Nemesis Games

“Thank you, but that’s not the cool part. Take a look at the trigger line. You see all those calls set to null? They’re all other system parameters that weren’t being used.”

“Okay,” Holden said. From the brightness in her expression, he had the sense he should have seen something more in her words. Maybe if he’d been able to sleep…

“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.