Chapter Twenty-Nine: Holden

 

Gravity returned as Alex brought the engine up, and Holden floated down to the deck of the cargo bay airlock at a gentle half g. They didn’t need to go fast now that the monster was outside the ship. They just needed to put some distance between the ship and it, and get it into the drive’s star-hot exhaust plume, where it would be broken down into its various subatomic particles. Even the protomolecule couldn’t survive being reduced to ions.

He hoped, anyway.

When he touched down on the deck, he intended to turn on the wall monitor and check the aft cameras. He wanted to watch the thing be torched, but the moment his weight came down, a white-hot spike of pain took his knee. He yelped and collapsed.

Amos drifted down next to him, then kicked off his boot mags and started to kneel. “You okay, Cap?” he said.

“Fine. I mean, for I-think-I-blew-out-my-knee levels of fine.”

“Yeah. Joint injury’s a lot less painful in microgravity, ain’t it?”

Holden was about to reply when a massive hammer hit the side of the ship. The hull rang like a gong. The Roci’s engine cut off almost instantly, and the ship snapped into a flat spin. Amos was lifted away from Holden and thrown across the airlock to slam against the outer door. Holden slid along the deck to land standing upright against the bulkhead next to him, his knee collapsing under him so painfully he nearly blacked out.

He chinned a button in his helmet, and his body armor shot him full of amphetamines and painkillers. Within seconds, his knee still hurt, but the pain was very far away and easy to ignore. The threatening tunnel vision vanished and the airlock became very bright. His heart started to race.

“Alex,” he said, knowing the answer before he asked, “what was that?”

“When we torched our passenger there, the bomb in the cargo bay went off,” the pilot replied. “We’ve got serious damage to that bay, to the outer hull, and to engineering. Reactor went into emergency shutdown. The cargo bay turned into a second drive during the blast and put us into a spin. I have no control over the ship.”

Amos groaned and began moving his limbs. “That sucks.”

“We need to kill this spin,” Holden said. “What do you need to get the attitude thrusters back up?”

“Holden,” Naomi cut in, “I think Prax may be injured in the airlock. He’s not moving in there.”

“Is he dying?”

The hesitation lasted for one very long second.

“His suit doesn’t think so.”

“Then ship first,” Holden said. “First aid after. Alex, we’ve got radios again. And the lights are on. So the jamming is gone, and the batteries must still be working. Why can’t you fire the thrusters?”

“Looks like … primary and secondary pumps are out. No water pressure.”

“Confirmed,” Naomi said a second later. “Primary wasn’t in the blast area. If it’s toast, engineering must be a mess. Secondary’s on the deck above. It shouldn’t have been physically damaged, but there was a big power spike just before the reactor went off-line. Might have fried it or blown a breaker.”

“Okay, we’re on it. Amos,” Holden said, pulling himself over to where the mechanic lay on the cargo airlock’s outer door. “You with me?”

Amos gave a one-handed Belter nod, then groaned. “Just knocked the wind out of me, is all.”

“Gotta get up, big man,” Holden said, pushing himself to his feet. In the partial gravity of their spin, his leg felt heavy, hot, and stiff as a board. Without the drugs pouring through him, standing on it would have probably made him scream. Instead, he pulled Amos up, putting even more pressure on it.

I will pay for this later, he thought. But the amphetamines made later seem very far away.

“What?” Amos said, slurring the word. He probably had a concussion, but Holden would get him some medical attention later when the ship was back under their control.

“We need to get to the secondary water pump,” Holden said, forcing himself to speak slowly in spite of the drugs. “What’s the fastest access point?”

“Machine shop,” Amos replied, then closed his eyes and seemed to fall asleep on his feet.

“Naomi,” Holden said. “Can you control Amos’ suit from there?”

“Yes.”

“Shoot him full of speed. I can’t drag his ass around with me, and I need him.”

“Okay,” she said. A couple of seconds later, Amos’ eyes popped open.

“Shit,” he said. “Was I asleep?” His words were still slurred but now had a sort of manic energy to them.

“We need to get to the bulkhead access point in the machine shop. Grab whatever you think we’ll need to get the pump running. It might have blown a breaker or fried some wiring. I’ll meet you there.”

“Okay,” Amos said, then pulled himself along the toe rings set into the floor to get to the inner airlock door. A moment later it was open and he crawled out of view.

With the ship spinning, gravity was pulling Holden to a point halfway between the deck and the starboard bulkhead. None of the ladders and rings set into the ship for use in low g or under thrust would be oriented in the right direction. Not really a problem with four working limbs, but it would make maneuvering with one useless leg difficult.

And of course, once he moved past wherever the ship’s center of spin was, everything would reverse.

For a moment, his perspective shifted. The vicious Coriolis rattled the fine bones inside his ears, and he was riding a spinning hunk of metal lost in permanent free fall. Then he was under it, about to be crushed. He flushed with the sweat that came a moment before nausea as his brain ran through scenarios to explain the sensations of the spin. He chinned the suit controls, pumping a massive dose of emergency antinausea drugs into his bloodstream.

Without giving himself more time to think about it, Holden grabbed the toe rings and pulled himself up to the inner airlock door. He could see Amos filling a plastic bucket with tools and supplies he was yanking out of drawers and lockers.

“Naomi,” Holden said. “Going to take a peek in engineering. Do we have any cameras left in there?”

She made a sort of disgusted grunt he interpreted as a negative, then said, “I’ve got systems shorted out all over the ship. Either they’re destroyed, or the power is out on that circuit.”

Holden pulled himself over to the deck-mounted pressure hatch that separated the machine shop from engineering. A status light on the hatch blinked an angry red.

“Shit, I was afraid of that.”

“What?” Naomi asked.

“You don’t have environmental readings either, do you?”

“Not from engineering. That’s all down.”

“Well,” Holden said with a long sigh. “The hatch thinks there’s no atmosphere on the other side. That incendiary charge actually blew a hole through the bulkhead, and engineering is in vacuum.”

“Uh-oh,” Alex said. “Cargo bay’s in vacuum too.”

“And the cargo bay door is broken,” Naomi added. “And the cargo airlock.”

“And a partridge in a fucking pear tree,” Amos said with a disgusted snort. “Let’s get the damn ship to stop spinning and I’ll go outside and take a look at it.”

“Amos is right,” Holden said, giving up on the hatch and pushing himself to his feet. He staggered down a steeply angled bulkhead to the access panel where Amos was now waiting, bucket in hand. “First things first.”

While Amos used a torque wrench to unbolt the access panel, Holden said, “Actually, Naomi, pump all the air out of the machine shop too. No atmo below deck four. Override the safeties so we can open the engineering hatch if we need to.”

Amos ran out the last bolt and pulled the panel off the bulkhead. Beyond it lay a dark, cramped space filled with a confusing tangle of pipes and cabling.

“Oh,” Holden added. “Might want to prep an SOS if we can’t get this fixed.”

“Yeah, because we got a lot of people out there who we really want coming to help us right now,” Amos said.

Amos pulled himself into the narrow passage between the two hulls and then out of sight. Holden followed him in. Two meters beyond the hatch loomed the blocky and complex-looking pump mechanism that kept water pressure to the maneuvering thrusters. Amos stopped next to it and began pulling parts off. Holden waited behind him, the narrow space not allowing him to see what the big mechanic was doing.

“How’s it look?” Holden asked after a few minutes of listening to Amos curse under his breath while he worked.

“It looks fine here,” Amos said. “Gonna swap this breaker anyway, just to be sure. But I don’t think the pump’s our problem.”

Shit.

Holden backed out of the maintenance hatch and half crawled up the steep slope of bulkhead back to the engineering hatch. The angry red light had been replaced with a morose yellow one now that there was no atmosphere on either side of the hatch.

“Naomi,” Holden said. “I’ve got to get into engineering. I need to see what happened in there. Have you killed the safeties?”

“Yes. But I’ve got no sensors in there. The room could be flooded with radiation—”

“But you have sensors here in the machine shop, right? If I open the hatch and you get radiation warnings, just let me know. I’ll shut it immediately.”

“Jim,” Naomi said, the stiffness that had been in her voice every time she’d spoken to him for the last day slipping a bit. “How many times can you get yourself massively irradiated before it catches up with you?”

“At least once more?”

“I’ll tell the Roci to prep a bed in sick bay,” she said, not quite laughing.

“Get one of the ones that’s not throwing errors.”

Without giving himself time to rethink it, Holden slapped the release on the deck hatch. He held his breath while it opened, expecting to see chaos and destruction on the other side, followed by his suit’s radiation alarm.

Instead, other than one small hole in the bulkhead closest to the explosion, it looked fine.

Holden pulled himself through the opening and hung by his arms for a few moments, examining the space. The massive fusion reactor that dominated the center of the compartment looked untouched. The bulkhead on the starboard side bowed in precariously, with a charred hole in its center, like a miniature volcano had formed there. Holden shuddered at the thought of how much energy had to have been released to bend the heavily armored and radiation-shielded bulkhead in like that, and how close it had come to punching a hole in their reactor. How many more joules to go from a badly dented wall to full containment breach?

“God, this one was close,” he said out loud to no one in particular.

“Swapped out all the parts I can think to,” Amos said. “The problem is somewhere else.”

Holden let go of the rim of the hatch and dropped a half meter to the bulkhead, which angled below him, then slid to the deck. The only other visible damage was a hunk of bulkhead plating stuck in the wall exactly on the other side of the reactor. Holden couldn’t see any way that the shrapnel could have gotten there without passing directly through the reactor, or else bouncing off two bulkheads and around it. There was no sign of the first, so the second, incredibly unlikely though it was, had to be what had happened.

“I mean, really close,” he said, touching the jagged metal fragment. It was sunk a good fifteen centimeters into the wall. Plenty far enough to have at least breached the shielding on the reactor. Maybe worse.

“Grabbing your camera,” Naomi said. A moment later she whistled. “No kidding. The walls in there are mostly cabling. Can’t make a hole like that without breaking something.”

Holden tried to pull the shrapnel out of the wall by hand and failed. “Amos, bring some pliers and a lot of patch cabling.”

“So no on the distress call, then,” Naomi said.

“No. But if someone could point a camera aft and reassure me that for all this trouble we actually killed that damned thing, that would be just swell.”

“Watched it go myself, Cap,” Alex said. “Nothin’ but gas now.”

 

Holden lay on one of the sick bay beds, letting the ship look his leg over. Periodically a manipulator prodded his knee, which was swelled up to the size of a cantaloupe, the skin stretched tight as a drum’s head. But the bed was also making sure to keep him perfectly medicated, so the occasional pokes and prods registered only as pressure without any pain.

The panel next to his head warned him to remain still; then two arms grabbed his leg while a third injected a needle-thin flexible tube into his knee and started doing something arthroscopic. He felt a vague tugging sensation.

At the next bed over lay Prax. His head was bandaged where a three-centimeter flap of skin had been glued back down. His eyes were closed. Amos, who had turned out not to have a concussion, just another nasty bump on his head, was belowdecks doing makeshift repairs on everything the monster’s bomb had broken, including putting a temporary patch on the hole in their engineering bulkhead. They wouldn’t be able to fix the cargo bay door until they docked at Tycho. Alex was flying them there at a gentle quarter g to make it easier to work.

Holden didn’t mind the delay. The truth was he was in no hurry to get back to Tycho and confront Fred about what he’d seen. The longer he thought about it, the further he got from his earlier blind panic, and the more he thought Naomi was right. It made no sense for Fred to be behind any of this.

But he wasn’t sure. And he had to be sure.

Prax mumbled something and touched his head. He started pulling on the bandages.

“I wouldn’t mess with those,” Holden said.

Prax nodded and closed his eyes again. Sleeping, or trying to. The auto-doc pulled the tube out of Holden’s leg, sprayed it with antiseptic, and began wrapping it with a tight bandage. Holden waited until the medical pod was done doing whatever it was doing to his knee, then turned sideways on the bed and tried to stand up. Even at a quarter g, his leg wouldn’t support him. He hopped on one foot over to a supply locker and got himself a crutch.

As he moved past the botanist’s bed, Prax grabbed his arm. His grip was surprisingly strong.

“It’s dead?”

“Yeah,” Holden said, patting his hand. “We got it. Thanks.”

Prax didn’t reply; he just rolled onto his side and shook. It took Holden a moment to realize Prax was weeping. He left without saying anything else. What else was there to say?

Holden took the ladder-lift up, planning to go to ops and read the detailed damage reports Naomi and the Roci were compiling. He stopped when he got to the personnel deck and heard two people speaking. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he recognized Naomi’s voice, and he recognized the tone she used when she was having an intimate conversation.

The voices were coming from the galley. Feeling a little like a Peeping Tom, Holden moved closer to the galley hatch until he could make out the words.

“It’s more than that,” Naomi was saying. Holden almost walked into the galley, but something in her tone stopped him. He had the terrible feeling she was talking about him. About them. About why she was leaving.

“Why does it have to be more?” the other person said. Amos.

“You almost beat a man to death with a can of chicken on Ganymede,” Naomi replied.

“Gonna hold a little girl hostage for some food? Fuck him. If he was here, I’d smash him again right now.”

“Do you trust me, Amos?” Naomi said. Her voice was sad. More than that. Frightened.

“More than anyone else,” Amos replied.

“I’m scared out of my wits. Jim is rushing off to do something really dumb on Tycho. This guy we’re taking with us seems like he’s one twitch from a nervous breakdown.”

“Well, he’s—”

“And you,” she continued. “I depend on you. I know you’ve always got my back, no matter what. Except maybe not now, because the Amos I know doesn’t beat a skinny kid half to death, no matter how much chicken he asks for. I feel like everyone’s losing themselves. I need to understand, because I’m really, really frightened.”

Holden felt the urge to go in, take her hand, hold her. The need in her voice demanded it, but he held himself back. There was a long pause. Holden heard a scraping sound, followed by the sound of metal hitting glass. Someone was stirring sugar into coffee. The sounds were so clear he could almost see it.

“So, Baltimore,” Amos said, his voice as relaxed as if he were going to talk about the weather. “Not a nice town. You ever heard of squeezing? Squeeze trade? Hooker squeeze?”

“No. Is it a drug?”

“No,” Amos said with a laugh. “No, when you squeeze a hooker, you put her on the street until she gets knocked up, then peddle her to johns who get off on pregnant girls, then send her back to the streets after she pops the kid. With procreation restrictions, banging pregnant girls is quite the kink.”

“Squeeze?”

“Yeah, you know, ‘squeezing out puppies’? You never heard it called that?”

“Okay,” Naomi said, trying to hide her disgust.

“Those kids? They’re illegal, but they don’t just vanish, not right away,” Amos continued. “They got uses too.”

Holden felt his chest tighten a little. It wasn’t something he’d ever thought about. When, a second later, Naomi spoke, her horror echoed his.

“Jesus.”

“Jesus got nothing to do with it,” Amos said. “No Jesus in the squeeze trade. But some kids wind up in the pimp gangs. Some wind up on the streets …”

“Some wind up finding a way to ship offworld, and they never go back?” Naomi asked, her voice quiet.

“Maybe,” Amos said, his voice as flat and conversational as ever. “Maybe some do. But most of them just … disappear, eventually. Used up. Most of them.”

For a time, no one spoke. Holden heard the sounds of coffee being drunk.

“Amos,” she said, her voice thick. “I never—”

“So I’d like to find this little girl before someone uses her up, and she disappears. I’d like to do that for her,” Amos said. His voice caught for a moment, and he cleared it with a loud cough. “For her dad.”

Holden thought they were done, and started to slip away when he heard Amos, his voice calm again, say, “Then I’m going to kill whoever snatched her.”

 

 

Chapter Thirty: Bobbie

 

Prior to working for Avasarala at the UN, Bobbie had never even heard of Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile, or if she had, she hadn’t noticed. She’d spent her whole life wearing, eating, or sitting on products carted through the solar system by Mao-Kwik freighters without ever realizing it. After she’d gone through the files Avasarala had given her, she’d been astonished at the size and reach of the company. Hundreds of ships, dozens of stations, millions of employees. Jules-Pierre Mao owned significant properties on every habitable planet and moon in the solar system.

His eighteen-year-old daughter had owned her own racing ship. And that was the daughter he didn’t like.

When Bobbie tried to imagine being so wealthy you could own a spaceship just to compete in races, she failed. That the same girl had run away to be an OPA rebel probably said a lot about the relationship of wealth and contentment, but Bobbie had a hard time being that philosophical.

She’d grown up solidly Martian middle class. Her father had done twenty as a Marine noncom and had gone into private security consulting after he’d left the corps. Bobbie’s family had always had a nice home. She and her two older brothers had attended a private primary school, and her brothers had both gone on to university without having to take out student loans. Growing up, she’d never once thought of herself as poor.

She did now.

Owning your own racing ship wasn’t even wealth. It was like speciation. It was conspicuous consumption befitting ancient Earth royalty, a pharaoh’s pyramid with a reaction drive. Bobbie had thought it was the most ridiculous excess she’d ever heard of.

And then she climbed off the short flight shuttle onto Jules-Pierre Mao’s private L5 station.

Jules didn’t park his ships in orbit at a public station. He didn’t even use a Mao-Kwik corporate station. This was an entire fully functioning space station in orbit around Earth solely for his private spaceships, and the whole thing done up like peacock feathers. It was a level of extravagance that had never even occurred to her.

She also thought it made Mao himself very dangerous. Everything he did was an announcement of his freedom from constraint. He was a man without boundaries. Killing a senior politician of the UN government might be bad business. It might wind up being expensive. But it would never actually be risky to a man with this much wealth and power.

Avasarala didn’t see it.

“I hate spin gravity,” Avasarala said, sipping at a cup of steaming tea. They’d be on the station for only three hours, while cargo was transferred from the shuttle to Mao’s yacht, but they’d been assigned a suite of four full-sized bedrooms, each with its own shower, and a massive lounge area. A huge screen pretended to be a window, the crescent Earth with her continent-veiling clouds hung on the black. They had a private kitchen staffed by three people, whose biggest task so far had been making the assistant undersecretary’s tea. Bobbie considered ordering a large meal just to give them something to do.

“I can’t believe we’re about to climb on a ship owned by this man. Have you ever known anyone this wealthy to go to jail? Or even be prosecuted? This guy could probably walk in here and shoot you in the face on a live newsfeed and get away with it.”

Avasarala laughed at her. Bobbie suppressed a surge of anger. It was just fear looking for an outlet.

“That’s not the game,” Avasarala said. “No one gets shot. They get marginalized. It’s worse.”

“No, it’s not. I’ve seen people shot. I’ve seen my friends shot. When you say, ‘That’s not the game,’ you mean for people like you. Not like me.”

Avasarala’s expression cooled.

“Yes, that’s what I mean,” the old woman said. “The level we’re playing at has different rules. It’s like playing go. It’s all about exerting influence. Controlling the board without occupying it.”

“Poker is a game too,” Bobbie said. “But sometimes the stakes get so high that one player decides it’s easier to kill the other guy and walk away with the money. It happens all the time.”

Avasarala nodded at her, not replying right away, visibly thinking over what Bobbie had said. Bobbie felt her anger replaced with a sudden rush of affection for the grumpy and arrogant old lady.

“Okay,” Avasarala said, putting her teacup down and placing her hands in her lap. “I hear what you’re saying, Sergeant. I think it’s unlikely, but I’m glad you’re here to say it.”

But you aren’t taking it seriously, Bobbie wanted to shout at her. Instead, she asked the servant who hovered nearby for a mushroom and onion sandwich. While she ate it, Avasarala sipped tea, nibbled on a cookie, and made small talk about the war and her grandchildren. Bobbie tried to be sure to make concerned noises during the war parts and awww, cute noises when the kids were the topic. But all she could think about was the tactical nightmare defending Avasarala on an enemy-controlled spacecraft would be.

Her recon suit was in a large crate marked FORMAL WEAR and being loaded onto the Mao yacht even as they waited. Bobbie wanted to sneak off and put it on. She didn’t notice when Avasarala stopped speaking for several minutes.

“Bobbie,” Avasarala said, her face not quite a frown. “Are my stories about my beloved grandchildren boring you?”

“Yeah,” Bobbie replied. “They really are.”

 

Bobbie had thought that Mao Station was the most ludicrous display of conspicuous wealth she’d ever seen right up until they boarded the yacht.

While the station was extravagant, it at least served a function. It was Jules Mao’s personal orbital garage, where he could store and service his fleet of private spacecraft. Underneath the glitz there was a working station, with mechanics and support staff doing actual jobs.

The yacht, the Guanshiyin, was the size of a standard cheapjack people-mover that would have transported two hundred customers, but it only had a dozen staterooms. Its cargo area was just large enough to contain the supplies they’d need for a lengthy voyage. It wasn’t particularly fast. It was, by any reasonable measurement, a miserable failure as a useful spacecraft.

But its job was not to be useful.

The Guanshiyin’s job was to be comfortable. Extravagantly comfortable.

It was like a hotel lobby. The carpet was plush and soft underfoot, and actual crystal chandeliers caught the light. Everyplace that should have had a sharp corner was rounded. Softened. The walls were papered with raw bamboo and natural fiber. The first thing Bobbie thought was how hard it would be to clean, and the second thing was that the difficulty was intentional.

Each suite of rooms took up nearly an entire deck of the ship. Each room had its own private bath, media center, game room, and lounge with a full bar. The lounge had a gigantic screen showing the view outside, which would not have been higher definition had it been an actual glass window. Near the bar was a dumbwaiter next to an intercom, which could deliver food prepared by Cordon Bleu chefs any hour of the day or night.

The carpet was so thick Bobbie was pretty sure mag boots wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t matter. A ship like this would never break down, never have to stop the engines during flight. The kind of people who flew on the Guanshiyin had probably never actually worn an environment suit in their lives.

All the fixtures in her bathroom were gold plated.

Bobbie and Avasarala were sitting in the lounge with the head of her UN security team, a pleasant-looking gray-haired man of Kurdish descent named Cotyar. Bobbie had been worried when she first met him. He looked like a friendly high school teacher, not a soldier. But then she’d watched him go through Avasarala’s rooms with practiced efficiency, laying out their security plan and directing his team, and her worries eased.

“Well, impressions?” Avasarala asked, leaning back in a plush armchair with her eyes closed.

“This room is not secure,” Cotyar said, his accent exotic to Bobbie’s ears. “We should not discuss sensitive matters here. Your private room has been secured for such discussions.”

“This is a trap,” Bobbie said.

“Aren’t we finished with that shit yet?” Avasarala said, then leaned forward to give Bobbie a glare.

“She is right,” Cotyar said quietly, clearly unhappy to be discussing such matters in an unsecured room. “I’ve counted fourteen crew on this ship already, and I would estimate that is less than one-third of the total crew of this vessel. I have a team of six for your protection—”

“Seven,” Bobbie interrupted, raising her hand.

“As you say,” Cotyar continued with a nod. “Seven. We do not control any of the ship’s systems. Assassination would be as simple as sealing the deck we are on and pumping out the air.”

Bobbie pointed at Cotyar and said, “See?”

Avasarala waved a hand as if she were shooing flies. “What’s communications look like?”

“Robust,” Cotyar said. “We’ve set up a private network and have been given the backup tightbeam and radio array for your personal use. Bandwidth is significant, though light delay will be an increasing factor as we move away from Earth.”

“Good,” Avasarala said, smiling for the first time since they’d come on the ship. She’d stopped looking tired a while ago and had moved on to whatever tired turns into when it became a lifestyle.

“None of this is secure,” Cotyar said. “We can secure our private internal network, but if they are monitoring outbound and inbound traffic through the array we’re using, there will be no way to detect that. We have no access to ship operations.”

“And,” Avasarala said, “that is exactly why I’m here. Bottle me up, send me on a long trip, and read all my fucking mail.”

“We’re lucky if that’s all they do,” Bobbie said. Thinking about how tired Avasarala looked had reminded her how tired she was too. She felt herself drift away for a moment.

Avasarala finished saying something, and Cotyar nodded and said yes to her. She turned to Bobbie and said, “Do you agree?”

“Uh,” Bobbie said, trying to rewind the conversation in her head and failing. “I’m—”

“You’re practically falling out of your fucking chair. When’s the last time you got a full night’s sleep?”

“Probably about the last time you did,” Bobbie said. The last time all my squaddies were alive, and you weren’t trying to keep the solar system from catching on fire. She waited for the next scathing comment, the next observation that she couldn’t do her job if she was that compromised. That weak.

“Fair enough,” Avasarala said. Bobbie felt another little surge of affection for her. “Mao’s throwing a big dinner tonight to welcome us aboard. I want you and Cotyar to come with. Cotyar will be security, so he’ll stand at the back of the room and look menacing.”

Bobbie laughed before she could stop herself. Cotyar smiled and winked at her.

“And,” Avasarala continued, “you’ll be there as my social secretary, so you can chat people up. Try to get a feel for the crew and the mood of the ship. Okay?”

“Roger that.”

“I noticed,” Avasarala said, her tone shifting to the one she used when she was going to ask for an unpleasant favor, “the executive officer staring at you when we did the airlock meet and greet.”

Bobbie nodded. She’d noticed it too. Some men had a large-woman fetish, and Bobbie had gotten the hair-raising sense that he might be a member of that tribe. They tended to have unresolved mommy issues, so she generally steered clear.

“Any chance you could talk him up at dinner?” Avasarala finished.

Bobbie laughed, expecting everyone else to laugh too. Even Cotyar was looking at her as though Avasarala had made a perfectly reasonable request.

“Uh, no,” Bobbie said.

“Did you say no?”

“Yeah, no. Hell no. Fuck no. Nein und abermals nein. Nyet. La. Siei,” Bobbie said, stopping when she ran out of languages. “And I’m actually a little pissed now.”

“I’m not asking you to sleep with him.”

“Good, because I don’t use sex as a weapon,” Bobbie said. “I use weapons as weapons.”

 

“Chrisjen!” Jules Mao said, enveloping Avasarala’s hand in his and shaking it.

The lord of the Mao-Kwik empire towered over Avasarala. He had the kind of handsome face that made Bobbie instinctively want to like him, and medically untreated male-pattern hair loss that said he didn’t care whether she did. Choosing not to use his wealth to fix a problem as treatable as thinning hair actually made him seem even more in control. He wore a loose sweater and cotton pants that hung on him like a tailored suit. When Avasarala introduced Bobbie to him, he smiled and nodded while barely glancing in her direction.

“Is your staff settled in?” he asked, letting Avasarala know that Bobbie’s presence reminded him of underlings. Bobbie gritted her teeth but kept her face blank.

“Yes,” Avasarala replied with what Bobbie would have sworn was genuine warmth. “The accommodations are lovely, and your crew has been wonderful.”

“Excellent,” Jules said, placing Avasarala’s hand on his arm and leading her to an enormous table. They were surrounded on all sides by men in white jackets with black bow ties. One of them darted forward and pulled a chair out. Jules placed Avasarala in it. “Chef Marco has promised something special tonight.”

“How about straight answers? Are those on the menu?” Bobbie asked as a waiter pulled out a chair for her.

Jules settled into his chair at the head of the table. “Answers?”

“You guys won,” Bobbie said, ignoring the steaming soup one of the servers placed in front of her. Mao tapped salt onto his and began eating it as though they were just having casual dinner conversation. “The assistant undersecretary is on the ship. No reason to bullshit us now. What’s going on?”

“Humanitarian aid,” he replied.

“Bullshit,” Bobbie said. She glanced at Avasarala, but the old woman was just smiling. “You can’t tell me that you have time to spend a couple months doing the transit to Jupiter just to oversee handing out rice and juice boxes. And you couldn’t get enough relief supplies onto this ship to feed Ganymede lunch, much less make a long-term difference.”

Mao settled back in his chair, and the white jackets bustled around the room, clearing the soup away. Bobbie’s was whisked away as well, even though she hadn’t eaten any of it.

“Roberta,” Mao began.

“Don’t call me Roberta.”

“Sergeant, you should be questioning your superiors at the UN foreign office, not me.”

“I’d love to, but apparently asking questions is against the rules in this game.”

His smile was warm, condescending, and empty. “I made my ship available to provide Madam Undersecretary the most comfortable ride to her new assignment. And while you have not yet met them, there are personnel currently on this vessel whose expertise will be invaluable to the citizens of Ganymede once you arrive.”

Bobbie had been around Avasarala long enough to see the game being played right in front of her. Mao was laughing at her. He knew this was all bullshit, and he knew she knew it as well. But as long as he remained calm and gave reasonable answers, no one could call him on it. He was too powerful to be called a liar to his face.

“You’re a liar, and—” she started; then something he’d said made her stop. “Wait, ‘once you arrive’? You aren’t coming?”

“I’m afraid not,” Mao said, smiling up at the white jacket who placed another plate in front of him. This one had what appeared to be a whole fish, complete with head and staring eyes.

Bobbie gaped at Avasarala, who was frowning at Mao now.

“I was told you were personally leading this relief effort,” Avasarala said.

“That was my intention. But I’m afraid other business has removed that option. Once we finish with this excellent dinner, I’ll be taking the shuttle back to the station. This ship, and its crew, are at your disposal until your vital work on Ganymede is complete.”

Avasarala just stared at Mao. For the first time in Bobbie’s experience, the old lady was struck speechless.

A white jacket brought Bobbie a fish while her lush prison flew at a leisurely quarter g toward Jupiter.

 

Avasarala hadn’t said a word on the ride down the lift to their suite. In the lounge, she stopped long enough to grab a bottle of gin off the bar, and waggled a finger at Bobbie. Bobbie followed her into the master bedroom, Cotyar close behind.

Once the door was closed and Cotyar had used his handheld security terminal to scan the room for bugs, Avasarala said, “Bobbie, start thinking of a way to either get control of this ship or get us off of it.”

“Forget that,” Bobbie said. “Let’s go grab that shuttle Mao’s leaving on right now. It’s within range of his station or he wouldn’t be taking it.”

To her surprise, Cotyar nodded. “I agree with the sergeant. If we plan to leave, the shuttle will be easier to commandeer and control against a hostile crew.”

Avasarala sat down on her bed with a long exhale that turned into a heavy sigh. “I can’t leave yet. It doesn’t work that way.”

“The fucking game!” Bobbie yelled.

“Yes,” Avasarala snapped. “Yes, the fucking game. I’ve been ordered by my superiors to make this trip. If I leave now, I’m out. They’ll be polite and call it a sudden illness or exhaustion, but the excuse they give me will also be the reason I’m not allowed to keep doing my job. I’ll be safe, and I’ll be powerless. As long as I pretend I’m doing what they asked me to, I can keep working. I’m still the assistant undersecretary of executive administration. I still have connections. Influence. If I run now, I lose them. If I lose them, these fuckers might as well shoot me.”

“But,” Bobbie said.

“But,” Avasarala repeated. “If I continue to be effective, they’ll find a way to cut me off. Unexplained comm failure, something. Something to keep me off the network. When that happens, I will demand that the captain reroute to the closest station for repairs. If I’m right, he won’t do it.”

“Ah,” Bobbie said.

“Oh,” Cotyar said a moment later.

“Yes,” Avasarala said. “When that happens, I will declare this an illegal seizure of my person, and you will get me this ship.”

 

 

Chapter Thirty-One: Prax

 

With every day that passed, the question came closer: What was the next step? It didn’t feel all that different from those first, terrible days on Ganymede, making lists as a way of telling himself what to do. Only now he wasn’t only looking for Mei. He was looking for Strickland. Or the mysterious woman in the video. Or whoever had built the secret lab. In that sense, he was much better off than he had been before.

On the other hand, he had been searching Ganymede. Now the field had expanded to include everywhere.

The lag time to Earth—or Luna, actually, since Persis-Strokes Security Consultants was based in orbit rather than down the planet’s gravity well—was a little over twenty minutes. It made actual conversation essentially impossible, so in practice, the hatchet-faced woman on his screen was making a series of promotional videos more and more specifically targeted to what Prax wanted to hear.

“We have an intelligence-sharing relationship with Pinkwater, which is presently the security company with the largest physical and operational presence in the outer planets,” she said. “We also have joint-action contracts with Al Abbiq and Star Helix. With those, we can take immediate action either directly or through our partners, on literally any station or planet in the system.”

Prax nodded to himself. That was exactly what he needed. Someone with eyes everywhere, with contacts everywhere. Someone who could help.

“I’m attaching a release,” the woman said. “We will need payment for the processing fee, but we won’t be charging your accounts for anything more than that until we’ve agreed on the scope of the investigation you’re willing to be liable for. Once we have that in hand, I will send you a detailed proposal with an itemized spreadsheet and we can decide the scope of work that works best for you.”

“Thank you,” Prax said. He pulled up the document, signed off, and returned it. It would be twenty minutes at the speed of light before it reached Luna. Twenty minutes back. Who knew how long in between?

It was a start. He could feel good about that, at least.

The ship was quiet in a way that felt like anticipation, but Prax didn’t know exactly what of. The arrival at Tycho Station, but beyond that, he wasn’t sure. Leaving his bunk behind, he went through the empty galley and up the ladder toward the ops center and then the pilot’s station. The small room was dim, most of the light coming from the control panels and the sweep of high-definition screens that filled 270 degrees of vision with starlight, the distant sun, and the approaching mass of Tycho Station, the oasis in the vast emptiness.

“Hey there, Doc,” Alex said from the pilot’s couch. “Come up to see the view?”

“If … I mean, if that’s all right.”

“Not a problem. I haven’t been running with a copilot since we got the Roci. Strap in right there. Just if somethin’ happens, don’t touch anything.”

“I won’t,” Prax promised as he scrambled into the acceleration couch. At first, the station seemed to grow slowly. The two counter-rotating rings were hardly larger than Prax’s thumb, the sphere they surrounded little more than a gum ball. Then, as they drew nearer, the fuzzy texture at the edge of the construction sphere began to resolve into massive waldoes and gantries reaching toward a strangely aerodynamic form. The ship under construction was still half undressed, ceramic and steel support beams open to the vacuum like bones. Tiny fireflies flickered inside and out: welders and sealant packs firing off too far away to see apart from the light.

“Is that built for atmosphere?”

“Nope. Kinda looks that way, though. That’s the Chesapeake. Or it will be, anyway. She’s designed for sustained high g. I think they’re talkin’ about running the poor bastard at something like eight g for a couple of months.”

“All the way where?” Prax asked, doing a little napkin-back math in his head. “It would have to be outside the orbit of … anything.”

“Yep, she’ll be going deep. They’re going after that Nauvoo.”

“The generation ship that was supposed to knock Eros into the sun?”

“That’s the one. They cut her engines when the plan went south, but she’s been cruisin’ on ever since. Wasn’t finished, so they can’t bring her around on remote. Instead, they’re buildin’ a retriever. Hope they manage too. The Nauvoo was an amazin’ piece of work. Of course, even if they get her back, it won’t keep the Mormons from suing Tycho into nonexistence if they can figure out how.”

“Why would that be hard?”

“OPA doesn’t recognize the courts on Earth and Mars, and they run the ones in the Belt. So it’s pretty much win in a court that doesn’t matter or lose in one that does.”

“Oh,” Prax said.

On the screens, Tycho Station grew larger and more detailed. Prax couldn’t tell what detail of it brought it into perspective, but between one heartbeat and the next, he understood the scope and size of the station before him and let out a little gasp. The construction sphere had to be half a kilometer across, like two complete farm domes stuck bottom to bottom. Slowly, the great industrial sphere grew until it filled the screens, starlight replaced by the glow from equipment guides and a glass-domed observation bubble. Steel-and-ceramic plates and scaffolds took the place of the blackness. There were the massive drives that could push the entire station, like a city in the sky, anywhere in the solar system. There were the complex swivel points, like the gimbals of a crash couch made by giants, that would reconfigure the station as a whole when thrust gravity took rotation’s place.

It took his breath away. The elegance and functionality of the structure lay out before him, as beautiful and simple and effective as a leaf or a root cluster. To have something so much like the fruits of evolution, but designed by human minds, was awe-inspiring. It was the pinnacle of what creativity meant, the impossible made real.

“That’s good work,” Prax said.

“Yup,” Alex said. And then on the shipwide channel: “We’ve arrived. Everyone strap in for docking. I’m going to manual.”

Prax half rose in his couch.

“Should I go to my quarters?”

“Where you are’s as good as anyplace. Just put the web on in case we bump against somethin’,” Alex said. And then, his voice changing to a stronger, more clipped cadence: “Tycho control, this is the Rocinante. Are we cleared for docking?”

Prax heard a distant voice speaking to Alex alone.

“Roger that,” Alex said. “We’re comin’ in.”

In the dramas and action films that Prax had watched back on Ganymede, piloting a ship had always looked like a fairly athletic thing. Sweating men dragging hard against the control bars. Watching Alex was nothing like it. He still had the two joysticks, but his motions were small, calm. A tap, and the gravity under Prax changed, his couch shifting under him by a few centimeters. Then another tap and another shift. The heads-up display showed a tunnel through the vacuum outlined in a blue and gold that swept up and to the right, ending against the side of the turning ring.

Prax looked at the mass of data being sent to Alex and said, “Why fly at all? Couldn’t the ship just use this data to do the docking itself?”

“Why fly?” Alex repeated with a laugh. “’Cuz it’s fun, Doc. Because it’s fun.”

The long bluish lights of the windows in Tycho’s observation dome were so clear Prax could see the people looking out at him. He could almost forget that the screens in the cockpit weren’t windows: The urge to look out and wave, to watch someone wave back, was profound.

Holden’s voice came over Alex’s line, the words unidentifiable and the tone perfectly clear.

“We’re looking fine, Cap,” Alex said. “Ten more minutes.”

The crash couch shifted to the side, the wide plane of the station curving down as Alex matched the rotation. To generate even a third of a g on a ring that wide would demand punishing inertial forces, but under Alex’s hand, ship and station drifted together slowly and gently. Before Prax had gotten married, he’d seen a dance performance based on neo-Taoist traditions. For the first hour, it had been utterly boring, and then after that, the small movements of arms and legs and torso, shifting together, bending, and falling away, had been entrancing. The Rocinante slid into place beside an extending airlock port with the same beauty Prax had seen in that dance, but made more powerful by the knowledge that instead of skin and muscles, this was tons of high-tensile steel and live fusion reactors.

The Rocinante eased into her berth with one last correction, one last shifting of the gimbaled couches. The final matching spin had been no more than any of the small corrections Alex had made on the way in. There was a disconcerting bang as the station’s docking hooks latched on to the ship.

“Tycho control,” Alex said. “This is the Rocinante confirming dock. We have seal on the airlock. We are reading the clamps in place. Can you confirm?”

A moment passed, and a mutter.

“Thank you too, Tycho,” Alex said. “It’s good to be back.”

Gravity in the ship had shifted subtly. Instead of thrust from the drive creating the illusion of weight, it now came from the spin of the ring they were clamped to. Prax felt like he was tilting slightly to the side whenever he stood up straight, and had to fight the urge to overcompensate by leaning the other way.

Holden was in the galley when Prax reached it, the coffee machine pouring black and hot, with just the slightest bend to the stream. Coriolis effect, a dimly remembered high school class reminded Prax. Amos and Naomi came in together. They were all together now, and Prax felt the time was right to thank them all for what they’d done for him. For Mei, who was probably dead. The naked pain on Holden’s face stopped him.

Naomi stood in front of him, a duffel bag over her shoulder.

“You’re heading out,” Holden said.

“I am.” Her voice was light, but it had meaning radiating from it like harmonic overtones. Prax blinked.

“All right, then,” Holden said.

For a few seconds, no one moved; then Naomi darted in, kissing Holden lightly on the cheek. The captain’s arms moved out to embrace her, but she’d already stepped away, marching out through the narrow hallway with the air of a woman on her way someplace. Holden took his coffee. Amos and Alex exchanged glances.

“Ah, Cap’n?” Alex asked. Compared to the voice of the man who’d just put a nuclear warship against a spinning metal wheel in the middle of interplanetary space, this voice was hesitant and concerned. “Are we lookin’ for a new XO?”

“We’re not looking for anything until I say so,” Holden said. Then, his voice quieter: “But, God, I hope not.”

“Yessir,” Alex said. “Me too.”

The four men stood for a long, awkward moment. Amos was the first to speak.

“You know, Cap,” he said, “the place I’ve got booked has room for two. If you want the spare bunk, it’s yours.”

“No,” Holden said. He didn’t look at them as he spoke, but reached out his hand and pressed his palm to the wall. “I’m staying on the Roci. I’ll be right here.”

“You sure?” Amos asked, and again it seemed to mean something more than Prax could understand.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Holden said.

“All right, then.”

Prax cleared his throat, and Amos took his elbow.

“What about you?” Amos said. “You got a place to bunk down?”

Prax’s prepared speech—I wanted to tell you all how much I appreciate …—ran into the question, derailing both thoughts.

“I … ah … I don’t, but—”

“Right, then. Get your stuff, and you can come with me.”

“Well, yes. Thank you. But first I wanted to tell you all—”

Amos put a solid hand on his shoulder.

“Maybe later,” the big man said. “Right now, how about you just come with me?”

Holden leaned against the wall now. His jaw was set hard, like that of a man about to scream or vomit or weep. His eyes were looking at the ship but seeing past it. Sorrow welled up in Prax as if he were looking into a mirror.

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

 

Amos’ rooms were, if anything, smaller than the bunks on the Rocinante: two small privacy areas, a common space less than half the size of the galley, and a bathroom with a fold-out sink and toilet in the shower stall. It would have induced claustrophobia if Amos had actually been there.

Instead, he’d seen Prax settled in, taken a quick shower, and headed out into the wide, luxurious passageways of the station. There were plants everywhere, but for the most part they seemed decorative. The curve of the decks was so slight Prax could almost imagine he was back on some unfamiliar part of Ganymede, that his hole was no more than a tube ride away. That Mei would be there, waiting for him. Prax let the outer door close, pulled out his hand terminal, and connected to the local network.

There was still no reply from Persis-Strokes, but it was probably too early to expect one. In the meantime, the problem was money. If he was going to fund this, he couldn’t do it alone.

Which meant Nicola.

Prax set up his terminal, turning the camera on himself. The image on the screen looked thin, wasted. The weeks had dried him out, and his time on the Rocinante hadn’t completely rebuilt him. He might never be rebuilt. The sunken cheeks on the screen might be who he was now. That was fine. He started recording.

“Hi, Nici,” he said. “I wanted you to know I’m safe. I got to Tycho Station, but I still don’t have Mei. I’m hiring a security consultant. I’m giving them everything I know. They seem like they’ll really be able to help. But it’s expensive. It may be very expensive. And she may already be dead.”

Prax took a moment to catch his breath.

“She may already be dead,” he said again. “But I have to try. I know you aren’t in a great financial position right now. I know you’ve got your new husband to think of. But if you have anything you can spare—not for me. I don’t want anything from you. Just Mei. For her. If you can give her anything, this is the last chance.”

He paused again, his mind warring between Thank you and It’s the least you can fucking do. In the end, he just shut off the recording and sent it.

The lag between Ceres and Tycho Station was fifteen minutes, given their relative positions. And even then, he didn’t know what the local schedule there was. He might be sending his message in the middle of the night or during dinnertime. She might not have anything to say to him.

It didn’t matter. He had to try. He could sleep if he knew he’d done everything he could to try.

He recorded and sent messages to his mother, to his old roommate from college who’d taken a position on Neptune Station, to his postdoctorate advisor. Each time, the story got a little easier to tell. The details started coming together, one leading into another. With them, he didn’t talk about the protomolecule. At best, it would have scared them. At worst, they’d have thought the loss had broken his mind.

When the last message was gone, he sat quietly. There was one other thing he thought he had to do now that he had full communication access. It wasn’t what he wanted.

He started the recording.

“Basia,” he said. “This is Praxidike. I wanted you to know that I know Katoa is dead. I saw the body. It didn’t … it didn’t look like he suffered. And I thought, if I was in your place, that wondering … wondering would be worse. I’m sorry. I’m just …”

He turned off the recording, sent it, and crawled onto the small bed. He’d expected it to be hard and uncomfortable, but the mattress was as cradling as crash couch gel, and he fell asleep easily and woke four hours later like someone had flipped a switch on the back of his head. Amos was still gone, even though it was station midnight. There was still no message from Persis-Strokes, so Prax recorded a polite inquiry—just to be sure the information hadn’t gotten lost in transit—then watched it and erased it. He took a long shower, washing his hair twice, shaved, and recorded a new inquiry, looking less like a raving lunatic.

Ten minutes after he sent it, a new-message alert chimed. Intellectually, he knew it couldn’t be a response. With lag, his message wouldn’t even be at Luna yet. When he pulled it up, it was Nicola. The heart-shaped face looked older than he remembered it. There was the first dusting of gray at her temples. But when she made that soft, sad smile, he was twenty again, sitting across from her in the grand park while bhangra throbbed and lasers traced living art on the domed ice above them. He remembered what it had been like to love her.

“I have your message,” she said. “I’m … I’m so sorry, Praxidike. I wish there was more I could do. Things aren’t so good here on Ceres. I will talk with Taban. He makes more than I do, and if he understands what’s happened, he might want to help too. For my sake.

“Take care of yourself, old man. You look tired.”

On the screen, Mei’s mother leaned forward and stopped the recording. An icon showed an authorized transfer code for eighty FusionTek Reál. Prax checked the exchange rates, converting the company scrip to UN dollars. It was almost a week’s salary. Not enough. Not near enough. But still, it had been a sacrifice for her.

He pulled the message back up, pausing it in the gap between two words. Nicola looked out at him from the terminal, her lips parted barely enough for him to see her pale teeth. Her eyes were sad and playful. He’d thought for so long that it was her soul and not just an accident of physiology that gave her that look of fettered joy. He’d been wrong.

As he sat, lost in history and imagination, a new message appeared. It was from Luna. Persis-Strokes. With a feeling somewhere between anxiety and hope, he went to the attached spreadsheet. At the first set of numbers, his heart sank.

Mei might be out there. She might be alive. Certainly Strickland and his people were there. They could be found. They could be caught. There was justice to be had.

He just couldn’t afford it.

 

 

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