Nemesis Games

The Chetzemoka hummed under her. She realized vaguely that she was hearing words. Voices. A voice. She knew that didn’t make sense, but she didn’t know why. She pressed her hands to her face. A storm of emotions ran through her – elation, grief, triumph, rage. Her brain wasn’t working well enough yet to associate them with anything. They just happened, and she watched and waited and gathered her scattered self together. Her hands and feet started hurting, tortured nerve endings screaming at her. She ignored them. Pain was only pain, after all. She’d lived through worse.

Next time, she made it to her feet. The little black thumb of the decompression kit was still lodged in her leg. She pulled it out, lifted it to shoulder high, and dropped it. It fell like maybe one and a half, two gs. That was nice. If she’d felt this bad at just one g, she’d have been worried. She should probably have been worried anyway.

She cycled the inner door open and stumbled out to the cheap locker room. The lockers hung open, EVA suits hanging in them or scattered on the floor. The air bottles were all gone. The voice – it was just one voice, but her ears seemed to have lost all their treble and left only an incomprehensible soup of bass tones – was familiar. She thought she should know it. She moved through the abandoned ship. She wondered how long she’d been unconscious, and if there was any way to know where she was, what heading she was on, and how fast she was already traveling.

She reached a control panel and tried to access the navigation system, but it was locked down. As was the comm, the system status, the repair and diagnostics. She laid her forehead against the panel more from exhaustion than despair. The direct contact of bone on ceramic changed the voice, sound conduction through contact, like pressing helmets together and shouting. She knew the voice. She knew the words. “This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. If you get this message, please retransmit. Tell James Holden I am in distress. Comm is not responding. I have no nav control. Please retransmit.” She chuckled, coughed up the clear fluid, spat it on the deck, and laughed again. The message was a lie built by Marco to lure Jim to his death.

Every bit of it was true.

Chapter Forty-two: Holden

Arnold Mfume, who wasn’t Alex, came out of the crew quarters still drying his hair. When he saw Holden and Foster – the two captains – by the coffee machine, he grimaced.

“Running a little late there, Mister Mfume,” Foster Sales said.

“Yes, sir. Chava just pointed that out to me. I’m on my way.”

“Coffee?” Holden said, holding out a freshly brewed bulb. “Little milk, no sugar. Might not be how you take it, but it’s ready now.”

“I won’t say no,” Mfume said with a fast, nervous smile. Holden couldn’t place his accent. Flat vowel sounds and swallowed consonants. Wherever it came from, it sounded good on him.

As Holden handed over the bulb, Foster cleared his throat. “You know it’s a bad habit to be late for your shift.”

“I know, sir. I’m sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.”

And then, Mfume was gone, bolting up the ladder toward the cockpit faster than the lift would have taken him. Foster sighed and shook his head. “It’s good being young,” he said, “but some people wear it better than others.”

Holden tapped in an order for another coffee. “I wouldn’t want people to judge me by what I did in my twenties. What about you? Can I get you one?”

“More of a tea man, myself,” the other captain said. “If that’s an option.”

“Don’t know that I’ve ever tried.”

“No?”

“There was always coffee.”

The morning meeting had started off as just part of the shakedown. Between the new crew and the uncertainty surrounding the ship, it had seemed like a good idea for Holden and Foster Sales to touch base with each other, compare notes, make sure that everything was the way it was supposed to be. The care Foster took to treat the Roci with respect had helped Holden. The new crew wasn’t his, and he didn’t feel comfortable with them, but they weren’t going through the real crew’s lockers while no one was looking. And day by day, their presence was growing more familiar. Less strange.