James Corey - Nemesis Games

And still, small things came together. A toolbox in the machine shop had a bent hasp and, given a few minutes, could be forced open. The Allen wrenches inside would open the access panel on the lift wall between the crew quarters and the airlock, which was where the secondary diagnostic handset for the comm array was stored. With a few uninterrupted minutes, someone could probably broadcast a message. A short one. If there was anything to say, or anyone to say it to.

She had half a dozen schemes like it. A path to sneak between the hulls and take control of a PDC. A way to use a stolen hand terminal to make copies of the engineering software. How to force-cycle an airlock by spoofing the emergency codes from the medical bay. Most of them were fantasies, possible in theory but nothing she had ever had reason to try. A few were fairly solid. And all of them were defeated by a simple, inescapable fact: the first layer of any security was always physical. Even if she’d found a way to take control of the whole ship using a magnet and a length of Velcro, it wouldn’t matter, because Cyn or Aaman or Bastien would put a bullet through her neck before she could manage it.

So she called it meditation and kept the darkness at bay. And sometimes – by being quiet and not making waves and keeping her mind and senses sharp – she heard something she wasn’t supposed to hear.

Karal, her minder that shift, was talking up a woman called Sárta while Naomi scraped the crew decking nearby. Truth was the ship was new enough it didn’t need it, but it was work. Wings, who’d first hunted her back on Ceres, came out from his quarters in a Martian naval uniform. Naomi looked up from under her hair as Wings saw Karal and Sárta standing together. The flicker of jealousy that passed over him had been the same since humans came down from the trees.

“Hey, y’all,” Wings said in a fake drawl. “Víse mé! Bin Marteño, sa sa? Howdy, howdy, howdy!”

Karal chuckled and Sárta looked annoyed. Wings stepped through the narrow hall with an affected bowlegged gait. Naomi shifted aside to give him room.

“You got nothing better to do than play dress up?” Sárta asked.

“Don’t wait underwater,” Karal said. “Heard we’re taking prisoners first. Liano, he ran whispers to Ceres. Tightbeam. Hamechie about the prisoners.”

“Not how I heard it,” Wings said, too quickly and more to Sárta than Karal. “I heard it’s only one. Sakai. And even that…” He shrugged.

“Even that?” Sárta said, and mimicked the shrug. Wings blushed in anger.

“Everyone knows how it is,” Wings said. “Sometimes they tell dead men they’ll live. Karal, you were there. Andrew and Chuchu? All about how help’s coming and then so sorry, so sad?”

“Esa died soldiers,” Karal said, but the point hit home. It was in his hands and the corners of his mouth. And then, like he realized his mistake, he looked over to Naomi. She kept her expression blank and bored, her attention on the seam in the deck and the thin plastic spatula she was dragging through it. The cascade of implications couldn’t reach her face.

Sakai had been the name of the new chief engineer on Tycho, and if this was the same man, he’d been one of Marco’s. And he’d been caught, or they wouldn’t have called him a prisoner. She blew the hair up out of her eyes, shifted over to a new seam and started again.

“Back to work, yeah?” Karal said.

Wings grunted his derision, but went back to his quarters to do as he’d been told. Karal and Sárta went back to flirting, but the moment was gone, and pretty soon it was only Karal and Naomi again, passing time.

While she worked, pressing the plastic into the seams, scraping out whatever had gathered there, doing it again, she tried to fit the new information into the larger scheme of things. Marco had hoped she would bring the Rocinante to Ceres. But Sakai had known that the ship needed repair, and must have passed that information up to leadership.

She’d thought that Marco had wanted her ship because of who and what she was. And maybe that was part of it. Or maybe what he’d really wanted was private access to a ship that would be expected and welcome at Tycho Station. For what, she didn’t know. The way he nested plans inside his plans, he might have had half a dozen uses for the Roci and for her. And more, there was a question about whether Sakai was in danger. Were they afraid Fred would execute him? Maybe. Maybe something else.

Either way, she knew more now than she’d known before, and, like the bent hasp on the toolbox, it gave her options she hadn’t had. She wondered what Jim or Amos or Alex would have done in her place, how they would have taken this one piece of information and used it. An academic question, really, because she knew what Naomi Nagata would do, and it wasn’t something any of them could have done.

When the deck was clean, she dropped the spatula into the recycler, stood, and stretched. The thrust gravity made her knees and spine ache, and she wished that wherever they were going, they’d be in a little less of a hurry to get there. It didn’t matter.

“Grabbing a shower, me,” she said. “Tell him I want to talk.”

“Him who?” Karal said.

Naomi hoisted an eyebrow. “Tell him the mother of his son wants to talk.”

“You’ve put him in the field?” Naomi said. “Is that where we are? Child soldiers?”

Marco’s smile looked almost sorrowful. “You think he’s a child?”

The exercise machines were empty apart from him. On the float, everyone in the crew would have been spending hours in the resistance gel or strapped into one of the mechs. On the burn, most of the crew were getting more than enough from their own weight. But Marco was there in a sheer exercise gown, straps wrapped around his hands, pulling down on wide bands that fought against him. The muscles in his back rippled with every stroke, and Naomi was certain he was aware of it. She had known many strong people in her life. She could tell the difference between the muscles that grew from work and the kind that came from vanity.

“I think he’s crowing about how he’s responsible for the rock fall on Earth,” she said. “Like it’s something to be proud of.”

“It is. It’s more than you or I could have done at his age. Filip’s smart and he’s a leader. Give him another twenty years, he could run the solar system. Maybe more.”

Naomi walked over and turned off the exercise sequence. The wide bands in Marco’s hands went slack with a barely audible hiss. “I wasn’t done,” he said.

“Tell me that isn’t why you brought me here,” she said. “Tell me that you didn’t abduct me in order to show me what a good father you’ve been and how well our boy turned out. Because you betrayed him.”

Marco’s laugh was low and warm and rolling. He started unwrapping his hands. It would have been so easy to hurt him while he did it that she was fairly certain he had a hidden way to defend himself. And if not, the impression that he might was defense enough. She wasn’t here to kill him. She was here to push him into saying something.

“Is that what you think?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I think you did it to show off. I walked away from you, and you’re such a little boy that you still can’t stand it. So when your big moment came, you had to have me here to see it happen.”

It was true, as far as it went. She did see a pleasure in him that came from having power over her. Even her weird half-status in the crew was a part of that. Locking her in a cage would have been a tacit admission she was a threat. He wanted her to see that she was powerless, to make the prison walls herself. There had been a time it would have worked. She was betting that he didn’t realize that time had passed.