Nemesis Games

“Happens when you’re losing,” Bobbie said. Even without turning, Alex could hear the smile in her voice.

From the cabin in the back, Smith’s voice came in staccato gasps. Even the relatively modest one-g flight was three times what the man was used to. He’d been burning up the tightbeam for hours. Sometimes, Alex caught Chrisjen Avasarala’s recorded voice, other times a man’s warm drawl. Someone on Mars, he figured.

The Razorback had been a toy once, and while the screens were decades out of date, they still had some bells and whistles. He set the wall screens to match external cameras, and the wide starscape bloomed around them. The sun was bigger and brighter here than it would have been on Earth, but constrained by the limits of the screen to a burning whiteness. The curves of the Milky Way glowed all along the plane of the ecliptic, the billions of stars made soft by distance. Being surrounded by missiles was like floating in a cloud of fireflies, and behind them, bright as seven Venuses in an Earth twilight, the drive plumes of the attackers who wanted them dead.

And also Naomi.

Bobbie sighed. “You know, a thousand of those stars out there are ours now. That’s like, what? Three ten-thousandths of a percent of our galaxy? That’s what we’re fighting over.”

“You think?”

“You don’t?”

“Nah,” Alex said. “I figure we’re fighting over who gets the most meat from the hunt and first access to the water hole. Mating rights. Who believes in which gods. Who has the most money. The usual primate issues.”

“Kids,” Bobbie said.

“Kids?”

“Yeah. Everyone wanting to make sure their kids have a better shot than they did. Or than everyone else’s kids. Something like that.”

“Yeah, probably,” Alex said. He shifted his personal screen back to tactical, pulling up the latest data on the Pella. It still had the strange, cheap-looking civilian craft tethered to it. Alex couldn’t tell if they were taking something off it or putting something on. So far, it was the only craft in the little force that wasn’t clearly military design. There hadn’t been any more contacts from Naomi. He didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a problem, but he couldn’t help checking on the ship every five minutes like he was picking at a scab.

“You ever worry about your kid?” Bobbie asked.

“Don’t have one,” Alex said.

“You don’t? I thought you did.”

“Nope,” Alex said. “Never really had the situation for one, you know? Or I guess I did, and it didn’t fit. What about you?”

“Never had the urge,” Bobbie said. “The family I’ve got has been more than enough.”

“Yeah. Family.”

Bobbie was silent for a moment. Then, “You’re thinking about her.”

“Naomi, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

Alex turned in his couch. Bobbie’s armor reached against both walls, servomotors locked in place to brace her. She looked crucified. The wound in the deck where she’d pulled out the crash couch made it seem like she’d burst through the bottom of the ship. Her expression managed to be both sympathetic and hard.

“Of course, I’m thinking about her,” Alex said. “She’s right there. And probably she’s in trouble. And I can’t figure out how the hell she got there in the first place. It’s not going to be too long before the cavalry gets here to save us, and when they do, I don’t know if I should be helping to attack the Pella or protect her.”

“That’s hard,” Bobbie agreed. “But you know we’ve got our mission. Get Smith to Luna. We’ve got to stand our watch.”

“I know. Can’t help thinking about it, though. I keep putting together schemes where we use the missiles we’ve got left to make them turn her over to us.”

“Any of them even remotely plausible?”

“Not a one,” Alex said.

“There’s nothing worse than keeping to your duty when it means leaving one of your own in danger.”

“No shit.” Alex looked at the readouts from the Pella. “You know, maybe —”

“Stand your watch, sailor. And heads up. We’ve got more PDCs coming in.”

Alex had already seen them and started laying in the course corrections. “Optimistic little shits. Got to give them that.”

“Maybe they think you’ll get sleepy.”

The overloading of the pinnace was awkward and strange. Moving from the pilot’s seat to the head meant both Alex and the prime minister of Mars squeezing past Bobbie’s power armor. Or, for Bobbie, exiling Smith to the empty space where her couch had been while she used the tiny cabin to break down her armor or climb back into it. No one even suggested that they sleep by hot-bunking in the cabin.