If Lydia had, indeed, died quietly in her own bed with a loving husband at her side, then he would meet this man. See the home she’d lived in. Put flowers on her grave and say his last goodbye. If not, he’d kill some people. Neither possibility excited him more than the other. Either one was fine.
He slept.
Chapter Eight: Holden
Holden ran the video back and watched it again. The ship, an ugly box of metal with additional storage containers strapped to its flanks, made him think of the supply-laden covered wagons in old westerns. It wasn’t far from the truth. The Rabia Balkhi, registered to Captain Eric Khan out of Pallas, was still just goods and people heading into the frontier to stake a claim. Fewer horses, maybe, but more fusion reactors.
Again, the ship passed through the gate, the image wiggled and jumped, the Balkhi was gone.
“So?” Monica asked, her voice rich with anticipation. “What do you think?”
He scratched his arm, deciding what the answer was.
“There are a million reasons an old rust bucket like that might disappear out there,” he said. “Loss of core containment, loss of atmospheric pressure, run into debris. Hell, the radio might have just gone out and they’re living comfortably on a new planet and hoping someone will drop by to check on them.”
“Maybe,” Monica said with a nod. “If there was only one. But four hundred thirty-seven ships have passed through the rings into new solar systems over the last year. And of them, thirteen have just vanished. Poof.” She spread her fingers out like a tiny explosion. Holden did the math in his head. That was something like a three percent rate of loss. Back when he’d been in the Navy, the budgets had assumed about half of a percent loss to mechanical failure, asteroid impacts, sabotage, and enemy action. This was six times that.
“Huh,” he said. “That seems pretty high for ships that were able to fly the year and a half to get to the Ring.”
“Agreed. Way too high. If ships blew up without explanation that regularly, no one would ever fly.”
“So,” Holden said, then paused to order another drink from the table menu. He had a feeling he’d need it. “Why isn’t anyone talking about it? Who’s keeping track of them?”
“No one!” Monica said triumphantly. “That’s the whole thing. No one is tracking them. We have thousands of ships leaving the inner system and streaming toward the gates. They belong to citizens of three different governments, and some who don’t think of themselves as citizens of any government. Most of these people never even filed a flight plan, they just threw their suitcases in a rock hopper and blasted off for the new worlds.”
“Real estate grabs are like that, I guess.”
“So here they are, heading off alone or in handfuls, and all of them with the incentive to get wherever it is first. Only something’s stopping them. Disappearing them. Or, some of them anyway.”
“Clearly,” Holden said, “you have a theory.”
“I think it’s the protomolecule.”
Holden sighed and rubbed his face with both hands. His drink arrived, and he sipped at it for a minute. The cold of the ice and the bite of the gin filled his mouth. Monica stared at him, practically bouncing with impatience. He said, “No, it’s not. The protomolecule is gone. It’s dead. I fired the last processing node into a star.”
“How do you know that? Even if it was the last of the ring-building weapon, we know whoever made all this did it with protomolecule tools. And what else can it be? I’ve read the reports. All those robots and things that woke up on Ilus? The protomolecule attacks us for taking its stuff.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Holden said. “That’s not what happened. Without knowing it, I’d brought a node of the original infection with me that was still trying to connect with whatever sent it out in the first place. It woke a lot of stuff up in the process. We shut it down, and, you know, shot it into a star to avoid that happening again.”
“How can you be sure?”
At the sushi bar, one of the chefs barked out an announcement, and half a dozen people around him applauded. Holden took a deep breath, letting it out slowly through his teeth.
“I guess I can’t be. How do you prove a negative?”
“I know a way that maybe you can,” Monica said. The look on her face made Holden think whatever she was about to say next was the entire reason for their conversation. It felt a little like watching a hunting cat track a steak. “Fred Johnson still has what may be the only remaining sample of the protomolecule. The one you took off the secret Mao-Kwikowski ship.”
“The one I… Hey, how do you know that?” Holden said. “And how many other people know that?”
“I don’t disclose sources, but I think we should get it and see if we can wake it up. Get your ghost Miller to come back and find out if the protomolecule is using the gates to destroy our ships.”
Half a dozen responses crashed together in Holden’s mind, ranging from That is the worst idea I’ve ever heard to Are you even listening to what you’re saying? It took a few seconds for one to win out.
“You want me to do a séance?”
“I wouldn’t call it a —”
“No,” Holden said. “Just no.”
“I can’t just let this drop. If you won’t help —”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t help. I said I’m not going to go commune with a bit of killer alien goo in hopes that it starts telling me its old cop stories. We don’t want to poke that stuff. We should leave it alone.”
Monica’s expression was open and interested. He wouldn’t have been able to see her annoyance and disappointment if he hadn’t known to look.
“What then?” she asked.
“You know the old joke about hearing hoofbeats, right?”
“I guess I don’t.”
“Long story, but the point is that if you hear hoofbeats in the distance, your first guess is that they’re horses, not zebras. And you’re hearing hoofbeats and jumping straight to unicorns.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying let’s go see if we can find some horses or zebras before we start a unicorn hunt.”
An intriguing new mystery didn’t mean Holden no longer had a day job, but it did give him something to think about other than missing Naomi. And Amos. And Alex. But mostly Naomi. As he crawled along the exposed ribs of the Rocinante’s flank with a plasma torch in his hand and looked for cracks, he pondered where ships could go when they disappeared. Monica was right; the number was too high to be just random system failures. There were a lot of other possibilities, even discounting her protomolecule unicorn theory. But Holden had stopped believing in coincidence about when he’d first started spending time with Detective Miller. And the other big thing going on was that radical OPA factions were launching attacks on inner planet holdings like Callisto. And even Earth.
A violent faction of the OPA was dead set against colonization. And, now, colony ships loaded with supplies were vanishing without a trace. Also, Medina Station – nee Behemoth nee Nauvoo and the hub of all the ring gates – was solidly in the control of the OPA. It made a compelling narrative, even if he didn’t have any actual evidence that it was true.
In that scenario, the ships would be boarded by OPA pirate crews, the supplies taken, and the colonists… spaced? A gruesome idea if it were true, and still not the most horrific thing humans had ever done to each other. But that left the ships. They’d keep the ships, and then they’d have to make them disappear. That meant changing the transponder codes. The fact that the Rocinante was no longer the Tachi was proof that the OPA had that ability.
“Sakai,” Holden said, chinning the radio frequency to the private channel he and the chief engineer shared. “Yo, you around?”
“Problem?” he replied in a tone of voice that sounded like he was daring Holden to have a problem. Holden had learned not to be offended by it. Impatience was Sakai’s default state.
“More of a riddle.”
“I hate riddle
s,” Sakai said.
“Let’s say you’re trying to figure out if someone has stolen a bunch of ships and changed the transponder codes. How would you find those ships, if you had to?”
The engineer huffed thoughtfully for a moment.
“Don’t look for the missing ships,” Sakai replied. “Look for the new ones that show up out of nowhere.”
“Yes, good. That,” Holden said, “is exactly right. Thanks.”
He stopped at a cracked weld between the inner hull and one of the ship’s ribs and started touching it up with the torch. His faceplate darkened, turning the world into a black place with one bright blue light in it. While he worked, he thought through how you’d track the magically appearing new ships down. The public ship registry was a good place to start, but you’d drown in data trying to do it manually. If Naomi were here, he had no doubt she’d have been able to build a program to find what he wanted in ten minutes on her hand terminal. He, sadly, didn’t have her programming skills, but Fred had software engineers on the payroll, and if he —
“Why?” Sakai said. It had been so long since the engineer had spoken that it took Holden a moment to remember the context for the question.
“Why what? Why do I want to know how to find lost ships?”
“Yeah.”
“So I have this reporter friend who’s looking into some missing ships. I said I’d give her a hand. Just trying to think of ways to actually do that.”
“Stuart,” Sakai said. It was half statement, half question. “I heard she was on the station.”
“Yeah, my old buddy Monica. Truth is, I think she’s snipe hunting, but I said I’d help. And I need something to do that isn’t feeling lonely and sorry for myself.”
“Yeah,” Sakai said, then after a long moment added, “So shit hasn’t gone weird enough for you to believe in snipes?”
There was a video message light blinking on his home console. Holden tried his hardest not to hope it was from Naomi and still felt a crushing disappointment when Alex’s round face appeared on the screen. “Hi boss,” the pilot said. “So the thing where I meet up with my ex-wife and we have a tearful reconciliation? Yeah, that was a failure. Probably shoulda thought that one through a little better. But I’m plannin’ on stopping by to see Bobbie before I leave, so there’s a bright spot. How’s my girl? You guys gettin’ her all polished up and pretty for my return? I’ll check in again when I can. Kamal out.”
Holden almost started his reply off by asking for a report on the ex-wife situation, but the little Naomi voice that now lived in his head said Don’t be nosey, so instead he replied, “Thanks for checking in. Give Bobbie my best. The Roci’s still months from ready, so take your time.”
He sat for a minute trying to think of something else to say, then just cut the dead air off the end of the message and sent it. It was strange how a person could be so vitally important in your life, and yet you had nothing to say to them when they weren’t sharing the same air. Normally, he and Alex would talk about the ship, about the other two crew members, about jobs. With them all split up and the Roci in dry dock, there wasn’t much left to say that wasn’t a personal invasion. Thinking about that looked like the beginning of a long dark road to bitter loneliness, so he decided to go investigating instead.
He kind of wished he had a hat.
“Back so soon?” Fred said when Holden was ushered into his office by one of the OPA leader’s minions. “I know my coffee is good, but…”
Holden grabbed a chair and stretched out while Fred puttered with the coffee maker. “So Monica Stuart is on Tycho.”
“Yeah. You think someone like that lands on this station without me knowing about it?”
“No,” Holden admitted. “But do you know why she’s here?”
The coffee maker started hissing to itself, and the office was filled with a rich, bitter smell. While the coffee brewed, Fred leaned over his desk tapping on the terminal. “Something with missing ships, right? That’s what our intel team says.”
“Have your people looked into it at all?”
“Honestly? No. I’d heard rumblings about it, but we’re buried here. Every ship with a functioning Epstein is heading through for the gates. We’ve got our hands full keeping them from running into each other going through the rings. Most of them are going into unexplored systems with no other ships or stations. We don’t hear back from a few, sort of seems like the obvious thing happening.”
Holden accepted a steaming mug from Fred with a grateful nod and took a sip. The old man’s coffee didn’t disappoint. “I get that,” Holden said after another drink. “And I think her theory on it is pretty far-fetched, but it’s the kind of thing that will get public traction if we don’t find a better answer first.”
“She has a theory already?”
“She thinks it’s the protomolecule. The robots and tech waking up on Ilus is her one datapoint.”
“You told me that was a onetime thing,” Fred said, frowning over his coffee mug. When he spoke again his words blew steam in front of them, like a whisp of dragon breath. “Is Miller back?”
“No, he’s not back. As far as I know, there isn’t an active protomolecule culture in existence in the universe. But —”
“But I’ve got the inactive stuff you gave me.”
“Right, and Monica knows about it somehow,” Holden said.
Fred’s frown only deepened at that. “I’ve got a leak somewhere.”
“Yeah, you totally do, but that isn’t the part that worries me.”
Fred’s eyebrows went up in a nonverbal question.
“Monica,” Holden continued, “has decided that we should take out the goo and use it like some sort of Ouija board to summon the ghost of Miller.”
“But that’s stupid,” Fred said.
“Right? So I think we should exhaust all other possibilities before we leap right to tinkering with alien viruses.”
“First time for everything, I guess,” Fred said, only lightly coating the words in sarcasm. “You have alternate theories?”
“I do,” Holden said, “but you won’t like it.”
“I also still have bourbon if we need anesthetic for this operation.”
“It may get there,” Holden replied, then drank off the rest of his coffee to give himself time. No matter how much Fred had aged over the last half decade, Holden found himself still intimidated by the man. It was hard to broach topics Fred might take offense to.
“More?” Fred asked, pointing at his empty cup. Holden declined with a shake of his head.
“So there’s that radical extremist faction of the OPA that you were telling me about,” Holden said.
“I don’t think —”
“They’ve had at least two public attacks. One on Martian interests, and one on Earth itself.”
“Both of which failed.”
“Maybe,” Holden said. “But we’re assuming we know what their goals were, and that seems like a bad assumption to make. Maybe blowing up a big chunk of a Martian shipyard and forcing the UN home fleet to fire a bunch of missiles at an ancient freighter are wins to them.”
“Okay,” Fred said with a grudging nod. “Fair enough.”
“But there’s a third leg to this. Sure, the radicals think Earth and Mars will abandon them once the new worlds are colonized, but that means the colonists themselves are part of the problem.”
“Agreed.”
“So, what if this radical OPA wing decides that in addition to blowing up some of the inner planets’ shit, they can send a message by taking out some colony ships?”
“Well,” Fred said, speaking slowly as though he were working out the answer as he said it, “the big problem with that is the location of the attacks.”
“Because they happen on the other side of the gates.”
“Exactly,” Fred continued. “If ships were getting nuked as they passed through the Belt, that would be one thing. But on the other side of the gates? Who has access there? Unless
you’re thinking the ships were sabotaged in some way. A bomb with a really long fuse?”
“There’s another alternative,” Holden said.
“No, there isn’t,” Fred replied, anticipating his next argument.
“Fred, look, I know you don’t want to think you’ve got people working against your interests on Medina. Doctoring records, maybe. Shutting off sensors when there’re things they don’t want people to see. And I get why that’s hard to swallow.”
“Medina is central to our long-term plans,” Fred said, his words hard as iron. “I’ve placed all of my very best and most loyal people on that station. If the radicals have a fifth column there, then it means that I can’t trust anyone in my organization. I might as well pack it up and retire.”
“There are thousands of people on Medina, I doubt you can vouch for every one of them personally.”
“No, but the people running the station are my people. The most loyal I have. There’s no way something like this could be going on without their knowledge and cooperation.”
“That’s a scary thought.”
“It means I don’t own Medina Station,” Fred said. “It means that the most violent, hard-line, extremist faction of our group controls the choke point of the entire galaxy.”
“So,” Holden said, “how would one go about finding that out?”
Fred leaned back in his chair with a sigh and gave Holden a sad smile. “You know what I think? I think you’re bored, and lonely, and looking for a distraction. Don’t dismantle the organization I spent a lifetime building to give yourself something to do.”
“But ships are missing. Even if it isn’t Medina taking them, something is. I don’t know that we can just ignore that and hope it goes away.”
“Fix your own ship, Jim. Fix your ship and get your crew back together. This thing with the missing ships isn’t your job.”
“Thanks for the coffee,” Holden said, standing up to leave.
“You’re not going to drop it, are you?”