Expanse 05 - Nemesis Games

  “Some things happened while you were out,” she said. “You should probably know about them.”

  Bobbie stood up and hugged him hard as soon as he walked into the debriefing room. She wore a flight jumpsuit just like the one they’d provided him. They didn’t say anything at first. It felt strange, being enveloped in her arms. She was much larger than him and stronger besides. He would have imagined that being held like that by an attractive woman would have had some erotic element, but all he felt was a deep sense of their shared vulnerability.

  He’d never been on Earth. He didn’t know it there. Until now, he wouldn’t have said he had any particular connection to the place. That he was wrong about that was a revelation. A quarter billion dead between the strikes and the tsunamis. And many more soon. Already the newsfeeds were reporting failures of infrastructure, and surface temperatures were dropping toward freezing in the springtime northern hemisphere under the vast clouds of dust and water and debris. The major cities had fusion reactors for power, but everywhere that still relied on distributed solar was running out of battery reserves. Billions more lights going dark. The secretary-general was dead, as were an unknown number of assembly representatives. The military was calling back ships from all parts of the solar system, making a cordon around the planet in fear of further strikes. The failed coup on Tycho and the dark fleet that they’d stumbled into, it all felt like a footnote to what had happened to humanity’s home world.

  And the worst thing was no one knew who’d done it all. Or why.

  Bobbie let him go and stepped back. He saw the same hollowness he felt reflected in her eyes.

  “Holy shit,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  Everything about the debriefing room expressed safety, comfort. The lights were indirect and shadowless. The walls had the same warm brown as the medical bay. Crash couches surrounded a small, built-in table instead of a desk. It was the kind of space Alex associated with psychiatrists’ offices in films. Bobbie looked around too, seeming to see the place anew now that Alex was there. She nodded to a small alcove opposite the door.

  “You want some tea? They have tea.”

  “Sure,” Alex said. “Okay. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. I mean, I’m a little shook, but they didn’t put me in the med bay,” she said. “What kind do you want? They’ve got orange pekoe, oolong, chamomile —”

  “I don’t know what any of those are.”

  “Me either. So. Okay, you get oolong.”

  The machine hissed. She handed him a bulb. It felt warm in his hand and had a subtle smell of smoke and water. Alex sat at the table and tried a sip, but it was too hot. Bobbie sat beside him.

  “That was some pretty amazing flying,” she said. “I’m almost sorry I wasn’t there to see it.”

  “I would have warned you, but, you know. Heat of the moment.”

  She shook her head. “No objections. If I’d been tensed up, I’d have probably popped open an old wound or stroked out or something. I watched the flight data. Seriously, I was in this room wearing a fresh suit and looking at recordings, and there were still a few seconds there I didn’t think we were going to make it.”

  The admiration in her voice felt warmer than the tea. He was pretty sure he was blushing, and hoped it didn’t show. “Yeah, it was a squeaker. Good damned thing you remembered the convoy here too. I wasn’t coming up with anything. Do we know who the hell those ships are?”

  “No. Most of the escort’s pulled off to cover us, and so far it looks like it’s working. But no transponder signals from the bad guys. No demands or threats or anything.”

  “Creepy.” The tea had cooled enough now. “Any chance they’ll let me send a message back to the captain?”

  Bobbie sighed and spread her hands. “Eventually, yeah. They’ve been treating us like friendlies, but it may be a while before they hand us access to the comm arrays. We’re still in a fight, even if we’re not at the middle of it.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  Bobbie’s brow furrowed. “The truth, only it doesn’t come out real well.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I said we were out there looking for missing ships hiding under new transponder signals because of a tip from James Holden.”

  “Huh. Yeah, that does sound a little ominous when you say it out loud, doesn’t it?”

  “They wanted to know how he knew to look there, and what my relationship was to Holden. I mean, they kind of knew about you, so it was more about why I was shipping with you.”

  “What was the answer for that?”

  “Old friends, and the fact that you were Navy. You know ships. I’m just a ground-pounder. But that got me into talking about looking at black market issues back at home, and you asking around on Hecate for me and the dead guy and the guys who attacked me.”

  “So the other dead guys.”

  “Well, yeah. And after that, it seemed like they were a little suspicious when I said I didn’t know anything.”

  Alex leaned forward. His body still felt weak and shaky. “At least they don’t think we’re part of… you know. That.”

  The door opened softly, almost apologetically. The man who came in was older, his hair a well-crafted white. He wore a suit instead of a uniform or jumpsuit. He looked like a particularly avuncular lawyer. Two marines came in behind him in full armor. They didn’t acknowledge Alex or Bobbie, just took positions at either side of the door. The white-haired man beamed at Alex and then Bobbie and then back at Alex again.

  “Mr. Kamal!” he said. His voice matched his appearance. “I’m so glad to see that you’re up and around. I was hoping to have a word with you about this present unpleasantness, yes?”

  Alex shot a glance at Bobbie. Her shrug was almost invisible. This wasn’t someone she knew.

  “Of course,” Alex said. “Anything I can do to help.”

  “Good, good, good,” the man said, then lifted a finger. “But first.”

  He sat down at the table, and an oddly mild scowl came over his face. Alex felt like they were about to be gently chided by the head of school. “Sergeant Draper, I was wanting to ask you why the government of Earth is demanding to speak with you. Have you been in contact with them?”

  Bobbie’s face went gray and pale. Her hand went to her mouth. “Oh, I am so sorry,” she said. “You look so different on video. I didn’t recognize you, sir. Alex, this is Prime Minister Smith.”

  Alex hopped to his feet. “Oh! I’m sorry, sir. With everything going on out on Ilus and such, I didn’t follow the elections last time.”

  One of the guards coughed in a way that might have hidden laughter. Prime Minister Smith’s scowl shifted to something slightly more authentic and nonplussed. He motioned Alex to sit back down. “Yes, well. No harm, of course. But, to the question. Have you been working with the government of Earth?”

  “No,” Bobbie said. “I’ve had some conversations and I have a personal familiarity with one person. Chrisjen Avasarala. But that’s all.”

  The prime minister nodded, his brows knitting. “Yes, I see. With the passing of the secretary-general and disarray of the assembly, Chrisjen Avasarala is the de facto legitimate government of Earth. And she has offered to… I believe the phrase was massage my balls with a paint scraper if anything happened to you.”

  “That sounds like her,” Alex said.

  “Yes, she is quite colorful. And she is also insisting that she be allowed to speak with you. I wonder what exactly it is you would tell her?”

  “Nothing I wouldn’t say in front of you, sir,” Bobbie said. “I’m not a spy. She brought up some questions and concerns that seemed legitimate and interesting, and I followed up for my own sake. If you’d like, I’d be happy to walk you through everything I did and what I found.”

  “You are close friends with Chrisjen Avasarala. You are flying with the crew of the Rocinante. You seem to have many contacts with Earth and the Belt, Sergeant.”

  “Yessi
r,” Bobbie said, her gaze forward and slightly down. “Good that we’re all on the same side, then.”

  The silence was longer than Alex liked. The prime minister laced his fingers across his knee. “I suppose it is at that,” he said. “So, why don’t we all go over what exactly you’ve found and how we can productively include our mutual friend Chrisjen in all of this.”

  The debriefing lasted for hours. They had taken him to a separate room, and he’d told them the story of everything that had happened since the return from Ilus. Then another woman had come, and he’d told her. Then they’d brought him back to where Bobbie was, and asked the two of them questions that, by and large, they couldn’t answer. All in all, it had been gentle as interrogations went, and even so, it left him drained.

  He had quarters of his own that night. A locker, a crash couch, a screen. Even his hand terminal back. The place was a little larger than his bunk on the Roci, tiny compared to the quarters on Tycho, and a little bit better than what he’d had back before he’d mustered out of the Navy. They’d even let him record messages for Holden and Amos and Naomi, though they were vetted by the ship’s system before being sent out. After that, he promised himself that he’d keep away from the newsfeeds.

  It had been years since he’d smelled the air of an MCRN ship. The astringent bite of the air recyclers brought back memories. His first tour, his last one. A sense of growing melancholy stole over him that he didn’t recognize at first. Grief. And fear. All his anxieties over the crew of the Roci came back a hundred times over. He imagined being back on the ship without Amos. Or without Naomi. Or never seeing his ship again, never hearing Holden’s voice. An hour after he’d resolved to go to sleep, he gave up, turned the lights back on, and opened a newsfeed.

  Mars was pledging drops of food and emergency supplies. Ganymede, back in control of her own docks, was diverting crops back to Earth. A group calling itself the Acadian Front had claimed responsibility for the attacks, but were discredited almost as soon as they’d made the claim. And on Earth, the riots had begun. Looting. He turned the feed back off and got dressed.

  He opened a connection to Bobbie, and she accepted it almost immediately. Wherever she was, it wasn’t her bunk. The walls behind her were too far away, and the sound of her voice echoed a little. Her hair was pulled back from her face, her cheeks were flushed, and she was sweating hard.

  “Hey,” she said, lifting her chin in a sharp nod.

  “Hey. Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d see what you were doing.”

  “Just got done sparring. The lieutenant’s going to let me drill some.”

  “They know you just got shot a little while ago, right?”

  “You think a few bullet holes gets you out of training?” she said with a ferocity that left him wondering whether she was joking. “They’re even loaning me a suit.”

  “You been in powered armor since Io?”

  “Nope. So that’ll be… I don’t know. Either really cool or nightmare inducing.”

  Alex chuckled, and she grinned. Her smile was like pouring water on a burn. “You heading straight for your bunk, or are you stopping by the mess first?”

  “I could stand something to eat probably. Meet you there?”

  It was an off-time for the mess. The alpha shift’s dinner was done, the beta shift’s lunch still an hour away. Bobbie was sitting alone at a table by the far wall, her hand terminal open before her. A group of three men and a woman sat not far from her, casting glances at her back and talking among themselves. Alex felt an instant protective surge, like he was back in lower university and one of his friends was being laughed at by another clique.

  He grabbed a cheese sandwich and bulb of water, then came and sat across from her. The remains of meatloaf and gravy she’d wolfed down were on her plate and a familiar voice was coming from her terminal.

  “— going to be monitoring anything we fucking say. If you wanted to discuss menstruation at great length and detail, this is probably our best chance. He’s always been squeamish about women, and no one likes a Peeping Tom, even if he is prime minister.”

  “How is she?” Alex asked, nodding toward the hand terminal. Bobbie turned the recording off and frowned at the newly blank screen.

  “Heartsick, I think. Devastated. But she’ll never let it show. This is what she always feared the most. And now it’s happened, and she can’t even look away, because she’s the one who has to… fix it. Only it can’t be fixed, can it?”

  “Naw, I guess not.”

  “They’re taking us to Luna.”

  “I figured as much,” Alex said. Something in his voice caught Bobbie’s attention.

  “You don’t want to?”

  “Honestly? I want to go home. Get back on the Roci with my crew, and after that, I care a whole lot less where we go. Be nice if it was somewhere they weren’t shooting at us.”

  “That would be a plus,” Bobbie said. “Don’t know where that is.”

  “Lot of planets out there. My experience with colonies is, ah, a little checkered, but I can see the appeal of a new start.”

  “There aren’t any new starts,” Bobbie said. “All the new ones pack the old ones along with them. If we ever really started fresh, it’d mean not having a history anymore. I don’t know how to do that.”

  “Still, I can dream.”

  “Right there with you.”

  At the other table, two of the men rose, carrying their trays to the recycler. The man and woman who stayed glanced over at Alex and Bobbie, and then pretended they hadn’t. Alex took a bite of his sandwich. The greasy cheese and fake butter were like being young again. Or else like remembering how long it had been since he was young.

  “Any word on the assholes who shot at us?”

  “They’re still fighting with the escort ships. Withdrawing, but not retreating. The escort isn’t looking to engage as long as they can keep the bastards from getting close to us.”

  “Yeah, all right.”

  “Seem weird to you too?”

  “Little bit,” Alex said. “Seems like a pretty piss-poor ambush if you don’t actually ambush anyone.”

  “It’s because of us,” Bobbie said. “You and me. We were in the right place at the right time. We forced the bad guys to make their play too soon. If we hadn’t, it wouldn’t be just the secretary-general that died. Honestly, I think that’s why we’re getting treated this well. Smith knows it could have gone a lot worse without us.”

  “You’re probably right. It’s just…”

  “You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Me too. We’re jumpy. Why wouldn’t we be? Someone just broke pretty much all of human civilization overnight.”

  The words hit Alex like a blow. He put down his sandwich. “They did, didn’t they? I don’t know who we are now. I don’t know what this does.”

  “Me neither. Or anyone else. But we’ll figure it out. And whoever did this, we’ll find them. We’re not going to let them win.”

  “No matter what game they’re playing.”

  “No matter what,” Bobbie agreed.

  Billions were dying right now, and no way to save them. Earth was broken, and even if it survived, it would never go back to what it had been. Mars was a ghost town, the terraforming project at its heart falling to pieces. The aliens that sent the protomolecule hadn’t needed to destroy humanity. They’d given humans the opportunity to destroy themselves, and as a species, they’d leaped on it. Alex pushed away an angry tear, and Bobbie pretended she hadn’t seen it.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Still. I’m going to feel a lot better when the relief ships get here.”

  “Amen,” Bobbie said. “Still, I wish it was more than just six ships coming. Well, seven. Six and a half.”

  “Six and a half?”

  “Relief ships picked up a commercial hauler somewhere. Nonmilitary. It’s called the Chetzemoka?”

  Chapter Twenty-eight: Holden

  “Cover f
or some kind of theft,’ ” Holden said again. “I mean what the hell was that?”

  Fred Johnson kept walking. The gently curving corridor with its view of the construction sphere was like Tycho Station’s boast that it had not been destroyed. The people they passed nodded to Fred and Holden. Some wore green armbands in solidarity, and more than a few of those had the OPA split circle with an additional split at ninety degrees to the first. Others had a stylized globe and the words ONE PEOPLE OPA & EARTH. The physical damage to the station was for the most part limited to the engineering and drive levels at the bottom of the sphere and Fred’s office on the ring, but Holden couldn’t help feeling that the deeper injury was to Tycho’s story about itself. Not long ago, Tycho – like Ceres – had been one of the jewels of the outer planets. Part of a greater argument about the independence of the Belt.

  Now that Belters had attacked it, it had become something else. The sense of unity with Earth wasn’t so much a real sympathy for the government that had so recently been the enemy, than a statement of separation from the OPA. Tycho Station for Tycho Station, and fuck anyone who crossed them.

  Or he may have been projecting, since he was feeling more than a little like that himself.

  “She was being a journalist,” Fred said. “That kind of thing? It’s what they do.”

  “We just saved her life. If it wasn’t for us, she’d have been carried off the station to God knows where and… I don’t know. Tortured or something.”

  “That’s true,” Fred said. They reached the lift, passing through doors that opened in anticipation of them. Fred’s rank still had its privileges, and first priority on lifts was one. “But we also lied to her. And she knew it.”

  Holden bit back an objection because it wasn’t much more than We did not and he knew that actually they did. It wasn’t something he’d have done, just a few years before. Then, he’d have told the truth, the whole truth, and let the chips fall wherever they fell. He didn’t know if it bothered him more that he’d changed or that he hadn’t noticed it until someone else pointed it out.