Nemesis Games (Expanse 5)

In the security office, Fred was pacing, his hands clasped behind his back, when Holden arrived. He nodded sharply by way of greeting. Drummer, at her seat, was a model of the crisp professionalism designed to offer no reason for the boss to yell at you. That was fine. Holden didn’t mind being the one who got yelled at.

“What’s the matter?”

“Medina went dark,” Fred said. “She was supposed to report in this morning, but with everything being at loose ends, I didn’t worry. She’s missed two opportunities since then. And… Drummer? Show him.”

The security chief pulled up a schematic of the solar system. At scale, even Jupiter and the sun were hardly more than a bright pixel. Thousands of dots showed the traffic in-system. Ships and bases, satellites and probes and navigation buoys. All of humanity in a nutshell. With a motion and a syllable, most of the clutter vanished. In its place, a couple dozen green dots with the word UNDETERMINED where the identification codes should be made a rough cloud. Someone’s statistics run with a small but significant correlation.

“As soon as the station went dark,” Drummer said, “we saw these. Twenty-five new plumes. All of them have drive signatures that match Martian military ships, and all of them are under heavy burn for the Ring.”

“Heavy burn?”

“Eight to ten g to start, curving down, which means they’re running at the limit of their drives.”

Holden whistled. Fred stopped in his pacing, his expression placid in a way that spoke volumes about rage. “Those are my people on Medina. If the station has been compromised, or if these new ships are on their way to do something violent there, it will pose a significant obstacle to my participation with the new direction within the OPA.”

“Meaning fuck that noise?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a long way out to Medina,” Holden said. “Even at those burns, it’ll take them a while. But I don’t think we could beat them there.”

“We couldn’t do anything if we did. If I took all the ships at my disposal, one Martian frigate could still rain hell on them. And even the Rocinante would be badly outgunned.”

“Have to wonder where they got Martian military ships,” Holden said.

“I’ll be sure to ask Dawes about that as soon as I’ve told him what I think of his good faith prisoner exchange. How long before the Rocinante’s ready to fly?”

“Put a rush on it, we could be out of here in five days.”

“Mister Drummer, please put all available teams on finishing the repairs and security audit for the Rocinante.”

“Yes, sir,” Drummer said, and shifted her screen to show the work schedules for the construction drum. Fred looked down at his feet and then back up.

“I’m going to be busy the next few days putting Tycho in order for Drummer. I’d like you to oversee the crews on the Roci.”

“Wasn’t going to do anything else.”

“Fair enough,” Fred said. And then, almost wistfully, “It will be good to see Luna again.”

Holden tried to wait until he got back to his quarters, but lost patience when he reached the lift. He opened Alex’s message and set up the camera to record his reply.

“Hey, Alex. So, funny thing. Looks like I’m going to be catching up with you sooner than we’d thought…”

Chapter Twenty-nine: Naomi

She’d known to expect it. Like falling back into a bad habit, the dark thoughts came: which conduits had power lines in them with enough voltage to stop a heart, which rooms were small enou

gh to seal and evacuate, the ways the medical bays could be tricked into administering an overdose. And the airlocks. Always the airlocks. The ideas weren’t compulsions, not yet. They were just her brain noticing things that interested her. The worst would come later. If she let it.

So instead, she distracted herself. Not with the newsfeeds that played constantly, everywhere. Those only made her feel more helpless. Not with the conversations with her old friends. At best, those left her feeling like she was lying. At worst, like she was becoming an earlier version of herself for whom the dark thoughts were more natural. What she did have was work. It was all simple tasks like checking inventories and swapping air filters, and always under the watchful eyes of a minder. When she did talk, it was polite and superfluous; the kind of banter anyone crewing the same ship would make. It gave the rest of the crew the illusion that she was one of them in a way that sulking in her bunk wouldn’t have. If she had any hope at all, it came from finding a way to leverage her weird non-status with the group. And with Marco.

At first, she’d tried distracting herself by thinking of her real crew. Alex and Amos. Jim. Even her best memories of them were riddled with guilt and pain now, so instead she filled her mind with technical concerns. In the mess, while the others cheered at the images of devastation, she speculated about the reactor’s output, starting with the size of the galley, and then guessing at the requirements of the air and water recycling systems, and knowing the rough percentage that the Roci put into them. During her sleep shift, as she lay restless in her crash couch, the steady one-third-g burn pressing her into the gel like a hand on her chest, she ran over the power grid from the Roci, mapping how the logic of her ship would apply to this one. She thought of it as a meditation because it was too dangerous to admit – even to herself – that she was planning.

And still, small things came together. A toolbox in the machine shop had a bent hasp and, given a few minutes, could be forced open. The Allen wrenches inside would open the access panel on the lift wall between the crew quarters and the airlock, which was where the secondary diagnostic handset for the comm array was stored. With a few uninterrupted minutes, someone could probably broadcast a message. A short one. If there was anything to say, or anyone to say it to.

She had half a dozen schemes like it. A path to sneak between the hulls and take control of a PDC. A way to use a stolen hand terminal to make copies of the engineering software. How to force-cycle an airlock by spoofing the emergency codes from the medical bay. Most of them were fantasies, possible in theory but nothing she had ever had reason to try. A few were fairly solid. And all of them were defeated by a simple, inescapable fact: the first layer of any security was always physical. Even if she’d found a way to take control of the whole ship using a magnet and a length of Velcro, it wouldn’t matter, because Cyn or Aaman or Bastien would put a bullet through her neck before she could manage it.

So she called it meditation and kept the darkness at bay. And sometimes – by being quiet and not making waves and keeping her mind and senses sharp – she heard something she wasn’t supposed to hear.