Nemesis Games (Expanse 5)

“Holden. Everyone has a past. Naomi was a grown woman when you met her. You didn’t think she’d popped out of the packaging right when you set eyes on her, did you?”

“No, of course not. Everyone on the Canterbury was there because they had a reason. Including me. It’s just if there was something big, like ‘part of a cabal that went on to destroy Earth’ big, I don’t know why she wouldn’t have told me.”

“Did you ask?”

“No. I mean, she knew that I was interested. That she could tell me whatever she wanted to tell me. I figured if she didn’t want to, that was up to her.”

“And now you’re upset that she didn’t. So what changed? Why are you entitled to know things now that you weren’t entitled to know before?”

The raï from the cockpit paused, silence filling the ops deck. On Fred’s screen, the playback had reached the split circle as it faded to white. “I may,” Holden said, “be a small, petty person. But if I’m going to lose her, I at least need to know why.”

“We’ll see if we can’t put you in a position to ask her yourself,” Fred said. The music from the cockpit kicked in again, and Fred scowled up at the hatch. “If it’s any comfort, I think we have a chance. I don’t think it’ll be long before he’s ready to open negotiations.”

“No?” Holden said. It was such a thin sliver of hope, but he felt himself jumping to it all the same.

“No. He got the jump on us tactically. I will absolutely give him that. But the next part is where he has to actually consolidate and hold power. That’s not tactics. That’s strategy, and I don’t see anything in him that leads me to think he has a handle on that.”

“I do.”

Fred waved a hand like Holden’s words had been smoke and he was clearing the air. “He’s playing a short-run game. Yes, his stock’s high right now, and probably will be for a little while. But he’s standing in the way of the gates. All of this is to stop people from going out and setting up colonies. But the hunger is already out there. Smith couldn’t stop Mars from depopulating itself. Avasarala couldn’t put the brakes on the process, and God knows she tried. Marco Inaros thinks he can do it at the end of a gun, but I don’t see it working. Not for long. And he doesn’t understand fragility.”

“You mean Earth?”

“Yes,” Fred said. “It’s the blind spot of being a Belter. I’ve seen it over and over in the past few decades. There’s a faith in the technology. In the idea of maintaining an artificial ecosystem. We’re able to grow food on Ganymede, so they think humanity’s freed from the bonds of Earth. They don’t think about how much work we had to do for those crops to grow. The mirrors to concentrate the sun, the genetic modifications to the plants. The process of learning to build rich soil out of substrate and fungus and full-spectrum lights. And backstopping all of that, the complexity of life on Earth. And now these new worlds… well I don’t have to tell you how much less hospitable they are than it says on the box. Once it becomes clear that he’s got it wrong —”

“He doesn’t, though,” Holden said. “Yeah, okay, the ecological part maybe he hasn’t thought all the way through, but when it comes to the Belt, he isn’t wrong. Look at all the people who just pulled up stakes and headed out for the rings. Ilus or New Terra or whatever the hell you want to call it? It’s a terrible, terrible planet, and there are people living on it. All those colony ships that left Mars to go try terraforming a place that’s already got air and a magnetosphere? A lot of those people are really, really smart. Even now, just now, you said how the pressure to get out to the new systems is more than this guy expects or is prepared for. That means he’s doomed, maybe. But that doesn’t make him wrong. We have to make him be wrong.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Fred said. “What I was doing with Medina Station would have —”

“Would have made a place for all the people living on Medina Station. But asteroid prospectors? Water haulers? The crews that are barely eking by? Those are who Marco’s talking to, and he’s right because no one else is taking them into account. Not even you. They’re looking at the future, and they’re seeing that no one needs them anymore. Everything they do will be easier in a gravity well, and they can’t go there. We have to make some kind of future that has a place for them in it. Because unless we do, they have literally nothing to lose. It’s all already gone.”

The system chimed and Maura’s voice came over the speakers. “Captain Holden, sir?”

“I’m here,” Holden said, still looking at Fred’s angry scowl. “And aren’t you supposed to be off shift, Mister Patel?”

“I am off shift, sir. But I couldn’t sleep, so I was running some diagnostics. But Captain Sales said you wanted an alert if the situation changed with the Razorback and its pursuers?”

Holden’s mouth flooded with the metallic taste of fear. “What’s going on?”

“We’re getting reports that the Free Navy ships have broken off, sir. The UN forces are still half a day out, but the thought is the Free Navy vessels are trying to steer well clear of any large-scale confrontation.”

“The Pella?” Holden said.

“With the Free Navy fleet, sir, but when they made the course change, a civilian ship broke off from the grouping, turning the other way. It’s got a lot of inertia to overcome, but unless it changes its acceleration profile, it looks to be on a course that will bring it within a million klicks of us.”

“That’s not accidental,” Fred said.

“It isn’t, sir,” Maura said. “The vessel’s registered at the Chetzemoka, and it’s broadcasting a message on loop. Message follows.”

Holden’s knuckles hurt and he forced himself to relax his fists. Naomi’s voice filled the ops deck, and it was like being on the verge of passing out from dehydration and being handed a glass of water. As dire as the message was, Holden still felt every syllable untying his knots. When Naomi’s message was done, he fell back in his couch, limp as a rag. She was in trouble, but it was tr

ouble they could fix. She was on her way back toward him.

“Thank you, Mister Patel,” Holden said. “In thanks, you may now have all my stuff. I don’t care about any of it anymore.”

“Including the coffee maker, sir?”

“Almost all my stuff.”