James Corey - Nemesis Games

“You mean Earth?”

“Yes,” Fred said. “It’s the blind spot of being a Belter. I’ve seen it over and over in the past few decades. There’s a faith in the technology. In the idea of maintaining an artificial ecosystem. We’re able to grow food on Ganymede, so they think humanity’s freed from the bonds of Earth. They don’t think about how much work we had to do for those crops to grow. The mirrors to concentrate the sun, the genetic modifications to the plants. The process of learning to build rich soil out of substrate and fungus and full-spectrum lights. And backstopping all of that, the complexity of life on Earth. And now these new worlds… well I don’t have to tell you how much less hospitable they are than it says on the box. Once it becomes clear that he’s got it wrong —”

“He doesn’t, though,” Holden said. “Yeah, okay, the ecological part maybe he hasn’t thought all the way through, but when it comes to the Belt, he isn’t wrong. Look at all the people who just pulled up stakes and headed out for the rings. Ilus or New Terra or whatever the hell you want to call it? It’s a terrible, terrible planet, and there are people living on it. All those colony ships that left Mars to go try terraforming a place that’s already got air and a magnetosphere? A lot of those people are really, really smart. Even now, just now, you said how the pressure to get out to the new systems is more than this guy expects or is prepared for. That means he’s doomed, maybe. But that doesn’t make him wrong. We have to make him be wrong.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Fred said. “What I was doing with Medina Station would have —”

“Would have made a place for all the people living on Medina Station. But asteroid prospectors? Water haulers? The crews that are barely eking by? Those are who Marco’s talking to, and he’s right because no one else is taking them into account. Not even you. They’re looking at the future, and they’re seeing that no one needs them anymore. Everything they do will be easier in a gravity well, and they can’t go there. We have to make some kind of future that has a place for them in it. Because unless we do, they have literally nothing to lose. It’s all already gone.”

The system chimed and Maura’s voice came over the speakers. “Captain Holden, sir?”

“I’m here,” Holden said, still looking at Fred’s angry scowl. “And aren’t you supposed to be off shift, Mister Patel?”

“I am off shift, sir. But I couldn’t sleep, so I was running some diagnostics. But Captain Sales said you wanted an alert if the situation changed with the Razorback and its pursuers?”

Holden’s mouth flooded with the metallic taste of fear. “What’s going on?”

“We’re getting reports that the Free Navy ships have broken off, sir. The UN forces are still half a day out, but the thought is the Free Navy vessels are trying to steer well clear of any large-scale confrontation.”

“The Pella ?” Holden said.

“With the Free Navy fleet, sir, but when they made the course change, a civilian ship broke off from the grouping, turning the other way. It’s got a lot of inertia to overcome, but unless it changes its acceleration profile, it looks to be on a course that will bring it within a million klicks of us.”

“That’s not accidental,” Fred said.

“It isn’t, sir,” Maura said. “The vessel’s registered at the Chetzemoka , and it’s broadcasting a message on loop. Message follows.”

Holden’s knuckles hurt and he forced himself to relax his fists. Naomi’s voice filled the ops deck, and it was like being on the verge of passing out from dehydration and being handed a glass of water. As dire as the message was, Holden still felt every syllable untying his knots. When Naomi’s message was done, he fell back in his couch, limp as a rag. She was in trouble, but it was trouble they could fix. She was on her way back toward him.

“Thank you, Mister Patel,” Holden said. “In thanks, you may now have all my stuff. I don’t care about any of it anymore.”

“Including the coffee maker, sir?”

“Almost all my stuff.”

When Fred spoke, his voice was hard. Sharp. Unrelieved. “Mister Patel, what relief ships are in the vicinity?”

“Transponder data shows nothing, sir. The inner system’s been pretty much shut down. UN order.”

Holden rolled to his side and called up a connection to Mfume. Music blared out of the console. Mixed with the sounds filtering through the deck, it made the ops deck seem larger than it was. “Mfume!” Holden shouted, and then a few seconds later, “Mister Mfume!”

The music turned down, but not off. “Sir?”

“I need you to take a look at the flight path for the Chetzemoka . See what it’s going to take to match orbits with her.”

“What ship?” Mfume said.

“The Chetzemoka ,” Holden said. “Just check the newsfeeds. It’ll be there. Let me know what you figure out as quickly as you possibly can. Like now would be good.”

“I’m on it,” Mfume said, and the music turned off both on the console and from the hatch. Holden took a deep breath, then another, then laughed. The relief wasn’t an emotion. It was too physical and profound for that. It was a state of being. It was a drug that poured invisibly through his veins. He started laughing and it turned into a moan that sounded like pain, or else pain’s aftermath.

Fred clicked his tongue against his teeth. “So. If I were to suggest that we not rendezvous with that ship?”

“I would be happy to let you and your friends off anywhere between here and there,” Holden said. “Because unless you’ve decided to turn to piracy and throw me out the airlock, that ship is where we’re going.”

“I thought as much,” Fred said. “Can we at least agree to be careful approaching it?”

Holden felt a little bubble of rage rise up in him. He wanted to shout at Fred, to punish him for taking this moment and soiling it with doubt. With the possibility that it was a trap and not Naomi coming home at last. Holden took the great glowing sense of release and tried to put it aside and his anger with it.

“Yes,” he said. “You’re right. It could be a trap.”

“It may not be,” Fred said. “I hope it isn’t. But…”

“But we’re living in interesting times,” Holden said. “It’s okay. I get it. I’ll be careful. We’ll be careful. But if it is her, and she really is in trouble, she’s my first priority. That’s just the way it is.”

“I know,” Fred said, and the way he said it meant I know, and everyone who knows anything about you does too. Which is why you should be careful.

Holden turned to the monitor and pulled up the nav data. As he watched, Mfume laid in the course that would get him to Naomi. Or whatever else was on that ship. Fred’s seed of doubt had already taken root. He didn’t know whether to be grateful or resent the old man. Between the distances and their respective velocities, it looked like it would be tricky. Naomi had been burning hard toward Earth, and the speed the Chetzemoka had built up was almost all in the wrong direction to reach him. If it wasn’t a trap and Naomi was in trouble, he could still be too late. The UN force might be able to help, but she was already peeling away from their flight path.

Which still didn’t leave him entirely without resources. He flipped to comms and started recording.

“Alex, since you’re in the neighborhood and it went so well the last time I asked you to check out a mystery ship, I was wondering if you’d be interested in making a little detour.”

Chapter Forty-three: Alex