James Corey - Nemesis Games

And she was betting that it had passed. When he narrowed his eyes at her, shaking his head, she still felt the tug of humiliation in her throat, familiar as an old habit. So perhaps the truth was more complicated.

“I brought you home to the winning side because you are the mother of my son, and always will be. Anything beyond that is happy coincidence. That we have the chance to find some sense of closure between us —”

“Bullshit. Closure? You lost. It’s closed. You only say it wasn’t finished because you hadn’t won yet. I left. I sacrificed everything because having nothing away from you was better than having it all and being your puppet.”

He lifted his hands, palms out, in a mocking gesture of peace. It wasn’t working. Not yet.

“I hear that you would have done things differently. I don’t blame you for that. Not everyone has the strength to be a soldier. I thought you did. I thought I could count on you. And when the burden bore you down, yes, I took our son someplace I knew he’d be safe. You blame me for keeping him away from you. But you’d have done exactly the same to me, if you’d had the power.”

“I would have,” she said. “I’d have taken him with me, and you’d never have seen either of us again.”

“So how different are we?” Sweat dewed his skin. He took a towel from the rack, dabbing at his face and arms. She knew intellectually that he was beautiful, the way the iridescent wings of a carrion fly would be. She felt the weight of her disgust with herself for letting this man be what he was to her, and knew that was part of what he intended. The dark thoughts stirred in her brain stem. They didn’t matter. She was here to solve a puzzle.

He put down the towel. “Naomi —”

“It’s Holden then, isn’t it? You brought me here as… what? Insurance against him?”

“I’m not afraid of your Earther fuck buddy,” Marco said, and Naomi heard the roughness in his voice like an animal scenting a distant fire.

“I think you are,” she said. “I think you wanted him off the board before you started this, and I was supposed to lead him into the trap. Because you couldn’t imagine that I would come alone. That I wouldn’t bring a man to be strong for me.”

Marco chuckled, but it had more of an edge to it. He walked across the exercise mat, scooping up his dark robe and shrugging into it. “You’re trying to talk yourself into something, Knuckles.”

“Do you know why I’m with him?”

If Marco were wise, he wouldn’t rise to that bait. He’d walk out, leave her alone among the machines. If she’d managed to make him angry, even just a little bit angry, though…

“I assume you have a kink for powerful men,” Marco said.

“Because he is what you pretend to be.”

She saw it land. She couldn’t even say what it was that changed in him, but the Marco she’d seen since being brought here – the smooth, world-weary, self-assured leader of the greatest coup in human history – was gone, dropped like a mask. In his place was the rage-filled boy who’d almost destroyed her once. His laugh wasn’t low or warm or rolling.

“Well, just wait around, and we’ll see how much that does for him. Big Man Holden may think he’s unkillable, but everyone bleeds.”

There. That was a datapoint. It was working. It might only have been the rhetoric of the squabble, an empty threat. Or he might have just told her that his plans still involved the Rocinante .

“You can’t do anything to him,” she said.

“No?” Marco said, his teeth bared like a chimp. “Well, maybe you will.”

He turned sharply, stalking out of the room. Leaving her alone the way he should have a few minutes earlier. Or else a decade and a half before.

“You done?” Cyn asked, nodding at the brick of lentil and rice half-eaten on her plate. On the screen in the mess hall, a Martian general was pounding a table, red-faced with passion that looked a lot like fear. He was describing the cowardice of the person or persons who had committed this atrocity against not only Earth, but humanity. Every third sentence or so, someone at the end of her table would repeat the general’s words in a high, quacking voice, like something from a children’s cartoon.

She broke off another piece of the lentil brick and popped it in her mouth. “Close enough,” she said around it. She put her tray and the rest of the brick into the recycler and walked back toward the lift. Cyn loomed behind her. She was so locked in her own thoughts that she barely noticed he was there until he spoke.

“Heard you had it out with el jefe,” Cyn said. “Etwas á Filipito?”

Naomi made a noncommittal sound in the back of her throat.

Cyn scratched at the scar behind his left ear. “Es un bon coyo, your son. I know this is none of what you’d pick, but… Filipito, he heard too. Took it hard.”

The lift stopped and she got out, Cyn close behind. “Took it hard?”

“No weight,” Cyn said. “Only know it. A man, our Filipito, but not so much he don’t want your opinion, yeah? You’re his mother.”

The heartbreaking thing was that she understood. She only nodded.

In her bunk, her fingers laced behind her neck, she stared up at the blackness on the ceiling. The interface screen at her side was dead. She didn’t miss it. Slowly, she put together what she knew.

Marco had made attempts on the lives of the heads of Earth, Mars, and the OPA, but only managed to kill the UN secretary-general. He had tried to get the Rocinante before any of those attempts were made. He’d unleashed the worst catastrophe on Earth since the dinosaurs went extinct. He had Martian warships and weapons but didn’t show any signs of cooperating with the Martian government or Navy. All things she’d known, nothing new. So what was new?

Three new things, and maybe only that. First, Wings thought the attempts to trade Sakai back might be more to reassure the prisoner than to actually retrieve him. Second, Marco had intimated that Holden was still in danger, and third, that she might be the one to hurt him.

And also, underlying everything, her certainty that until Marco had given his speech, made himself the focus of all humanity’s attention, the attack was still only half-done. And if Sakai thought he was going to remain a prisoner, it would go wrong. That was interesting. What could Sakai know —

Oh.

Fred Johnson was alive, and Tycho Station wasn’t in Marco’s hands. Holden was in danger. She would be the one that hurt him.

So that meant that the Roci , like the Augustín Gamarra before her, had been rigged to have her magnetic bottle fail. Probably in dock. Fred Johnson, James Holden, and incidentally Chief Engineer Sakai and everyone on the station – all of them would die in a fireball whenever the software she’d written a lifetime ago decided that they should.

It was all happening again, and she had no way to stop it.

Chapter Thirty: Amos

They moved on foot. The clouds weren’t really clouds, and the rain that spat down at them was as much grit and soot as water. The stink of turned earth and rot was all around them, but the cold pushed it back to where it mostly just smelled cold. From the way the trees were all knocked down in the same direction – leaves roughly northeast, roots pointing southwest – he hoped they’d be heading toward less devastated territory. At least until they got near the coast and the flooding.

In Baltimore, he figured the folks in the least trouble would be in the failed arcology in the middle of the city. It had been designed to hold a whole ecosystem inside its massive steel-and-ceramic walls. That it hadn’t worked for shit didn’t matter as much as the fact that it had been built tall and designed to last. Even if the bottom few floors went underwater, there’d be plenty of people near the top who rode out the worst of it. When Baltimore was a sea, the arcology would still be an island.