Leviathan Wakes

“Hey, Cap’n,” he said. “I found a whole case of fuel pellets for the reactor in the machine shop. We’ll probably want to take these with us.”

“Good work,” Holden said, holding up one hand to let Miller know to wait. “Go ahead and take those across. Also, I need you to work up a plan for scuttling this ship.”

“Wait, what?” Amos said. “This thing is worth a jillion bucks, Captain. Stealth missile ship? The OPA would sell their grandmothers for this thing. And six of those tubes still have fish in them. Capital-ship busters. You could slag a small moon with those. Forget their grannies, the OPA would pimp their daughters for that gear. Why the fuck would we blow it up?”

Holden stared at him in disbelief.

“Did you forget what’s in the engine room?” he asked.

“Hell, Cap,” Amos snorted. “That shit is all frozen. Couple hours with a torch and I can chop it up and chuck it out the airlock. Good to go.”

The mental image of Amos hacking the melted bodies of the ship’s former crew apart with a plasma torch and then cheerfully hurling the chunks out an airlock tipped Holden over the edge into full-fledged nausea. The big mechanic’s ability just to ignore anything that he didn’t want to notice probably came in handy while he was crawling around in tight and greasy engine compartments. His ability to shrug off the horrible mutilation of several dozen people threatened to change Holden’s disgust into anger.

“Forgetting the mess,” he said, “and the very real possibility of infection by what made that mess, there is also the fact that someone is desperately searching for this very expensive and very stealthy ship, and so far Alex can’t find the ship that’s looking.”

He stopped talking and nodded at Amos while the mechanic mulled that over. He could see Amos’ broad face working as he put it together in his head. Found a stealth ship. Other people looking for stealth ship. We can’t see the other people looking for it.

Shit.

Amos’ face went pale.

“Right,” he said. “I’ll set the reactor up to slag her.” He looked down at the time on his suit’s forearm display. “Shit, we’ve been here too long. Better get the lead out.”

“Better had,” Miller agreed.

* * *

Naomi was good. Very good. Holden had discovered this when he’d signed on with the Canterbury, and over the course of years, he’d added it to his list of facts, along with space is cold and the direction of gravity is down. When something stopped working on the water hauler, he’d tell Naomi to fix it, and then never think of it again. Sometimes she’d claim not to be able to fix something, but it was always a negotiating tactic. A short conversation would lead to a request for spare parts or an additional crewman hired on at the next port, and that would be that. There was no problem that involved electronics or spaceship parts she couldn’t solve.

“I can’t open the safe,” she said.

She floated next to the safe in the captain’s quarters, one foot resting lightly on his bunk to stabilize herself as she gestured. Holden stood on the floor with his boot mags on. Miller was in the hatchway to the corridor.

“What would you need?” Holden asked.

“If you won’t let me blast it or cut it, I can’t open it.”

Holden shook his head, but Naomi either didn’t see it or ignored him.

“The safe is designed to open when a very specific pattern of magnetic fields is played across that metal plate on the front,” she said. “Someone has a key designed to do that, but that key isn’t on this ship.”

“It’s at that station,” Miller said. “He wouldn’t send it there if they couldn’t open it.”

Holden stared at the wall safe for a moment, his fingers tapping on the bulkhead beside it.

“What’re the chances cutting it sets off a booby trap?” he said.

“Fucking excellent, Cap,” Amos said. He was listening in from the torpedo bay as he hacked the small fusion reactor that powered one of the six remaining torpedoes to go critical. Working on the ship’s main reactor was too dangerous with the shielding stripped off.

“Naomi, I really want that safe and the research notes and samples it contains,” Holden said.

“You don’t know that’s what’s in there,” Miller said, then laughed. “No, of course that’s what’s in there. But it won’t help us if we get blown up or, worse, if some piece of goo-coated shrapnel makes a hole in our nice suits.”

“I’m taking it,” Holden replied, then pulled a piece of chalk from his suit’s pocket and drew a line around the safe on the bulkhead. “Naomi, cut a small hole in the bulkhead and see if there’s anything that would stop us from just cutting the whole damned thing out and taking it with us.”

“We’d have to take out half the wall.”

“Okay.”

Naomi frowned, then shrugged, then smiled and nodded with one hand.

“All right, then,” she said. “Thinking of taking it to Fred’s people?”