Monica was renting a small suite of rooms on the visitors’ level of Tycho. They were expensive, and to Holden’s surprise, not any nicer than the company quarters Fred had set aside for his crew. Not many companies treated their own as well as they treated guests. But courtesy dictated that he act like the rooms were something special to make Monica feel good about the investment, so he made impressed noises at the open spaces and quality of the furnishings.
“So what did Fred say?” Monica asked once he took a seat at her dining table and sipped at the tea she’d made.
“He doesn’t think there’s much to go on, honestly.”
“I mean about using the protomolecule sample to try and get in touch with Detective Miller.”
“Yeah,” Holden replied, putting the tea back on the table and pushing it away. The first sip had left his tongue feeling scalded and rough. “I mentioned that but only so he’d know he had a leak somewhere. That was always a nonstarter as an investigation tool. No one’s letting that shit out of its bottle anytime soon.”
“Then I’m wasting my time here, is what you’re saying.”
“No,” Holden said. “Not at all. I think the missing ship thing is legitimate. I just don’t think it’s an alien conspiracy. It’s much more likely to be associated with this hard-line OPA wing. I’m looking into it, if that’s a story you want to pursue.”
Monica spun her hand terminal around on the tabletop, already impatient with him for changing the subject. “I made my name with the story on the Behemoth. Aliens and wormhole gates and a protomolecule ghost that only talked to the most famous person in the solar system. I don’t think my follow-up to that can be Humans Still Shitty to Each Other. Lacks panache.”
“So, is this about finding those missing ships? Or is it about finding another batch of alien weirdness to make you more famous?”
“That sounded awfully judgmental for a guy who’s managed to shoehorn himself into every major news piece for the last six years.”
“Ouch,” Holden said, then let the uncomfortable silence stretch a while. Monica kept spinning her hand terminal but not looking him in the eye.
“Sorry,” she finally said.
“It’s okay. Look, I’m going through this weird empty-nest thing, and it’s left me kind of restless. And because I’m looking to latch onto something, I’m going to go find those missing ships. Probably won’t be an alien conspiracy, but I’m going to do it anyway. Want to help?”
“Not sure what that looks like, to be honest. I was hoping to just ask the omniscient aliens. Do you know how big space is?”
“I’ve given it some thought,” Holden said. “I have this plan. I talked to Fred about the OPA angle, but he doesn’t like that idea so he’s rejecting it out of hand. Still, that got me thinking. The OPA isn’t going to throw a bunch of ships away. Belters just don’t think that way. They recycle everything.”
“So?”
“So how do you find pirated ships? Chief Engineer Sakai suggested looking for the new ships that turn up rather than hunting the missing ones.”
“Sakai suggested…”
“He’s a guy I work with on the Roci refits. But anyway, I thought that sounded like a great idea so I hired a local data wonk to write a database mining script to track all the new ship names that show up on the registries and try to find an origin point.”
“A data wonk.”
“Freelance coder. Whatever the name is for that kind of work, yeah, and anytime now I’ll start getting a stream of data that includes all the mysteriously appearing ships. Our missing seventeen should be a subset of that. At least it’ll be a smaller number of ships than, you know, all of them.”
Monica stood up and walked away several steps, not speaking. Holden blew on his tea and waited. When she finally turned back around, the look on her face was carefully controlled incredulity. “You’ve involved Fred Johnson, some engineer here on Tycho, and a fucking hacker in this? Are you that stupid?”
Holden sighed and stood up. “I first heard about this from you, so I’ll do you the courtesy of letting you know where the investigation goes —”
“And now you’re leaving?” The incredulous look on Monica’s face only deepened.
“Well, funny thing. I don’t have to put up with being called stupid by someone I’m trying to help.”
Monica lifted her palms in a placating gesture that he suspected she didn’t really mean.
“Sorry,” she said, “but you just involved three new people, one of whom is the highest-profile member of the OPA, in my… our investigation. What on earth made you think that was a good idea?”
“You know me, right?” Holden said, not sitting again but not heading straight for the door either. “I’m not a guy who hides things. I don’t think Fred is the bad guy, but if he is then his reaction to our searching will tell us something. Secrecy is the potting soil in which all this conspiracy shit grows. Trust me. The roaches don’t like it when you start shining a light on them.”
“And what if they decide to get rid of the guy with the light?”
“Well,” Holden said with a grin, “that’ll be interesting too. They won’t be the first ones to try, and I’m still here.”