James Corey - Nemesis Games

The main room was wider than the ops deck back on the Roci , and done in shades of terra-cotta and gray that shouldn’t have worked together, but did. The dining table didn’t seat more than four, and there were only two chairs beside it. Through an archway across from the front door, a wall monitor was set to a slowly shifting spray of colors, like Monet’s water lilies animated. Where most places would have had a couch, a resistance-training machine dominated the space, a rack of chrome free weights beside it. A spiral staircase led up and down in the den’s corner, bamboo laminate steps glowing warmly in the light.

“Fancy digs,” Alex had said.

Bobbie’s glance at her own rooms seemed almost apologetic. “It’s more than I need. A lot more than I need. But I thought I’d like the space. Room to stretch out.”

“You thought you would?”

She shrugged. “It’s more than I need.”

She put on a brown leather jacket that looked professional and minimized the breadth of her shoulders, then led him to a fish shack with shredded trout in black sauce that had been some of the best he’d ever had. The beer was a local brew, served cold. Over the course of two hours, the sting of Talissa’s voice and his feeling of self-loathing lost their edges, if they didn’t quite vanish. Bobbie told stories about working veterans’ outreach. A woman who’d come in to get psychiatric help for her son who wouldn’t stop playing console games since he’d finished his deployment. Bobbie had made contact with the boy’s first drill sergeant, and now the kid had a job at the shipyards. Or the time a man came in claiming that the sex toy lodged in his colon was service related. When Bobbie laughed, Alex laughed with her.

Slowly, he’d started taking his turn too. What it had been like on the far side of the Ring. Watching Ilus or New Terra or whatever the hell they wound up calling it as it went through its paroxysms. What it had been like shipping back with a prisoner, which led into the first time they’d shipped a prisoner – Clarissa Mao, daughter of Jules-Pierre and sister to the protomolecule’s patient zero, that one had been – and how Holden and Amos and Naomi were all doing these days.

That had been when the ache hit. The homesickness for his crew and their ship. He enjoyed Bobbie’s wit and the easy physicality of her company, but what he’d really wanted – then and in the days since – was to be back on the Rocinante . Which was why the end of their conversation had been so awkward for him.

“So, Alex,” Bobbie said, her attempt to make the words as casual and friendly as everything that had gone before flagging them at once, “are you still in touch with anyone over at the naval yard?”

“I know a few guys still serving at Hecate, sure.”

“So I was wondering if I could get you to do a little favor for me.”

“Sure, of course,” Alex said. And then a fraction of a second later, “What is it?”

“I’ve got a kind of hobby thing going on,” she said, looking pained. “It’s… unofficial.”

“Is it for Avasarala?”

“Sort of. The last time she was through, we had dinner, and some of the things she said got me thinking. With the new worlds opening up, there’s a lot of change going on. Strategies shifting. Like that. And one of the big resources Mars has – one of the things that there’s going to be a market for – is the Navy.”

“I don’t understand,” Alex said, leaning back in his chair. “You mean like mercenary work?”

“I mean like things going missing. Black market. We’ve been through a couple pretty major wars in the last few years. A lot of ships got scrapped. Some of them it seems like we just lost track of. And the Navy’s stretched pretty thin. I don’t know how much energy they’re putting into tracking things right now. You know there was an attack on the Callisto shipyards?”

“Saw something about that, yeah.”

“So that’s an example, right? Here’s a big incident, and the first response is all about identifying who was behind it and rebuilding the defenses.”

“Sure,” Alex said. “You’d want to do that, right?”

“So figuring out exactly what was lost in the attack is on someone’s to-do list, but it’s not the top. And with all the shit going on, it may never get to the top. And everyone kind of knows that, even if they aren’t saying it.”

Alex drank, put down the bottle, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “So if there’s a profiteer on the base, they could take the opportunity to lift some equipment that survived, sell it on the black market, and call it lost.”

“Exactly. I mean to some degree, that’s always happening, but right now, with things a little chaotic and getting weirder all the time?”

“And with Mars losing a lot of its people to colony ships.”

“Yeah, that too,” Bobbie said. Her expression was hard. Alex sat forward, his elbows on the table. The smell of trout and black sauce still hung in the air, though the plates were gone by then. On the screen at the front of the restaurant, a young woman in a parody of business wear danced to a computer-generated pop tune. Alex hadn’t been able to make out the language; at a certain speed every language sounded equally meaningless.

“You’re telling me that you’re investigating the sources of black market military equipment flowing off Mars.”

“Weapons,” Bobbie said. “Medical supplies. Ammunition. Power suits. Even ships.”

“And you’re doing it on your own, for fun, because of something Chrisjen Avasarala said to you.”

“I’m kind of working for her.”

Alex laughed. “I’m almost afraid to point this out, but you started off saying you needed a favor. You haven’t told me what the favor is.”

“A lot of the guys on Hecate won’t talk to me. I’m a marine, they’re Navy. There’s that whole thing. But you know them, and even if you don’t, you’re one of them in a way I’m not going to manage this lifetime. I was wondering, as a favor, if you could help me dig a little.”

Alex had nodded at the time, but what he’d said was “Let me think about it.”

And now, because it was Bobbie and because he needed something in his life to actually have a moment of real closure, he was going to see her one last time to tell her the answer was no. He had a ship to get back to. If there was something he could do for her from there, he’d be pleased to lend a hand. His first priority now was getting off Mars and not coming back.

He reached the end of her corridor. The iron lanterns were glowing, creating the illusion of a street back on Earth centuries before. The echo of a place that neither he nor Bobbie had ever been, and still it was pleasant and comforting. He walked slowly, listening to the almost-silent chucking of the recyclers as if, just behind them, he could catch the murmur of the flowing Thames.

Somewhere nearby a man shouted once and briefly. It was Innis Shallow after all. Alex walked a little faster. At Bobbie’s door, he paused.

It was closed, but not solidly. A black smudge, perfectly round and dented into the flesh of the panel, marked it just where the latch met the frame. A thin line of light at the door’s edge showed where the frame had bent, the ceramic shattering. The man’s voice came again, a low mutter rising to a final, powerful snap. It was coming from inside Bobbie’s rooms.

Alex’s heart beat triple time as he pulled out his hand terminal and tapped quickly, quietly to the local system’s emergency services link. He thumbed in an alert request and a confirmation, but didn’t fill in the details screen. There wasn’t time for it. He stood before the door, his hands in fists, wishing as hard as he’d ever wished anything that Amos was there too.