Expanse: Nemesis Games Part 36

At her quarters, Karal came in behind her and closed the door. With two of them in the tiny s.p.a.ce, it felt cramped and uncomfortably intimate. She sat on the crash couch, arms crossed, her legs tucked under her, and looked at him, her expression carrying the question. Karal shook his head.

"You got to stop this, Knuckles," he said, and his voice was surprisingly gentle. "We're in king s.h.i.t here. Esa la we're doing? History, yeah? Changing everything, but for us this time. I know you and him ain't right, but tu muss listen him. Yeah?"

Naomi looked away. She just wanted him to leave, but Karal didn't go. He sank down, his back against the wall, his knees to his broad chest.

"I heard the plan where we gehst con du? Bring you in? Fought it, me. Mal concep, I said. Why cut open the scar? Marco said was worth it. Said you were going to be in danger when it all came, and Filip, he deserved to see his mother, yeah? And Marco's Marco, so si."

Karal rubbed his palms over his head. It made a soft hissing sound, almost too faint to hear. Naomi felt an inexplicable urge to touch him, to offer some comfort, but she didn't. When he spoke again, he sounded tired.

"We're little people in big times, yeah? Time for Butchers and Marco men and history-book things. Other pinche worlds. Who wants that? Just you let this pa.s.s, yeah? Maybe your Holden, he doesn't take the bait. Maybe something else trips before he gets here. Maybe you get small and you live through this. That so bad? Doing what needs to live through?"

She shrugged. For a time, the only sound was the clicking of the air recycler. Karal lifted himself up with a grunt. He looked older than she thought of him. It was more than just the years, she thought. For a moment, she was young again, back on Ceres with Filip bawling in his crib while she watched the news of the Augustin Gamarra. It occurred to her for the first time that everyone on that ship had watched Earth die in real time the way she'd seen the firefly light of the Gamarra rise and fade on the newsfeed, looped a dozen times while the reporter spoke over it. She wanted to say something, but she couldn't, so she just watched as Karal opened the door then closed it behind him. The lock slid closed. She wiped the wet from her eyes, and once she was sure he wasn't coming back spat the decompression kit into her hand.

Wet with her saliva and no bigger than her thumb, it was the sort of thing any mech driver kept with her. A tiny ampoule of injectable oxygenated artificial blood, and a panic b.u.t.ton that would make an emergency medical request for an airlock to cycle. Military ships like the Pella and Roci ignored that sort of request as basic security. The Canterbury and other commercial ships usually allowed it, filled as they were with civilians who posed a greater threat to themselves than pirates or boarders did. She didn't know how the Chetzemoka would respond to it, but there was only one way to find out. The only other things she needed were an EVA suit and a clear idea of when the ships would cut thrust.

Then it was a matter of taking control of the ship, maybe blowing the core, and getting the h.e.l.l away from Marco. Again. She felt a pang of regret at the thought of Filip and Cyn and Karal and all the people she'd known once and cared for. Even loved. It was an echo of greater pain, and she could ignore it.

"Didn't break me when I was a girl," she said to the tiny black kit. "Don't know why he thinks he can break me now."

Chapter Thirty-six: Holden.

Holden wanted badly to sleep, but sleep wouldn't come. The most he'd been able to manage was a few hours' unconsciousness that left him groggy and ragged. He'd been given the option of moving back into quarters on the station, but he'd refused. Even though he slept better with gravity holding him to the mattress, he didn't want to leave the ship. He wasn't sure how long it had been since he'd shaved, but the patchwork of stubble on his cheeks and neck itched a little. During the work shifts, it wasn't so bad. The new crew checked the systems they'd all checked before, looking for sabotage they hadn't seen last time, and it gave him something to do. People to talk to. When they left, he ate in the galley, tried to sleep for a while, then wandered through the ship like he was looking for something but couldn't remember what it was.

And then, inevitably and against his better judgment, he checked the newsfeeds.

"With the silence from Medina Station, all contact with the colonial planets has been lost. We can only speculate on the significance of the partial report from the Folkvangr settlement concerning alien activity in the southern hemisphere of New Triton -"

"A spokesman for the port authority said that Ganymede's neutrality was a reflection of its universal importance and not a political statement -"

"UN forces are en route, but it is not clear whether Prime Minister Smith is actually aboard the racing ship or if this is a distraction to pull the enemy's attention away from a more traditional evacuation. Regardless, acting secretary-general Avasarala has announced a security zone covering the flight path of the pinnace, and all ships in the area have been advised to move beyond weapon range until such time as -"

Light speed, he decided, was a curse. It made even the farthest corners of humanity's reach feel close, and the illusion was a kind of poison. The delay between Tycho Station and Earth was a little less than a quarter of an hour, but to travel that far would take days. If Alex or Naomi died, he could know within minutes that they were gone. He floated in his restraints, the cabin lights turned off, and flipped through the feeds, jumping back and forth in case anything had happened, knowing that if it had, there was nothing he could do. He felt like he was standing on a frozen lake, looking down through the ice while the people he cared about most drowned.

If he couldn't know, if everything that was happening could happen someplace he couldn't watch, then maybe he could look away. Maybe he could close his eyes and dream about them, at least. When a connection request came on his hand terminal, he was glad to get it.

"Paula," Holden said.

"Holden," the hacker replied. "Wasn't sure what schedule you're on. I was afraid I was calling in your sleep shift."

"No," Holden said. He didn't know why he felt defensive about being awake, but he did. "It's fine. I'm fine. What have you got?"

She grinned. "I have a smoking gun. I can transmit a report to you -"

"No. I mean, yes. Do that. But am I going to understand what I'm seeing?"

On the screen, she stretched, grinning. "I was about to head out to dinner. Meet me at La Fromagerie and I'll walk you through the whole thing."

Holden pulled up the station directory. It wasn't far. If Naomi died right now, the news would reach him just about when he got there. Maybe before. He pressed his palm against his sandpaper-dry eyes. "Sounds like a plan," he said.

"Meal's on you."

"You've got me over a barrel, yeah, yeah. Be right over."

The restaurant was small, with what appeared to be real wooden tables but were certainly pressed bamboo from station hydroponics; no one charging even vaguely reasonable prices for the meals would have been able to afford something from an actual tree. Paula was at a table against the wall. The bench she sat on looked normal for her. When he sat across from her, his feet didn't quite touch the deck.

"Boss," Paula said. "I already ordered."

"I'm not hungry. What have you got?"

"Take a look," she said, pa.s.sing her hand terminal over to him. The screen was filled with a structured scatter of code, structures nested inside structures with repeated sections showing variations so subtle as to approach invisibility. It was like seeing a poem written in an alphabet he didn't know.

"What am I looking at?"

"These two lines," she said. "This sends the stop code to the bottle. These are the conditional statements that call it. For you, if you'd gotten to ninety-five percent, you'd have been a star. If you'd been in dock, which you probably would have, it would have taken a fair bite out of the station too."

"And the new software? The one that the ship's running now?"

"Not in it," Paula said. "This is where you get to be impressed with me finding two lines of uncommented code in a fusion reactor's magnetic bottle driver."

"Very impressive," Holden said, dutifully.

"Thank you, but that's not the cool part. Take a look at the trigger line. You see all those calls set to null? They're all other system parameters that weren't being used."

"Okay," Holden said. From the brightness in her expression, he had the sense he should have seen something more in her words. Maybe if he'd been able to sleep...

"This is an all-purpose trap. You want something to blow when they've been out of port for six days? Set that call there to about half a million seconds. You want it to go when the weapons systems are armed? This call right here set to one. There's maybe a dozen different ways to set this thing off, and you can mix and match them."

"That's interesting -"

"That's a smoking f.u.c.king gun," Paula said. "Bottle containment failures don't leave much by way of data. Not supposed to happen ever, but sometimes they do. The story has always been that accidents happen, what can you do? Ships blow up sometimes. This shows that someone built a tool specifically to make it happen. And to make it happen again and again and again, wherever they could sneak their code into the ship they decided had to die. What we have here is key evidence in maybe thousands of murders no one even knew were murders until right now."

Excitement tightened her voice, brightened her eyes. The unease in his gut grew thicker.

I need to go do something, Naomi said in his memory. And I can't have you involved in it. At all.

Was this it? Was this what she'd been trying to keep separate from him, from the Rocinante? And what did it mean if it was? Paula was still looking at him, expectation in her eye. He didn't know how to respond, but the silence was getting awkward.

"Cool?" he said.

Fred was sitting at Drummer's desk, his elbows resting on the tabletop, his hands cradling his chin. He looked as tired as Holden felt. On the screen, Drummer and Sakai were in one of the interrogation rooms. The table that was usually between them had been moved askew, and Drummer was leaning back in her chair and resting her feet on it. Prisoner and guard were both drinking what looked like coffee. Sakai laughed at something and shook his head. Drummer grinned impishly. She looked younger. Holden realized with a start that she was wearing her hair down.

"What the h.e.l.l is this?" he asked.

"Professionalism," Fred said. "Building rapport. Establishing trust. She's halfway convinced him that whoever he was working for was willing to crack the station open with him still inside it. Once he's come around, we'll own him. That man will tell us everything we ask and then try to remember something we didn't think to dig for if we give him time. No one's as zealous as a convert."

Holden crossed his arms. "I think you're overlooking the beat-him-with-a-wrench stratagem. I favor it."

"No you don't."

"In this case, I'd make an exception."

"No. You wouldn't. Torture's for amateurs."

"So? I don't do this professionally."

Fred sighed and turned to look up at him. "The reckless tough-guy version of you is almost as tiring as the relentless Boy Scout was. I'm hoping your pendulum swings. .h.i.t middle sometime soon."

"Reckless?"

Fred shrugged. "Did you find anything?"

"Yeah," Holden said, "but it's not in the fresh driver. We have a clean bill of health."

"Unless there's something else."

"Yup."

"Sakai says there wasn't."

"Not entirely sure I know how to respond to that," Holden said. Then, a moment later, "So, I've been thinking."

"About the message from the Pella?"

"Yeah."

Fred stood up. His expression was hard, but not without compa.s.sion. "I was expecting this fight, Holden. But there's more at stake here than Naomi. If the protomolecule is being weaponized, or even just set loose again -"

"That doesn't matter," Holden said. "Wait, no. That came out wrong. Of course that matters. It matters a lot. It just doesn't change anything. We can't..." He paused, swallowed. "We can't go after her. I've got one ship, they've got half a dozen. Everything in me wants to fire up the engines and burn like h.e.l.l after her, but it won't help."

Fred was silent. The distant sound of Sakai's laughter filtered through from the screen. They both ignored it. Holden looked at his hands. He felt like he was confessing something. Maybe he was.

"Whatever's going on here?" Holden said. "Whatever she's involved with, I can't fix it by putting on my shining armor and riding into battle. The only way I can see to do her any good at all is to do what we had planned. Get you to Luna. If you can use Dawes and Sakai and Avasarala to open some kind of communication with these sons of b.i.t.c.hes, Naomi can be a bargaining chip. We can trade her for some of the people you've got in the brig. Or Sakai. Or something."

"That's the conclusion you've reached?"

"It is," Holden said, the words tasting like ashes.

"You've grown up some since the first time we met," Fred said. Holden heard the sympathy in it. The consolation. "It's making me regret my 'reckless' comment."

"I'm not convinced that's a good thing. Have you ever done this? Loved someone like they were part of you and then left them in danger?"

Fred put a hand on Holden's shoulder. For all the frailty that age and trouble had put in the older man's face and body, his grip was still firm. "Son, I've grieved for more people than you've met. You can't trust your heart on this. You have to do what you know, not what you feel."

"Because if I do what I feel..." Holden said, thinking that the end of the sentence was something like I'd beat Sakai's teeth in or I'd get us all killed. Fred surprised him.

"Then we lose her."

"Course set," Chava Lombaugh said from the c.o.c.kpit. "On your order, sir."

Holden tried to lean back into his crash couch, but without thrust gravity to give him weight, it ended up as just a straightening of the neck. His heart was racing, adrenaline ticking coolly through his veins.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. The command deck felt too full. Sun-yi, serious and relaxed, was at weapons. Maura had comm controls up, monitoring them because that was what she did more than from any actual need. It should have been Alex's voice. It should have been him and Naomi in the couches.

He shouldn't have been scared.

"All right," he said. "Let's do this."

"Sir," Chava said. The warning light went from amber to red and Holden fell back into his couch. Tycho Station fell away behind them. It wouldn't be an hour before it was too small to make out without a.s.sistance. Holden waited for three long, shuddering breaths. Four.

"How are we looking, Mister Ip?"

From the engineering deck, Sandra Ip who should have been Amos said, "All systems are within tolerance."

"Meaning not all blowed up," Holden said.

There was a pause on the channel. "Yes, sir. Not all blowed up, sir."

Holden hated it that he wasn't sure of his own ship. The Rocinante had been nothing but solid for him since the day he'd gotten aboard her. He'd trusted the ship with his life the way he trusted his heart to beat. It was more than instinct. It was automatic. To do anything else would have been strange.

But that was before. Sakai's sabotage hadn't killed him, but it hadn't left him unscathed either. It would be a long time before Holden was sure that there were no more unpleasant surprises hidden in the ship. Software waiting for the right moment to evacuate the air or throw the ship into a fatal acceleration or any of the other thousand ways a ship could fail and kill its crew. They had looked everything over and found nothing, but they'd done that before and nearly died from their oversights. There was no amount of double-checking that would ever prove that nothing had been missed. From now on maybe for a long time, maybe forever he would wonder about things he hadn't before. He was resentful, even angry, that his faith had been shaken.

He wondered if he was still thinking about the Rocinante.

"All right," he said, unstrapping. "I'm going to get some coffee. You folks try not to break anything, and if you do, let me know."

The chorus of yessirs was oddly disheartening. He wished they'd known he was joking. Or felt comfortable enough to joke back. Their formality was just another way it didn't feel like his ship anymore.

He found Fred in the galley, talking into his hand terminal, recording a message that was clearly meant for Anderson Dawes. Holden got his coffee quietly between phrases like lines of communication and profound lack of trust. When Fred finished, he folded his hands and looked over.

"I'd take one of those too. Cream, no sugar."

"Coming up," Holden said. "Anything new?"

"Two of the original Martian escort surrendered."

"Seriously?"

"They were too far from the action to affect the outcome, and they were getting hammered. I don't like it, but I won't second-guess their command."

"Is it just my imagination, or are these people handing us our a.s.ses on a plate?" Holden said, bringing the coffee mugs to the table. "Are they really this good, or do we all just suck a lot worse than I thought we did?"