James Corey - Nemesis Games

“How long would you need it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would it be hauling cargo?”

“No.”

The man’s eyes lost their focus for a moment. The glasses were an interface, then. Naomi crossed her arms.

One in a hundred , she thought, I show up with my own warship ready to carry people off Ceres. One in twenty, I know how to find someone who will. She wondered what the one-in-five plan was. What was the sure thing.

The man’s focus came back to her.

“I think we may be able to help,” he said.

Chapter Fifteen: Alex

The ride to the hospital was a thing out of a nightmare. As the transport sped through the corridors, the painkillers started to take effect. The combination of ache and sharpness in his body shifted into a deep and troubling sense of simply being wrong. Once, when they were near the emergency admitting entrance, time stuttered as his consciousness slipped away and back again. None of the medics paid him much attention.

They were all focused on Bobbie.

The big woman’s eyes were closed, and a pale plastic tube came out of her mouth, keeping her jaw open. From where he rode, Alex could make out only parts of her gurney’s readout, and he wasn’t sure how to interpret what he was seeing. The medics’ voices were clipped and tense. Words and phrases like attempting to reinflate and stabilizing and maintaining pressure pushed Alex toward the edge of panic. Bobbie’s body, what he could see of it, was limp. He told himself she wasn’t dead. If she were dead, they wouldn’t be trying to save her. He hoped that was true.

At the emergency ward, he found himself wheeled into an automated surgical bed not that different from the ones on the Rocinante . The scan probably took a minute and a half, but it seemed to go on forever. He kept turning to the side, looking for Bobbie, then remembering she was in a different room now. Even then he didn’t understand how much his injuries and painkillers had compromised his mind until the police came and he tried to explain what had happened.

“So how did the woman with the power armor fit into it?” Bobbie asked.

She was sitting up in her hospital bed. Her gown was thick, disposable paper with Bhamini Pal Memorial Hospital printed on it like a pattern, dark blue over light. Her hair was pulled back into a loose bun, and deep bruises darkened her left cheek and her knuckles. When she shifted, the movement was careful. It was the way Alex moved after he’d worked out too hard and felt a little sore. He hadn’t been shot twice – once through her left lung, once in her right leg – and he’d seriously considered taking a wheelchair to go between his room and hers.

“I meant you,” Alex said. “I was having trouble coming up with your name.”

Bobbie chuckled. “Yeah, they’re going to want to talk to you again. I think the version they got was a little muddled.”

“Do you think… Should we not be talking?”

“We’re not under arrest,” Bobbie said. “The only one of the other guys that’s still breathing lawyered up before he got here. I’m pretty sure they’re not going to be looking at us if they want to throw someone in jail.”

“What did you tell them?” Alex asked.

“The truth. That a bunch of thugs broke into my rooms, tied me up, and started taking turns between kicking the shit out of me and asking why I was meeting with Alex Kamal.”

Alex pressed his thumb against his upper lip until it ached a little. Bobbie’s smile carried a load of sympathy.

“I don’t know why that is,” he said. “I don’t have any enemies on Mars. That I know of.”

Bobbie shook her head and Alex noticed again that she was a remarkably attractive woman. He coughed and mentally filed the thought under horrifically inappropriate given the circumstances .

“My guess,” Bobbie said, “is that it was less about who you are than who you’re connected to.”

“Holden?”

“And Fred Johnson. And maybe they can even put the two of us together with Avasarala. She shipped on the Rocinante for a while.”

“For about a minute and a half, years ago.”

“I remember. I was there,” Bobbie said. “Still, one way or another, the most plausible scenario I’ve got is that they thought I was reporting something to you or you were reporting something to me. And, even better, the idea scared them.”

“Don’t mean to look a gift horse in the mouth, but that definition of even better has got some mighty long teeth,” Alex said. “Did you tell them about your investigation?”

“No, I’m not ready to do that.”

“But you think this was related.”

“Oh, hell yes. Don’t you?”

“It’s what I’m hoping for, actually,” Alex said with a sigh. Across the hallway, someone shouted words Alex couldn’t make out. A nurse stalked by, scowling. “So what are we goin’ to do about it?”

“Only thing we can do,” Bobbie said. “Keep digging.”

“Fair enough. So. What exactly are we looking at?”

Bobbie’s expression sharpened. The problem, she said, was ships. The Martian Navy was the newest, best set of ships in the solar system. Earth had more ships, but her Navy was aging, with tech in them that was either generations old or retrofitted, shoehorning more recent designs into older frames. Both fleets had taken heavy losses in the last few years. Whether you called Avasarala’s influence prompting or putting her on a mission, Bobbie had started looking, and what she’d found was interesting.

The seven big Donnager -class ships were easy to keep track of, but the fleet of corvettes that they carried, ships like the Rocinante – they were slippery. Bobbie had started by going back to review the battle data from Io, from outside the Ring, from the incident in the slow zone. Really, when it came to damage reports, there was an embarrassment of riches.

At first, the numbers had seemed to match up. Half a dozen ships lost here, a handful there, the transponder codes decommissioned. But as she looked more deeply, she started running into discrepancies.

The Tsuchi , a corvette assigned to the Bellaire , had been decommissioned and scrapped after Io. A year later, it appeared in a small-group action report near Europa. The supply ship Apalala had been retired from service, and then seven months later, picked up a shipment headed to Ganymede. A load of medical supplies lost to accident appeared briefly on a loading schedule bound for Ceres and then disappeared again. Weapons lost in the fighting around what was now Medina Station appeared in an audit at Hecate Base once and not again.

Someone, Bobbie reasoned, had gone back through the records and doctored the old reports, forging the deaths of ships and then erasing them from the later records, or trying to. She’d found half a dozen hiccups in the data, but any ships that had been successfully erased, she wouldn’t see. That meant someone had to be involved high enough up the naval chain of command that they had access to the files.

There was protocol, of course, that laid out who was supposed to have access to the records, but she’d been in the process of looking into how that actually played out in practice when Alex had dropped her a line and suggested dinner.

“If you’re up for it,” Bobbie said, “that’s what I’d want you to look at. Just who could have changed the information. Then I can start looking at them.”

“Keep going down the road you were already on,” Alex said.

“Only with maybe some friends in the Navy.”