James Corey - Nemesis Games

“Did you actually read my report?” Holden asked, not able to keep all the disbelief out of his voice.

“I’m not underestimating the dangers left on those worlds —”

“Forget what got left behind,” Holden said. He put down his half-empty coffee cup and stalked across the room to lean across Fred’s desk. The old man sat back with a frown. “Forget the robots and railroad systems that still work after being powered down for a billion years or so. The exploding reactors. Forget lethal slugs and microbes that crawl into your eyes and blind you.”

“How long is this list?”

Holden ignored him. “The thing you should be remembering is the magic bullet that stopped it all.”

“The artifact was a lucky find for you, given what was —”

“No, it wasn’t. It was the scariest fucking answer to Fermi’s paradox I can think of. Do you know why there aren’t any Indians in your Old West analogy? Because they’re already dead. The whatever-they-were that built all that got a head start and used their protomolecule gate builder to kill all the rest. And that’s not even the scary part. The really frightening part is that something else came along, shot the first guys in the back of the head, and left their corpses scattered across the galaxy. The thing we should be asking is, who fired the magic bullet? And are they going to be okay with us taking all of the victims’ stuff?”

Fred had given the crew two suites in the management housing level of Tycho Station’s habitation ring. Holden and Naomi shared one, while Alex and Amos lived in the other, though in practice that usually just meant they slept there. When the boys weren’t partaking of Tycho’s many entertainment options, they seemed to spend all their time in Holden and Naomi’s apartment.

When Holden came in, Naomi was sitting in the dining area scrolling through something complex on her hand terminal. She smiled at him without looking up. Alex was sitting on the couch in their living room. The wall screen was on, the graphics and talking heads of a newsfeed playing, but the sound was muted and the pilot’s head lay back and his eyes were closed. He snored quietly.

“Now they’re sleeping here too?” Holden asked, sitting down across the table from Naomi.

“Amos is picking up dinner. How did your thing go?”

“You want the bad news or the worse news?”

Naomi finally looked up from her work. She cocked her head to one side and narrowed her eyes at him. “Did you get us fired again?”

“Not this time. The Roci ’s pretty beat up. Sakai says —”

“Twenty-eight weeks,” Naomi said.

“Yeah. Have you bugged my terminal?”

“I’m looking at the spreadsheets,” she said, pointing at her screen. “Got them an hour ago. He’s— Sakai’s pretty good.”

Not as good as Sam hung in the air between them, unspoken. Naomi looked back down at the table, hiding behind her hair.

“So, yeah, that’s the bad news,” Holden said. “Half a year of downtime, and I’m still waiting for Fred to come out and say that he’s paying for it. Or some of it. Any of it, really.”

“We’re still pretty flush. The UN’s payment came through yesterday.”

Holden nodded the comment away. “But forgetting money for a minute, I still can’t get anyone to listen to me when it comes to the artifact.”

Naomi gave him a Belter shrug of her hands. “Because this time it would be different? They’ve never listened before.”

“Just once I’d like to be rewarded for my optimistic view of humanity.”

“I made coffee,” she said, pointing at the kitchen with a tilt of her head.

“Fred gave me some of his, which was good enough that I am ruined for lesser coffees from now on. Yet another way in which my meeting with him was unsatisfying.”

The door to the apartment slid open, and Amos stomped in carrying a pair of large sacks. A curry and onion scent filled the air around him.

“Chow,” he said, then dumped the bags on the table in front of Holden. “Hey, Cap’n, when do I get my ship back?”

“Is that food?” Alex said in a loud, groggy voice from the living room. Amos didn’t answer; he was already taking foam cartons out of the bags and setting them around the table. Holden had thought he was too annoyed to eat, but the spicy smell of Indian food changed his mind.

“Not for a long time,” Naomi said to Amos around a mouthful of bean curd. “We bent the mount.”

“Shit,” Amos said, sitting and grabbing a pair of chopsticks. “I leave you guys alone for a couple weeks and you fuck my girl up.”

“Alien superweapons were used,” Alex said, walking into the room, sleep-sweaty hair standing out from his skull in every direction. “The laws of physics were altered, mistakes were made.”

“Same shit, different day,” Amos replied and handed the pilot a carton of curried rice. “Turn the sound up. That looks like Ilus.”

Naomi turned up the sound on the video feed, and the voice of a newscaster filled the apartment. “— partial power restored, but sources on the ground say this setback will —”

“Is that real chicken?” Alex asked, grabbing at one of the cartons. “Splurgin’ a bit, are we?”

“Shush,” Amos said. “They’re talking about the colony.”

Alex rolled his eyes, but said nothing as he piled spicy strips of chicken on his plate. “— in other news, a draft report detailing the investigation into last year’s attack on the Callisto shipyards was leaked this week. While the text is not finalized, the early reports suggest that a splinter faction of the Outer Planets Alliance was involved, and places blame for the high casualty —”

Amos shut off the sound with an angry stab at the table’s controls. “Shit, wanted to hear more about what’s going on with Ilus, not some dumbass OPA cowboys getting themselves blown up.”

“I wonder if Fred knows who was behind that,” Holden said. “The OPA hardliners are having trouble getting over their ‘us against the solar system’ theology.”

“What did they want there anyway?” Alex said. “Callisto didn’t have any of the heavy munitions. No nukes. Nothing worth a raid like that.”

“Oh, now we’re expecting this shit to make sense?” Amos asked. “Gimme that naan.”

Holden sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I know it makes me a naïve idiot, but after Ilus I actually thought we might get a moment’s peace. No one needing to blow anyone else up.”

“This is what that looks like,” Naomi said, then stifled a burp and put her chopsticks down. “Earth and Mars are in a prickly detente, the legitimate wing of the OPA is governing instead of fighting. The colonists on Ilus are working with the UN instead of everyone shooting each other. This is as good as it gets. Can’t expect everyone to be on the same page. We’re still humans after all. Some percentage of us are always going to be assholes.”

“Truer words were never spoken, boss,” Amos said.

They finished eating and sat in companionable silence for several minutes. Amos pulled beers out of the small refrigerator and handed them around. Alex picked his teeth with his pinky fingernail. Naomi went back to her repair projections.

“So,” she said after a few minutes poring over the numbers, “the good news is that even if the UN and the OPA decide that we’re responsible for our own repair bills, we’ll be able to cover them with just what we have in the ship’s emergency fund.”

“Lots of work flyin’ colonists out through the rings,” Alex said. “When we’re flyin’ again.”

“Yeah, because we can stuff so much compost in our tiny cargo hold,” Amos said with a snort. “Plus, broke-as-hell-and-desperate is maybe not the customer base we should be chasing.”