James Corey - Nemesis Games

When he called down to engineering and Kazantzakis or Ip replied, it didn’t seem as wrong anymore. Finding Sun-yi and Gor wired into gaming goggles shooting the crap out of each other in simulated battles – because as weapons techs with no one to shoot at they were getting antsy – stopped being weird and edged into sort of endearing. Maura Patel was spending her insomniac, sleepless shifts upgrading the tightbeam system. Holden knew it was something Naomi had on her list of projects, but he let Maura do it anyway. And after the long, quiet days in the dock, sleeping in his couch and waking to an empty ship, part of him even appreciated the company. They might be the wrong people, but they were people. Having guests in his house kept him from descending into his fear and anxiety. He was only putting on a brave face, but it actually made him feel a little braver.

“Anything else I should be aware of?” Foster asked.

“Just I want to know if anything happens with the Razorback or the Pella ,” Holden said. “Or if we get a message from Earth. Amos Burton or my family, either one.” As if they were different.

“I think you’ve made that clear to the crew,” Foster said solemnly, but with a glimmer of amusement in his eye. Probably Holden had made the point a few times. To everyone. The coffee machine chimed and gave Holden a fresh bulb. Foster made his way to the ladder, and then down toward the torpedo bays where Kazantzakis was cleaning things that were already clean. Holden waited a few seconds and then headed up to the ops deck. Chava, coming down, met him, and they did a little awkward no-you-first dance before they got past each other.

Fred was in the crash couch that he’d appropriated as his office. The hatch to the cockpit was closed, but Holden could still hear the wailing of the raï that Mfume liked to listen to during his shift in the pilot’s seat. Between that and the coffee, he wouldn’t be sleeping, but Fred had put headphones on and so didn’t hear Holden coming. The image on his screen was familiar. Marco Inaros, the self-styled head of the Free Navy and public face of the devastation of Earth. And – Holden tried the thought carefully in case it hurt too much to think it – if Naomi was dead, the man who’d probably killed her. His chest contracted painfully and he pushed the idea away. Thinking about Amos and Naomi was too dangerous.

Fred turned sharply, noticing him, and pulled off the headphones. “Holden. How long have you been there?”

“Just came up.”

“Good. Hate to think I’m getting too feeble to know when there’s someone in the room. Everything all right?”

“Apart from being in the middle of a system-wide coup with half of my crew missing? Peachy. I mean, I’m not sleeping, and when I do it’s nightmares from start to finish, but peachy.”

“Well, it was kind of a stupid question. Sorry about that.”

Holden sat on the couch beside Fred’s and leaned in.

“What do we know about this guy?”

“Inaros?” Fred said. “He was on my short list of possibilities when the rocks dropped. Not the head of it, but in the top five. He leads a splinter group of high-poverty Belters. The kind of people who live in leaky ships and post screeds about taxation being theft. I’ve spoken to him a time or two, usually to deescalate a situation he wanted to set on fire.”

“You think he’s the one behind it all?”

Fred sat back, his couch gimbals hissing as they shifted. From the headphones, Holden could hear the man’s voice even over the murmurs of raï – “We will begin again and remake humanity without the corruption, greed, and hatred that the inner planets could not transcend…”

Fred grunted and shook his head. “I don’t see it. Inaros is charismatic. And he’s smart. Watching his press release, he certainly thinks he’s in charge, but he’d have to. The man’s a first-rate narcissist and a sadist besides. He’d never knowingly share power with anyone if he could help it. This level of organization? Of coordination? It seems beyond his reach.”

“How so?”

Fred gestured toward the screen. The light from it glowed in his eyes; tiny images of Inaros giving his salute. “It doesn’t feel right. He’s the kind of man who carries a lot of weight in a small circle. Playing at this scale isn’t what he does best. He isn’t a bad tactician, and the timing of the attacks was showy in a way that seems like he was likely behind them. And he’s charming at the negotiating table. But…”

“But?”

“But he’s not a first-class mind, and this is a first-class operation. I don’t know how to put it better than that. My gut says that even if he’s taking credit for it, he has a handler.”

“What would your gut have said before the rocks dropped?”

Fred coughed out a laugh. “That he was an annoyance and a small-time player. So yes, it may just be sour grapes on my part. I’d rather think I was outplayed by someone who’s a genius at something grander than self-mythologizing.”

“Do you have any idea why Naomi would be on his ship?”

Fred’s gaze shifted from the hazy middle distance of thought to directly on Holden. “Is that someplace we want to go right now?”

“Do you?”

“I don’t. But I can speculate. Naomi is a Belter, and what I know of her says she grew up in the same circles as Inaros and his crew. I have to assume they crossed paths before and had some unfinished business. Maybe they were on the same side, maybe they were enemies, maybe both. But not neither.”

Holden leaned forward, elbows on his knees. As general as they were, as gently as he’d said them, the words were like little hammer blows. He swallowed.

“Holden. Everyone has a past. Naomi was a grown woman when you met her. You didn’t think she’d popped out of the packaging right when you set eyes on her, did you?”

“No, of course not. Everyone on the Canterbury was there because they had a reason. Including me. It’s just if there was something big, like ‘part of a cabal that went on to destroy Earth’ big, I don’t know why she wouldn’t have told me.”

“Did you ask?”

“No. I mean, she knew that I was interested. That she could tell me whatever she wanted to tell me. I figured if she didn’t want to, that was up to her.”

“And now you’re upset that she didn’t. So what changed? Why are you entitled to know things now that you weren’t entitled to know before?”

The raï from the cockpit paused, silence filling the ops deck. On Fred’s screen, the playback had reached the split circle as it faded to white. “I may,” Holden said, “be a small, petty person. But if I’m going to lose her, I at least need to know why.”

“We’ll see if we can’t put you in a position to ask her yourself,” Fred said. The music from the cockpit kicked in again, and Fred scowled up at the hatch. “If it’s any comfort, I think we have a chance. I don’t think it’ll be long before he’s ready to open negotiations.”

“No?” Holden said. It was such a thin sliver of hope, but he felt himself jumping to it all the same.

“No. He got the jump on us tactically. I will absolutely give him that. But the next part is where he has to actually consolidate and hold power. That’s not tactics. That’s strategy, and I don’t see anything in him that leads me to think he has a handle on that.”

“I do.”

Fred waved a hand like Holden’s words had been smoke and he was clearing the air. “He’s playing a short-run game. Yes, his stock’s high right now, and probably will be for a little while. But he’s standing in the way of the gates. All of this is to stop people from going out and setting up colonies. But the hunger is already out there. Smith couldn’t stop Mars from depopulating itself. Avasarala couldn’t put the brakes on the process, and God knows she tried. Marco Inaros thinks he can do it at the end of a gun, but I don’t see it working. Not for long. And he doesn’t understand fragility.”