James Corey - Nemesis Games

He started to record a response, but the restaurant was too open and too public for the things he wanted to say, so he promised himself he’d get to it when he was back in his quarters. He finished as much of the curry as he could stomach and the restaurant light slowly shifted from yellow to gold, the colors of a false sunset on a planet many of the people there had never seen except on screens. He paid the check and the waiter came, offering a variety of after-dinner desserts or drinks. The man’s gaze lingered long enough that, while it was all within the bounds of politeness, it was pretty clear that Holden could have asked for some other things too.

Holden’s mind shifted on most of the questions. More food, more drink, more sleep, more sex. Any sex. He was aware of a deep and oceanic cavern of want in his belly. Something that was like hunger or thirst, exhaustion or lust, but that wouldn’t be satisfied. He didn’t have words for it, except that it left him quick to anger and despair. Lingering behind it all, the fear that he wouldn’t ever have his crew back on his ship made him feel gut-punched.

And then the word for it came. He was homesick , and the Rocinante , wonderful as she was, wasn’t home unless Alex and Amos and Naomi were in her. He wondered how long the feeling would last if they never came back. How long he’d wait for them, even once he knew they wouldn’t return. The waiter smiled gently down at him.

“Nothing,” Holden said. “Thanks.”

He walked out to the main corridor, mentally rehearsing what he’d say to Alex and how he’d say it. Anything he said was going to be examined by the Martian communications service, so he didn’t want to put anything in it that was open to misinterpretation. The problem with that being that he always knew what he meant by things, and didn’t see the other readings until someone made them. Maybe he could just make a few jokes and say that he was ready to have everyone back together.

When his hand terminal buzzed a connection request, he accepted it, his mind primed to expect Alex even though light delay made that impossible. Drummer scowled out at him from the screen. “Mister Holden, I was wondering if you could stop by the auxiliary security office.”

“I guess,” Holden said, suddenly wary. He still half expected Drummer to turn out to be playing some angle of her own. “Is it something I should know about now?”

A stream of cursing came from the background, growing louder. Drummer stepped aside and Fred lurched into the screen. “If we were talking about it on the network, you wouldn’t be coming in here.”

“Right,” Holden said. “On my way.”

In the security office, Fred was pacing, his hands clasped behind his back, when Holden arrived. He nodded sharply by way of greeting. Drummer, at her seat, was a model of the crisp professionalism designed to offer no reason for the boss to yell at you. That was fine. Holden didn’t mind being the one who got yelled at.

“What’s the matter?”

“Medina went dark,” Fred said. “She was supposed to report in this morning, but with everything being at loose ends, I didn’t worry. She’s missed two opportunities since then. And… Drummer? Show him.”

The security chief pulled up a schematic of the solar system. At scale, even Jupiter and the sun were hardly more than a bright pixel. Thousands of dots showed the traffic in-system. Ships and bases, satellites and probes and navigation buoys. All of humanity in a nutshell. With a motion and a syllable, most of the clutter vanished. In its place, a couple dozen green dots with the word UNDETERMINED where the identification codes should be made a rough cloud. Someone’s statistics run with a small but significant correlation.

“As soon as the station went dark,” Drummer said, “we saw these. Twenty-five new plumes. All of them have drive signatures that match Martian military ships, and all of them are under heavy burn for the Ring.”

“Heavy burn?”

“Eight to ten g to start, curving down, which means they’re running at the limit of their drives.”

Holden whistled. Fred stopped in his pacing, his expression placid in a way that spoke volumes about rage. “Those are my people on Medina. If the station has been compromised, or if these new ships are on their way to do something violent there, it will pose a significant obstacle to my participation with the new direction within the OPA.”

“Meaning fuck that noise?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a long way out to Medina,” Holden said. “Even at those burns, it’ll take them a while. But I don’t think we could beat them there.”

“We couldn’t do anything if we did. If I took all the ships at my disposal, one Martian frigate could still rain hell on them. And even the Rocinante would be badly outgunned.”

“Have to wonder where they got Martian military ships,” Holden said.

“I’ll be sure to ask Dawes about that as soon as I’ve told him what I think of his good faith prisoner exchange. How long before the Rocinante ’s ready to fly?”

“Put a rush on it, we could be out of here in five days.”

“Mister Drummer, please put all available teams on finishing the repairs and security audit for the Rocinante .”

“Yes, sir,” Drummer said, and shifted her screen to show the work schedules for the construction drum. Fred looked down at his feet and then back up.

“I’m going to be busy the next few days putting Tycho in order for Drummer. I’d like you to oversee the crews on the Roci .”

“Wasn’t going to do anything else.”

“Fair enough,” Fred said. And then, almost wistfully, “It will be good to see Luna again.”

Holden tried to wait until he got back to his quarters, but lost patience when he reached the lift. He opened Alex’s message and set up the camera to record his reply.

“Hey, Alex. So, funny thing. Looks like I’m going to be catching up with you sooner than we’d thought…”

Chapter Twenty-nine: Naomi

She’d known to expect it. Like falling back into a bad habit, the dark thoughts came: which conduits had power lines in them with enough voltage to stop a heart, which rooms were small enough to seal and evacuate, the ways the medical bays could be tricked into administering an overdose. And the airlocks. Always the airlocks. The ideas weren’t compulsions, not yet. They were just her brain noticing things that interested her. The worst would come later. If she let it.

So instead, she distracted herself. Not with the newsfeeds that played constantly, everywhere. Those only made her feel more helpless. Not with the conversations with her old friends. At best, those left her feeling like she was lying. At worst, like she was becoming an earlier version of herself for whom the dark thoughts were more natural. What she did have was work. It was all simple tasks like checking inventories and swapping air filters, and always under the watchful eyes of a minder. When she did talk, it was polite and superfluous; the kind of banter anyone crewing the same ship would make. It gave the rest of the crew the illusion that she was one of them in a way that sulking in her bunk wouldn’t have. If she had any hope at all, it came from finding a way to leverage her weird non-status with the group. And with Marco.

At first, she’d tried distracting herself by thinking of her real crew. Alex and Amos. Jim. Even her best memories of them were riddled with guilt and pain now, so instead she filled her mind with technical concerns. In the mess, while the others cheered at the images of devastation, she speculated about the reactor’s output, starting with the size of the galley, and then guessing at the requirements of the air and water recycling systems, and knowing the rough percentage that the Roci put into them. During her sleep shift, as she lay restless in her crash couch, the steady one-third-g burn pressing her into the gel like a hand on her chest, she ran over the power grid from the Roci , mapping how the logic of her ship would apply to this one. She thought of it as a meditation because it was too dangerous to admit – even to herself – that she was planning.