Nemesis Games

Chapter Twenty-nine: Naomi

She’d known to expect it. Like falling back into a bad habit, the dark thoughts came: which conduits had power lines in them with enough voltage to stop a heart, which rooms were small enough to seal and evacuate, the ways the medical bays could be tricked into administering an overdose. And the airlocks. Always the airlocks. The ideas weren’t compulsions, not yet. They were just her brain noticing things that interested her. The worst would come later. If she let it.

So instead, she distracted herself. Not with the newsfeeds that played constantly, everywhere. Those only made her feel more helpless. Not with the conversations with her old friends. At best, those left her feeling like she was lying. At worst, like she was becoming an earlier version of herself for whom the dark thoughts were more natural. What she did have was work. It was all simple tasks like checking inventories and swapping air filters, and always under the watchful eyes of a minder. When she did talk, it was polite and superfluous; the kind of banter anyone crewing the same ship would make. It gave the rest of the crew the illusion that she was one of them in a way that sulking in her bunk wouldn’t have. If she had any hope at all, it came from finding a way to leverage her weird non-status with the group. And with Marco.

At first, she’d tried distracting herself by thinking of her real crew. Alex and Amos. Jim. Even her best memories of them were riddled with guilt and pain now, so instead she filled her mind with technical concerns. In the mess, while the others cheered at the images of devastation, she speculated about the reactor’s output, starting with the size of the galley, and then guessing at the requirements of the air and water recycling systems, and knowing the rough percentage that the Roci put into them. During her sleep shift, as she lay restless in her crash couch, the steady one-third-g burn pressing her into the gel like a hand on her chest, she ran over the power grid from the Roci, mapping how the logic of her ship would apply to this one. She thought of it as a meditation because it was too dangerous to admit—even to herself—that she was planning.

And still, small things came together. A toolbox in the machine shop had a bent hasp and, given a few minutes, could be forced open. The Allen wrenches inside would open the access panel on the lift wall between the crew quarters and the airlock, which was where the secondary diagnostic handset for the comm array was stored. With a few uninterrupted minutes, someone could probably broadcast a message. A short one. If there was anything to say, or anyone to say it to.

She had half a dozen schemes like it. A path to sneak between the hulls and take control of a PDC. A way to use a stolen hand terminal to make copies of the engineering software. How to force-cycle an airlock by spoofing the emergency codes from the medical bay. Most of them were fantasies, possible in theory but nothing she had ever had reason to try. A few were fairly solid. And all of them were defeated by a simple, inescapable fact: the first layer of any security was always physical. Even if she’d found a way to take control of the whole ship using a magnet and a length of Velcro, it wouldn’t matter, because Cyn or Aaman or Bastien would put a bullet through her neck before she could manage it.

So she called it meditation and kept the darkness at bay. And sometimes—by being quiet and not making waves and keeping her mind and senses sharp—she heard something she wasn’t supposed to hear.

Karal, her minder that shift, was talking up a woman called Sárta while Naomi scraped the crew decking nearby. Truth was the ship was new enough it didn’t need it, but it was work. Wings, who’d first hunted her back on Ceres, came out from his quarters in a Martian naval uniform. Naomi looked up from under her hair as Wings saw Karal and Sárta standing together. The flicker of jealousy that passed over him had been the same since humans came down from the trees.

“Hey, y’all,” Wings said in a fake drawl. “Víse mé! Bin Marteño, sa sa? Howdy, howdy, howdy!”

Karal chuckled and Sárta looked annoyed. Wings stepped through the narrow hall with an affected bowlegged gait. Naomi shifted aside to give him room.

“You got nothing better to do than play dress up?” Sárta asked.

“Don’t wait underwater,” Karal said. “Heard we’re taking prisoners first. Liano, he ran whispers to Ceres. Tightbeam. Hamechie about the prisoners.”

“Not how I heard it,” Wings said, too quickly and more to Sárta than Karal. “I heard it’s only one. Sakai. And even that…” He shrugged.

“Even that?” Sárta said, and mimicked the shrug. Wings blushed in anger.

“Everyone knows how it is,” Wings said. “Sometimes they tell dead men they’ll live. Karal, you were there. Andrew and Chuchu? All about how help’s coming and then so sorry, so sad?”

“Esa died soldiers,” Karal said, but the point hit home. It was in his hands and the corners of his mouth. And then, like he realized his mistake, he looked over to Naomi. She kept her expression blank and bored, her attention on the seam in the deck and the thin plastic spatula she was dragging through it. The cascade of implications couldn’t reach her face.

Sakai had been the name of the new chief engineer on Tycho, and if this was the same man, he’d been one of Marco’s. And he’d been caught, or they wouldn’t have called him a prisoner. She blew the hair up out of her eyes, shifted over to a new seam and started again.

“Back to work, yeah?” Karal said.

Wings grunted his derision, but went back to his quarters to do as he’d been told. Karal and Sárta went back to flirting, but the moment was gone, and pretty soon it was only Karal and Naomi again, passing time.

While she worked, pressing the plastic into the seams, scraping out whatever had gathered there, doing it again, she tried to fit the new information into the larger scheme of things. Marco had hoped she would bring the Rocinante to Ceres. But Sakai had known that the ship needed repair, and must have passed that information up to leadership.

She’d thought that Marco had wanted her ship because of who and what she was. And maybe that was part of it. Or maybe what he’d really wanted was private access to a ship that would be expected and welcome at Tycho Station. For what, she didn’t know. The way he nested plans inside his plans, he might have had half a dozen uses for the Roci and for her. And more, there was a question about whether Sakai was in danger. Were they afraid Fred would execute him? Maybe. Maybe something else.

Either way, she knew more now than she’d known before, and, like the bent hasp on the toolbox, it gave her options she hadn’t had. She wondered what Jim or Amos or Alex would have done in her place, how they would have taken this one piece of information and used it. An academic question, really, because she knew what Naomi Nagata would do, and it wasn’t something any of them could have done.

When the deck was clean, she dropped the spatula into the recycler, stood, and stretched. The thrust gravity made her knees and spine ache, and she wished that wherever they were going, they’d be in a little less of a hurry to get there. It didn’t matter.

“Grabbing a shower, me,” she said. “Tell him I want to talk.”

“Him who?” Karal said.

Naomi hoisted an eyebrow. “Tell him the mother of his son wants to talk.”

“You’ve put him in the field?” Naomi said. “Is that where we are? Child soldiers?”

Marco’s smile looked almost sorrowful. “You think he’s a child?”

The exercise machines were empty apart from him. On the float, everyone in the crew would have been spending hours in the resistance gel or strapped into one of the mechs. On the burn, most of the crew were getting more than enough from their own weight. But Marco was there in a sheer exercise gown, straps wrapped around his hands, pulling down on wide bands that fought against him. The muscles in his back rippled with every stroke, and Naomi was certain he was aware of it. She had known many strong people in her life. She could tell the difference between the muscles that grew from work and the kind that came from vanity.

“I think he’s crowing about how he’s responsible for the rock fall on Earth,” she said. “Like it’s something to be proud of.”

“It is. It’s more than you or I could have done at his age. Filip’s smart and he’s a leader. Give him another twenty years, he could run the solar system. Maybe more.”

Naomi walked over and turned off the exercise sequence. The wide bands in Marco’s hands went slack with a barely audible hiss. “I wasn’t done,” he said.

“Tell me that isn’t why you brought me here,” she said. “Tell me that you didn’t abduct me in order to show me what a good father you’ve been and how well our boy turned out. Because you betrayed him.”

Marco’s laugh was low and warm and rolling. He started unwrapping his hands. It would have been so easy to hurt him while he did it that she was fairly certain he had a hidden way to defend himself. And if not, the impression that he might was defense enough. She wasn’t here to kill him. She was here to push him into saying something.

“Is that what you think?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I think you did it to show off. I walked away from you, and you’re such a little boy that you still can’t stand it. So when your big moment came, you had to have me here to see it happen.”

It was true, as far as it went. She did see a pleasure in him that came from having power over her. Even her weird half-status in the crew was a part of that. Locking her in a cage would have been a tacit admission she was a threat. He wanted her to see that she was powerless, to make the prison walls herself. There had been a time it would have worked. She was betting that he didn’t realize that time had passed.

And she was betting that it had passed. When he narrowed his eyes at her, shaking his head, she still felt the tug of humiliation in her throat, familiar as an old habit. So perhaps the truth was more complicated.

“I brought you home to the winning side because you are the mother of my son, and always will be. Anything beyond that is happy coincidence. That we have the chance to find some sense of closure between us—”

“Bullshit. Closure? You lost. It’s closed. You only say it wasn’t finished because you hadn’t won yet. I left. I sacrificed everything because having nothing away from you was better than having it all and being your puppet.”

He lifted his hands, palms out, in a mocking gesture of peace. It wasn’t working. Not yet.

“I hear that you would have done things differently. I don’t blame you for that. Not everyone has the strength to be a soldier. I thought you did. I thought I could count on you. And when the burden bore you down, yes, I took our son someplace I knew he’d be safe. You blame me for keeping him away from you. But you’d have done exactly the same to me, if you’d had the power.”

“I would have,” she said. “I’d have taken him with me, and you’d never have seen either of us again.”

“So how different are we?” Sweat dewed his skin. He took a towel from the rack, dabbing at his face and arms. She knew intellectually that he was beautiful, the way the iridescent wings of a carrion fly would be. She felt the weight of her disgust with herself for letting this man be what he was to her, and knew that was part of what he intended. The dark thoughts stirred in her brain stem. They didn’t matter. She was here to solve a puzzle.

He put down the towel. “Naomi—”

“It’s Holden then, isn’t it? You brought me here as… what? Insurance against him?”

“I’m not afraid of your Earther fuck buddy,” Marco said, and Naomi heard the roughness in his voice like an animal scenting a distant fire.

“I think you are,” she said. “I think you wanted him off the board before you started this, and I was supposed to lead him into the trap. Because you couldn’t imagine that I would come alone. That I wouldn’t bring a man to be strong for me.”

Marco chuckled, but it had more of an edge to it. He walked across the exercise mat, scooping up his dark robe and shrugging into it. “You’re trying to talk yourself into something, Knuckles.”

“Do you know why I’m with him?”

If Marco were wise, he wouldn’t rise to that bait. He’d walk out, leave her alone among the machines. If she’d managed to make him angry, even just a little bit angry, though…

“I assume you have a kink for powerful men,” Marco said.

“Because he is what you pretend to be.”

She saw it land. She couldn’t even say what it was that changed in him, but the Marco she’d seen since being brought here—the smooth, world-weary, self-assured leader of the greatest coup in human history—was gone, dropped like a mask. In his place was the rage-filled boy who’d almost destroyed her once. His laugh wasn’t low or warm or rolling.

“Well, just wait around, and we’ll see how much that does for him. Big Man Holden may think he’s unkillable, but everyone bleeds.”

There. That was a datapoint. It was working. It might only have been the rhetoric of the squabble, an empty threat. Or he might have just told her that his plans still involved the Rocinante.

“You can’t do anything to him,” she said.

“No?” Marco said, his teeth bared like a chimp. “Well, maybe you will.”

He turned sharply, stalking out of the room. Leaving her alone the way he should have a few minutes earlier. Or else a decade and a half before.

“You done?” Cyn asked, nodding at the brick of lentil and rice half-eaten on her plate. On the screen in the mess hall, a Martian general was pounding a table, red-faced with passion that looked a lot like fear. He was describing the cowardice of the person or persons who had committed this atrocity against not only Earth, but humanity. Every third sentence or so, someone at the end of her table would repeat the general’s words in a high, quacking voice, like something from a children’s cartoon.

She broke off another piece of the lentil brick and popped it in her mouth. “Close enough,” she said around it. She put her tray and the rest of the brick into the recycler and walked back toward the lift. Cyn loomed behind her. She was so locked in her own thoughts that she barely noticed he was there until he spoke.

“Heard you had it out with el jefe,” Cyn said. “Etwas á Filipito?”

Naomi made a noncommittal sound in the back of her throat.

Cyn scratched at the scar behind his left ear. “Es un bon coyo, your son. I know this is none of what you’d pick, but… Filipito, he heard too. Took it hard.”

The lift stopped and she got out, Cyn close behind. “Took it hard?”

“No weight,” Cyn said. “Only know it. A man, our Filipito, but not so much he don’t want your opinion, yeah? You’re his mother.”

The heartbreaking thing was that she understood. She only nodded.

In her bunk, her fingers laced behind her neck, she stared up at the blackness on the ceiling. The interface screen at her side was dead. She didn’t miss it. Slowly, she put together what she knew.

Marco had made attempts on the lives of the heads of Earth, Mars, and the OPA, but only managed to kill the UN secretary-general. He had tried to get the Rocinante before any of those attempts were made. He’d unleashed the worst catastrophe on Earth since the dinosaurs went extinct. He had Martian warships and weapons but didn’t show any signs of cooperating with the Martian government or Navy. All things she’d known, nothing new. So what was new?

Three new things, and maybe only that. First, Wings thought the attempts to trade Sakai back might be more to reassure the prisoner than to actually retrieve him. Second, Marco had intimated that Holden was still in danger, and third, that she might be the one to hurt him.

And also, underlying everything, her certainty that until Marco had given his speech, made himself the focus of all humanity’s attention, the attack was still only half-done. And if Sakai thought he was going to remain a prisoner, it would go wrong. That was interesting. What could Sakai know—

Oh.

Fred Johnson was alive, and Tycho Station wasn’t in Marco’s hands. Holden was in danger. She would be the one that hurt him.

So that meant that the Roci, like the Augustín Gamarra before her, had been rigged to have her magnetic bottle fail. Probably in dock. Fred Johnson, James Holden, and incidentally Chief Engineer Sakai and everyone on the station—all of them would die in a fireball whenever the software she’d written a lifetime ago decided that they should.

It was all happening again, and she had no way to stop it.