Nemesis Games (Expanse 5)

“Really?”

“No, I just made that number up. But I fucking hate flying to Luna so I’ve been putting it off to finish other work anyway. Do you need a ride? If it gets you off my planet, I can give you a ride. What? Did I say something funny?”

“Naw, just reminded me of somebody,” Amos said. “Anyway, I get the feeling this is the only trip down the well I’m ever going to take.”

“I’m crushed,” she said.

“Since I’m here, I figured anything I might want to do, better do it now. Anyone I wanted to see, you know,” Amos continued. “Where did you guys wind up locking Peaches away?”

“Peaches?”

“The Mao girl. Clarissa. She flew with us for a few months back after she stopped trying to kill the captain. And I have to admit, she grew on me a little.”

“You fucked your prisoner?” Avasarala said, her expression evenly divided between amusement and disgust.

“Nah,” Amos said. “I don’t tend to do that with people I like.”

Chapter Thirteen: Holden

The systems that the gate network had opened up were scattered across what everyone was pretty sure was the Milky Way galaxy. Cartography was still working out their relative locations, but even the initial findings put some of the new systems tens of thousands of light-years from Earth and with some distinct weirdness about time and location. Confronted by such unimaginably vast distances, it was easy to forget how much space was in just one solar system. Until you tried to find something in it.

Legally, any spaceship on the move had to register a flight plan and run an active transponder. That made ships traveling from place to place relatively easy to track. And with a transponder pinging away so you knew where to point your telescope, an active drive was visible from across the solar system. But ships would power down for repairs in dock, so transponders disappeared off the grid all the time. Ships were decommissioned, so a transponder might go black an

d never return for entirely legitimate reasons. Newly commissioned ships showed up with brand-new names and ships that were sold registered name changes. Some were cobbled together from scrap, some were built in shipyards, some were salvaged. And all of it was happening scattered across roughly one hundred quintillion square kilometers of space, give or take a few quadrillion. And that was only if you ignored that space had a third dimension.

So, seventeen ships had vanished going through ring gates, and if Holden was right, they were probably back in the home system with new names. In theory, there was a path to the information he wanted, but unless he was interested in spending several hundred lifetimes sifting through the raw data, he’d need help.

Specifically, he needed a computer plowing through a number of different massive databases on new ships, decommissioned ships, sold ships, repaired ships, and lost ships, looking for anything that didn’t add up. Even with a good computer and very smart data sorting software, it was what a programmer would call a nontrivial task.

And, unfortunately, the best software engineer that Holden knew had flown off to parts unknown and wasn’t answering his messages. He didn’t have the skills to do it himself, the time to learn them, or a crew to do it for him. What he had, was money.

After his shift working with Sakai’s people on the Roci refit, Holden called up Fred yet again. “Fred, hey, I have a software problem. Can I hire some of your programming wonks for a short-term gig?”

“Your ship need an update?” Fred asked. “Or is this something that will piss me off?”

“Something that’ll piss you off. So, who’s available for custom script writing?”

Paula Gutierrez had the elongated body and slightly oversized head of a low-g childhood. Her smile was sharp and professional. She was a freelance software engineer who’d taken a six-month consulting job on Tycho five years before and then just stayed on the station picking up the odd bit of piecework. On Holden’s hand terminal, her wide face filled the screen with dark bushy eyebrows and blindingly white teeth.

“So, that’s what I’m looking for, and I need it as fast as possible,” Holden said after laying out his requirements. “Doable?”

“Very,” Paula said. “Tycho keeps all the traffic databases mirrored local, so don’t even have to sweat the lag. Gonna cost you for speed, though.”

“Cost me what?”

“Fifteen hundred an hour, ten hours minimum. Know up front I don’t argue about billing and I don’t give discounts.”

“That,” Holden said, “sounds like a lot.”

“That’s because I’ve got you over a barrel and I’m gouging the shit out of you.”

“Okay, how soon will I start seeing output?”

Paula shrugged with her eyebrows, then looked down at something off camera. “Call it twenty hours from now before you start getting data sent to you. Want me to collate or stream it as it comes in?”

“Send it straight to me, please. Going to ask me why I want it?”

Paula laughed. “I never do.”