James Corey - Nemesis Games

“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 riddles,” 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.”