Nemesis Games

The words seemed to carry more nuance than they could bear, as if the simple logistical facts also meant something about why she’d left. About who they were to each other. It was like she could feel the words creaking, but she didn’t know what Filip heard in them, or what she should have said differently. For a moment, there was a flicker in his expression. Sorrow or hatred or pain, it was gone too quickly to identify. A new stratum of guilt settled onto her, bearing her down. Compared to what she already had, it was trivial.

“He said I should tell you once we were off the station,” Filip said.

“Apparently he didn’t know I’d be arranging passage on a different ship. Plans change. It’s what they do.”

Filip’s gaze fixed on her, his eyes hard as marbles. She realized she’d been quoting Marco without meaning to. Maybe Filip thought it was a slap, that she was making a claim on his father by using his words. She didn’t know. She didn’t know him. She had to keep reminding herself of that.

“There’s a rendezvous point.”

“Is there a time?”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

She saw We don’t talk about it floating in his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was smaller, younger. More vulnerable. “Soon.”

“How soon?”

He looked away.

“Very.”

She’d known, back then, that there were hard-core OPA factions on Ceres, but it hadn’t bothered her. Radical OPA was still OPA, and that made them family. The crazy uncle who got drunk and started fights, maybe, but with Earth cranking up tariffs and Mars lowering the prices it would pay for ore, the sense of being under siege put Belters on the side of Belters first. And after shipping with Rokku for a while, talk of killing Earthers and Martians became a kind of white noise.

The birth had been hard. Thirty hours of labor. The muscles of her abdominal wall, made weaker by a lifetime of inconstant g, had shredded themselves. If they had been in Rokku’s ship or even back on Hygeia Station, she might have died, and the baby with her. But the medical complex on Ceres had seen it all before, and worse. A gray-haired woman with a cathedral of tattoos on her hands and arms had been in her room the whole time, singing little tunes in Swahili and Arabic. Naomi could still see her and hear her voice, though she’d forgotten the woman’s name. If she’d ever known it.

Filip had drawn his first, exhausted, angry breath at five in the morning, the day after she’d gone into the complex. The pediatric autodoc scanned him, considered for the longest five seconds of Naomi’s life, and declared the baby safely within standard error. The gray-haired woman had placed him on Naomi’s breast and sung a blessing.

It hadn’t occurred to her then to wonder where Marco was. She had assumed he was in a waiting area somewhere, ready to pass out some equivalent of cigars as soon as news of her came. Of her and their son. Maybe that had even been true.

“Do we need to be there, or is off station enough?” Naomi asked.

“Off station at minimum. Better to be there, but not here solid.”

“And where are we going?”

“Hungaria cluster.” They were a group of minor asteroids. High albedo. No station, but an open-access storage facility. As close to the inner planets as Belt rocks got.

“Are we meeting someone there?”

“Not there. There’s a ship a few days in. Sunward. But locked to Hungaria. Pella, it’s called.”

“And after that?”

Filip made the hand shrug of a Belter. Apparently she could know that much, but no more. She wondered what would happen if she pushed, and knew it was an experiment she wouldn’t make. I’m sorry, she thought. I loved you more than I have ever loved anything. I would have stayed if I could. I would have taken you with me.

Filip looked at her and then away.

She’d spent most of the weeks following the birth in recovery. The baby kept her from sleeping very long at a stretch, but apart from one week of frankly hellish colic, he was neither harder nor easier than she’d been led to expect. The worst thing she suffered was boredom, and Marco helped with that. The local group he’d been drinking with were mechanics and technicians at the port, and Marco brought her engineering problems that they were trying to solve. They were the sort of work consultants would do for half a month’s credit. She did them from goodwill and the need to do something intellectually challenging. While Filip napped in the little plastic crib, she customized diagnostic programs for water recyclers. She built virtual timing sequencers for shear force detection units. She designed software overrides for testing the containment limits of magnetic bottles.

The kind of limits that, before long, would fail on the Gamarra.

“All right,” Naomi said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Do you have access to another ship?” Filip asked.

“I may be able to charter something.”

“You can’t just hire a charter. This has to be untraceable.”