Expanse: Nemesis Games Part 48

"Have erased their niche," Avasarala said. "And that's s.h.i.tty, and maybe we could have found a way to support them. Put them on some kind of cooperative basic, but they put a cherry bomb up the a.s.s of the largest functioning ecosphere in the system, and it's going to be a while before handing them free food's going to be an option for me, practically or politically."

"They're never going to shut up and take handouts," Amos said. "Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are three, four generations out there because they weren't looking to live on basic. I'm against eugenics same as the next guy, but the Belt hasn't been breeding for the kind of people who just kick back and see how much they can f.u.c.k and watch entertainment feeds before they die."

"I'm aware of the cultural problem," Avasarala said. "And as I said, it doesn't f.u.c.king matter anyway. If they'd be willing to take it, I still couldn't give it to them. So I have to find another way to cut the Free Navy off at the knees. But since Earth's navy is going to be busy making sure we don't have any more radar-invisible rocks dropping on us and Mars is in the process of ignoring that it's suffered a minor coup, it's going to be tricky. Tomorrow, I'm going to make an announcement. You get a preview. Lucky you.

"The United Nations, with a.s.sistance from the Mars Republic and cooperation from the OPA, is going to field a task force to address the criminal conspiracy of pirates and terrorists going under the Free Navy name. Not a war. A policing task force. And that's where you all come into play."

"You want me to lead it," Holden said.

"Yes," Avasarala said, "because literally every UN naval officer who wasn't dishonorably discharged is suddenly unavailable. For f.u.c.k's sake, Holden, I have crates of anti-herpes drugs that are more legitimately UN Navy than you are."

The old woman shook her head in disbelief and disgust. Holden's scowl was matched by a rising blush. Bobbie tried to hide her laughter, but Alex had to admit it was a little funny. Even if just to himself. Bobbie was the one to step in.

"What exactly are you looking for from us?"

"I want your presence and cooperation at the debriefing, for one thing. But more importantly, I need to know what you know. What you've found. We have to figure out how a third-rate gang leader managed to beat us at every turn -"

"He didn't," Naomi said, stepping in from under the spreading arches, a security escort at her side. In the shadowless light, she looked weirdly delicate. Her skin was peeling and she moved with the careful shifting of someone prepared for pain to come at any moment. But her sclera had faded from the blood-and-bone color to an ivory yellow that actually looked healthier, and her voice had lost the slushiness at its edges. A weight lifted from Alex's heart.

"The prisoner, ma'am," the security escort said.

"Yes, thank you, I noticed that," Avasarala said, then turned her attention to Naomi. "What do you mean he didn't?"

"Look at everything he tried to do and failed. He didn't kill Fred Johnson. He didn't kill Prime Minister Smith. He didn't take Tycho Station or destroy it. The Rocinante's in one piece. He didn't keep hold of me. It's how he works. If he wins, it was the important thing. If he loses, it just disappears."

"And the protomolecule sample that he stole?"

Naomi blinked, seemed to lose focus for a moment, and shook her head. "He never said anything about that."

"Would he have?"

Naomi sat in the chair beside Holden. He took her hand, and she allowed it, but her attention was on Avasarala. Alex wasn't sure why that bothered him so much. The meeting wasn't an invitation for the two of them to work out their relationship status. And still, if she'd been just a little less guarded with him...

"Yes," Naomi said. "He would have. He likes to brag." The intimacy of that one piece of information filled Alex's chest with a sense of deep foreboding. Holden's face was calm. Unreadable.

"Good," Avasarala said, a sharpness in her voice. "That's very good to know." She considered Naomi silently. "You look like you're feeling better. You heard some of what I was saying?"

"Enough of it," Naomi said.

"Are you going to be able to help us?"

The question hung in the air, rich with nuance and complicated importance. Not Why were you on his ship. Not How do you know him. Not Who are you to him that he brags about his plans to you. Just, Are you going to be able to help?

"You okay?" Amos murmured.

"What? I'm fine," she replied.

"Because you're kinda fidgeting," Amos said at the same time Naomi said, "I want immunity from prosecution."

The air seemed to go out of the room. It wasn't a confession, but it painted a picture that none of them had wanted to admit might be possible. To ask for immunity was an admission of guilt, even if they didn't know what she was guilty of.

Avasarala's smile was indulgent and friendly and, he was almost certain, deceptive. "Blanket immunity?"

"For all of us."

"Who is 'all of us'?" Avasarala said, forming the words carefully as she said them. "Your friends in the Free Navy?"

"The crew of the Rocinante," Naomi said, and then stuttered. Paused. "And maybe one other person."

Alex shot a look at Amos. Did she know about Clarissa? Was that who she meant? Amos' smile was amiable and empty. Avasarala tapped her fingernails against the table.

"Not for Earth," Avasarala said. "Dropping the rocks? No one gets immunity for that."

Alex saw it hit. Tears appeared in Naomi's eyes, br.i.m.m.i.n.g silver and bright. "The crew of the Rocinante," she said. "The other one... I may ask for clemency and consideration later on. If the occasion arises."

"For Inaros?"

"No," Naomi said. "Him, you can f.u.c.king burn."

"I need to understand this fully," Avasarala said. "You, as a former member of Inaros' group, are willing to exchange complete and accurate information about his activities both before and after the bombardment of Earth in exchange for blanket immunity for the crew of the Rocinante on any matter not related to the present attacks?" That there had been no profanity in the statement gave it a solidity that unnerved Alex.

"Yes," Naomi said. "That's right."

The relief on Avasarala's face was hard as flint. "Glad to hear you say that, dear. I was worried I'd misjudged you." She rose to her feet, then grabbed at the table, cursing under her breath. "I miss weighing something. Half the time, I feel like I'm on a f.u.c.king trampoline. I'm going to go lie down and take a sleeping pill before I have a psychotic break, but the debriefing? It starts in the morning."

"We'll be wherever you want us to be," Holden said. "We're not going to hide anything." He was still holding Naomi's hand, and her fingers had curled around his. So maybe that was hopeful after all. As to not hiding anything... Well, Amos still didn't say anything.

The meeting broke up, except that it also didn't. Avasarala left, but the rest of them, including Bobbie, went to the security lobby, through the checkpoint, and out to the public lobby together. The sober silence gave way slowly to more mundane conversation: whether there was anyplace with food better than the mess on the Roci. Or if not better, at least different. Whether Naomi was up to drinking alcohol, because there was a little pub on one of the lower levels that was supposed to have some pretty good beers on offer. No one asked whether Bobbie was joining them. It was just a.s.sumed. As they shuffled and bounced in the thin gravity, Naomi and Holden kept hold of each other's hands. Amos and Bobbie traded dirty jokes. It was the powerfully ordinary talk that gave Alex hope. For everything that had happened, that was happening, that was still looming in the unseen and uncertain future, there were still moments like these. And so maybe it would be all right despite it all.

At the wide slope of Chandrayaan Plaza, where the traffic of carts and mechs and half-skipping people turned down a wide ramp deeper into the body of the moon, Amos cleared his throat.

"So that immunity for the crew thing?"

"It wasn't just for you," Naomi said, making it a joke, and also not one.

"Yeah, figured," Amos said. "But here's the thing. I was thinking about maybe taking on an apprentice. You know, help flesh out the crew. Get some skill redundancy."

"That's a good idea," Holden said. "Did you have someone in mind?"

Chapter Fifty-one: Naomi.

"h.e.l.l no," Jim said when they were alone in the suite. "Absolutely no. No f.u.c.king way, no. There have got to be a billion different ways to say no, and I'd still have to cycle through them a couple times to really express the depth of no on this one. Clarissa Mao? On the Roci? How is that anything but a ma.s.sive load of let's-not-do-that?"

"And yet," she said, letting herself drift down to the bed, "you told Amos you'd think about it."

Jim tried pacing, but the slight lunar gravity made it difficult for him. He gave up and sat at the foot of the bed.

"We just got the crew back together. And Bobbie was there. I didn't want to spoil the moment."

"Ah. The moment."

She closed her eyes. Everything hurt. Her skin hurt. Her eyes felt gritty and swollen. The joints in her hands and feet ached. Her knees hurt. Her fingertips felt raw and oversensitive. She had the kind of headache that expressed as a sense of profound fragility until she moved too fast, and then it throbbed. It was better now than it had been, though. And it would get better. Slowly, over the course of at least days and maybe weeks, she'd come back to herself. Or some version of herself. But even if some of the damage was permanent, she'd feel better than she did now. Not yet, but soon.

Alex, Amos, and Bobbie were gone. Out to get beer and food. Their food. Pizza or falafel or sashimi. Earth food. There wasn't any good red kibble on Luna, or if there was, it wouldn't be served at the kinds of places they'd go. Part of her wished she'd had the energy to go with them. Part of her wished Jim had decided to join them instead of her. Part of her was euphoric and on the edge of tears that she was here, that she'd escaped, that it was over. She felt like her soul was a handful of dice that were still rolling, and what came up would decide the shape that the rest of her life took.

"I mean... Clarissa Mao?" Jim said. "How does anyone think that's a good idea?"

"Amos isn't afraid of monsters," she said. The words tasted bitter, but not completely so. Or no, not bitter. Complex, though.

"She is responsible for a lot of dead people," Jim said. "She blew up the Seung Un. Took out a quarter of the crew. And that one body they found? The one she was carrying around in a toolbox? Do you remember that?"

"I do."

"That guy was a friend of hers. She wasn't just killing faceless enemies. She was right down, look-them-in-the-eyes killing people that she knew. That she liked. How do you go from that to 'I know, let's ship out with her'?"

She knew she should stop him. He wasn't talking about her or the Augustin Gamarra or any of the other ships that had been sabotaged since using the code she wrote. He wasn't talking about Cyn, or the way he'd tried to intervene in her half-staged suicide. If he had been, there would have been more. How could she abandon her son? How could she let Filip think that she'd killed herself? How could she have kept something that important hidden from the people she said she cared about? All the sins she carried that even Clarissa Mao didn't.

She knew she should stop him, but she didn't. His voice was like tearing back scabs. It hurt to hear, and it left her exposed and raw and painful to the touch, and the pain felt good. Worse, it felt right.

"I'm not saying she should be killed. That whole thing about how if she's ever going back to prison, Amos is going to shoot her? I understand that he's joking -"

"He's not."

"Okay, I'm pretending that he's joking, but I'm not advocating killing her. I don't want her to die. I don't even want her locked up in inhumane, s.h.i.tty prisons. But that's not what we're talking about. Shipping with someone means literally trusting them with your life all the time. And, okay, I was on the Canterbury, and we had some people there who were deeply, deeply sketchy. But even Byers only killed her husband. Clarissa Mao set out to destroy me in particular. Me. I just... I don't... How does anyone think this is a good idea? Someone who does the things she did doesn't just change."

She took a deep breath, pulling air into her bruised lungs. They still gurgled a little, but she was on enough reflex inhibitors that she wasn't coughing herself light-headed anymore. She didn't want to open her eyes, didn't want to talk. She opened her eyes, sat up, her back against the headboard, her arms wrapped around her knees. Holden went quiet, feeling the weight of what was about to come. Naomi plucked at her hair, pulling it over her eyes like a veil, then almost angrily, she smoothed it back so her eyes were clear.

"So," she said. "We need to talk."

"Captain to XO?" he asked, carefully.

She shook her head. "Naomi to Jim."

The dread that bloomed in his eyes hurt to see, but she'd also been expecting it. She felt its echo in her own chest. It was strange that after all she'd done all the demons she'd faced and escaped this should still be so hard. Holden's hand terminal chimed, and he didn't even look at the screen. The lines around his mouth deepened the way they did when he'd tasted something he didn't like. His hands folded together, strong, controlled, calm. She remembered the first time they'd met, lifetimes ago back on the Canterbury. How he'd radiated charm and certainty and how much she'd hated it at first. How much she'd hated him for being too much like Marco. And then how much she'd come to love him for not being like him at all.

And now, she would break her rule of silence, and the thing they had between them would either survive or it wouldn't. It was a terrible thought. Marco might still be able to empty her, and he wouldn't even have to spend the effort of being aware of it. Existing was enough.

"I don't," Jim said, then stopped. He looked up at her through his eyebrows, like he was the one feeling guilty for it all. "We all have pasts. We all have secrets. When you took off, I felt... lost. Confused. Like part of my brain was gone. And now that you're here, I am just profoundly happy to see you. This right here? It's enough."

"Are you saying you don't want to know?"

"Oh lord, no. No, I'd pretty much cut off a toe. I'm pretty much made of ragingly deep curiosity and floating jealousy. But I can deal with those. I don't have any more right to make you tell me anything you don't want to than I ever did. If there's anything you don't want to say -"

"I don't want to say any of this," Naomi said. "But I want you to know. And so we have to get through this part, no?"

Jim shifted, pulling his legs up under him, kneeling at the foot of the bed, his face to hers. His hair was the color of coffee with just a little cream. His eyes were blue as deep water. As evening sky was supposed to be.

"Then we'll get through it," he said with a simple, boundless optimism that caught her by surprise and drew out laughter, even here.

"Well," she said. "When I was in my middle teens, I was living with a woman we called Tia Margolis and burning through the engineering courses on the networks as fast as I could, and there were ships that came through dock. Belter ships. Hard-core."

Jim nodded, and then to her surprise it was easy. In her mind, the idea of unpacking her past to Jim to anyone was a thing of anger and disgust and recriminations. Or worse, of pity. Jim, who for all his faults was sometimes capable of perfection, listened carefully and completely. She had been Marco Inaros' lover. She'd gotten pregnant young. She'd been involved at first without knowing it in the sabotage of inner planets ships. She had a son named Filip who had been taken from her as a way to control her. She described the dark thoughts, and realized it was very nearly the first time she'd talked about them openly, without a veil of ironic humor. I tried to kill myself, but it didn't work. Just saying the words out loud felt like being in a dream. Or waking up from one.

And then, somehow in the depth of her confession, the baring of her blighted soul that was always supposed to be a trauma and a terror, it was just her and Jim having a conversation. She'd found a way to get a message out to him during the battle, and he told her about getting it, and the conversation he'd been having with Monica Stuart, and why he'd felt betrayed by her. And then backtracked to how she'd been kidnapped, and then before that to her plan to use the protomolecule sample as a Ouija board to investigate the missing ships. And then they went back to the Chetzemoka and Marco's fallback plan, which brought up the way he always nested one scheme inside another, and before she got back around to Cyn, Alex and Amos and Bobbie were back, their voices burbling over each other like birdsong. Jim closed the bedroom door against them and, when he came back, settled beside her, his back to the headboard too.

When she did talk about killing Cyn during her jump, Jim took her hand. They were silent for a moment while she examined her grief. It was real, and it was deep, but it was also complicated with anger at her old friend and captor. She hadn't let herself be aware of that at the time, but looking back, her whole stretch on the Pella seemed like an exercise in retracting into herself. Except when she'd defied Marco. She remembered saying that Jim was all the things he only pretended to be, wondered whether she should tell that part of the story, and then did. Jim looked horrified and then laughed. They lost track of their stories and spent ten minutes getting the timeline back: the Chetzemoka left the Pella after Jim and Fred had already departed from Tycho, or before? He'd told Alex to go investigate the Pau Kant before the rocks dropped on Earth? Oh right. Okay. She got it now.

They got sleepy together, her arm curled in his. The pauses grew longer, and softer. She thought Oh, we should really talk about Amos and Clarissa Mao, but then she was dreaming that she was on a ship that was burning at a full g for everyone else while she was on the float. All the other people in the crew, pressed to the deck while she moved through the air, reaching the tools and ducts they couldn't get to. In the dream, Alex was explaining that it was because she had so much built-up inertia that the rest of them would take a while catching up. In context, it seemed to make sense.

She woke up. She didn't know how much later it was, but there were no more voices from the main room. Jim was curled on his side, his back against her. His breath was deep and slow. She stretched slowly, careful not to disturb him. The aches in her muscles and skin and joints felt a little better, and there was a warmth in her chest. A looseness.

For years, she'd kept her secrets. Held them like she was keeping the pin in a hand grenade. The fear and the shame and the guilt had built up without her even noticing. The things she had done wrong and there were so many had grown in power. Not having them gnawing at her ribs from the inside felt strange. Empty, in a way, but a peaceful kind of empty.

Not that she was suddenly made of light and happiness. Cyn was still dead because of her. Filip was still abandoned. Abandoned again. Marco was still as much a pool of anger and hatred. Nothing about that had changed, and everything had. An old picture made into something new by replacing the frame. Jim shifted in his sleep. The thin, dark hairs on the back of his neck had a couple paler ones among them. The first touches of gray.

Something had changed between them. Not just during her sabbatical in h.e.l.l, but now that she was back from her own personal underworld. She wasn't sure exactly who they were to each other, she and Jim, except that things would be different now. Because she was different, and her changing wasn't going to break him. He wouldn't try to make her stay the Naomi he'd imagined.

Things changed, and they didn't change back. But sometimes they got better.

She got out of bed slowly, shuffling to the little desk in the corner of the room. Their hand terminals were there, and the little bottle of Jim's anticancer drugs, since he wasn't on the Roci. She reached for her terminal, paused, and picked up his. She should ask first, but he was asleep, and she didn't want to wake him, and she didn't think he'd mind.

Monica Stuart's footage of the Rabia Balkhi pa.s.sing through the ring gate was unexceptional. Nothing in it seemed at all strange, except for the story around it. What had Marco done with it, she wondered. Why had he started his piracy so long before the actual coup that would permit it to go large-scale? Just the effort of doctoring all the logs from Medina would be a risk he didn't need to take. Maybe it was something to do with the system the Balkhi was heading into...?

She shifted to her own terminal, connecting to the Roci's system and putting out a series of simple pattern matching requests. It wasn't hard to do. Most of the information Stuart had been working with was public record. And optical telescopes around the system had been trained on the Free Navy since the moment Marco had started his a.s.sault on the Martian convoy. The list of systems where ships had gone missing wasn't long, but the pattern in it wasn't obvious either. She tried to remember if anyone on the Pella had talked about any of them: Tasnim, Jerusalem, New Kashmir. Of course, the naming conventions were also a mess. New Kashmir also got called Sandalphon, High Texas, and LM-422. She pulled up alternate names for the other systems. Now that Jim had learned the worst of her past, she was almost eager to start the debriefing with Avasarala's team, and if there was some clue she could bring from her time on the Pella...

She scowled. Ran the matching schema again with different tolerances. Behind her, Jim yawned. When he sat up, the sheets made a hushing sound. The Roci came back with a list of possibles, and she spooled through them. The Ankara Slough was an approximate match for the Rabia Balkhi, but looking through the differences she saw the drive signatures were wrong. It would have cost less to make a new ship than to swap a whole drive complex out of an existing one. In the front room, Alex said something and Amos answered. And then to her brief surprise Bobbie. Jim's hand touched her shoulder.

"Hey. You all right?"

"Yeah," Naomi said. "Fine."

"How long have you been up?"

She checked the time and groaned. "Three and a half hours."

"Breakfast?"

"G.o.d, yes."

Her back protested when she stood, but only a little. Her mind felt focused and alive and wholly her own for the first time in weeks. Maybe since the first, toxic message from Marcos had come in. She wasn't at war with herself, and it felt good. But...