Holden felt a little bubble of rage rise up in him. He wanted to shout at Fred, to punish him for taking this moment and soiling it with doubt. With the possibility that it was a trap and not Naomi coming home at last. Holden took the great glowing sense of release and tried to put it aside and his anger with it.
“Yes,” he said. “You’re right. It could be a trap.”
“It may not be,” Fred said. “I hope it isn’t. But…”
“But we’re living in interesting times,” Holden said. “It’s okay. I get it. I’ll be careful. We’ll be careful. But if it is her, and she really is in trouble, she’s my first priority. That’s just the way it is.”
“I know,” Fred said, and the way he said it meant I know, and everyone who knows anything about you does too. Which is why you should be careful.
Holden turned to the monitor and pulled up the nav data. As he watched, Mfume laid in the course that would get him to Naomi. Or whatever else was on that ship. Fred’s seed of doubt had already taken root. He didn’t know whether to be grateful or resent the old man. Between the distances and their respective velocities, it looked like it would be tricky. Naomi had been burning hard toward Earth, and the speed the Chetzemoka had built up was almost all in the wrong direction to reach him. If it wasn’t a trap and Naomi was in trouble, he could still be too late. The UN force might be able to help, but she was already peeling away from their flight path.
Which still didn’t leave him entirely without resources. He flipped to comms and started recording.
“Alex, since you’re in the neighborhood and it went so well the last time I asked you to check out a mystery ship, I was wondering if you’d be interested in making a little detour.”
Chapter Forty-three: Alex
The worst thing was not knowing. The newsfeeds were awash with information, but very little of it matched up. Four billion were dead on Earth. Or seven. The ash and vapor that had turned the blue marble to white was starting to thin already – much sooner than the models predicted. Or the surface of the Earth wouldn’t see daylight and blue skies for years. It was the dawn of a resurgence of natural flora and fauna driven by the human dieback or it was the final insult that would crash a perennially overstressed ecosystem.
Three more colony ships had been captured on their way to the ring gate and turned back or boarded and the crews spaced, or else seven had, or it was only one. Ceres Station’s announcement that Free Navy ships could use the docks was a provocation or a proof that the OPA was unified or the station administration was giving in to fear. All around the system, ships were turning off their transponders, and the systems for visual tracking of the exhaust plumes were getting dusted off and reprogrammed in languages that contemporary systems could parse. Alex told himself it was temporary, that in a few months, maybe a year, everyone would run with transponders again. That the Earth would be the center of human civilization and culture. That he would be back on the Roci with Holden and Naomi and Amos.
He told himself that, but he was getting less and less persuasive. Not knowing was the worst thing. The second-worst thing was being chased by a bunch of top-of-the-line warships that really wanted to kill you.
In the display, one of their escort missiles went from green to amber to flashing red.
“Shit,” Bobbie said. “Lost one.”
“It’s all right. We’ve got plenty more.”
In the past hours, the Pella and her pack had come up with the bright idea of coordinating their comm lasers to hit a particular missile and then pumping energy into it until the controls overheated. The missiles failed inert, or they would have figured the enemy strategy out when the escorting cloud had cooked off in a massive chain reaction. Instead, they’d lost four missiles in half an hour and put together what was happening. Bobbie and the Razorback’s antiquated and underpowered system had designed a rolling pattern formation for the missiles that kept any one of them from being in an uninterrupted sightline for more than a few seconds at a time. Watching it on the cameras reminded Alex of documentaries he’d seen about deep sea fish on Earth, vast schools roiling and yet staying together. Only for him, it was their little group of remaining missiles.
Ever since the announcement by the Free Navy, the prime minister had been back in the cabin, using their own tightbeam for what sounded like a hundred furious conversations that all seemed to have the same timbre. Alex couldn’t quite make out all the words and he made conscious effort not to listen in case someone asked later what he knew. But the phrases not substantiated and significant failure and still investigating all came through enough times that Alex started to recognize them, kind of like hearing a song often enough that the lyrics became clearer.
His monitor was divided between a large-scale map of the solar system highlighting the parts of it critical to him – the Razorback, the UN military escort burning out to meet them, the Rocinante, the Pella and its pack, Tycho Station, Mars, Earth, Luna – and a smaller inset that was the Razorback’s internal systems diagnostics. The little pinnace hadn’t been intended for full interplanetary travel, and with Earth and Mars where they were, they were going to be cutting it pretty close. The reactor had enough fuel pellets to burn for months, but once they ran out of ejection mass, the drive wouldn’t do them much good. So far, they were still inside the error bars. Which, for him, meant that even if they ran out, they’d be going slow enough that someone could come throw a tether on them. Rescued by professionals was still firmly in his win column.
The navigation system threw an alert to his monitor. He opened it.
“What’ve you got?” Bobbie asked.
“The Pella and her little friend there cut their drives again,” Alex said. “And… Hey! I think… Some of the ships are peeling off. I think they’re giving up!”
Bobbie whooped and Smith stopped his conversation in the back long enough to come see what was going on. By the time Alex had explained it all, the Pella had its drive on too, and was turning with the others. Not a full flip-and-burn, but a kind of fishtail slide that kept a good fraction of their momentum while still setting them on a course for the Belt and, give or take a few million kilometers, the Jovian system. The Chetzemoka peeled off in the opposite direction. Whatever mission the Pella was on, it was leaving the Razorback behind.
A tension Alex hadn’t been consciously aware of started to evaporate along with Bobbie’s occasional whoops and laughter. The UN escort force checked in. The solar flares weren’t even coming close to intersecting with their path. The Razorback’s heat sinks were coping with the radiant heat well enough. Alex let himself relax.
It lasted almost half an hour.
“This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. If you get this message, please retransmit. Tell James Holden I am in distress. Comm is not responding. I have no nav control. Please retransmit…”
And then forty minutes after that:
“Alex, since you’re in the neighborhood and it went so well the last time I asked you to check out a mystery ship, I was wondering if you’d be interested in making a little detour. I’m having my temporary pilot figure out a fast burn that will get me to Naomi, but you’re closer and you’re going in nearly the same direction. There’s a chance this is the bad guys trying to trick us, so keep your eyes open. If it is Naomi, though, make sure she’s still breathing when I get there. Let me know what you think.”
Alex’s jaw was clenched hard enough his teeth ached. He already knew what Bobbie was going to say, so instead of starting the conversation, he started quietly feeding data into the nav system and seeing what options were open depending on how hard he wanted to burn and how much fuel he had left, and what telemetry said about the little ship and the convoy it broke off from. The wall screens were set to mimic the exterior view, so when he looked up from the navigation data, he could pick out the dot of light that was her drive plume. He also pulled up an audio feed matched to the broadcast from it. “This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. If you get this message, ple
ase retransmit…”
He could feel the disapproval radiating up from behind him. Bobbie didn’t say anything at first, didn’t even make a grunt or a noise. It didn’t matter. Alex knew. When she finally did speak, it was almost a relief to have it out in the open.
“What are you doing there, sailor?” Bobbie asked.
“Figuring the best way to go after Naomi.”
“Any reason you’re doing it?”
“Because we’re going after Naomi.”
“We’re almost at the flip part of the flip-and-burn. Any course changes we make are going to eat up a lot of fuel.”
Alex didn’t look back. Just gestured at the screen. “The way I figure, that’s a distress call. We logged it. We’re obligated to stop.”
“Don’t,” Bobbie said.
“That’s the rules.”
“Don’t throw the rule book at me. We’ve got a mission here. I don’t like it any more than you do, but we need to stand our post. We’ve got orders.”
Alex’s jaw hurt worse. He tried yawning to stretch the ache away. It didn’t work. He turned his crash couch to face her. With her helmet off and her hair pulled back in a tight, functional ponytail, her head seemed small. The power armor was still locked in place, hands in fists against each side of the ship. If she decided to disable him and take command of the pinnace, she was just going to win. Also, he needed to keep in mind that she was jerry-rigged in place, and probably couldn’t actually take a really high-g burn without coming loose.
“We do,” he said. “We’ve got orders. But you’ve got orders from Nate and Avasarala, and I absolutely respect how you look out for both of those. But I got orders from my captain, and the watch I need to stand is over that way and getting farther from us.”
“You’re not thinking with your head,” Bobbie said. “Look at the risk profile, Alex, because if we go, we’re taking a risk. If we win, we get Naomi Nagata out of trouble. If we lose, the leader of one of the most important political organizations in the human race dies at a time when unity and leadership is critically important. No, stop. I know what you’re thinking. I’ve thought it too, just about some other people. Naomi’s yours. She’s one of the people in your circle, and fuck if you’re going to risk her, much less sacrifice her for some kind of vague greater good, right?”
Alex closed his mouth, paused. “Right.”
“I understand that,” Bobbie said. “I do. I had to train a lot to understand that isn’t what we do. You had that training too. Whether we’re on active duty or not doesn’t matter. We serve Mars because we swore an oath. If doing the right thing was the same as doing the easy thing, we wouldn’t have had to swear. We have the prime minister of Mars in this ship. We have a military escort coming to get him safely to Luna.”
“And we have the enemy out there,” Alex said, hating the words as he said them. “It’s a trap, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Bobbie said. “It could be. Disable someone and shoot the responders is a dirty trick, but I wouldn’t put it past these bastards.”
“I don’t see how going after her would put us in more danger than holding course,” Alex said. “If they’ve got a rail gun pointing at us, they can hole us right here just as well as over there.”
“Trojan horse,” Bobbie said. “Pack that thing full of soldiers. If we dock with her, all these missiles aren’t going to help a damned bit. Or if the Rocinante gets to it, they take Fred Johnson.”
“The odds of —”
“Don’t think about the odds,” Bobbie said. “Think about the stakes. Think how much we lose if we take the risk and it goes wrong.”
Alex’s head felt thick, like the first stages of illness. He looked back at his nav panel. The distance between the Razorback and Chetzemoka increased with every second. He took a deep breath, blew out. Naomi’s voice came softly from the feed. “Tell James Holden I am in distress. Comm is not responding. I have no nav control…”
The voice that came from the cabin space was soft, gentle, conversational. “An interesting analysis, but incomplete.”
Nathan Smith stood in the doorway. His hair was greasy and disarrayed. His clothes looked like they’d been slept in. His eyes were bloodshot, the rims red and angry. Alex thought he looked a decade older than when they’d taken off. The prime minister smiled at Alex, then Bobbie, then Alex again.
“Sir,” Bobbie said.
“You’ve neglected a term, Sergeant. Consider what we stand to lose if we don’t make the attempt.”
“The reason for doing this,” Alex said. “The reason for doing any of this. If there’s a chance – and I think there’s a pretty damned good one – that Naomi managed her own escape, and she’s out there and in distress, and she’s called for help, you know what the rules are? That we stop and help. Even if she’s not someone we know. Even if it was someone else’s voice. That’s the rule, because out here, we help each other. And if we stopped doing that because we’re more important or because the rules don’t apply to us anymore, I can make a decent case that we’ve stopped being the good guys.”
Smith beamed. “That was beautiful, Mister Kamal. I had been thinking of explaining to Chrisjen Avasarala that we’d left our only solid witness to the Pella behind, but I think I like your version better. Set course and alert the UN escort to our change of plans.”
“Yes, sir,” Alex said. When the door closed, he turned to Bobbie. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Bobbie said. “It’s not like I didn’t want to go after her.”
“And if it turns out the ship’s full of soldiers?”
“I can take this suit out for a drive,” Bobbie said. “Won’t hurt my feelings.”
It only took a few minutes to set the optimal intercept course and fire off a flight plan to the UN escort ships. Afterward, he recorded a tightbeam message for Holden. “Hey there, Cap’n. We’re on our way, but we’ll be careful. Get in, take a good look, and if anything’s getting our hackles up, we won’t board. Meantime, you tell that pilot you’ve got that whoever makes rendezvous first owes the other fella a beer.”
Chapter Forty-four: Naomi
Even a steady one g could be unpleasant for her. The constant press of two was a slow torture. It began as a deep ache in her knees and the base of her spine, then progressed quickly to sharp pain, like a needle stuck into the joints. Naomi surveyed the Chetzemoka in stages, moving through a deck, then lying down until the pain lessened, then the next deck. Her hands and feet hurt even as the swelling subsided. Her cough didn’t get better, but it didn’t get worse.
The first disappointment was that the controls were in lockdown. She tried a few passwords – FreeNavy and Marcoisgreat and Filip – but even if she got it right, there was no reason to expect that they’d left the biometrics profiles turned off.
The lockers by the airlock hung open and empty. The three EVA suits that remained didn’t have batteries or air bottles. The emergency rations were gone. She expected the toolboxes to be gone from the machine shop, but they’d taken out the racks that held them too, the drawers from the cabinets, the LEDs from the wall lights. The crash couches were all slit open, gel and padding pooled on the deck beside them. The drug delivery system and reservoirs were gone. The only water was in the drives; ejection mass to be spit out the back of the ship. The only food was the residue in the recyclers that hadn’t been processed back into anything edible. The stink of welding rigs and burning still hung in the air, so the air recycler was probably running unfiltered.
Naomi lay on the deck, her head resting on her hands, and her eyes closed. The ship had been constructed for one use and as an insurance write-off. Its working life had begun with it being disposable, and it had been looted from there. Even the physical panels and monitors had been salvaged and carried away. As presents to Filip went, it was actually pretty crappy. The deck shook under her, the vibration of thrust setting up resonances that no system even tried to damp down. Between the high g and the vacuum damage leaking fluid
into her lungs, breathing took more effort than it should have.
The ship wasn’t a ship. She needed to stop thinking of it that way. It was a bomb. It was what she’d done to the Augustín Gamarra years ago and had carried with her ever since like a weight around her throat. Jim had known the kind of person that landed on water haulers like the Canterbury. He’d said that everyone there had reasons for being there. There were reasons the ship she’d tried to give to her son was stripped empty and triggered to kill. Not just her but anyone who came close to her. There were reasons. If she could defuse it, undo the threat, then she could follow it back, though. Take it to Ceres, where it had all started. There should be a way through the machine shop. All machine shops were supposed to be connected at the back.
She reached out her hands, only they weren’t her hands. She was dreaming. She forced her eyes open and rolled to her back with an exhausted sob.
Okay. If she stopped moving now, she was going to sleep. That was good to know. She sat up, rested her head against the wall. Sleep later. Sleep when you’re dead. Or even better, sleep when you’re safe. She grinned to herself. Safe. That sounded like a good plan. She should try that for a change. She balled her hands into tight fists. The joints all screamed in pain, but when she opened them, her fingers moved better. That was probably a metaphor for something.
She had to set priorities. She didn’t have a lot of resources. If she just grabbed at the first idea that came to her, it would be easy to exhaust herself without getting the critical work done. She needed to get food and water and make sure the air supply was reliable. She needed to warn anyone coming to save her not to approach. She needed to disarm the trap. Maybe dump core, maybe replace the drivers with a copy that didn’t carry her poisoned code.
And she needed to do it before the ship blew up. At two g. Without tools or access to the controls. Or… was that right? Access to the controls was going to be hard, but she should be able to improvise some tools. The EVA suits weren’t powered and didn’t have bottles, but they had seals and reinforcement. She could take the cloth apart, and salvage some lengths of wire. Maybe something solid enough to cut with. And could she use the helmet clamps as a kind of vise grip or clamp? She wasn’t sure.