Nemesis Games (Expanse 5)

The following day the data from Paula’s program began trickling in. He authorized his terminal to transfer the remaining payment for her services and began going through the list.

Lots of new ships were showing up around Mars and Earth, but that was to be expected. The shipyards were cranking out new and refurbished vessels as fast as the mechanics and engineers could make them. Everyone with two yuan to rub together was making a play for the ring gates and the worlds beyond them, and the biggest group of people who like living on planets and were already physiologically adapted to it came from the two inner worlds. Only a tiny fraction of those ships had gaps in their records that Paula’s program would flag, but even a brief search led Holden to believe that the flagged ships were mostly paperwork errors, not piracy.

There were also a scattering of suspicious new ships in the Belt. Those were more interesting. If the OPA was stealing ships, then the logical place to hide them was in a region of space thick with ships and other metallic bodies. Holden began going through the Belt list one ship at a time.

The Gozerian appeared out of nowhere in the docks at the Pallas refinery in the right date range. The records listed it as a probate transfer, but were vague on who’d died and what relation the new owner had to the old. Holden guessed the answer to those two questions was person who used to own the ship and person who killed them and took it. The transfer of ownership was sketchy enough that it almost certainly was the result of piracy, but the Gozerian was listed as a non-Epstein light-hulled mining ship. A rock hopper. The records from Pallas backed that up, and a search of the list of seventeen missing ships didn’t turn up anything matching its description. No one was going to make a run for the edge of the solar system and then all the way in to a new world in something that didn’t have an

Epstein drive. There were much more comfortable places to die of old age.

Holden checked the Gozerian off his list and moved to the next. By the time he’d gone through the entire initial list from Paula it was three a.m., Tycho time, and his shift on the Roci started at eight, so he caught a couple hours of rack time and spent a miserable morning trying to trace maneuvering thruster cables through a fog of sleep deprivation.

By the time his shift was over all he could think about was a little dinner and a lot of sleep, but the data stream from Paula was waiting for him with nearly fifty new ships. So he picked up a carton of noodles on his way home and spent the rest of the evening going through the list.

The Mouse Pie was a gas freighter and didn’t match his missing list. The Vento first appeared before the date range he was interested in, and a query to the last dock it had visited confirmed the dates were correct. The Blasphemous Jester was listed as Epstein equipped, but a search of the service records showed that the drive had been out of commission for years. Someone had been using it as a short-hop shuttle in teakettle mode ever since.

On and on and on through the names it went. At one point his terminal beeped with an incoming message. Amos checking in with a cryptic “Visited my friend’s grave. Went okay, but still got some shit to do. Back later.” Holden slurped up another mouthful of noodles that had long since gone cold and now had the consistency of earthworms. How had Miller done shit like this for a living, he wondered. It was shocking to realize how much of investigation was just brute-force solutions. Going through endless lists looking for one thing that doesn’t fit. Talking to every single potential witness over and over. Pounding the pavement, as the gumshoes in Alex’s neo-noir movies might say.

It was thinking about Alex that twigged his memory, and he went back through the list until he found a ship designated the Pau Kant. The last location was marked as 434 Hungaria. A high albedo rock in the Hungaria group, an asteroid group relatively close to the orbit of Mars but with a high inclination. Mars control had caught a ping from the Pau Kant and then lost it shortly after. They’d marked the ship as missing.

But prior to that single and short-lived appearance, the Pau Kant didn’t seem to exist in any other records. He couldn’t find any description of her hull type or drive. Nor were there any owner records he could track down. He’d moved it to his list of ships to look into later, but something about Mars and inner Belt asteroids was making his brain itch.

The Hungaria group wasn’t a terrible place to hide things. 434 Hungaria was about twenty kilometers across. Plenty of mass to mask ships from radar, and the high albedo of the group would clutter up the results of anyone looking for ships with a telescope. The location was intriguing too. If the OPA radicals were collecting ships to pirate colony transports, the inner Belt was not a bad staging area. They’d also launched an attack on Earth in the recent past. That it had failed didn’t mean they weren’t planning more. A bunch of stolen ships hiding in the inner ring was exactly the sort of first step another attempt might take.

The Hungaria asteroids were a long way from Tycho’s current location, and Holden didn’t have a ship. But they were pretty close to Mars, and Alex was there. If he had access to a ship, it wouldn’t be too long a trip to go take a peek. See if the Pau Kant was still out there, tethered to the rock and staying dark. And if it matched any of Monica’s missing ships? Well, that would be interesting to take back to Fred.

Holden put his terminal on the table, angled up to record his face, and said, “Alex. Hey, hope things are going well out there, and that Bobbie is good. So, I’ve been looking into this thing with missing ships? And there’s a suspicious hit 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.”

He put all the information he had on the Pau and its most recent location from the Mars control records into a file. It wasn’t much to go on, and it felt like a long shot, but Alex would enjoy the flight and Holden was willing to foot the bill so he didn’t feel too bad about asking.

He was pretty sure the burst of energy that came from having made progress would be short-lived, but he wanted to share his success and felt wide-awake, so he called Monica. He got her voice mail. He left her a message to call him back, slurped down the last of his cold and nasty noodles, and immediately fell asleep on his couch.

The next morning he wasn’t on the duty roster to work on the Roci, and Monica hadn’t called him back, so he called again. No answer. On his way to breakfast he dropped by her apartment, but she wasn’t there either. She’d been a little miffed at him, but he didn’t think she’d bail on the whole missing ship story without saying anything. He made another call.

“Tycho security,” a young male voice said.

“Hey, this is Jim Holden. I’m checking on a visiting journalist, Monica Stuart. Has she left the station?”

“One sec. No. Records list her as still on board. Her apartment is —”

“Yeah, actually? I’m at her apartment right now and she’s not answering here or on her hand terminal.”

“My records show that her terminal hasn’t connected to Tychonet since early yesterday.”

“Huh,” Holden said, frowning at her door. The quiet on the other side had taken on an ominous feel. What if they decide to get rid of the guy with the light? He wasn’t the only one who fit that description. “So she hasn’t so much as paid for a sandwich in over a day. That strikes me as not good.”

“Want me to send a team?”

“Please do that.”

By the time the security team arrived and opened the door to Monica’s apartment, Holden was expecting the worst. He wasn’t disappointed. The rooms had been methodically searched. Monica’s clothes and personal effects were scattered across the floor. The hand terminal she used for interviews had been crushed under someone’s heel, but the screen still flickered when Holden touched it. The team found no traces of blood, which was about the only positive sign.

Holden called Fred while the team finished their forensic sweep. “It’s me,” he said as soon as the OPA chief answered. “You’ve got a bigger problem than radicals on Medina.”

“Really?” Fred said, his voice weary. “And what is that?”

“You’ve got them on Tycho.”

Chapter Fourteen: Naomi