James Corey - Nemesis Games

Legally, any spaceship on the move had to register a flight plan and run an active transponder. That made ships traveling from place to place relatively easy to track. And with a transponder pinging away so you knew where to point your telescope, an active drive was visible from across the solar system. But ships would power down for repairs in dock, so transponders disappeared off the grid all the time. Ships were decommissioned, so a transponder might go black and never return for entirely legitimate reasons. Newly commissioned ships showed up with brand-new names and ships that were sold registered name changes. Some were cobbled together from scrap, some were built in shipyards, some were salvaged. And all of it was happening scattered across roughly one hundred quintillion square kilometers of space, give or take a few quadrillion. And that was only if you ignored that space had a third dimension.

So, seventeen ships had vanished going through ring gates, and if Holden was right, they were probably back in the home system with new names. In theory, there was a path to the information he wanted, but unless he was interested in spending several hundred lifetimes sifting through the raw data, he’d need help.

Specifically, he needed a computer plowing through a number of different massive databases on new ships, decommissioned ships, sold ships, repaired ships, and lost ships, looking for anything that didn’t add up. Even with a good computer and very smart data sorting software, it was what a programmer would call a nontrivial task.

And, unfortunately, the best software engineer that Holden knew had flown off to parts unknown and wasn’t answering his messages. He didn’t have the skills to do it himself, the time to learn them, or a crew to do it for him. What he had, was money.

After his shift working with Sakai’s people on the Roci refit, Holden called up Fred yet again. “Fred, hey, I have a software problem. Can I hire some of your programming wonks for a short-term gig?”

“Your ship need an update?” Fred asked. “Or is this something that will piss me off?”

“Something that’ll piss you off. So, who’s available for custom script writing?”

Paula Gutierrez had the elongated body and slightly oversized head of a low-g childhood. Her smile was sharp and professional. She was a freelance software engineer who’d taken a six-month consulting job on Tycho five years before and then just stayed on the station picking up the odd bit of piecework. On Holden’s hand terminal, her wide face filled the screen with dark bushy eyebrows and blindingly white teeth.

“So, that’s what I’m looking for, and I need it as fast as possible,” Holden said after laying out his requirements. “Doable?”

“Very,” Paula said. “Tycho keeps all the traffic databases mirrored local, so don’t even have to sweat the lag. Gonna cost you for speed, though.”

“Cost me what?”

“Fifteen hundred an hour, ten hours minimum. Know up front I don’t argue about billing and I don’t give discounts.”

“That,” Holden said, “sounds like a lot.”

“That’s because I’ve got you over a barrel and I’m gouging the shit out of you.”

“Okay, how soon will I start seeing output?”

Paula shrugged with her eyebrows, then looked down at something off camera. “Call it twenty hours from now before you start getting data sent to you. Want me to collate or stream it as it comes in?”

“Send it straight to me, please. Going to ask me why I want it?”

Paula laughed. “I never do.”

Monica was renting a small suite of rooms on the visitors’ level of Tycho. They were expensive, and to Holden’s surprise, not any nicer than the company quarters Fred had set aside for his crew. Not many companies treated their own as well as they treated guests. But courtesy dictated that he act like the rooms were something special to make Monica feel good about the investment, so he made impressed noises at the open spaces and quality of the furnishings.

“So what did Fred say?” Monica asked once he took a seat at her dining table and sipped at the tea she’d made.

“He doesn’t think there’s much to go on, honestly.”

“I mean about using the protomolecule sample to try and get in touch with Detective Miller.”

“Yeah,” Holden replied, putting the tea back on the table and pushing it away. The first sip had left his tongue feeling scalded and rough. “I mentioned that but only so he’d know he had a leak somewhere. That was always a nonstarter as an investigation tool. No one’s letting that shit out of its bottle anytime soon.”

“Then I’m wasting my time here, is what you’re saying.”

“No,” Holden said. “Not at all. I think the missing ship thing is legitimate. I just don’t think it’s an alien conspiracy. It’s much more likely to be associated with this hard-line OPA wing. I’m looking into it, if that’s a story you want to pursue.”

Monica spun her hand terminal around on the tabletop, already impatient with him for changing the subject. “I made my name with the story on the Behemoth . Aliens and wormhole gates and a protomolecule ghost that only talked to the most famous person in the solar system. I don’t think my follow-up to that can be Humans Still Shitty to Each Other . Lacks panache.”

“So, is this about finding those missing ships? Or is it about finding another batch of alien weirdness to make you more famous?”

“That sounded awfully judgmental for a guy who’s managed to shoehorn himself into every major news piece for the last six years.”

“Ouch,” Holden said, then let the uncomfortable silence stretch a while. Monica kept spinning her hand terminal but not looking him in the eye.

“Sorry,” she finally said.

“It’s okay. Look, I’m going through this weird empty-nest thing, and it’s left me kind of restless. And because I’m looking to latch onto something, I’m going to go find those missing ships. Probably won’t be an alien conspiracy, but I’m going to do it anyway. Want to help?”

“Not sure what that looks like, to be honest. I was hoping to just ask the omniscient aliens. Do you know how big space is?”

“I’ve given it some thought,” Holden said. “I have this plan. I talked to Fred about the OPA angle, but he doesn’t like that idea so he’s rejecting it out of hand. Still, that got me thinking. The OPA isn’t going to throw a bunch of ships away. Belters just don’t think that way. They recycle everything.”

“So?”

“So how do you find pirated ships? Chief Engineer Sakai suggested looking for the new ships that turn up rather than hunting the missing ones.”

“ Sakai suggested…”

“He’s a guy I work with on the Roci refits. But anyway, I thought that sounded like a great idea so I hired a local data wonk to write a database mining script to track all the new ship names that show up on the registries and try to find an origin point.”

“A data wonk.”

“Freelance coder. Whatever the name is for that kind of work, yeah, and anytime now I’ll start getting a stream of data that includes all the mysteriously appearing ships. Our missing seventeen should be a subset of that. At least it’ll be a smaller number of ships than, you know, all of them.”

Monica stood up and walked away several steps, not speaking. Holden blew on his tea and waited. When she finally turned back around, the look on her face was carefully controlled incredulity. “You’ve involved Fred Johnson, some engineer here on Tycho, and a fucking hacker in this? Are you that stupid?”