Nemesis Games

Chapter Thirty-five: Naomi

Back before, when she had been a girl and not known any better, it had been hard for her to cast Marco as the bad guy in their pairing. Even after the Gamarra, it had been difficult. Even after he’d taken Filip away. She’d grown up around poverty. She knew what bad men looked like. They raped their wives. Or beat them. Or their children. That was how you knew them for what they were. Marco was never that. He never hit her, never forced himself on her, never threatened to shoot her or throw her out an airlock or pour acid in her eyes. He’d pretended kindness so well she would doubt herself, make herself wonder if she was the one being unreasonable, irrational, all the things he implied she was.

He never did anything that would have made it easy for her.

After she’d reached her quarters, the door had locked. She hadn’t bothered trying to raise help or leave her little room since. She knew a cell when she was in it, and she’d known with a certainty like her own mortality that sooner or later, Marco would come.

He sat across from her now, still in his Martian military uniform. His eyes were soft, his lips pressed into a smile of amusement and regret. He looked like a poet. A man well bruised by the world, but still capable of passion. She wondered if he practiced the expression in a mirror. Probably, he did.

The wound on her head had stopped bleeding. Her joints all ached, and a vast bruise was blooming on her left hip. Even her fingertips felt like she’d scraped the first layers of skin off them, leaving them weeping and raw, though actually they just looked a little pinker than usual. She drank the same version of chamomile tea that the Rocinante made, and it felt like having a secret ally. She recognized that wasn’t a perfectly sane thought, but comfort was comfort.

The mess was empty, the screens turned off and the crew sent away. Even Cyn and Karal were absent. The implication was that whatever they said there was private, but it probably wasn’t. She could imagine Filip on another deck, watching. It felt like a setup. Everything about Marco felt like a setup. Because everything was.

“I don’t know why you do these things to me, Naomi,” Marco said. There was no anger in his voice. No, that wasn’t true. The anger was there, but hidden behind the mask of disappointment. “You used to be better than this.”

“I’m sorry. Did I upset your plans?”

“Well, yes,” Marco said. “That’s the thing. Used to be, you knew better. Used to be you at least tried to understand what was going on before you jumped in. Professional. This, though? Took a difficult thing and made it worse. Now what could have been gentle is going to be hard. I just want you to understand why I’m going to do what I’m going to do so you see I didn’t have a choice.”

There was a smart thing to do. She knew it. A wiser woman would have cried, begged forgiveness. That it would be insincere was the point. It was a mistake to give Marco anything real. Better to be thought weak. Better to be underestimated and misunderstood. She knew that, but she couldn’t do it. When she tried, something deep within her pushed back. Maybe if she pretended to be weak, it was too possible that it would become true. Maybe she was pretending to be strong.

Naomi spat on the deck. There was a little blood along with her saliva. “Save the air.”

He leaned forward, taking her hand in his. His grip was strong, like he was showing that he could hurt her, even if he wasn’t doing it right now. She thought, Well, that’s one way to make your subtext physical, and then chuckled.

“Naomi, I know we aren’t good, du y mé. I know you’re angry. But I know we were something once. We’re one body, you and me. Much as we try to be apart, our son means we will never be totally separate.”

She tried to pull her hand back, but he kept hold of it. She could pull harder or let him touch her, control her body even if it was only that much. The glimmer in his eyes was pleasure. His smile was a little more genuine, and it had an edge.

“You’ve got to understand what I’m doing here, it’s not for me. It’s for us.”

“Us?”

“Belters. All Belters. It’s for Filip. So when his turn comes, there’s still a place for him. Not just a footnote. Once upon a time there were a people who lived on moons and asteroids and the planets where life didn’t evolve. But then we found the gates, and those people died out because we didn’t need them. It’s why I have to do this. You don’t like my methods. I understand that. But they’re mine, and the cause is righteous.”

Naomi didn’t speak. The food processor let out a high whine that meant its water supply was getting low. She wondered if Marco knew that, or if it was just another meaningless noise for him.

“Pretty speech. But it doesn’t explain why I’m here. You didn’t need me here in order to break the system. Needed me for something else. You want to know what I think?”

“You told me,” Marco said, his grip on her hand tightening just a degree. “So the great James Holden wouldn’t come blow my house down. Seriously, you think too much of him. He’s not that impressive.”

“No, it’s worse than that. I think you wanted the Roci. I think you wanted my ship flying at your side when you did all this. But when I didn’t bring her, you fell back. Had Sakai rig her to blow. Because there is nothing original about you at all.”

His smile was as warm, but his eyes were cold now. Unamused. “Don’t follow,” he said.

“You start the conversation with Why do you make me hurt you when I love you so much? and now we’re at If I can’t have you, no one can. You can pretend we’re talking about the ship if you want. Doesn’t matter to me.”

Marco let her go and stood. He wasn’t as tall as she remembered him. “You got it wrong from the start. I wanted Fred Johnson—Butcher of Anderson Station, who killed people like you and me and Filip just because we were Belters. I wanted him isolated. Keep your ship out of his hands. Tried to get it brought, but no. Had Sakai try to disable her. Disable, sa sa? Had it rigged to blow at three percent power. Blown off her aft, maybe didn’t even hurt anyone.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said, but he was on a roll now, pacing the length of the mess, his arms spread wide like a man giving a speech to an invisible crowd.

“Killing the ship wasn’t my plan. That’s what you pushed me into. What happens to Holden is your fault, not mine. That’s what you need to see. How things get worse when you start acting like you know. You don’t know, Naomi. You don’t know because I haven’t told you.”

She took a sip of her tea and shrugged. “So tell me.”

Marco grinned. “You notice when we cut thrust for a few minutes? Strange thing to do in the middle of a chase, don’t you think?”

The truth was, she hadn’t noticed. In her bunk, nursing her wounds, the shifts in ship gravity hadn’t been on her mind.

“Docking procedure,” he said and pulled his hand terminal from his pocket and chose something. The speakers on the screens clicked, hissed. No image appeared on them, but a voice came.

Her voice.

“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.”

Marco touched something else on his hand terminal, and the screens sprang to life. Exterior cameras, probably connected to the point defense. The Chetzemoka burned not more than a hundred meters away, a docking tube clinging to her airlock like an umbilical cord. A ship that, if they dug hard enough, would trace back to her. The payments that had come from her accounts.

“Put it on intersecting course, more or less,” Marco said, his voice weary and sorrowful in a way she was certain hid glee. “Set the bottle to fail when the proximity sensors ping a ship. Didn’t have to be this way, but it does now.”

A real despair rose up in her throat, and she pushed it back down. It was what Marco wanted, so she would do anything, feel anything except that. She considered the screen. The ship looking like a box held together with one line of solder and some epoxy.

“You’re stealing it from your own son,” she said. Marco frowned. Naomi pointed toward the screen with her chin. “The Chetzemoka. I told Filip he could have it when we were here. That’s his ship. You’re stealing it from him.”

“Necessity of war,” Marco said.

“Shitty parenting.”

His jaw slid forward. His hands balled in fists. For a moment, she thought he was going to make it easy. He’d show whatever audience he was playing for who and what he really was. He got his temper back in time, and she wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed.

“If you’d stayed in your place, James Holden would have lived. But you stepped out. Put yourself where you didn’t belong. Because of you, he’s going to die.”

Naomi stood up, rubbed her eye with the back of her hand. Her false voice repeated through the mess hall—“Tell James Holden I am in distress…”

“Anything else?”

“You pretend you don’t care,” Marco said. “But you do.”

“You say so.” She shrugged. “I got a little bump. It’s giving me a headache. Or something is. Going to med bay get it fixed, yeah?”

“You can pretend—”

“Can I pretend in the med bay? Or do you need to go on impressing me?” It was too much. She felt a flood of words hammering up behind all she’d said. You are an egomaniac and a sadist and I can’t believe I ever thought I loved you and If Jim dies, I will by God find a way to make the bottle on this ship fail and we’ll all go to hell behind him. But engaging was also a trap, so she didn’t. She let the silence break the rhythm of Marco’s performance and saw his shoulders shift when he gave up and stepped off the stage in his head.

“Miral!” he yelled, and as the sounds of one of the crew moving from the quarters grew louder, “You abused the freedom I gave you. You can’t expect to keep it.”

“Too dangerous to leave free?” she asked, then licked her fingertip and ticked off a mark on an imaginary board. “One point for me, then.”

In the med bay, a woman she didn’t know ran tests to make sure Naomi wasn’t bleeding in her brain; that none of the bruises she had were crush wounds bad enough to kill the muscle, flood her body with potassium, stop her heart. Miral leaned against the supply cabinet, reciting obscenities—bitch, puta, cunt—with a half-focused rage. After spending all those days running inventory, Naomi knew everything in the cabinet. First drawer: gauze and bandages. Second drawer: one-use blood cards for maybe a hundred different field tests. Third drawer: emergency medical supplies like decompression kits, adrenaline shots, defibrillating tape. Naomi stared at Miral as he recited his litany. He glanced away, and then returned the stare, enunciating each word a little more sharply.

The medic had her sit up, the cushion of the medical table crackling under her shifting weight. The analgesic was a spray that went in Naomi’s mouth. It tasted like fake cherry and mold.

“Maybe take it easy for a couple days, yeah?” the medic said.

“Best I can,” Naomi agreed, hopping down from the bed. She straight-kicked Miral in the crotch, sending him sprawling into the cabinet and cracking two of her toes. She ignored the stab of pain in her foot and launched herself onto him, pounding at his head and neck. When he rolled, she rolled with him. The cabinet doors were open, spilling test cards and preloaded hypodermics across the floor. Miral’s elbow swung up, glancing off her jaw but still hard enough to make her ears ring.

She fell to the side, her belly to the deck, decompression kits the size of her thumb pressing into her face as Miral writhed around to kneel on her back. The medic was screaming. Naomi tried to turn, tried to evade the punches, but she couldn’t. The pain bloomed between her shoulder blades. And then, like time skipping, the weight was off her. She rolled to her side. Karal had Miral in a submission hold. He struggled and cursed, but the old Belter’s eyes were flat and dead.

“Be angry con sus séra that she got you unexpected,” Karal said. “Marco pas beat her down, you sure as fuck don’t, sabe pendejo?”

“Sa sa,” Miral said, and Karal let him go. The medic, standing in the corner, was a picture of silent rage. Miral rubbed his neck and glared at Naomi where she still lay on the deck. Karal walked over to look down at her.

“Bist bien, Knuckles?”

She nodded, and when Karal put out his hand, she took it and let him help her up. When she started for the door, Miral began to follow. Karal put a hand on the man’s chest. “I got this, me.”

Naomi hung her head as they walked, her hair falling over her face like a veil. The steady pressure of acceleration left her knees and spine aching even more than her wounds. All through the ship, malefic faces turned to her. She could feel the hatred coming off them like heat from a fire. When she passed through the mess, the Chetzemoka was still on the screen, the docking umbilical linking them. They’d need to cut thrust when they unhooked it, or it would fall to the side, trailing along the ship like a limp tentacle. That would be how she knew she was too late. It hadn’t happened yet.

At her quarters, Karal came in behind her and closed the door. With two of them in the tiny space, it felt cramped and uncomfortably intimate. She sat on the crash couch, arms crossed, her legs tucked under her, and looked at him, her expression carrying the question. Karal shook his head.

“You got to stop this, Knuckles,” he said, and his voice was surprisingly gentle. “We’re in king shit here. Esá la we’re doing? History, yeah? Changing everything, but for us this time. I know you and him ain’t right, but tu muss listen him. Yeah?”

Naomi looked away. She just wanted him to leave, but Karal didn’t go. He sank down, his back against the wall, his knees to his broad chest.

“I heard the plan where we gehst con du? Bring you in? Fought it, me. Mal cóncep, I said. Why cut open the scar? Marco said was worth it. Said you were going to be in danger when it all came, and Filip, he deserved to see his mother, yeah? And Marco’s Marco, so si.”

Karal rubbed his palms over his head. It made a soft hissing sound, almost too faint to hear. Naomi felt an inexplicable urge to touch him, to offer some comfort, but she didn’t. When he spoke again, he sounded tired.

“We’re little people in big times, yeah? Time for Butchers and Marco—men and history-book things. Other pinché worlds. Who wants that? Just you let this pass, yeah? Maybe your Holden, he doesn’t take the bait. Maybe something else trips before he gets here. Maybe you get small and you live through this. That so bad? Doing what needs to live through?”

She shrugged. For a time, the only sound was the clicking of the air recycler. Karal lifted himself up with a grunt. He looked older than she thought of him. It was more than just the years, she thought. For a moment, she was young again, back on Ceres with Filip bawling in his crib while she watched the news of the Augustín Gamarra. It occurred to her for the first time that everyone on that ship had watched Earth die in real time the way she’d seen the firefly light of the Gamarra rise and fade on the newsfeed, looped a dozen times while the reporter spoke over it. She wanted to say something, but she couldn’t, so she just watched as Karal opened the door then closed it behind him. The lock slid closed. She wiped the wet from her eyes, and—once she was sure he wasn’t coming back—spat the decompression kit into her hand.

Wet with her saliva and no bigger than her thumb, it was the sort of thing any mech driver kept with her. A tiny ampoule of injectable oxygenated artificial blood, and a panic button that would make an emergency medical request for an airlock to cycle. Military ships like the Pella and Roci ignored that sort of request as basic security. The Canterbury and other commercial ships usually allowed it, filled as they were with civilians who posed a greater threat to themselves than pirates or boarders did. She didn’t know how the Chetzemoka would respond to it, but there was only one way to find out. The only other things she needed were an EVA suit and a clear idea of when the ships would cut thrust.

Then it was a matter of taking control of the ship, maybe blowing the core, and getting the hell away from Marco. Again. She felt a pang of regret at the thought of Filip—and Cyn and Karal and all the people she’d known once and cared for. Even loved. It was an echo of greater pain, and she could ignore it.

“Didn’t break me when I was a girl,” she said to the tiny black kit. “Don’t know why he thinks he can break me now.”