Nemesis Games (Expanse 5)

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 pinché worlds. Who wants that? Just you let this pass, 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 Augustín 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 button 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 hell 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 Fólkvangr 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, passing 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.”