“You recognize them?” Holden asked.
“They’re not in the system.”
“Then how did they get on the station?”
Fred glanced at him. “Working on that.”
“Right. Sorry.”
On-screen, the two men – Holden was pretty sure they were both men – took the crate to a maintenance corridor, the trace clicking over from camera to camera automatically. In the narrower space, the crate bumped against the walls and tried to bind up where the corridor turned.
“Doors and corners,” Holden said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
The security trace showed men and cart entering a warehouse. Pallets of similar crates filled the space. The men guided the cart to a half-filled one, unlocked the clamps, and hauled the crate up and onto the pallet with its siblings. Fred split the display, holding the trace on the cart, but adding one to each of the two men. One panel showed the storage space; the other followed the two figures out to the common corridors.
In the warehouse, a pair of mech drivers came, logged in from lunch, and resumed the task of piling on crates. In the common corridor, the two men went into a lavatory and didn’t come out. The trace on them flickered forward until the green border that marked a live feed framed the images. A short call to the warehouse manager verified that the two men hadn’t holed up there; they’d just disappeared. The cart, still going through the older records, was buried in among others just like it. Fred advanced the feed. Mech drivers came and went. Pallets filled and were piled on top of each other.
“Present status,” Fred said, and the security feed skipped forward without moving away from the warehouse camera. Whatever had been in the crate was still there.
“Well,” Fred said, rising to his feet, “this is about to turn into an unpleasant day. You coming?”
The environmental controls in the warehouse showed no anomalies, but Holden couldn’t help imagining he smelled something under the oil and ozone. A smell like death. The mech driver was a fresh-faced young woman with straight brown hair the same color as her skin. Her expression as she moved the crates back out from the pallet spoke of excitement and curiosity and barely constrained dread. With every crate that came off, Holden’s gut went tighter. Monica had told him that involving other people in his investigation was dangerous. He couldn’t help thinking that whatever they found in the next few minutes was going to be his fault.
And so fixing it would be his responsibility. Assuming it could be fixed.
“That’s the one,” Fred said to the mech driver. “Put it over here.”
She maneuvered the container to the empty decking. Its magnetic clamps engaged with a deep thump. The indicator still showed that it was sealed. Even if Monica had been put into the thing alive, her air would have run out hours ago. The mech backed away, settling onto titanium and ceramic haunches. Fred stepped forward, lifted his hand terminal, and tapped in an override. The indicator on the crate shifted. Fred flipped open the lid.
The smell was rich and organic. Holden had a sudden powerful memory of being fourteen at his family compound on Earth. Mother Sophie had kept an herb garden by the kitchen, and when she’d turned the dirt before planting, it smelled just like this. The crate was filled to the brim with the soft, crumbling beige of raw fungal protein. Fred leaned forward, pressing his hand deep. Looking for a hidden body. When he pulled his arm back, dust clung to it up to the elbow. He shook his head no. It was an Earth gesture.
“Are you sure it’s the right crate?” Holden asked.
“I am,” Fred said. “But let’s check anyway.”
For the next hour, the increasingly confused mech driver hauled out crates from the pallet and Fred and Holden opened them. When the motes of protein dust in the air set off the particulate warning alarm twice, Fred called a stop.
“She’s not here,” he said.
“I saw that. So that’s kind of weird, right?”
“It is.”
Fred rubbed his eyes with his finger and thumb. He looked old. Tired. When he gathered himself, the sense of power and authority was still there. “Either they switched the crates somewhere between her quarters and here or they doctored the feed.”
“Both of those would be bad.”
Fred looked over at the mech driver as she piled the opened crates into a stack to ship back for reprocessing. When he spoke, his voice was low enough it would only carry to Holden. “Both of which would mean they had a high-level working knowledge of the security system, but not enough access to wipe the records completely.”
“That narrows it down?”
“A little, maybe. Could be a UN black ops team. They could have done something like this. Or Mars.”
“But you don’t think that’s it, do you?”
Fred chewed his lip. He pulled up his hand terminal, typed in a series of codes, every tap sharp and percussive. An alert Klaxon sounded and gold-and-green alert icons appeared on every display from Holden’s hand terminal to the door controls to the mech status panel. Fred pushed his fists into his pockets with a satisfied grunt.
“Did you just lock down the station?” Holden said.
“I did,” Fred said. “And I’m keeping it locked down until I’ve got some answers. And Monica Stuart back.”
“Good,” Holden said. “Extreme, but good.”
“I may be a little pissed off.”
The contents of Monica’s quarters were laid out on the gray-green ceramic counters of the security lab. No blood, no images, and the background soup of DNA from thousands of people who’d been in contact with the objects in the last week, usually with too small a sample to identify an individual. This was what was left. A clothing bag, its zipper ripped and hanging open in a mindless smile. A shirt Holden remembered her wearing when he’d seen her a few days before. Her crippled hand terminal with its shattered display. All the things that hadn’t belonged to the station when it rented her the space. It seemed small, like there wasn’t enough there. He realized it was just that he was thinking of it as the collection of a lifetime. Probably she had other possessions somewhere else, but maybe she didn’t. If they didn’t find her alive, maybe this was all she’d have to leave behind.
“You cannot be fucking serious,” Sakai said for what seemed like the third or fourth time. The chief engineer’s face was red, his jaw set. He’d arrived at the security station a few minutes after Fred and Holden, and Holden was a little surprised Fred hadn’t had him thrown out yet. “I have eight ships inbound within the next week. What am I supposed to do? Tell them to match orbit and float until we decide whether we’ll let them in?”
“Seems like a good start,” Fred said.
“We have supplies due to ship on half a dozen contracts.”
“I’m aware of that, Mister Sakai.” Fred’s voice was no louder; there was no anger in it. The cool politeness made the hair on the back of Holden’s neck rise. Sakai seemed to feel it too. It didn’t stop him, but his voice went from accusatory to almost wheedling.
“I’ve got shipments on two dozen jobs due to go out. There are a lot of people counting on us.”
For a moment, Fred’s shoulders seemed to sag, but his voice was just as strong. “I’m aware of that. We’ll open up for business again as soon as we can.”
Sakai wavered, on the edge of saying something more. Instead, he made a short, impatient sigh and walked back out as the head of security came in. She was a thin-faced woman Fred called Drummer, but Holden didn’t know if that was her first name, her last, or just something she went by.
“How’s it going?” Fred asked.
“Nothing we can’t handle,” she said. Her voice had a crisp accent that Holden couldn’t place. She glanced at him, nodded curtly, and turned back to Fred. “Do we have any information we can give on how long we expect the lockdown to be in effect?”
“Tell them the interruption of service will be as brief as possible.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, si
r,” Drummer said, then turned away.
“Drummer. Close the door when you go, eh?”
Her eyes flickered, cut back to Holden, then away again. She didn’t say anything, but she pulled the door closed behind her when she left. Fred gave Holden a mirthless, tired smile.
“Sakai’s right. I just shut down the equivalent of a major port city because of one missing woman. Every hour I keep it like this, Tycho’s losing thousands of credits in a dozen different scrips.”
“So we’ll have to find her quickly.”
“If they haven’t already fed her into the recyclers and broken her down to water and a few active molecules,” Fred said. And then a moment later, “I have the sensor arrays sweeping the local area. If she’s been spaced, we’ll know it soon.”
“Thank you,” Holden said, leaning against the counter. “I know I don’t say it often, but I do appreciate this.”
Fred nodded to the door. “You see her? Drummer?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve been working with her directly for three years. Knew who she was for ten before that.”
“All right,” Holden said.
“If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have told you I trusted her with my life.”
“Now?”
“Now there is exactly one person on this station who I’m certain isn’t going to shoot me in the back of the head if I keep pressing on this, and that’s you,” Fred said.
“That’s got to be uncomfortable.”
“It really is. So what I mean to say, James, is that while I am glad that you appreciate all I’m doing for you, I’m also taking you on right now as my personal bodyguard. In return, I’ll try to keep anyone from shooting you.”
Holden nodded slowly. Something in the back of his brain was shifting, like a thought that wasn’t quite formed. A wave of vertigo washed over him like he was looking over a cliff. “Two of us against a deep OPA conspiracy.”
“Until I have evidence to the contrary, yes.”
“That really is an uncomfortable position to be in, isn’t it?”
“Not what I would have picked, no,” Fred said. “But someone knows how to circumvent my security systems, and whatever your reporter friend was doing was enough to spook them into action direct enough to tip their hand.”
“The missing ships,” Holden said. “There were a couple of people I mentioned it to.”
“That’s not something you do.”
“In retrospect, I wish I’d played it a little closer to the vest, but —”
“Not that,” Fred said. “When you’ve infiltrated the enemy security structures, you don’t do anything that shows that you’ve managed it. It’s basic information warfare. As long as the enemy doesn’t know they’re compromised, you can keep gathering intelligence. That’s not something you give up unless the stakes are unimaginably high or…”
“Or?”
“Or the enemy you’ve compromised isn’t going to be around very long anyway. I don’t know if those missing ships spooked someone into making a stupid mistake, or if my position on Tycho is so precarious that it doesn’t matter anymore whether I know.”
“You seem to be taking it all in stride.”
Fred hoisted an eyebrow. “I’m panicking on the inside,” he said in a deadpan.
Holden looked over the pile of Monica’s belongings as if they might have something to add to the conversation. The hand terminal blinked forlornly. The blouse hung loose and sad.
“Did you pull anything from her terminal?” he asked.
“We can’t connect to it,” Fred said. “All the diagnostics are disabled or sunk in third-party encryption. Journalists.”
Holden picked up the hand terminal. The shattered display was a mess of light scatter. The only sections that still had anything close to recognizable were a blinking red button in one corner and a few letters in a particularly large shard: NG SIG. Holden tapped the red button and the hand terminal flashed once. The button was gone, the letters replaced by something pale brown with a line across it, a single jigsaw puzzle piece floating in a sea of noise-light.
“What did you do?” Fred asked.
“There was a button,” Holden said. “I pushed it.”
“Jesus Christ. That really is how you go through life, isn’t it?”
“But look. It… I think I may have accepted an incoming signal.”
“From what?”
Holden shook his head. Then turned back to the pile of Monica’s belongings, the tiny half-thought that had been bothering him slipping into his consciousness with something like relief.
“Her video capture,” he said. “She has a little wearable interview rig. It’s intentionally unobtrusive so that the person she’s talking to sort of forgets they’re on camera.”
“And?”
Holden spread his hands. “It’s not here.”
Fred moved forward, his lips thin, his eyes shifting over the mess of light from the broken screen. Holden had a sense of movement, as if the image was shifting slightly. Voices came from the far side of Fred’s office door. A man’s voice raised in anger; Drummer’s calm, clipped reply.
“Are you sure we can’t get into this hand terminal?” Holden said.
“Positive,” Fred said, “but there may be another way. Come on. If we’re going to solve this, we’re going to need an imaging astronomer.”
Once Fred explained the problem, it took three hours to set up a rig that would capture the glow coming from the scattered screen and an hour more to get the computer to understand its new task. The properties of light coming off extrasolar dust clouds were apparently very different from a busted terminal display. Once the expert systems were convinced that the problem fit inside their job description, the lab went to work matching polarizations and angles, mapping the fissures in the surface of the display, and building a computational lens that couldn’t exist in the physical world.
Fred had emptied the lab and sealed it. Holden sat on a chair, listening to the tick-tick-tick of the scanners recording photons and watching the image on the display slowly cohere. Fred hummed to himself, a low, slow tune that seemed melancholy and threatening at the same time. The empty stations and desks highlighted how alone the two of them were in a station filled with people.
A computational run ended. The image updated. It was still rough. Rainbow-colored deformations crossed it and sections were simply missing; it looked like the beginning of a migraine.
But it was enough. Several empty meters, ending in a square metal door complicated by an industrial bolt mechanism. Walls, ceiling, and floor marked with scuffed yellow paint and stippled by guide holes where pallets and crates would stack.
“That’s a storage container,” Fred said. “She’s in a shipping container.”
“The way the image moves. Is that her? Is she moving?”
Fred shrugged.
“Because if she’s moving, then she’s probably alive, right?”
“Could be. If she’s alive, it’s because they want her alive. And off Tycho. Look at that.”
Holden followed Fred’s finger. “It’s the edge of the doorway?”
“The door’s sealed. You don’t do that until it’s ready to ship. There are probably a quarter million containers like that on the station, but I’d bet we don’t have more than a few thousand sealed and ready to go out. Whoever wants her, they want her someplace we can’t get her back from.”
Holden felt something in his gut relax. She was out there, and she was okay. Not safe, not yet. But not dead. He hadn’t realized how much the guilt and fear had settled down on his shoulders until the moment of hope lifted it.
“What?” Fred said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“But you made that noise.”
“Oh,” Holden said. “Yeah, I was just noticing how having everyone I care about gone makes it really important that I not screw up the things I can control.”
“Good insight. Well done.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Little bit. But I’m also running a targeted security scan of the shipping containers on the float. And guess what?” Fred gestured to the display on the desk before him. The great emptiness of the Tycho work sphere was drawn in thin, clean schematic lines. From habit, Holden’s gaze went to the Rocinante. Fred pointed beyond it to a floating cluster of metal containers. “One of them’s warm.”
Chapter Seventeen: Alex
Alex had spent a fair amount of his training time at Hecate Base, and going back now was strange in a couple ways. There were the sorts of changes that he’d become accustomed to on Mars – old bars gone, new restaurants in place, the crappy handball courts converted to an administrative center, things like that. But driving his cart through the wide corridors, the thing that struck him most was how young everyone was. Cadets strutted in front of the bar that had once been the Steel Cactus Mexican Grill and sold to-go cups of Thai food now, their chins up and their chests out looking like they were playing dress-up. The ads on the screens were all for weapons and churches, singles services designed for people on tours of duty, and life insurance tailored for the families they left behind. They were the sorts of things that promised control or comfort in an uncertain universe. Alex remembered ads like that from decades before. The styles had changed, but the needs and subterranean fears that fueled them were the same.
Alex had worn the uniform, told the jokes. Or at least the same kind. He’d wondered whether there would be violence when he got out with a mixture of hope and dread. He’d pretended to be tougher than he was in hope of becoming tougher. He remembered how serious it had all been. The time Preston had gotten drunk and started a fight with Gregory. Alex had been pulled into it, and they’d all ended up before the MPs, certain their careers were over. The time Andrea Howard got busted cheating and had been dishonorably discharged. It had felt like someone died.
Now, looking at these kids, of course there was brawling and stupid decisions. They were children. And so he’d been a child when he was there too, and his choices had been made by a guy who didn’t know any better. He’d married Talissa when he was about that old. They’d made their blueprints for how he’d serve his tours and then come home. All their plans had been made by kids this young. Looked at that way, it made sense how nothing had worked out.