James Corey - Nemesis Games

“This is an all-purpose trap. You want something to blow when they’ve been out of port for six days? Set that call there to about half a million seconds. You want it to go when the weapons systems are armed? This call right here set to one. There’s maybe a dozen different ways to set this thing off, and you can mix and match them.”

“That’s interesting —”

“That’s a smoking fucking gun,” Paula said. “Bottle containment failures don’t leave much by way of data. Not supposed to happen ever, but sometimes they do. The story has always been that accidents happen, what can you do? Ships blow up sometimes. This shows that someone built a tool specifically to make it happen. And to make it happen again and again and again, wherever they could sneak their code into the ship they decided had to die. What we have here is key evidence in maybe thousands of murders no one even knew were murders until right now.”

Excitement tightened her voice, brightened her eyes. The unease in his gut grew thicker.

I need to go do something , Naomi said in his memory. And I can’t have you involved in it. At all.

Was this it? Was this what she’d been trying to keep separate from him, from the Rocinante ? And what did it mean if it was? Paula was still looking at him, expectation in her eye. He didn’t know how to respond, but the silence was getting awkward.

“Cool?” he said.

Fred was sitting at Drummer’s desk, his elbows resting on the tabletop, his hands cradling his chin. He looked as tired as Holden felt. On the screen, Drummer and Sakai were in one of the interrogation rooms. The table that was usually between them had been moved askew, and Drummer was leaning back in her chair and resting her feet on it. Prisoner and guard were both drinking what looked like coffee. Sakai laughed at something and shook his head. Drummer grinned impishly. She looked younger. Holden realized with a start that she was wearing her hair down.

“What the hell is this?” he asked.

“Professionalism,” Fred said. “Building rapport. Establishing trust. She’s halfway convinced him that whoever he was working for was willing to crack the station open with him still inside it. Once he’s come around, we’ll own him. That man will tell us everything we ask and then try to remember something we didn’t think to dig for if we give him time. No one’s as zealous as a convert.”

Holden crossed his arms. “I think you’re overlooking the beat-him-with-a-wrench stratagem. I favor it.”

“No you don’t.”

“In this case, I’d make an exception.”

“No. You wouldn’t. Torture’s for amateurs.”

“So? I don’t do this professionally.”

Fred sighed and turned to look up at him. “The reckless tough-guy version of you is almost as tiring as the relentless Boy Scout was. I’m hoping your pendulum swings hit middle sometime soon.”

“Reckless?”

Fred shrugged. “Did you find anything?”

“Yeah,” Holden said, “but it’s not in the fresh driver. We have a clean bill of health.”

“Unless there’s something else.”

“Yup.”

“Sakai says there wasn’t.”

“Not entirely sure I know how to respond to that,” Holden said. Then, a moment later, “So, I’ve been thinking.”

“About the message from the Pella ?”

“Yeah.”

Fred stood up. His expression was hard, but not without compassion. “I was expecting this fight, Holden. But there’s more at stake here than Naomi. If the protomolecule is being weaponized, or even just set loose again —”

“That doesn’t matter,” Holden said. “Wait, no. That came out wrong. Of course that matters. It matters a lot. It just doesn’t change anything. We can’t…” He paused, swallowed. “We can’t go after her. I’ve got one ship, they’ve got half a dozen. Everything in me wants to fire up the engines and burn like hell after her, but it won’t help.”

Fred was silent. The distant sound of Sakai’s laughter filtered through from the screen. They both ignored it. Holden looked at his hands. He felt like he was confessing something. Maybe he was.

“Whatever’s going on here?” Holden said. “Whatever she’s involved with, I can’t fix it by putting on my shining armor and riding into battle. The only way I can see to do her any good at all is to do what we had planned. Get you to Luna. If you can use Dawes and Sakai and Avasarala to open some kind of communication with these sons of bitches, Naomi can be a bargaining chip. We can trade her for some of the people you’ve got in the brig. Or Sakai. Or something.”

“That’s the conclusion you’ve reached?”

“It is,” Holden said, the words tasting like ashes.

“You’ve grown up some since the first time we met,” Fred said. Holden heard the sympathy in it. The consolation. “It’s making me regret my ‘reckless’ comment.”

“I’m not convinced that’s a good thing. Have you ever done this? Loved someone like they were part of you and then left them in danger?”

Fred put a hand on Holden’s shoulder. For all the frailty that age and trouble had put in the older man’s face and body, his grip was still firm. “Son, I’ve grieved for more people than you’ve met. You can’t trust your heart on this. You have to do what you know, not what you feel.”

“Because if I do what I feel…” Holden said, thinking that the end of the sentence was something like I’d beat Sakai’s teeth in or I’d get us all killed . Fred surprised him.

“Then we lose her.”

“Course set,” Chava Lombaugh said from the cockpit. “On your order, sir.”

Holden tried to lean back into his crash couch, but without thrust gravity to give him weight, it ended up as just a straightening of the neck. His heart was racing, adrenaline ticking coolly through his veins.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The command deck felt too full. Sun-yi, serious and relaxed, was at weapons. Maura had comm controls up, monitoring them because that was what she did more than from any actual need. It should have been Alex’s voice. It should have been him and Naomi in the couches.

He shouldn’t have been scared.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

“Sir,” Chava said. The warning light went from amber to red and Holden fell back into his couch. Tycho Station fell away behind them. It wouldn’t be an hour before it was too small to make out without assistance. Holden waited for three long, shuddering breaths. Four.

“How are we looking, Mister Ip?”

From the engineering deck, Sandra Ip – who should have been Amos – said, “All systems are within tolerance.”

“Meaning not all blowed up,” Holden said.

There was a pause on the channel. “Yes, sir. Not all blowed up, sir.”

Holden hated it that he wasn’t sure of his own ship. The Rocinante had been nothing but solid for him since the day he’d gotten aboard her. He’d trusted the ship with his life the way he trusted his heart to beat. It was more than instinct. It was automatic. To do anything else would have been strange.

But that was before. Sakai’s sabotage hadn’t killed him, but it hadn’t left him unscathed either. It would be a long time before Holden was sure that there were no more unpleasant surprises hidden in the ship. Software waiting for the right moment to evacuate the air or throw the ship into a fatal acceleration or any of the other thousand ways a ship could fail and kill its crew. They had looked everything over and found nothing, but they’d done that before and nearly died from their oversights. There was no amount of double-checking that would ever prove that nothing had been missed. From now on – maybe for a long time, maybe forever – he would wonder about things he hadn’t before. He was resentful, even angry, that his faith had been shaken.