“Can I order you something?” Holden asked as she sat.
“Sure, I’ll take a grapefruit martini,” she said. While Holden entered the order on the table, she looked him over with a mysterious half smile that turned his belly to liquid.
“Okay,” he said, authorizing his terminal to open a bar tab and pay for the drinks. “One hideous martini on its way.”
Naomi laughed. “Hideous?”
“A near-fatal case of scurvy being the only reason I can imagine drinking something with grapefruit juice in it.”
She laughed again, untying at least one of the knots in Holden’s gut, and they sat together in companionable silence until the drinks arrived. She took a small sip and smacked her lips in appreciation, then said, “Okay. Spill.”
Holden took a much longer drink, nearly finishing off the small glass of scotch in a single gulp, trying to convince himself that the spreading warmth in his belly could stand in for courage. I didn’t feel comfortable with where we left things, and I thought that we should talk. Kind of process this together. He cleared his throat.
“I fucked everything up,” he said. “I’ve treated my friends badly. Worse than badly. You were absolutely right to do what you did. I couldn’t hear what you were saying at the time, but you were right to say it.”
Naomi took another drink of her martini, then casually reached up and pulled out the elastic band holding her masses of black curls behind her head. Her hair fell down around her face in a tangle, making Holden think of ivy-covered stone walls. He realized that for as long as he’d known her, Naomi had always let her hair down in emotional situations. She hid behind it, not literally, but because it was her best feature. The eye was just naturally drawn to its glossy black curls. A distraction technique. It made her suddenly seem very human, as vulnerable and lost as he was. Holden felt a rush of affection for her that must have showed on his face, because she looked at him and then blushed.
“What is this, Jim?”
“An apology?” he said. “An admission that you were right, and that I was turning into my own screwed-up version of Miller? Those at the very least. Hopefully opening the dialogue to reconciliation, if I’m lucky.”
“I’m glad,” Naomi said. “I’m glad you’re figuring that out. But I’ve been saying this for months now, and you-”
“Wait,” Holden said. He could feel her pulling back from him, not letting herself believe. All he had left to offer her was absolute truth, so he did. “I couldn’t hear you. Because I’ve been terrified, and I’ve been a coward.”
“Fear doesn’t make you a coward.”
“No,” he said. “Of course it doesn’t. But refusing to face up to it. To not admit to you how I felt. To not let you and Alex and Amos help me. That was cowardice. And it may have cost me you, the crew’s loyalty, everything I really care about. It made me keep a bad job a lot longer than I should have because the job was safe.”
A small knot of the Golgo players began drifting toward their table, and Holden was gratified when he saw Naomi wave them off. It meant she wanted to keep talking. That was a start.
“Tell me,” she said. “Where are you going from here?”
“I have no idea,” Holden replied with a grin. “And that’s the best feeling I’ve had in ages. But no matter what happens next, I need you there.”
When she started to protest, Holden quickly put up a hand to stop her and said, “No, I don’t mean like that. I’d love to win you back, but I’m perfectly okay with the idea that it might take some time, or never happen at all. I mean the Roci needs you back. The crew needs you there.”
“I don’t want to leave her,” Naomi said with a shy smile.
“She’s your home,” Holden said. “Always will be as long as you want it. And that’s true no matter what happens between us.”
Naomi began wrapping one thick strand of hair around her finger and drank off the last of her drink. Holden pointed at the table menu, but she shook her hand at him.
“This is because you confronted Fred, right?”
“Yeah, partly,” Holden said. “I was standing in his office feeling terrified and realizing I’d been afraid for a long, long time. I’ve screwed things up with him too. Some of that’s probably his fault. He’s a true believer, and those are bad people to climb into bed with. But it’s mostly still mine.”
“Did you quit?”
“He fired me, but I was probably going to quit.”
“So,” Naomi said. “You’ve lost us our paying gig and our patron. I guess I feel a little flattered that the part you’re trying to patch up is me.”
“You,” Holden said, “are the only part I really care about fixing.”
“You know what happens now, right?”
“You move back onto the ship?”
Naomi just smiled the comment away. “Now we pay for our own repairs. If we fire a torpedo, we have to find someone to sell us a new one. We pay for water, air, docking fees, food, and medical supplies for our very expensive automated sick bay. Have a plan for that?”
“Nope!” Holden said. “But I have to say, for some reason, it feels great.”
“And when the euphoria passes?”
“I’ll make a plan.”
Her smile grew reflective and she tugged on her lock of hair.
“I’m not ready to move back to the ship right now,” Naomi said, reaching across the table to take his hand in hers. “But by the time the Roci is patched up, I’ll need my cabin back.”
“I’ll move the rest of my stuff out immediately.”
“Jim,” she said, squeezing his fingers once before letting go. “I love you, and we’re not okay yet. But this is a good start.”
And yes, Holden thought, it really was.
Holden woke up in his old cabin on the Rocinante feeling better than he had in months. He climbed out of his bunk and wandered naked through the empty ship to the head. He took an hour-long shower in water he actually had to pay for now, heated by electricity the dock would be charging him for by the kilowatt-hour. He walked back to his bunk, drying skin made pink by the almost scalding water as he went.
He made and ate a large breakfast and drank five cups of coffee while catching up on the technical reports on the Roci’s repairs until he was sure he understood everything about what had been done. Holden had switched to reading a column about the state of Mars-Earth relations by a political humorist when his terminal buzzed at him, and a call came through from Amos.
“Hey, Cap,” he said, his big face filling the small screen. “You coming over to the station today? Or should we come meet you on the Roci?”
“Let’s meet here,” Holden replied. “Sam and her team will be working today and I want to keep an eye on things.”
“See you in a few, then,” Amos said, and killed the connection.
Holden tried to finish the humor column but kept getting distracted and having to read the same passage over again. He finally gave up and cleaned the galley for a while, then set the coffee-maker to brew a fresh pot for Amos and the work crew when they arrived.
The machine was gurgling happily to itself like a content infant when the deck hatch clanged open and Amos and Prax climbed down the crew ladder and into the galley.
“Cap,” Amos said, dropping into a chair with a thump. Prax followed him into the room but didn’t sit. Holden grabbed mugs and pulled two more cups of coffee, then set them on the table.
“What’s the news?” he said.
Amos answered with a shit-eating grin and spun his terminal across the table to Holden. When Holden looked at it, it was displaying the account information for Prax’s “save Mei” fund. It had just over half a million UN dollars in it.
Holden whistled and slumped into a chair. “Jesus grinned, Amos. I’d hoped we might… but never this.”
“Yeah, it was a little under 300k this morning. It’s gone up another 200k just over the last three hours. Seems like everyone following the Ganymede shit on the news has mad
e little Mei the poster child for the tragedy.”
“Is this enough?” Prax cut in, anxiety in his voice.
“Oh, hell yes,” Holden said with a laugh. “Way more than enough. This will fund our rescue mission just fine.”
“Also, we got a clue,” Amos said, pausing dramatically to sip his coffee.
“About Mei?”
“Yep,” Amos said, adding a little more sugar to his cup. “Prax, send him that message you got.”
Holden watched the message three times, grinning wider with each viewing. “The security video on your presentation. I believe I know the man in it,” the elderly gentleman on the screen was saying. “But his name isn’t Strickland. When I worked with him at Ceres Mining and Tech University, his name was Merrian. Carlos Merrian.”
“That,” Holden said after his final viewing, “is what my old buddy Detective Miller might have called a lead.”
“What now, chief?” Amos asked.
“I think I need to make a phone call.”
“Okay. The doc and I will get out of your hair and watch his money roll in.”
They left together, Holden waiting until the deck hatch slammed behind them to send a connection request to the switchboard at Ceres M amp;T. The lag was running about fifteen minutes with Tycho’s current location, so he settled back and played a simple puzzle game on his terminal that left his mind free to think and plan. If they knew who Strickland had been before he was Strickland, they might be able to trace his career history. And somewhere along the way, he’d stopped being a guy named Carlos who worked at a tech school, and became a guy named Strickland who stole little kids. Knowing why would be a good start to learning where he might be now.
Almost forty minutes after sending out the request, he received a reply. He was a little surprised to see the elderly man from the video message. He hadn’t expected to connect on his first try.
“Hello,” the man said. “I’m Dr. Moynahan. I’ve been expecting your message. I assume you want to know the details about Dr. Merrian. To make a long story short, he and I worked together at the CMTU biosciences lab. He was working on biological development constraint systems. He was never good at playing the university game. Didn’t make many allies while he was here. So when he crossed some ethical gray areas, they were only too happy to run him out of town. I don’t know the details on that. I wasn’t his department head. Let me know if you need anything else.”
Holden watched the message twice, taking notes and cursing the fifteen-minute lag. When he was ready, he sent a reply back.
“Thank you so much for the help, Dr. Moynahan. We really appreciate it. I don’t suppose you know what happened after he was kicked out of the university, do you? Did he go to another institution? Take a corporate job? Anything?”
He hit send and sat back to wait again. He tried the puzzle game but got annoyed and turned it off. Instead, he pulled up the Tycho public entertainment feed and watched a children’s cartoon that was frantic and loud enough to distract him.
When his terminal buzzed with the incoming message, he almost knocked it off the table in his haste to start the video.
“Actually,” Dr. Moynahan said, scratching at the gray stubble on his chin while he spoke, “he never even made it in front of the ethics review. Quit the day before. Made a lot of fuss, walking through the lab and yelling that we weren’t going to be able to push him around anymore. That he had a bigwig corporate job with all the funding and resources he wanted. Called us small-minded pencil pushers stagnating in a quagmire of petty ethical constraints. Can’t remember the name of the company he was going to work for, though.”
Holden hit pause and felt a chill go down his spine. Stagnating in a quagmire of petty ethical constraints. He didn’t need Moynahan to tell him which company would snatch a man like that up. He’d heard almost those exact words spoken by Antony Dresden, the architect of the Eros project that had killed a million and a half people as part of a grand biology experiment.
Carlos Merrian had gone to work for Protogen and disappeared. He’d come back as Strickland, abductor of small children.
And, Holden thought, the murderer too.
Chapter Thirty-Five: Avasarala
On the screen, the young man laughed as he had laughed twenty-five seconds earlier on Earth. It was the level of lag Avasarala hated the most. Too much for the conversation to feel anything like normal, but not quite enough to make it impossible. Everything she did took too long, every reading of reaction and nuance crippled by the effort to guess what exactly in her words and expression ten seconds before had elicited it.
“Only you,” he said, “could take another Earth-Mars war, turn it into a private cruise, and then seem pissed off about it. Anyone in my office would give their left testicle to go with you.”
“Next time I’ll take up a collection, but-”
“As far as an accurate military inventory,” he said twenty-five seconds ago, “there are reports in place, but they’re not as good as I’d like. Because it’s you, I’ve got a couple of my interns building search parameters. My impression is that the research budget is about a tenth of the money going to actual research. With your clearances, I have rights to look at it, but these Navy guys are pretty good at obscuring things. I think you’ll find…” His expression clouded. “A collection?”
“Forget it. You were saying?”
She waited fifty seconds, resenting each individually.
“I don’t know that we’ll be able to get a definitive answer,” the young man said. “We might get lucky, but if it’s something they want to hide, they can probably hide it.”
Especially since they’ll know you’re looking for it, and what I asked you to look for, Avasarala thought. Even if the income stream between Mao-Kwikowski, Nguyen, and Errinwright was in all the budgets right now, by the time Avasarala’s allies looked, it would be hidden. All she could do was keep pushing on as many fronts as she could devise and hope that they fucked up. Three more days of information requests and queries, and she could ask for traffic analysis. She couldn’t know exactly what information they were hiding, but if she could find out what kinds and categories of data they were keeping away from her, that would tell her something.
Something, but not much.
“Do what you can,” she said. “I’ll luxuriate out here in the middle of nowhere. Get back to me.”
She didn’t wait fifty seconds for a round of etiquette and farewell. Life was too short for that shit.
Her private quarters on the Guanshiyin were gorgeous. The bed and couch matched the deep carpet in tones of gold and green that should have clashed but didn’t. The light was the best approximation of mid-morning sunlight that she’d ever seen, and the air recyclers were scented to give everything just a note of turned earth and fresh-cut grass. Only the low thrust gravity spoiled the illusion of being in a private country club somewhere in the green belt of south Asia. The low gravity and the goddamned lag.
She hated low gravity. Even if the acceleration was perfectly smooth and the yacht never had to shift or move to avoid debris, her guts were used to a full g pulling things down. She hadn’t digested anything well since she’d come on board, and she always felt short of breath.
Her system chimed. A new report from Venus. She popped it open. The preliminary analysis of the wreckage from the Arboghast was under way. There was some ionizing in the metal that was apparently consistent with someone’s theory of how the protomolecule functioned. It was the first time a prediction had been confirmed, the first tiny toehold toward a genuine understanding of what was happening on Venus. There was an exact timing of the three energy spikes. There was a spectral analysis of the upper atmosphere of Venus that showed more elemental nitrogen than expected. Avasarala felt her eyes glazing over. The truth was she didn’t care.
She should. It was important. Possibly more important than anything else that was happening. But just like Errinwright and Nguyen and all the others, she was caught up in this sm
aller, human struggle of war and influence and the tribal division between Earth and Mars. The outer planets too, if you took them seriously.
Hell, at this point she was more worried about Bobbie and Cotyar than she was about Venus. Cotyar was a good man, and his disapproval left her feeling defensive and pissed off. And Bobbie looked like she was about to crack. And why not? The woman had watched her friends die around her, had been stripped of her context, and was now working for her traditional enemy. The marine was tough, in more ways than one, and having someone on the team with no allegiance or ties to anyone on Earth was a real benefit. Especially after fucking Soren.
She leaned back in her chair, unnerved by how different it felt when she weighed so little. Soren still smarted. Not the betrayal itself; betrayal was an occupational hazard. If she started getting her feelings hurt by that, she really should retire. No, it was that she hadn’t seen it. She’d let herself have a blind spot, and Errinwright had known how to use it. How to disenfranchise her. She hated being outplayed. And more than that, she hated that her failure was going to mean more war, more violence, more children dying.
That was the price for screwing up. More dead children.
So she wouldn’t screw up anymore.
She could practically see Arjun, the gentle sorrow in his eyes. It isn’t all your responsibility, he would say.
“It’s everyone’s fucking responsibility,” she said out loud. “But I’m the one who’s taking it seriously.”
She smiled. Let Mao’s monitors and spies make sense of that. She let herself imagine them searching her room for some other transmission device, trying to find who she’d been speaking to. Or they’d just think the old lady was losing her beans.
Let ’em wonder.
She closed out the Venus report. Another message had arrived while she was in her reverie, flagged as an issue she’d requested follow-up on. When she read the intelligence summary, her eyebrows rose.
Caliban;s war e-2 Page 35
