“Look, Naomi,” he started, but she ignored him and hit a button on her panel. He stopped when Fred’s face appeared on the display in front of her.
“Is that Fred?” he said, because he couldn’t think of anything even more idiotic to say.
“You should see this. Got it from Tycho a couple hours ago on the tightbeam after I sent them an update on our status.”
Naomi tapped the play button and Fred’s face sprang to life.
“Naomi, sounds like you guys have had a tough time of it. The air’s full of chatter on the station shutdown, and the supposed nuclear explosion. No one knows what to make of it. Keep us informed. In the meantime, we managed to hack open that data cube you left here. I don’t think it’ll help much, though. Looks like a bunch of sensor data from the Donnager, mostly EM stuff. We’ve tried looking for hidden messages, but my smartest people can’t find anything. I’m passing the data along to you. Let me know if you find anything. Tycho out.”
The screen went blank.
“What does the data look like?” Holden asked.
“It’s just what the man said,” Naomi said. “EM sensor data from the Donnager during the pursuit by the six ships, and the battle itself. I’ve dug through raw stuff, looking for anything hidden inside, but for the life of me, I can’t find a thing. I’ve even had the Roci digging through the data for the last couple hours, looking for patterns. She has really good software for that sort of thing. But so far, nothing.”
She tapped on the screen again and the raw data began spooling past faster than Holden could follow. In a small window inside the larger screen, the Rocinante’s pattern-recognition software worked to find meaning. Holden watched it for a minute, but his eyes quickly unfocused.
“Lieutenant Kelly died for this data,” he said. “He left the ship while his mates were still fighting. Marines don’t do that unless it matters.”
Naomi shrugged and pointed at the screen with resignation.
“That’s what was on his cube,” she said. “Maybe there’s something steganographic, but I don’t have another dataset to compare it to.”
Holden began tapping on his thigh, his pain and romantic failures momentarily forgotten.
“So let’s say that this data is all that it is. There’s nothing hidden. What would this information mean to the Martian navy?”
Naomi leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes in thought, one finger twisting and untwisting a curl of hair by her temple.
“It’s mostly EM data, so lots of engine-signature stuff. Drive radiation is the best way to keep track of other ships. So that tells you where which ships were during the fight. Tactical data?”
“Maybe,” Holden said. “Would that be important enough to send Kelly out with?”
Naomi took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Me either.”
Something tapped at the edge of his conscious mind, asking to be let in.
“What was that thing with Amos all about?” he said.
“Amos?”
“Him showing up at the airlock with two guns when we arrived,” he said.
“There was some trouble on our trip back to the ship.”
“Trouble for who?” Holden asked. Naomi actually smiled at that.
“Some bad men didn’t want us to hack the lockdown on the Roci. Amos talked it over with them. You didn’t think it was because we were waiting for you, did you, sir?”
Was there a smile in her voice? A hint of coyness? Flirtation? He stopped himself from grinning.
“What did the Roci say about the data when you ran it?” Holden asked.
“Here,” Naomi replied, and hit something on her panel. The screen began displaying long lists of data in text. “Lots of EM and light spectrum stuff, some leakage from damaged—”
Holden yelped. Naomi looked up at him.
“I’m such an idiot,” Holden said.
“Granted. Elaborate?”
Holden touched the screen and began scrolling up and down through the data. He tapped one long list of numbers and letters and leaned back with a grin.
“There, that’s it,” he said.
“That’s what?”
“Hull structure isn’t the only recognition metric. It’s the most accurate, but it’s also got the shortest range and”—he gestured around him at the Rocinante—“is the easiest to fool. The next best method is drive signature. Can’t mask your radiation and heat patterns. And they’re easy to spot even from really far away.”
Holden turned on the screen next to his chair and pulled up the ship’s friend/foe database, then linked it to the data on Naomi’s screen.
“That’s what this message is, Naomi. It’s telling Mars who killed the Donnager by showing them what the drive signature was.”
“Then why not just say, ‘So-and-so killed us,’ in a nice easy-to-read text file?” Naomi asked, a skeptical frown on her face.
Holden leaned forward and paused, opened his mouth, then closed it and sat back again with a sigh.
“I don’t know.”
A hatch banged open with a hydraulic whine; then Naomi looked past Holden to the ladder and said, “Miller’s coming up.”
Holden turned to watch the detective finish the slow climb up from the sick bay deck. He looked like a plucked chicken, pink-gray skin stippled with gooseflesh. His paper gown went poorly with the hat.
“Uh, there’s a lift,” Holden said.
“Wish I’d known that,” Miller replied, then dragged himself up onto the ops deck with a gasp. “We there yet?”
“Trying to figure out a mystery,” Holden said.
“I hate mysteries,” Miller said, then hauled himself to his feet and made his way to a chair.
“Then solve this one for us. You find out who murdered someone. You can’t arrest them yourself, so you send the information to your partner. But instead of just sending the perp’s name, you send your partner all the clues. Why?”
Miller coughed and scratched his chin. His eyes were fixed on something, like he was reading a screen Holden couldn’t see.
“Because I don’t trust myself. I want my partner to arrive at the same conclusion I did, without my biasing him. I give him the dots, see what it looks like when he connects ’em.”
“Especially if guessing wrong has consequences,” Naomi said.