James Corey - Nemesis Games

“Are you sure it’s the right crate?” Holden asked.

“I am,” Fred said. “But let’s check anyway.”

For the next hour, the increasingly confused mech driver hauled out crates from the pallet and Fred and Holden opened them. When the motes of protein dust in the air set off the particulate warning alarm twice, Fred called a stop.

“She’s not here,” he said.

“I saw that. So that’s kind of weird, right?”

“It is.”

Fred rubbed his eyes with his finger and thumb. He looked old. Tired. When he gathered himself, the sense of power and authority was still there. “Either they switched the crates somewhere between her quarters and here or they doctored the feed.”

“Both of those would be bad.”

Fred looked over at the mech driver as she piled the opened crates into a stack to ship back for reprocessing. When he spoke, his voice was low enough it would only carry to Holden. “Both of which would mean they had a high-level working knowledge of the security system, but not enough access to wipe the records completely.”

“That narrows it down?”

“A little, maybe. Could be a UN black ops team. They could have done something like this. Or Mars.”

“But you don’t think that’s it, do you?”

Fred chewed his lip. He pulled up his hand terminal, typed in a series of codes, every tap sharp and percussive. An alert Klaxon sounded and gold-and-green alert icons appeared on every display from Holden’s hand terminal to the door controls to the mech status panel. Fred pushed his fists into his pockets with a satisfied grunt.

“Did you just lock down the station ?” Holden said.

“I did,” Fred said. “And I’m keeping it locked down until I’ve got some answers. And Monica Stuart back.”

“Good,” Holden said. “Extreme, but good.”

“I may be a little pissed off.”

The contents of Monica’s quarters were laid out on the gray-green ceramic counters of the security lab. No blood, no images, and the background soup of DNA from thousands of people who’d been in contact with the objects in the last week, usually with too small a sample to identify an individual. This was what was left. A clothing bag, its zipper ripped and hanging open in a mindless smile. A shirt Holden remembered her wearing when he’d seen her a few days before. Her crippled hand terminal with its shattered display. All the things that hadn’t belonged to the station when it rented her the space. It seemed small, like there wasn’t enough there. He realized it was just that he was thinking of it as the collection of a lifetime. Probably she had other possessions somewhere else, but maybe she didn’t. If they didn’t find her alive, maybe this was all she’d have to leave behind.

“You cannot be fucking serious,” Sakai said for what seemed like the third or fourth time. The chief engineer’s face was red, his jaw set. He’d arrived at the security station a few minutes after Fred and Holden, and Holden was a little surprised Fred hadn’t had him thrown out yet. “I have eight ships inbound within the next week. What am I supposed to do? Tell them to match orbit and float until we decide whether we’ll let them in?”

“Seems like a good start,” Fred said.

“We have supplies due to ship on half a dozen contracts.”

“I’m aware of that, Mister Sakai.” Fred’s voice was no louder; there was no anger in it. The cool politeness made the hair on the back of Holden’s neck rise. Sakai seemed to feel it too. It didn’t stop him, but his voice went from accusatory to almost wheedling.

“I’ve got shipments on two dozen jobs due to go out . There are a lot of people counting on us.”

For a moment, Fred’s shoulders seemed to sag, but his voice was just as strong. “I’m aware of that. We’ll open up for business again as soon as we can.”

Sakai wavered, on the edge of saying something more. Instead, he made a short, impatient sigh and walked back out as the head of security came in. She was a thin-faced woman Fred called Drummer, but Holden didn’t know if that was her first name, her last, or just something she went by.

“How’s it going?” Fred asked.

“Nothing we can’t handle,” she said. Her voice had a crisp accent that Holden couldn’t place. She glanced at him, nodded curtly, and turned back to Fred. “Do we have any information we can give on how long we expect the lockdown to be in effect?”

“Tell them the interruption of service will be as brief as possible.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Drummer said, then turned away.

“Drummer. Close the door when you go, eh?”

Her eyes flickered, cut back to Holden, then away again. She didn’t say anything, but she pulled the door closed behind her when she left. Fred gave Holden a mirthless, tired smile.

“Sakai’s right. I just shut down the equivalent of a major port city because of one missing woman. Every hour I keep it like this, Tycho’s losing thousands of credits in a dozen different scrips.”

“So we’ll have to find her quickly.”

“If they haven’t already fed her into the recyclers and broken her down to water and a few active molecules,” Fred said. And then a moment later, “I have the sensor arrays sweeping the local area. If she’s been spaced, we’ll know it soon.”

“Thank you,” Holden said, leaning against the counter. “I know I don’t say it often, but I do appreciate this.”

Fred nodded to the door. “You see her? Drummer?”

“Sure.”

“I’ve been working with her directly for three years. Knew who she was for ten before that.”

“All right,” Holden said.

“If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have told you I trusted her with my life.”

“Now?”

“Now there is exactly one person on this station who I’m certain isn’t going to shoot me in the back of the head if I keep pressing on this, and that’s you,” Fred said.

“That’s got to be uncomfortable.”

“It really is. So what I mean to say, James, is that while I am glad that you appreciate all I’m doing for you, I’m also taking you on right now as my personal bodyguard. In return, I’ll try to keep anyone from shooting you.”

Holden nodded slowly. Something in the back of his brain was shifting, like a thought that wasn’t quite formed. A wave of vertigo washed over him like he was looking over a cliff. “Two of us against a deep OPA conspiracy.”

“Until I have evidence to the contrary, yes.”

“That really is an uncomfortable position to be in, isn’t it?”

“Not what I would have picked, no,” Fred said. “But someone knows how to circumvent my security systems, and whatever your reporter friend was doing was enough to spook them into action direct enough to tip their hand.”

“The missing ships,” Holden said. “There were a couple of people I mentioned it to.”

“That’s not something you do.”

“In retrospect, I wish I’d played it a little closer to the vest, but —”

“Not that,” Fred said. “When you’ve infiltrated the enemy security structures, you don’t do anything that shows that you’ve managed it. It’s basic information warfare. As long as the enemy doesn’t know they’re compromised, you can keep gathering intelligence. That’s not something you give up unless the stakes are unimaginably high or…”

“Or?”

“Or the enemy you’ve compromised isn’t going to be around very long anyway. I don’t know if those missing ships spooked someone into making a stupid mistake, or if my position on Tycho is so precarious that it doesn’t matter anymore whether I know.”