Expanse 05 - Nemesis Games

  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.

  Karal, her minder that shift, was talking up a woman called Sárta while Naomi scraped the crew decking nearby. Truth was the ship was new enough it didn’t need it, but it was work. Wings, who’d first hunted her back on Ceres, came out from his quarters in a Martian naval uniform. Naomi looked up from under her hair as Wings saw Karal and Sárta standing together. The flicker of jealousy that passed over him had been the same since humans came down from the trees.

  “Hey, y’all,” Wings said in a fake drawl. “Víse mé! Bin Marteño, sa sa? Howdy, howdy, howdy!”

  Karal chuckled and Sárta looked annoyed. Wings stepped through the narrow hall with an affected bowlegged gait. Naomi shifted aside to give him room.

  “You got nothing better to do than play dress up?” Sárta asked.

  “Don’t wait underwater,” Karal said. “Heard we’re taking prisoners first. Liano, he ran whispers to Ceres. Tightbeam. Hamechie about the prisoners.”

  “Not how I heard it,” Wings said, too quickly and more to Sárta than Karal. “I heard it’s only one. Sakai. And even that…” He shrugged.

  “Even that?” Sárta said, and mimicked the shrug. Wings blushed in anger.

  “Everyone knows how it is,” Wings said. “Sometimes they tell dead men they’ll live. Karal, you were there. Andrew and Chuchu? All about how help’s coming and then so sorry, so sad?”

  “Esa died soldiers,” Karal said, but the point hit home. It was in his hands and the corners of his mouth. And then, like he realized his mistake, he looked over to Naomi. She kept her expression blank and bored, her attention on the seam in the deck and the thin plastic spatula she was dragging through it. The cascade of implications couldn’t reach her face.

  Sakai had been the name of the new chief engineer on Tycho, and if this was the same man, he’d been one of Marco’s. And he’d been caught, or they wouldn’t have called him a prisoner. She blew the hair up out of her eyes, shifted over to a new seam and started again.

  “Back to work, yeah?” Karal said.

  Wings grunted his derision, but went back to his quarters to do as he’d been told. Karal and Sárta went back to flirting, but the moment was gone, and pretty soon it was only Karal and Naomi again, passing time.

  While she worked, pressing the plastic into the seams, scraping out whatever had gathered there, doing it again, she tried to fit the new information into the larger scheme of things. Marco had hoped she would bring the Rocinante to Ceres. But Sakai had known that the ship needed repair, and must have passed that information up to leadership.

  She’d thought that Marco had wanted her ship because of who and what she was. And maybe that was part of it. Or maybe what he’d really wanted was private access to a ship that would be expected and welcome at Tycho Station. For what, she didn’t know. The way he nested plans inside his plans, he might have had half a dozen uses for the Roci and for her. And more, there was a question about whether Sakai was in danger. Were they afraid Fred would execute him? Maybe. Maybe something else.

  Either way, she knew more now than she’d known before, and, like the bent hasp on the toolbox, it gave her options she hadn’t had. She wondered what Jim or Amos or Alex would have done in her place, how they would have taken this one piece of information and used it. An academic question, really, because she knew what Naomi Nagata would do, and it wasn’t something any of them could have done.

  When the deck was clean, she dropped the spatula into the recycler, stood, and stretched. The thrust gravity made her knees and spine ache, and she wished that wherever they were going, they’d be in a little less of a hurry to get there. It didn’t matter.

  “Grabbing a shower, me,” she said. “Tell him I want to talk.”

  “Him who?” Karal said.

  Naomi hoisted an eyebrow. “Tell him the mother of his son wants to talk.”

  “You’ve put him in the field?” Naomi said. “Is that where we are? Child soldiers?”

  Marco’s smile looked almost sorrowful. “You think he’s a child?”

  The exercise machines were empty apart from him. On the float, everyone in the crew would have been spending hours in the resistance gel or strapped into one of the mechs. On the burn, most of the crew were getting more than enough from their own weight. But Marco was there in a sheer exercise gown, straps wrapped around his hands, pulling down on wide bands that fought against him. The muscles in his back rippled with every stroke, and Naomi was certain he was aware of it. She had known many strong people in her life. She could tell the difference between the muscles that grew from work and the kind that came from vanity.

  “I think he’s crowing about how he’s responsible for the rock fall on Earth,” she said. “Like it’s something to be proud of.”

  “It is. It’s more than you or I could have done at his age. Filip’s smart and he’s a leader. Give him another twenty years, he could run the solar system. Maybe more.”

  Naomi walked over and turned off the exercise sequence. The wide bands in Marco’s hands went slack with a barely audible hiss. “I wasn’t done,” he said.

  “Tell me that isn’t why you brought me here,” she said. “Tell me that you didn’t abduct me in order to show me what a good father you’ve been and how well our boy turned out. Because you betrayed him.”

  Marco’s laugh was low and warm and rolling. He started unwrapping his hands. It would have been so easy to hurt him while he did it that she was fairly certain he had a hidden way to defend himself. And if not, the impression that he might was defense enough. She wasn’t here to kill him. She was here to push him into saying something.

  “Is that what you think?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I think you did it to show off. I walked away from you, and you’re such a little boy that you still can’t stand it. So when your big moment came, you had to have me here to see it happen.”

  It was true, as far as it went. She did see a pleasure in him that came from having power over her. Even her weird half-status in the crew was a part of that. Locking her in a cage would have been a tacit admission she was a threat. He wanted her to see that she was powerless, to make the prison walls herself. There had been a time it would have worked. She was betting that he didn’t realize that time had passed.

  And she was betting that it had passed. When he narrowed his eyes at her, shaking his head, she still felt the tug of humiliation in her throat, familiar as an old habit. So perhaps the truth was more complicated.

  “I brought you home to the winning side because you are the mother of my son, and always will be. Anything beyond that is happy coincidence. That we have the chance to find some sense of closure between us —”

  “Bullshit. Closure? You lost. It’s closed. You only say it wasn’t finished because you hadn’t won yet. I left. I sacrificed everything because having nothing away from you was better than having it all and being your puppet.”

  He lifted his hands, palms out, in a mocking gesture of peace. It wasn’t working. Not yet.

  “I hear that you would have done things differently. I don’t blame you for that. Not everyone has the strength to be a soldier. I thought you did. I
thought I could count on you. And when the burden bore you down, yes, I took our son someplace I knew he’d be safe. You blame me for keeping him away from you. But you’d have done exactly the same to me, if you’d had the power.”

  “I would have,” she said. “I’d have taken him with me, and you’d never have seen either of us again.”

  “So how different are we?” Sweat dewed his skin. He took a towel from the rack, dabbing at his face and arms. She knew intellectually that he was beautiful, the way the iridescent wings of a carrion fly would be. She felt the weight of her disgust with herself for letting this man be what he was to her, and knew that was part of what he intended. The dark thoughts stirred in her brain stem. They didn’t matter. She was here to solve a puzzle.

  He put down the towel. “Naomi —”

  “It’s Holden then, isn’t it? You brought me here as… what? Insurance against him?”

  “I’m not afraid of your Earther fuck buddy,” Marco said, and Naomi heard the roughness in his voice like an animal scenting a distant fire.

  “I think you are,” she said. “I think you wanted him off the board before you started this, and I was supposed to lead him into the trap. Because you couldn’t imagine that I would come alone. That I wouldn’t bring a man to be strong for me.”

  Marco chuckled, but it had more of an edge to it. He walked across the exercise mat, scooping up his dark robe and shrugging into it. “You’re trying to talk yourself into something, Knuckles.”

  “Do you know why I’m with him?”

  If Marco were wise, he wouldn’t rise to that bait. He’d walk out, leave her alone among the machines. If she’d managed to make him angry, even just a little bit angry, though…

  “I assume you have a kink for powerful men,” Marco said.

  “Because he is what you pretend to be.”

  She saw it land. She couldn’t even say what it was that changed in him, but the Marco she’d seen since being brought here – the smooth, world-weary, self-assured leader of the greatest coup in human history – was gone, dropped like a mask. In his place was the rage-filled boy who’d almost destroyed her once. His laugh wasn’t low or warm or rolling.

  “Well, just wait around, and we’ll see how much that does for him. Big Man Holden may think he’s unkillable, but everyone bleeds.”

  There. That was a datapoint. It was working. It might only have been the rhetoric of the squabble, an empty threat. Or he might have just told her that his plans still involved the Rocinante.

  “You can’t do anything to him,” she said.

  “No?” Marco said, his teeth bared like a chimp. “Well, maybe you will.”

  He turned sharply, stalking out of the room. Leaving her alone the way he should have a few minutes earlier. Or else a decade and a half before.

  “You done?” Cyn asked, nodding at the brick of lentil and rice half-eaten on her plate. On the screen in the mess hall, a Martian general was pounding a table, red-faced with passion that looked a lot like fear. He was describing the cowardice of the person or persons who had committed this atrocity against not only Earth, but humanity. Every third sentence or so, someone at the end of her table would repeat the general’s words in a high, quacking voice, like something from a children’s cartoon.

  She broke off another piece of the lentil brick and popped it in her mouth. “Close enough,” she said around it. She put her tray and the rest of the brick into the recycler and walked back toward the lift. Cyn loomed behind her. She was so locked in her own thoughts that she barely noticed he was there until he spoke.

  “Heard you had it out with el jefe,” Cyn said. “Etwas á Filipito?”

  Naomi made a noncommittal sound in the back of her throat.

  Cyn scratched at the scar behind his left ear. “Es un bon coyo, your son. I know this is none of what you’d pick, but… Filipito, he heard too. Took it hard.”

  The lift stopped and she got out, Cyn close behind. “Took it hard?”

  “No weight,” Cyn said. “Only know it. A man, our Filipito, but not so much he don’t want your opinion, yeah? You’re his mother.”

  The heartbreaking thing was that she understood. She only nodded.

  In her bunk, her fingers laced behind her neck, she stared up at the blackness on the ceiling. The interface screen at her side was dead. She didn’t miss it. Slowly, she put together what she knew.

  Marco had made attempts on the lives of the heads of Earth, Mars, and the OPA, but only managed to kill the UN secretary-general. He had tried to get the Rocinante before any of those attempts were made. He’d unleashed the worst catastrophe on Earth since the dinosaurs went extinct. He had Martian warships and weapons but didn’t show any signs of cooperating with the Martian government or Navy. All things she’d known, nothing new. So what was new?

  Three new things, and maybe only that. First, Wings thought the attempts to trade Sakai back might be more to reassure the prisoner than to actually retrieve him. Second, Marco had intimated that Holden was still in danger, and third, that she might be the one to hurt him.

  And also, underlying everything, her certainty that until Marco had given his speech, made himself the focus of all humanity’s attention, the attack was still only half-done. And if Sakai thought he was going to remain a prisoner, it would go wrong. That was interesting. What could Sakai know —

  Oh.

  Fred Johnson was alive, and Tycho Station wasn’t in Marco’s hands. Holden was in danger. She would be the one that hurt him.

  So that meant that the Roci, like the Augustín Gamarra before her, had been rigged to have her magnetic bottle fail. Probably in dock. Fred Johnson, James Holden, and incidentally Chief Engineer Sakai and everyone on the station – all of them would die in a fireball whenever the software she’d written a lifetime ago decided that they should.

  It was all happening again, and she had no way to stop it.

  Chapter Thirty: Amos

  They moved on foot. The clouds weren’t really clouds, and the rain that spat down at them was as much grit and soot as water. The stink of turned earth and rot was all around them, but the cold pushed it back to where it mostly just smelled cold. From the way the trees were all knocked down in the same direction – leaves roughly northeast, roots pointing southwest – he hoped they’d be heading toward less devastated territory. At least until they got near the coast and the flooding.

  In Baltimore, he figured the folks in the least trouble would be in the failed arcology in the middle of the city. It had been designed to hold a whole ecosystem inside its massive steel-and-ceramic walls. That it hadn’t worked for shit didn’t matter as much as the fact that it had been built tall and designed to last. Even if the bottom few floors went underwater, there’d be plenty of people near the top who rode out the worst of it. When Baltimore was a sea, the arcology would still be an island.

  Plus, the arcology was a shit neighborhood. Erich and his thugs owned at least some of it. And so long as the rest wasn’t controlled by one of the major players – Loca Griega or Golden Bough – they could probably take it in a determined push. And even if Erich hadn’t made it, there’d be someone there to negotiate with. He just hoped it wasn’t Golden Bough. Those guys, in his experience, were fucking assholes.

  In the meantime, though, there were more immediate problems. Getting there was the goal, and if the idea was to put one foot in front of the other from the Pit in Bethlehem to the arcology in Baltimore, there were some holes in the plan. The expanded district put about three million people between him and where he was going if he took the straightest path. High-density urban centers seemed like a bad idea. He was hoping that they could stay a little to the west of that and make their way around. He was pretty sure there was conservancy zone there they could trek along. Not that he’d spent much of his time on Earth camping. But it was what he had to go with. He probably could have done it, if he’d been by himself.

  “How’re we holding together, Peaches?”

  Cla
rissa nodded. Her prison hospital gown was mud-streaked from shoulder to hem, and her hair hung long and lank. She was just too fucking skinny and pale. It made her look like a ghost. “I’m fine,” she said. Which was bullshit, but what was he going to do about it? Stupid to have asked in the first place.

  So they walked, tried to conserve energy, looked for places that might have fresh water. There were a couple emergency stations set up by the highway, men and women with medical armbands and generators to run the lights. It never got more than low twilight, even at noon. The clouds kept some of the heat from radiating out into space, but they blocked the sun too. It felt like early winter, and it should have been summer hot. Every now and then, they came across some new ruin: a gutted building, the walls blown off the steel and ceramic girders, a high-speed train on its side like a dead caterpillar. The bodies they found on the roadside looked like they’d gone in the initial blast.

  Most of the dead-eyed, shell-shocked refugees on the roads seemed to be heading for the stations, but Amos tried to steer away from them. For one thing, Peaches was pretty clearly not supposed to be walking free among the law-abiding citizens of Earth, and Amos didn’t really feel like having any long conversations about what laws still applied, post-apocalypse. And anyway, the stuff they really needed they couldn’t get there. So he kept his eyes open and headed northeast.

  Still, it was three days before he found what he was looking for.

  The tent was back off the road about seven meters. It wasn’t a real tent so much as a tarp strung over a line between a power station pole and a pale sapling. There was a fire outside it though, with a man hunched over it feeding twigs and sticks into the smoky flames. An electric motorcycle leaned against the power station pole, its display dark either because it was conserving power or it was dead. Amos walked over, making sure his hands were always where the other guy could see them, and stopped about four meters away. Peaches stumbled along at his side. He figured that to anyone who didn’t know her or who she was, she probably didn’t look real threatening.