA oversight. The last few years, he's been negotiating for the OPA to have a stake in Ganymede equal to Earth and Mars."

"All right," Holden said.

Fred started the recording, and the man came to life. His voice was gravelly and low, like he'd been punched in the throat too many times. "Fred. I know this has got to be a hard time for you. For what it's worth, it's pretty shocking to all of us. But so it goes. History's made of surprises that seem obvious in retrospect. I want you to know, I didn't sanction any of this. But I know the men who did, and say what you will about their methods, they're true patriots."

"What the f.u.c.k is this?" Holden said.

"Wait for it," Fred said.

"I'm reaching out to you now to make peace within the organization. I know as well as you do how much you've sacrificed and how hard you've worked for the OPA over the years. It's not forgotten. But we're in a new age now, and it carries its own logic. I know you're enough of a man to recognize the difference between justice and the things that have to happen. I'll get you back in the fold. I swear to that. But I'm going to need a token. Something I can take to the new powers to show that you're a reasonable man. That you can negotiate. You've taken a prisoner. Not one of the people who partic.i.p.ated in the insurrection. Even they know asking that so soon is a bridge too far. But a prisoner of yours nonetheless. His name's William Sakai. As a gesture of good faith, I'm asking that you turn him over to me at Pallas Station, in return for which I will guarantee you a seat at the table when -"

Fred stopped the recording, Anderson Dawes caught with his eyes and mouth half-open.

"You have got to be kidding me," Holden said.

"No one's laughing."

Holden sat down on the edge of the desk, staring at the frozen man, his chest a welter of conflicting emotions: anger, surprise, outrage, amus.e.m.e.nt, despair. "You could tell him we already threw him out an airlock."

"Would that be before or after we threw him out an airlock?"

"Either way works for me."

Fred smiled and shut down the display. "You say that, but you wouldn't do it. Even angry, you're too decent a man. And it turns out I am too."

"Really?"

"I got soft when I got old. Everything seems... delicate to me now. We're still under lockdown, and I have to open that up. Have to get some semblance of normalcy. That's not the point, though. I have invitations to two tables. The inner planets are in retreat. They're regrouping. The radicals within the OPA are becoming the new leadership."

"But they're crazy ma.s.s murderers."

"Yes," Fred said. "And we don't know who they are. Dawes does. I don't."

"Wait a minute," Holden said. "Hold on. Are you about to propose that you trade Sakai to this Dawes guy so that you can feed the names of whoever's behind dropping rocks on Earth to Avasarala? How many times are you looking to change sides in one career?"

"I never changed sides," Fred said. "The sides keep changing around me. I was always the one who wanted order. Peace. Justice, even. What happened at Anderson Station opened my eyes to things I hadn't seen. Or had chosen not to see. Now this..."

"It's done the same thing again."

"I don't know what it's done. That's what I'm trying to decide. There have always been radicals within the OPA. The Voltaire Collective. Marco Inaros. Ca.s.sandra Lec. But they were on the margins, where we thought we could control them. Keep them in line, or if not always that, use their excesses to make the mainstream places like Ceres and Tycho seem the least of the available evils. Now, they're in charge. I don't know if the best thing is to declare against them or stand beside them and try to control the fall." He shook his head.

"Your friend Dawes seems to be in bed with them already."

"His loyalty's to the Belt. When the best thing was to find a way to be respected as an equal by the inner planets, that was what he aimed for. My loyalty is to... everyone. There was a long time that meant speaking for the people who had the least voice. Then the protomolecule came and changed the game, and now, if riding beside the radicals gives me the most influence... As long as my people hold Medina, no one can ignore me. I can throw in on whichever side I think it will do the most good to be on, in the long-term."

"That sounds like post hoc realpolitik rationalizing bulls.h.i.t," Holden said. And then a moment later, "Sir."

"It is," Fred said. "But it's what I've got to work with. If I commission the Rocinante to take me to Luna and the meeting with Avasarala, will you accept the job?"

"If we finish checking all of Sakai's work and you bring your own crew, sure. Or, better, we go pick up mine from wherever they've gotten to."

"And if I hire you to take me and the prisoner to Pallas?"

"Then you can go f.u.c.k yourself."

Fred chuckled and stood up, checking his sidearm. "I do always enjoy our little chats, Captain. Take the day off. I'll get back to you when I've made a decision. Either way."

"Where are you going now?"

"To talk with Sakai," Fred said. "See if there's anything about this I can glean from him. The prospect of not getting thrown out one of my airlocks might make him more willing to talk with me." He looked at Holden, and his expression shifted to a strange place at the friction point between pitying and pleading. "I try to do the right thing, Holden. But there are times when it's not obvious what that is."

"I agree with you," Holden said. "Right up to the part where you tell me this is one of those times."

Holden was in a Thai restaurant eating peanut curry that was, as far as he could remember from his childhood on Earth, totally unlike anything served on a planet's surface. A piece of not-chicken floated on top of the not-curry, and Holden was pushing it under with a chopstick and watching it pop back to the surface when two messages came through. The first was from Mother Elise. The family was all right so far. They were under an environmental watch, but no evacuation orders had come. Not, she said with one lifted eyebrow, that there was anyplace to evacuate to better prepared and equipped than the ranch. They were sending the spare reactor down to help with the local grid at Three Forks, and waiting to hear from the Jacksons to see if they needed anything. He knew her well enough to see the depth of anxiety in all the things she didn't say. But when she said goodbye, she promised to be in touch. It was thin comfort, but it was something.

The second message was from Alex.

Bobbie Draper and he were on the prime minister's ship and burning for Luna with the escort fleet watching their backs. Everyone was pretty freaked-out, but he thought they were okay for the time being. The relief ships were on their way and due in a day or two. He hadn't had any word from Naomi, wherever she was. Or, more to the point, from Amos. He made a joke about Amos surviving anything, and how this wasn't the first planet that had blown up on him, but the humor carried the same dread and fear that Holden felt. When Alex signed off, he replayed the whole message from the start three more times, just to hear the familiar voice.

He started to record a response, but the restaurant was too open and too public for the things he wanted to say, so he promised himself he'd get to it when he was back in his quarters. He finished as much of the curry as he could stomach and the restaurant light slowly shifted from yellow to gold, the colors of a false sunset on a planet many of the people there had never seen except on screens. He paid the check and the waiter came, offering a variety of after-dinner desserts or drinks. The man's gaze lingered long enough that, while it was all within the bounds of politeness, it was pretty clear that Holden could have asked for some other things too.

Holden's mind shifted on most of the questions. More food, more drink, more sleep, more s.e.x. Any s.e.x. He was aware of a deep and oceanic cavern of want in his belly. Something that was like hunger or thirst, exhaustion or l.u.s.t, but that wouldn't be satisfied. He didn't have words for it, except that it left him quick to anger and despair. Lingering behind it all, the fear that he wouldn't ever have his crew back on his ship made him feel gut-punched.

And then the word for it came. He was homesick, and the Rocinante, wonderful as she was, wasn't home unless Alex and Amos and Naomi were in her. He wondered how long the feeling would last if they never came back. How long he'd wait for them, even once he knew they wouldn't return. The waiter smiled gently down at him.

"Nothing," Holden said. "Thanks."

He walked out to the main corridor, mentally rehearsing what he'd say to Alex and how he'd say it. Anything he said was going to be examined by the Martian communications service, so he didn't want to put anything in it that was open to misinterpretation. The problem with that being that he always knew what he meant by things, and didn't see the other readings until someone made them. Maybe he could just make a few jokes and say that he was ready to have everyone back together.

When his hand terminal buzzed a connection request, he accepted it, his mind primed to expect Alex even though light delay made that impossible. Drummer scowled out at him from the screen. "Mister Holden, I was wondering if you could stop by the auxiliary security office."

"I guess," Holden said, suddenly wary. He still half expected Drummer to turn out to be playing some angle of her own. "Is it something I should know about now?"

A stream of cursing came from the background, growing louder. Drummer stepped aside and Fred lurched into the screen. "If we were talking about it on the network, you wouldn't be coming in here."

"Right," Holden said. "On my way."

In the security office, Fred was pacing, his hands clasped behind his back, when Holden arrived. He nodded sharply by way of greeting. Drummer, at her seat, was a model of the crisp professionalism designed to offer no reason for the boss to yell at you. That was fine. Holden didn't mind being the one who got yelled at.

"What's the matter?"

"Medina went dark," Fred said. "She was supposed to report in this morning, but with everything being at loose ends, I didn't worry. She's missed two opportunities since then. And... Drummer? Show him."

The security chief pulled up a schematic of the solar system. At scale, even Jupiter and the sun were hardly more than a bright pixel. Thousands of dots showed the traffic in-system. Ships and bases, satellites and probes and navigation buoys. All of humanity in a nutsh.e.l.l. With a motion and a syllable, most of the clutter vanished. In its place, a couple dozen green dots with the word UNDETERMINED where the identification codes should be made a rough cloud. Someone's statistics run with a small but significant correlation.

"As soon as the station went dark," Drummer said, "we saw these. Twenty-five new plumes. All of them have drive signatures that match Martian military ships, and all of them are under heavy burn for the Ring."

"Heavy burn?"

"Eight to ten g to start, curving down, which means they're running at the limit of their drives."

Holden whistled. Fred stopped in his pacing, his expression placid in a way that spoke volumes about rage. "Those are my people on Medina. If the station has been compromised, or if these new ships are on their way to do something violent there, it will pose a significant obstacle to my partic.i.p.ation with the new direction within the OPA."

"Meaning f.u.c.k that noise?"

"Yes."

"It's a long way out to Medina," Holden said. "Even at those burns, it'll take them a while. But I don't think we could beat them there."

"We couldn't do anything if we did. If I took all the ships at my disposal, one Martian frigate could still rain h.e.l.l on them. And even the Rocinante would be badly outgunned."

"Have to wonder where they got Martian military ships," Holden said.

"I'll be sure to ask Dawes about that as soon as I've told him what I think of his good faith prisoner exchange. How long before the Rocinante's ready to fly?"

"Put a rush on it, we could be out of here in five days."

"Mister Drummer, please put all available teams on finishing the repairs and security audit for the Rocinante."

"Yes, sir," Drummer said, and shifted her screen to show the work schedules for the construction drum. Fred looked down at his feet and then back up.

"I'm going to be busy the next few days putting Tycho in order for Drummer. I'd like you to oversee the crews on the Roci."

"Wasn't going to do anything else."

"Fair enough," Fred said. And then, almost wistfully, "It will be good to see Luna again."

Holden tried to wait until he got back to his quarters, but lost patience when he reached the lift. He opened Alex's message and set up the camera to record his reply.

"Hey, Alex. So, funny thing. Looks like I'm going to be catching up with you sooner than we'd thought..."

Chapter Twenty-nine: Naomi.

She'd known to expect it. Like falling back into a bad habit, the dark thoughts came: which conduits had power lines in them with enough voltage to stop a heart, which rooms were small enough to seal and evacuate, the ways the medical bays could be tricked into administering an overdose. And the airlocks. Always the airlocks. The ideas weren't compulsions, not yet. They were just her brain noticing things that interested her. The worst would come later. If she let it.

So instead, she distracted herself. Not with the newsfeeds that played constantly, everywhere. Those only made her feel more helpless. Not with the conversations with her old friends. At best, those left her feeling like she was lying. At worst, like she was becoming an earlier version of herself for whom the dark thoughts were more natural. What she did have was work. It was all simple tasks like checking inventories and swapping air filters, and always under the watchful eyes of a minder. When she did talk, it was polite and superfluous; the kind of banter anyone crewing the same ship would make. It gave the rest of the crew the illusion that she was one of them in a way that sulking in her bunk wouldn't have. If she had any hope at all, it came from finding a way to leverage her weird non-status with the group. And with Marco.

At first, she'd tried distracting herself by thinking of her real crew. Alex and Amos. Jim. Even her best memories of them were riddled with guilt and pain now, so instead she filled her mind with technical concerns. In the mess, while the others cheered at the images of devastation, she speculated about the reactor's output, starting with the size of the galley, and then guessing at the requirements of the air and water recycling systems, and knowing the rough percentage that the Roci put into them. During her sleep shift, as she lay restless in her crash couch, the steady one-third-g burn pressing her into the gel like a hand on her chest, she ran over the power grid from the Roci, mapping how the logic of her ship would apply to this one. She thought of it as a meditation because it was too dangerous to admit even to herself that she was planning.

And still, small things came together. A toolbox in the machine shop had a bent hasp and, given a few minutes, could be forced open. The Allen wrenches inside would open the access panel on the lift wall between the crew quarters and the airlock, which was where the secondary diagnostic handset for the comm array was stored. With a few uninterrupted minutes, someone could probably broadcast a message. A short one. If there was anything to say, or anyone to say it to.

She had half a dozen schemes like it. A path to sneak between the hulls and take control of a PDC. A way to use a stolen hand terminal to make copies of the engineering software. How to force-cycle an airlock by spoofing the emergency codes from the medical bay. Most of them were fantasies, possible in theory but nothing she had ever had reason to try. A few were fairly solid. And all of them were defeated by a simple, inescapable fact: the first layer of any security was always physical. Even if she'd found a way to take control of the whole ship using a magnet and a length of Velcro, it wouldn't matter, because Cyn or Aaman or Bastien would put a bullet through her neck before she could manage it.

So she called it meditation and kept the darkness at bay. And sometimes by being quiet and not making waves and keeping her mind and senses sharp she heard something she wasn't supposed to hear.

Karal, her minder that shift, was talking up a woman called Sarta while Naomi sc.r.a.ped the crew decking nearby. Truth was the ship was new enough it didn't need it, but it was work. Wings, who'd first hunted her back on Ceres, came out from his quarters in a Martian naval uniform. Naomi looked up from under her hair as Wings saw Karal and Sarta standing together. The flicker of jealousy that pa.s.sed over him had been the same since humans came down from the trees.

"Hey, y'all," Wings said in a fake drawl. "Vise me! Bin Marteno, sa sa? Howdy, howdy, howdy!"

Karal chuckled and Sarta looked annoyed. Wings stepped through the narrow hall with an affected bowlegged gait. Naomi shifted aside to give him room.

"You got nothing better to do than play dress up?" Sarta asked.

"Don't wait underwater," Karal said. "Heard we're taking prisoners first. Liano, he ran whispers to Ceres. Tightbeam. Hamechie about the prisoners."

"Not how I heard it," Wings said, too quickly and more to Sarta than Karal. "I heard it's only one. Sakai. And even that..." He shrugged.