Nemesis Games

Chapter Twenty-five: Naomi

Hour by hour, history rolled out, every new moment making things worse. The newsfeeds from Earth and Mars, and then reports from Tycho Station and Ganymede filled with reporters and journalists blank with shock or else weeping. The hammering of Earth took most of the bandwidth: images from an apocalypse. Cities along the coasts of the Atlantic with grinding waves shattering fourth- and fifth-story windows. An army of small tornados forming behind the shock wave’s leading edge. The planet she was so used to seeing glow as the city lights made it a permanent fire, going dark. The field hospital at Dakar where ash and stones rained down upon row after row of the dead. The shaking UN spokesman confirming the death of the secretary-general. The void between the planets was alive with chatter and speculation, reports and theories and then conflicting reports and theories. With the complexity of light delay, it was almost impossible to put events in order. Everything seemed to be happening at once.

Which, she supposed, was how Marco had wanted it.

The events in other places—things that would have been shattering on any other day—seemed footnotes to the grand thesis of destruction playing out on Earth. Yes, there had been an attempted coup on Tycho Station, but the Earth was dying. Yes, an OPA cell had taken control of the ports on Ganymede, but the Earth was dying. Yes, a battle was going on between Martian escort ships and an unknown force near the Hungaria asteroids, but Earth was dying. The sense that something vast had descended on all humanity was inescapable.

Outside, in the common room, elated voices rose with each new report, cheering with delight. In her assigned quarters, she watched with a growing numbness. And beneath it, something else. After half a shift, she turned the screen off. Her own face reflected in the emptiness that followed looked like another stunned reporter searching for words and failing. She pulled herself out of her crash couch and walked out to the common room. It was so much like the Roci’s galley that her brain kept trying to recognize it, failing, and trying again. An utterly unfamiliar space would have been easier than this architectural uncanny valley.

“Hoy, Knuckles,” Cyn said, rising from among the crowd. “A que gehst, yeah?”

She made an automatic Belter’s shrug, but Cyn didn’t sit back down. Not the question of a friend wondering where she was going, but of a guard demanding information of a prisoner. She arranged her expression more carefully.

“This was why, wasn’t it? This was why he wanted me?”

“Marco son Marco,” Cyn said, and his voice was weirdly gentle. “He thought we should get you, so did, yeah? Why does why matter? Still the safest place to be in the system right here.”

Naomi took a long breath and blew it out.

“Lot to take in,” she said. “Big.”

“Is that,” Cyn said. Naomi looked at her hands, her fingers laced together. Act like one of them, she thought. What would she do if she were one of them again? The answer came too naturally. As if she was one of them. As if she always had been.

“Ship’s got an inventory,” she said. “I can do the checks. Be useful.”

“I’ll join,” he said, falling into step with her.

She knew where to go, how the lift would take her, where the machine shop was. In the years she’d been on the Roci, she hadn’t been aware that she was also internalizing the design logic of the Martian Navy, but she had been. When they reached the shop, she knew where the diagnostic arrays would be stored even though she’d never set foot in the place before.

Cyn hesitated before he opened the cabinets, but only a little. Checking inventory, testing batteries and relays and storage bubbles, was something everyone did in their spare time if they grew up in the Belt. It was as natural as drinking water, and when she picked up an array, he did too. The door to the cargo bay was sealed, but it cycled open for Cyn.

The bay was well-stocked. Magnetic pallets locked to the decks and walls in neat rows. She wondered idly where it had all come from, and what promises had been given in exchange. She went to the nearest, plugged the array into the pallet, and popped it open. The crates unfolded. Batteries. She took the first, snapped it into the array. The indicator went green, and she snapped the battery back out, replaced it, and took the next one.

“All going to be good,” Cyn said. “Military grade, this.”

“Well thank God militaries never get shit wrong.” The indicator went green. She swapped the battery in her hand for the next one. Cyn went to the next crate over, popped it, and started doing as she was doing.

She recognized it as a kindness. He hadn’t come down to be her friend, but her jailer. He could as easily have put her back in her cabin and locked the door to keep her there, but he hadn’t. He could have stood guard over her while she worked through the batteries, but he didn’t. He pretended that they were together on the task, equals. Even if it meant missing beer and Armageddon with his friends. Against her will, Naomi felt a spark of gratitude for that.

“Big day,” she said.

“A long time coming,” Cyn said.

“Long time,” she agreed automatically.

“Got to be weird seeing him again.”

She pulled another battery, checked it, put it back, grabbed the next one. Cyn cleared his throat.

“Mé falta,” he said. “Shouldn’t have said it.”

“No, it’s fine,” Naomi said. “Yes, it’s weird seeing him again. Did a lot to get away from him last time. Didn’t see ever coming back.”

“Bad times.”

“Those or these?”

Cyn coughed out a laugh and looked over at her, a question in his eyes. “These? Esá the promised land. Belt standing up. You know how it was before. You remember running thin because we couldn’t get enough oxygen. Breaking bones because the meds got taxed too much.”

“I do,” she said, but Cyn was on a roll now, and he wasn’t ready to stop. He put down his array and stared at her. The sympathy had burned out of him, and there was a rage in his eyes. Not with her. With something bigger.

“I got three cousins died because Earth corporations wouldn’t sell the good cancer meds to Belters. Gave us the crap left over from the farms on Ganymede. Only vat meats aren’t like people, yeah? Don’t work the same, but who cares? Tio Bennett got his ship taken away because he was behind on his permitting. He wasn’t even in a pinché Earther dock, but he didn’t pay, so they boarded him, dropped him on Ceres, and sold his rig. And for what? They protect us from pirates? They protect us from third-rate manufacturers passing off old suits as new? They care if we got shot? If we got killed?”

“I know they don’t.”

“Didn’t, Knuckles. They didn’t. Because past is the past now. Today,” Cyn said, poking the air with his thumb. “You been flying on their side for a lot of years, and maybe not tu falta. Things before, keeping Filipito away, maybe we all did that wrong, yeah? But I’m starting to think you been sharing a couch with an Earth coyo so long you forgot what you are. Started thinking maybe you’re like them.”

No, she wanted to say. No, I never forgot. But even as she formed the words, she wasn’t sure if they were true. Once, there had been a girl with her name who had belonged here. Who’d felt the rage she saw in Cyn and in Filip. There had been a time when she could have cheered the deaths on Earth. But Jim was from Earth. And Amos. Alex from Mars, which from a Belt perspective was more or less the same thing. And what was she? Their pet Belter? The one that didn’t belong? She didn’t think so. So then, she was something else.

And still, how well had they known her, really? There was so much she hadn’t said. She didn’t know what would have changed if she had.

Cyn was scowling at her, his eyes hard, his jaw set. She tried to retreat back behind the curtain of her hair, but it wasn’t enough. Not here. Not now. She had to say something; she had to react or it would be the same as confessing, and she was done taking responsibility for things she hadn’t chosen. She tried to think what Jim would have said, but imagining him was like touching an open wound. Guilt at keeping her past from him and the grief and longing of being away from him and the fear that something bad had happened to him on Tycho. Or was happening to him, right now, while she could do nothing about it. She didn’t know what Jim would do, and didn’t dare to imagine him.

All right. Amos, then. What would Amos do?

She took a deep breath, let it out. When she looked up, she brushed her hair away. Grinned. “Well, Cyn. That’s one way of looking at things,” she said, leaning into the words. “Ain’t it?”

Cyn blinked. Whatever he’d expected, it hadn’t been that. She checked the last battery on her pallet, replaced it, and shut the box back down. Cyn was still looking at her, his head turned a degree to his left. It made him seem wary of her.

Good.

She nodded at the open pallet at his feet. “You going to check those?” she asked. “Or d’you need some help?”

By dinner, it seemed like the attacks were done. The feeds, on the other hand, were in full swarm. She sat at a table that, like everything on the ship, seemed too familiar. Cyn sat on her right, and a young woman she didn’t know on her left. Her plate was heaped with fried mushroom in hot sauce, the way Rokku used to make it. She ate it one-handed, the way the others did, and wondered whether someone looking over the room would have been able to pick her out as the one that didn’t fit.

The screen was set to a feed coming out of Tycho Station. She watched it and tried not to feel anything. When Monica Stuart appeared, she felt a shock of fear that she couldn’t quite explain. The woman made an introduction that told Naomi nothing new, then turned to Fred Johnson sitting stiffly across from her. He looked old. He looked tired. She didn’t watch him, barely listened to them speak, straining instead at the edges of the screen in case Jim was there. The others were heckling and catcalling anyway. She caught fragments.

“Do you believe that you were the primary target of the attack?”

“That appears to be the case.”

“Fucking liar!” someone across the galley shouted, and the others roared their approval. Including Cyn.

Fred moved carefully, and the camera stayed close on his face. He was hurt then, and hiding it. She’d heard once that birds back on Earth would do everything they could to hide that they were ill. Any visible weakness was an invitation to attack. The comparison made Fred Johnson seem vulnerable. Maybe everything was vulnerable now. “The attackers are in custody, and we hope very soon to have a clear idea who was behind this.” Something about that caught her. It was odd, knowing Marco, that he hadn’t made a press release of it. He’d brought her here to show off, hadn’t he?

Or had he? She was supposed to bring the Rocinante with her, and they’d been disappointed when she didn’t. Was the ship what he’d really wanted? Or Jim? She wondered with a sense of dread what would have happened if she hadn’t come alone.

And then, as if thinking had summoned him, Monica Stuart ended the interview with Colonel Fred Johnson, voice of the OPA and director of Tycho Station, and turned instead to Captain James Holden.

Her breath stuttered.

“I understand you were working as a bodyguard for Colonel Johnson,” Monica said.

“Yes, that’s true,” Jim said with a little grimace. He hadn’t done a very good job of it apparently. “It wasn’t really needed. The people who infiltrated the security team turned out to be a very small minority. He wasn’t ever in real danger.”

He was lying. Naomi pushed her food away.

“Is it true that there was a secondary target? There are some people reporting that the attack may have been cover for some kind of theft.”

Annoyance flashed in Jim’s eyes. She wondered if anyone else saw it. Monica was probably pushing into territory that they hadn’t agreed on. Or had agreed to avoid. “They’re not reporting that to me,” Jim said. “As far as I know, apart from some damage to the station, the coup was a total failure.” Another lie.

“Switch the feed!” someone shouted. A chorus of agreement rose. Someone called Jim something insulting, and Cyn glanced over at her and then away. Naomi went back to her food. The hot sauce burned her lips, but she didn’t mind. The screen switched to a major newsfeed from Earth. The reporter was a young man in a black raincoat. The text said he was in someplace called Porto. The buildings behind him were a mix of ancient and new, with thick, muddy water tearing at them all. On the higher ground behind him, there were rows of sacks. No, body bags.

“That was him, wasn’t it?”

She didn’t know how long Filip had been standing behind her. The girl to her left nodded to Filip and fled. The boy took the empty seat. Wisps of stubble stretched along the line of his jaw, black against the golden brown of his skin. He turned to look at her, and his eyes took a moment to find her, like he was drunk. “That was the man you left us for, si no?”

Cyn grunted like he’d been hit. Naomi didn’t know why. The question was so wrong it was actually funny.

“Not how it played,” she said. “But yes. I ship with him.”

“He’s handsome,” Filip said. She wondered whose voice he was echoing. It didn’t sound like Marco. “Wanted to say, about your being here? Wanted to say.”

But then he didn’t go on to actually finish the thought. She wondered whether she saw regret in his eyes, or if she was imagining it because she wanted it to be there. She didn’t know what to say, how to answer. It felt like there were many versions of her—the captive, the collaborator, the mother reunited, the mother who went away—and all of them spoke differently. She didn’t know which was her real self. If any of them.

Probably, it was all.

“Not the way I’d have chosen,” she said, stepping through the words like they were sharp. “But that’s true of a lot of things, yeah?”

Filip nodded, looked down. For a moment she thought he’d move away, and didn’t know whether she wanted him to stay or go.

“It’s me up there now, you know,” Filip said. “On the feed? That’s me.”

The reporter was older than Filip, broader across the face and shoulders. For a moment, she tried to see a resemblance between them, and then like walking into a freezer, she understood.

“Your work,” she said.

“Gave it to me as a present,” Filip said. “The stealth coating on the rocks? I led the team that retrieved it, me. Without me, none of this.”

He was boasting. It was in the corner of his eyes and the tightness of his lips how badly he wanted her to be impressed. To approve. Something like rage shifted in her gut. On the screen, the reporter was listing relief organizations and religious groups. People who were trying to organize help for the refugees. As if anyone on the planet didn’t need refuge now.

“Did that to me too,” she said. Filip’s expression asked the question. “Your father. He put blood on my hands too. Made me complicit in killing people. Thought it would make me easier to control, I guess.”

It was the wrong thing to say. The boy flinched, drawing into himself like a snail’s feeler touched with salt. The feed changed. The dead and missing on Earth had topped two hundred million. A cheer went up all through the galley.

“Is that why you left?” Filip asked. “Couldn’t handle doing the work?”

She sat silent for a long moment. Then, “Yes.”

“Better that you went, then,” Filip said. She told herself he didn’t mean it. It was just something he said to hurt her. It worked. But more than that, she felt a vast sorrow for all the things her baby boy might have been that he wasn’t. For the child she could have had in him, if there had been a way. But she’d left her child in the hands of a monster, and the infection had spread. A family of monsters, father and mother and child.

It made it easier.

“Weighed on me,” she said. “All those dead people because of what I’d done. I tried to leave. Told him I wouldn’t turn him in if he just let me take you and go. So instead he took you away. Said I was acting crazy, and he didn’t trust me around you. That if anyone was getting turned in, it would be me.”

“I know,” Filip said. Spat. “He told me.”

“And I was going to have to do it again. And again. And again. Kill more people for him. I tried to do it too. Tried to push through. Let them die. He tell you I tried to kill myself?”

“Yeah,” Filip said. She should stop. She didn’t need to put this on him. Her little boy. Her little boy who’d just helped kill a world.

God, she still wanted to protect him. How stupid was that? He was a murderer now. He needed to know.

“I was at an airlock on Ceres Station. Rigged it to open. All I needed to do was step out. It was an old-style one. Blue and gray. And it smelled like fake apple. Something about the recycler there. And, anyway, I did it. I triggered it. Only the station had put in a fail-safe I didn’t know about. So.” She shrugged. “That was when I knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That I couldn’t save you. You could have a gone mother or a dead one. Those were all the options.”

“Some people aren’t meant to be soldiers,” Filip said. It was meant to cut, but she was past feeling now.

“The only right you have with anyone in life is the right to walk away. I would have taken you with me if I could. But I couldn’t. I would have stayed if I could. But I couldn’t. I would have saved you if I could.”

“I didn’t need saving.”

“You just killed a quarter of a billion people,” she said. “Someone should have kept that from happening.”

Filip stood, his motions wooden. For a moment, she saw what he would look like as a man. And what he had been as a boy. There was a deep pain in his eyes. Not like her own. His pain was his, and she could only hope he would feel it. That he would at least learn to regret.

“Before you kill yourself,” she said, “come find me.”

He pulled back a centimeter, as if she’d shouted. “Con que I do something stupid like that? Soy no coward, me.”

“When it comes,” she said, “find me. Nothing can ever take it back, but I’ll help you if I can.”

“You’re merde to me, puta,” Filip snapped and stalked away. Around the galley, the others stared or pretended not to. Naomi shook her head. Let them look. She was past caring. She didn’t even hurt. Her heart was vast and dry and empty as a desert. For the first time since she’d taken Marco’s call on Tycho, her mind was clear.

She’d almost forgotten Cyn was there until he spoke. “Harsh words for his big day.”

“Life’s like that,” she said. But she thought, This isn’t the big day.

In her memory, Marco spoke. In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. But he hadn’t made his pronouncement yet. Not in any diction. She didn’t know his plans. Likely no one but Marco knew all of them.

But whatever his grand design was, it wasn’t over yet.