Nemesis Games (Expanse 5)

“Have we broken up?” Naomi asked. She squeezed his hand.

“No, of course not.”

“Then thank you for trusting me enough to let me handle this on my own.”

“Is that what I just said?” Holden asked.

“Yeah, pretty much.” Naomi stood up. She had a packed duffel on the floor next to her chair that Holden hadn’t seen. “I’ll be in touch when I can, but if I can’t, don’t read anything into it. Okay?”

“Okay,” Holden replied. The whole scene had taken on a vaguely dreamlike feel. Naomi, standing at the end of the table holding her olive-green duffel bag, seemed very far away. The room felt bigger than it was, or else Holden had shrunk. He stood up too, and vertigo made him dizzy.

Naomi dropped the duffel on the table and wrapped both arms around him. Her chin was against his forehead when she whispered, “I’ll be back. I promise.”

“Okay,” he said again. His brain had lost the ability to form any other words.

After one last tight squeeze, she picked up her bag and walked to the door.

“Wait!” he said.

She looked back.

“I love you.”

“I love you too,” she said, and then was gone.

Holden sat back down, because it was that or sink to the floor. He finally pulled himself out of the chair a minute or an hour later; it was hard to tell. He had almost called Amos to join him for a drink when he remembered Amos and Alex were gone too.

Everyone was.

It was strange how nothing could change while everything did. He still got up every morning, brushed his teeth, put on a fresh set of clothes, and ate breakfast. He arrived at the repair docks by nine a.m. local time, put on a vacuum suit, and joined the crew working on the Rocinante. For eight hours he’d climb through the skeletal ribs of the ship, attaching conduit, installing replacement maneuvering thrusters, patching holes. He didn’t know how to do everything that needed to be done, but he wanted to, so he shadowed the technicians doing the really complicated work.

It all felt very normal, very routine, almost like still having his old life.

But then he’d return to his apartment eight hours later and no one would be there. He was truly alone for the first time in years. Amos wouldn’t come by asking him to hit a bar. Alex wouldn’t watch the video streams sitting on his couch and making sarcastic comments to the screen. Naomi wouldn’t be there to ask about his day and compare notes on how the repairs were coming. The rooms even smelled empty.

It wasn’t something about himself he’d ever had to face before, but Holden was coming to realize how much he needed family. He’d grown up with eight parents, and a seemingly endless supply of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. When he’d left Earth for the Navy, he’d spent four years at the academy with roommates and classmates and girlfriends. Even after his dishonorable discharge, he’d gone straight to work for Pur’N’Kleen on the Canterbury and a whole new loose-knit family of coworkers and friends. Or if not family, at least people.

The only two people he’d been close with on Tycho were Fred, so busy with his political machinations he barely had time to breathe, and Sam, who’d died in the slow zone years ago. The new Sam – Sakai – was a competent engineer and seemed to take fixing his ship seriously, but had expressed no interest in any association outside of that.

So Holden spent a lot of time in bars.

The Blauwe Blome was too noisy and too filled with people who knew Naomi but not him. The places close to the docks were full of boisterous workers coming off shift and picking a fight with a famous guy seemed like a great way to blow off steam. Anyplace else with more than four people in it at a time turned into line up to have your picture taken with James Holden then ask him personal questions for an hour. So, he found a small restaurant nestled in a side corridor between a residential section and a strip of commercial shopping outlets. It specialized in what the Belters were calling Italian food and had a small bar in a back room that everyone seemed to ignore.

Holden could sit at a tiny table skimming the latest news on his hand terminal, reading messages, and finally check out all the books he’d downloaded over the last six years. The bar served the same food as the restaurant out front, and while it was not something anyone from Earth would have mistaken for Italian, it was edible. The cocktails were mediocre and cheap.

It might almost have been tolerable if Naomi hadn’t seemingly fallen out of the universe. Alex sent regular updates about where he was and what he was up to. Amos had his terminal automatically send a message letting Holden know his flight had landed on Luna, and then New York. From Naomi, nothing. She still existed, or at least her hand terminal did. The messages he sent arrived somewhere. He never got a failed connection from the network. But the successfully received message was his only reply.

After a couple weeks of his new bad Italian food and cheap cocktails routine, his terminal finally rang with an incoming voice request. He knew it couldn’t be from Naomi. The light lag made a live connection unworkable for any two people not living on the same station. But he still pulled the terminal out of his pocket so fast that he fumbled it across the room.

The bartender – Chip – said, “Had a few too many of my margaritas?”

“The first one was too many,” Holden replied, then climbed under the booth looking for the terminal. “And calling that a margarita should be illegal.”

“It’s as margarita as it gets with rice wine and lime flavor concentrate,” Chip said, sounding vaguely hurt.

“Hello?” Holden yelled at the terminal, mashing the touch screen to open the connection. “Hello?”

“Hi, Jim?” a female voice said. It didn’t sound anything like Naomi.