Текст книги "Caliban’s War"

Автор книги: James S.A. Corey

Соавторы: Daniel Abraham
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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

The four days since he had sent the broadcast, he’d hardly slept. Instead, he’d read through the comments and messages pouring in with the donations, responding to a few, asking questions of people all over the system whom he didn’t know. The goodwill and generosity pouring out to him was intoxicating. For two days, he hadn’t slept, borne up on the euphoria of feeling effective. When he had slept, he’d dreamed of finding Mei.

When the answer came, he only wished he’d found it before.

“The time they had, they could have taken her anywhere, Doc,” Amos said. “I mean, not to bust your balls or nothing.”

“They could,” Prax said. “They could take her anywhere as long as they had a supply of her medications. But she’s not the limiting factor. The question is where they were coming from.”

Prax had called the meeting without a clear idea of where to have it. The crew of the Rociwas small, but Amos’ rooms were smaller. He’d considered the galley of the ship, but there were still technicians finishing the repairs, and Prax wanted privacy. In the end, he’d checked the incoming stream of contributions from Holden’s broadcast and taken enough to rent a room from a station club.

Now they were in a private lounge. Outside the wall-screen window, the great construction waldoes shifted by tiny degrees, attitude rockets flaring and going still in patterns as complex as language. Another thing Prax had never thought about before coming here: The station waldoes had to fire attitude rockets to keep their movements from shifting the station they were attached to. Everything, everywhere, a dance of tiny movements and the ripples they made.

Inside the room, the music that floated between the wide tables and crash-gel chairs was soft and lyrical, the singer’s voice deep and soothing.

“From?” Alex said. “I thought they were from Ganymede.”

“The lab on Ganymede wasn’t equipped to deal with serious research,” Prax said. “And they arranged things so that Ganymede would turn into a war zone. That’d be a bad idea if they were doing their primary work in the middle of it. That was a field lab.”

“I try not to shit where I eat,” Amos said, agreeing.

“You live on a spaceship,” Holden said.

“I don’t shit in the galley, though.”

“Fair point.”

“Anyway,” Prax said, “we can safely assume they were working from a better-protected base. And that base has to be somewhere in the Jovian system. Somewhere nearby.”

“You lost me again,” Holden said. “Why does it need to be close?”

“Transport time. Mei can go anywhere if there’s a good supply of medications, but she’s more robust than the c the things.”

Holden raised his hand like a schoolboy asking a question.

“Okay, I could be hearing you wrong, but did you just say that the thing that ripped its way into my ship, threw a five-hundred-kilo storage pallet at me, and almost chewed a path straight to the reactor core is more delicate than a four-year-old girl with no immune system?”

Prax nodded. A stab of horror and grief went through him. She wasn’t four anymore. Mei’s birthday had been the month before, and he’d missed it. She was five. But grief and horror were old companions by now. He pushed the thought aside.

“I’ll be clearer,” he said. “Mei’s body isn’t fighting its situation. That’s her disease, if you think about it. There’s a whole array of things that happen in normal bodies that don’t happen in hers. Now you take one of the things, one of the creatures. Like the one from the ship?”

“That bastard was pretty active,” Amos said.

“No,” Prax said. “I mean, yes, but no. I mean active on a biochemical level. If Strickland or Merrian or whoever is using the protomolecule to reengineer a human body, they’re taking one complex system and overlaying another one. We know it’s unstable.”

“Okay,” Naomi said. She was sitting beside Amos and across the table from Holden. “Howdo we know that?”

Prax frowned. When he’d practiced making the presentation, he hadn’t expected so many questions. The things he’d thought were obvious from the start hadn’t even occurred to the others. This was why he hadn’t gone in for teaching. Looking at their faces now, he saw blank confusion.

“All right,” he said. “Let me take it from the top. There was something on Ganymede that started the war. There was also a secret lab staffed with people who at the very least knew about the attack before it happened.”

“Check,” Alex said.

“Okay,” Prax said. “In the lab, we had signs of the protomolecule, a dead boy, and a bunch of people getting ready to leave. And when we got there, we only had to fight halfway in. After that, something else was going ahead of us and killing everyone.”

“Hey!” Amos said. “You think that was the same fucker that got into the Roci?”

Prax stopped the word obviouslyjust before it fell from his lips.

“Probably,” he said instead. “And it seems likely that the original attack involved more like that one.”

“So two got loose?” Naomi asked, but he could see that she already sensed the problem with that.

“No, because they knew it was going to happen. One got loose when Amos threw that grenade back at them. One was released intentionally. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re using the protomolecule to remake human bodies, and they aren’t able to control it with perfect fidelity. The programming they’re putting in fails.”

Prax nodded, as if by doing it he could will them to follow his chain of reasoning. Holden shook his head, paused, and then nodded.

“The bomb,” he said.

“The bomb,” Prax agreed. “Even when they didn’t know that the second thing was going to get loose, they’d outfitted it with a powerful incendiary explosive device.”

“Ah!” Alex said. “I get it! You figure they knew it was going to go off the rails eventually, so they wired it to blow if it got out of hand.”

In the depths of space, a construction welder streaked across the hull of the half-built ship, the light of its flare casting a sudden, sharp light across the pilot’s eager face.

“Yes,” Prax said. “But it could be also be an ancillary weapon, or a payload that the thing was supposed to deliver. I think it’s a fail-safe. It probably is, but it could be any number of other things.”

“Okay, but it left it behind,” Alex said.

“Given time, it ejectedthe bomb,” Prax said. “You see? It chose to reconfigure itself to remove the payload. It didn’t place it to destroy the Roci, even though it could have. It didn’t deliver it to a preset target. It just decided to pop it loose.”

“And it knew to do that—”

“It’s smart enough to recognize threat,” Prax said. “I don’t know the mechanism yet. It could be cognitive or networked or some kind of modified immune response.”

“Okay, Prax. So if the protomolecule can eventually get out of whatever constraints they’re putting on it and go rogue, where does that get us?” Naomi asked.

Square one, Prax thought, and launched in on the information he’d intended to give them in the first place.

“It means that wherever the main lab is—the place they didn’t release one of those things on—it has to be close enough to Ganymede to get it there before it slipped its leash. I don’t know how long that is, and I’m betting they don’t either. So closer is better.”

“A Jovian moon or a secret station,” Holden said.

“You can’t have a secret station in the Jovian system,” Alex said. “There’s too much traffic. Someone’d see something. Shit, it’s where most of the extrasolar astronomy was going on until we got out to Uranus. Put something close, the observatories are gonna get pissed because it’s stinking up their pictures, right?”

Naomi tapped her fingers against the tabletop, the sound like the ticking of condensate falling inside sheet metal vents.

“Well, the obvious choice is Europa,” she said.

“It’s Io,” Prax said, impatience slipping into his voice. “I used some of the money to get a tariff search on the kinds of arylamines and nitroarenes that you use for mutagentic research.” He paused. “It’s all right that I did that, isn’t it? Spent the money?”

“That’s what it’s there for,” Holden said.

“Okay, so mutagens that only start functioning after you activate them are very tightly controlled, since you can use them for bioweapons research, but if you’re trying to work with that kind of biological cascade and constraint systems, you’d need them. Most of the supplies went to Ganymede, but there was a steady stream to Europa too. And when I looked at that, I couldn’t find a final receiver listed. Because they shipped back out of Europa about two hours after they landed.”

“Bound for Io,” Holden said.

“It didn’t list a location, but the shipping containers for them have to follow Earth and Mars safety specifications. Very expensive. And the shipping containers for the Europa shipment were returned to the manufacturer for credit on a transport bound from Io.”

Prax took a breath. It had been like pulling teeth, but he was pretty sure he’d made all the points he needed to for the evidence to be, if not conclusive, at least powerfully suggestive.

“So,” Amos said, drawing the word out to almost three syllables. “The bad guys are probably on Io?”

“Yes,” Prax said.

“Well shit, Doc. Coulda just said so.”

  The thrust gravity was a full g but without the subtle Coriolis of Tycho Station. Prax sat in his bunk, bent over his hand terminal. There had been times on the journey to Tycho Station when being half starved and sick at heart were the only things that distracted him. Nothing physical had changed. The walls were still narrow and close. The air recycler still clicked and hummed. Only now, rather than feeling isolated, Prax felt he was in the center of a vast network of people, all bent toward the same end that he was.

MR. MENG, I SAW THE REPORT ON YOU AND MY HEART AND PRAYERS ARE WITH YOU. I’M SORRY I CAN’T SEND MONEY BECAUSE I’M ON BASIC, BUT I HAVE INCLUDED THE REPORT IN MY CHURCH NEWSLETTER. I HOPE YOU CAN FIND YOUR DAUGHTER SAFE AND HEALTHY.

  Prax had composed a form letter for responding to all the general well-wishers, and he’d considered trying to find a filter that could identify those messages and reply automatically with the canned response. He held off because he wasn’t sure how well he could define the conditions set, and he didn’t want anyone to feel that their sentiments were being taken for granted. And after all, he had no duties on the Rocinante.

I’M WRITING YOU BECAUSE I MAY HAVE INFORMATION THAT WILL HELP WITH THE QUEST TO RECLAIM YOUR DAUGHTER. SINCE I WAS VERY YOUNG, I HAVE HAD POWERFUL PREMONITIONS IN MY DREAMS, AND THREE DAYS BEFORE I SAW JAMES HOLDEN’S ARTICLE ABOUT YOU AND YOUR DAUGHTER, I SAW HER IN A DREAM. SHE WAS ON LUNA IN A VERY SMALL PLACE WITHOUT LIGHT, AND SHE WAS SCARED. I TRIED TO COMFORT HER, BUT I FEEL SURE NOW THAT YOU ARE MEANT TO FIND HER ON LUNA OR IN A NEARBY ORBIT.

  Prax didn’t respond to everything, of course.

The journey to Io wouldn’t take much more time than the one to Tycho had. Probably less, since they were unlikely to have the chaos of a stowaway protomolecule construct blowing out the cargo bay this time. If Prax thought about it too long, it made his palm itch. He knew where she was—or where she had been. Every hour was bringing him closer, and every message flowing into his charitable account gave him a little more power. Someone else who might know where Carlos Merrian was and what he was doing.

There were a few he’d set up conversations with, mostly video conversations sent back and forth. He’d spoken with a security broker based out of Ceres Station, who’d run some of his tariff searches and seemed like a genuinely nice man. He’d exchanged a few video recordings with a grief counselor on Mars before he started to get an uncomfortable feeling that she was hitting on him. An entire school of children—at least a hundred of them—had sent him a recording of them singing a song in mixed Spanish and French in honor of Mei and her return.

Intellectually, he knew that nothing had changed. The chances were still very good that Mei was dead, or at least that he would never see her again. But to have so many people—and in such a steady stream—telling him that it would be all right, that they hoped it would be all right, that they were pulling for him made despair less possible. It was probably something like group reinforcement effect. It was something common to some species of crop plant: An ill or suffering plant could be moved into a community of well members of the species and, through proximity, improve, even if soil and water were supplied separately. Yes, it was chemically mediated, but humans were social animals, and a woman smiling up from the screen, her eyes seeming to look deeply into your own, and saying what you wanted to believe was almost impossible to wholly disbelieve.

It was selfish, and he knew that, but it was also addictive. He’d stopped paying attention to the donations that were coming in once he knew there was enough to fund the ship as far as Io. Holden had given him an expense report and a detailed spreadsheet of costs, but Prax didn’t think Holden would cheat him, so he’d barely glanced at anything other than the total at the bottom. Once there was enough money, he’d stopped caring about money.

It was the commentary that took his time and attention.

He heard Alex and Amos in the galley, their voices calm and conversational. It reminded him of living in the group housing at university. The awareness of other voices, other presences, and the comfort that came from those familiar sounds. It wasn’t that different from reading the comment threads.

I LOST MY SON FOUR YEARS AGO, AND I STILL CAN’T IMAGINE WHAT YOU ARE GOING THROUGH RIGHT NOW. I WISH THERE WAS MORE I COULD DO.

  He had the list down to only a few dozen. It was mid-afternoon in the arbitrary world of ship time, but he was powerfully sleepy. He debated leaving the remaining messages until after a nap, and decided to read through them without requiring himself to respond to each one. Alex laughed. Amos joined him.

Prax opened the fifth message.

YOU ARE A SICK, SICK, SICK MOTHERFUCKER, AND IF I EVER SEE YOU, I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL KILL YOU MYSELF. PEOPLE LIKE YOU SHOULD BE RAPED TO DEATH JUST SO YOU KNOW WHAT IT FEELS LIKE.

  Prax tried to catch his breath. The sudden ache in his body was just like the aftermath of being punched in the solar plexus. He deleted the message. Another came in, and then three more. And then a dozen. With a sense of dread, Prax opened one of the new ones.

I HOPE YOU DIE.

  “I don’t understand,” Prax said to the terminal. The vitriol was sudden and constant and utterly inexplicable. At least, it was until he opened one of the messages that had the link to a public newsfeed. Prax put in a request, and five minutes later, his screen went blank, the logo of one of the big Earth-based news aggregators glowed briefly in blue, and the title of the feed series—The Raw Feed—appeared.

When the logo faded out, Nicola was looking out at him. Prax reached for the controls, part of his mind insisting that he’d somehow slipped into his private messages, even as the rest of him knew better. Nicola licked her lips, looked away, then back at the camera. She looked tired. Exhausted.

“My name’s Nicola Mulko. I used to be married to Praxidike Meng, the man who put out a call for help finding our daughter c my daughter, Mei.”

A tear dripped down her cheek, and she didn’t wipe it away.

“What you don’t know—what no one knows—is that Praxidike Meng is a monster of a human being. Ever since I got away from him, I’ve been trying to get Mei back. I thought his abuse of me was between us. I didn’t think he’d hurt her. But information has come back to me from friends who stayed on Ganymede after I left that c”

“Nicola,” Prax said. “Don’t. Don’t do this.”

“Praxidike Meng is a violent and dangerous man,” Nicola said. “As Mei’s mother, I believe that she has been emotionally, physically, and sexually abused by him since I left. And that her alleged disappearance during the troubles on Ganymede are to hide the fact that he’s finally killed her.”

The tears were flowing freely down Nicola’s cheeks now, but her voice and eyes were dead as last week’s fish.

“I don’t blame anyone but myself,” she said. “I should never have left when I couldn’t get my little girl away too c”

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Avasarala

I don’t blame anyone but myself,” the teary-eyed woman said, and Avasarala stopped the feed, sitting back in her chair. Her heart was beating faster than usual and she could feel thoughts swimming just under the ice of her conscious mind. She felt like someone could press an ear to her skull and listen to her brain humming.

Bobbie was sitting on the four-poster. She made the thing look small, which was impressive in itself. She had one leg tucked up under her and a pack of real playing cards laid out in formation on the crisp gold-and-green bedspread. The game of solitaire was forgotten, though. The Martian’s gaze was on her, and Avasarala felt a slow grin pulling at her lips.

“Well, I’ll be fucked,” she said. “They’re scared of him.”

“Who’s scared of who?”

“Errinwright is moving against Holden and this Meng bastard, whoever he is. They actually forced him to take action. Icouldn’t get that out of him.”

“You don’t think the botanist was diddling his kid?”

“Might have been, but that”—she tapped on the still, tearful face of the botanist’s ex-wife—“is a smear campaign. I’ll bet you a week’s pay that I’ve had lunch with the woman coordinating it.”

Bobbie’s skeptical look only made Avasarala smile more broadly.

“This,” Avasarala said, “is the first genuinely good thing that’s happened since we got on this floating whorehouse. I’ve got to get to work. Goddamn, but I wish I was back at the office.”

“You want some tea?”

“Gin,” she said, engaging the camera on her terminal. “We’re celebrating.”

In the focus window, she looked smaller than she felt. The rooms had been designed to command attention whatever angle she put herself in, like being trapped in a postcard. Anyone who rode in the yacht would be able to brag without saying a word, but in the weak gravity her hair stood out from her head like she’d just gotten out of bed. More than that, she looked emotionally exhausted and physically diminished.

Put it away, she told herself. Find the mask.

She took a deep breath, made a rude gesture into the camera, and then started recording.

“Admiral Souther,” she said. “Thank you so much for your last message. Something’s come to my attention that I thought you might find interesting. It looks like someone’s taken a fresh dislike to James Holden. If I were with the fleet instead of floating around the fucking solar system, I’d take you out for a cup of coffee and talk this over, but since that’s not happening, I’m going to open some of my private files for you. I’ve been following Holden. Take a look at what I’ve got and tell me if you’re seeing the same things I am.”

She sent the message. The next thing that would have made sense would be contacting Errinwright. If the situation had been what they were both pretending it was, she’d have kept him involved and engaged. For a long moment, she considered following the form, pretending. Bobbie loomed up on her right, putting the glass of gin on the desk with a soft click. Avasarala picked it up and sipped a small taste of it. Mao’s private-label gin was excellent, even without the lime twist.

Nah. Fuck Errinwright. She pulled up her address book and started leafing through entries until she found what she wanted and pressed record.

“Ms. Corlinowski, I’ve just seen the leaked video accusing Praxidike Meng of screwing his cute little five-year-old daughter. When exactly did UN media relations turn into a fucking divorce court? If it gets out that we were behind that, I would like to know whose resignation I’m going to hand to the newsfeeds, and right now I’m thinking it’s yours. Give my love to Richard, and get back to me before I fire your incompetent ass out of spite.”

She ended the recording and sent it.

“She was the one that arranged it?” Bobbie asked.

“Might have been,” Avasarala said, taking another bite of gin. It was too good. If she wasn’t careful, she’d drink a lot of it. “If it wasn’t, she’ll find who it was and serve them up on a plate. Emma Corlinowski’s a coward. It’s why I love her.”

Over the next hour, she sent a dozen more messages out, performance after performance after performance. She started a liability investigation into Meng’s ex-wife and whether the UN could be held responsible for slander. She put the Ganymede relief coordinator on high alert, demanding everything she could get about Mei Meng and the search for her. She put in high-priority requests to have the doctor and the woman from Holden’s broadcast identified, and then sent a twenty-minute rambling message to an old colleague in data storage, with a small, tacit request for the same information made in the middle of it all.

Errinwright had changed the game. If she’d had freedom, she’d have been unstoppable. As it was, she had to assume that every move she made would be cataloged and acted against almost as soon as she made it. But Errinwright and his allies were only human, and if she kept a solid flow of demands and requests, screeds and wheedling, they might overlook something. Or someone on a newsfeed might notice the uptick in activity and look into it. Or, if nothing else, her efforts might give Errinwright a bad night’s sleep.

It was what she had. It wasn’t enough. Long years of practice with the fine dance of politics and power had left her with expectations and reflexes that couldn’t find their right form there. The lag was killing her with frustration, and she took it out on whomever she was recording for at the moment. She felt like a world-class musician standing before a full auditorium and handed a kazoo.

She didn’t notice when she finished her gin. She only put the glass to her mouth, found it empty, and realized it wasn’t the first time she’d done it. Five hours had passed. She’d had only three responses so far out of almost fifty messages she’d sent out. That was more than lag. That was someone else’s damage control.

She didn’t realize that she was hungry until Cotyar came with a plate, the smell of curried lamb and watermelon wafting in with him. Avasarala’s belly woke with a roar, and she turned off her terminal.

“You’ve just saved my life,” she told him, gesturing at the desk.

“It was Sergeant Draper’s idea,” he said. “After the third time you ignored her asking.”

“I don’t remember that,” she said as he put the dish in front of her. “Don’t they have servants on this thing? Why are you bringing the food?”

“They do, ma’am. I’m not letting them in here.”

“That seems extreme. Feeling jumpy, are you?”

“As you say.”

She ate too quickly. Her back was aching, and her left leg was tingling with the pins and needles she got now from sitting too long in one position. As a young woman, she’d never suffered that. On the other hand, she hadn’t had the ability to pepper every major player in the United Nations and be taken seriously. Time took her strength but it gave her power in exchange. It was a fair trade.

She couldn’t wait to finish her meal, turning on the terminal while she gulped the last of it down. Four waiting messages. Souther, God bless his shriveled little heart. One from someone at the legal council whose name she didn’t recognize, and another from someone she did. One from Michael-Jon, which was probably about Venus. She opened the one from Souther.

The admiral appeared on her screen and she had to stop herself from saying hello. It was only a video recording, not a real conversation. She hated it.

“Chrisjen,” the admiral said. “You’re going to have to be careful with all this information you’re sending me. Arjun’s going to get jealous. I wasn’t aware of our friend Jimmy’s part in instigating this latest brouhaha.”

Our friend Jimmy. He wasn’t saying the name Holden out loud. That was interesting. He was expecting some kind of filtering to be sniffing out Holden’s name. She tried to guess whether he thought the filter would be on his outgoing messages or her incoming. If Errinwright had half a brain—which he did—he’d be watching the traffic both ways for both of them. Was he worried about someone else? How many players were there at the table? She didn’t have enough information to work with, but it was interesting, at least.

“I can see where your concerns might lead you,” Souther said. “I’m making some inquiries, but you know how these things are. Might find something in a minute, might find something in a year. You don’t be a stranger, though. There’s more than enough going on out here that I can wish I could take you up on that lunch. We’re all looking forward to seeing you again.”

There was a barefaced lie, Avasarala thought. Still, nice of him to say it. She scraped her fork along the bottom of the plate, a thin residue of curry clinging to the silver.

The first message was some young man with a Brazilian accent explaining to her that the UN had nothing to do with the video footage released of Nicola Mulko, and therefore could not be held responsible for it. The second was the boy’s supervisor, apologizing for him and promising a fully formed brief by the end of the day, which was considerably more like it. The smart people were still afraid of her. That thought was more nourishing than the lamb.

As she reached for the screen, the ship shifted under her, gravity pulling her slightly to the side. She put her hand on the desk; the curry and the remnants of gin churned her gut.

“Were we expecting that?” she shouted.

“Yes, ma’am,” Cotyar called from the next room. “Scheduled course correction.”

“Never happens at the fucking office,” she said, and Michael-Jon appeared on her screen. He looked mildly confused, but that could have been just the angle of his face. She felt a sick dread.

For a moment, the Arboghastfloated before her again, coming apart. Without intending it, she paused the feed. Something in the back of her mind wanted to turn away. Not to know.

It wasn’t hard to understand how Errinwright and Nguyen and their cabal would turn their backs on Venus, on the alien chaos that was becoming order and more than order. She felt it too, the atavistic fear lurking at the back of her mind. How much easier to turn to the old games, the old patterns, the history of warfare and conflict, deception and death. For all its horror, it was familiar. It was known.

As a girl, she’d seen a film about a man who saw the face of God. For the first hour of the film, he had gone through the drab life of someone living on basic on the coast of southern Africa. When he saw God, the film switched to ten minutes of the man wailing and then another hour of slowly building himself back up to do the same idiot life he’d had at the beginning. Avasarala had hated it. Now, though, she almost understood. Turning away was natural. Even if it was moronic and self-destructive and empty, it was natural.

War. Slaughter. Death. All the violence that Errinwright and his men—and she felt certain they were almost all of them men—were embracing, they were drawn to because it was comforting. And they were scared.

Well, so was she.

“Pussies,” she said, and restarted the playback.

“Venus can think,” Michael-Jon said instead of helloor any other social pleasantry. “I’ve had the signal analysis team running the data we saw from the network of water and electrical currents, and we’ve found a model. It’s only about a sixty percent correlation, but I’m comfortable putting that above chance. It’s got different anatomy, of course, but its functional structure is most like a cetacean doing spatial reasoning problems. I mean, there’s still the problem of the explanatory gap, and I can’t help with that part, but with what we’ve seen, I’m fairly sure that the patterns we saw were it thinking. They were the actual thoughts, like neurons firing off.”

He looked into the camera as if expecting her to answer and then looked mildly disappointed when she didn’t.

“I thought you’d want to know,” he said, and ended the recording.

Before she could formulate a response, a new message from Souther appeared. She opened it with a sense of gratitude and relief that she was slightly ashamed of.

“Chrisjen,” he said. “We have a problem. You should check the force assignments on Ganymede and let me know if we’re seeing the same things.”

Avasarala frowned. The lag now was over twenty-eight minutes. She put in a standard request, expedited it, and stood up. Her back was a solid knot. She walked to the common area of the suite. Bobbie, Cotyar, and three other men were sitting in a circle, the deck of cards distributed among them. Poker. Avasarala walked toward them, rolling through the hips where movement hurt. Something about lower gravity made her joints ache. She lowered herself to Bobbie’s side.

“Next hand, you can deal me in,” she said.

  The order had come from Nguyen, and at first glance it made no sense at all. Six UN destroyers had been ordered off the Ganymede patrol, sent out at high burn on a course that seemed to lead essentially to nowhere. Initial reports showed that after a decent period of wondering what the fuck, a similar detachment of Martian ships matched course.

Nguyen was up to something, and she didn’t have the first clue what it could be. But Souther had sent it and thought she would see something.

It took another hour to find it. Holden’s Rocinantehad departed Tycho Station on a gentle burn for the Jovian system. He might have filed a flight plan with the OPA, but he hadn’t informed Earth or Mars of anything, which meant Nguyen was watching him too.

They weren’t just scared. They were going to kill him.

Avasarala sat quietly for a long moment before she stood up and went back toward the game. Cotyar and Bobbie were at the end of a high-stakes round, which meant the pile of little bits of chocolate candy they were using for chips was almost five centimeters deep.

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