When Fred spoke, his voice was hard. Sharp. Unrelieved. “Mister Patel, what relief ships are in the vicinity?”
“Transponder data shows nothing, sir. The inner system’s been pretty much shut down. UN order.”
Holden rolled to his side and called up a connection to Mfume. Music blared out of the console. Mixed with the sounds filtering through the deck, it made the ops deck seem larger than it was. “Mfume!” Holden shouted, and then a few seconds later, “Mister Mfume!”
The music turned down, but not off. “Sir?”
“I need you to take a look at the flight path for the Chetzemoka. See what it’s going to take to match orbits with her.”
“What ship?” Mfume said.
“The Chetzemoka,” Holden said. “Just check the newsfeeds. It’ll be there. Let me know what you figure out as quickly as you possibly can. Like now would be good.”
“I’m on it,” Mfume said, and the music turned off both on the console and from the hatch. Holden took a deep breath, then another, then laughed. The relief wasn’t an emotion. It was too physical and profound for that. It was a state of being. It was a drug that poured invisibly through his veins. He started laughing and it turned into a moan that sounded like pain, or else pain’s aftermath.
Fred clicked his tongue against his teeth. “So. If I were to suggest that we not rendezvous with that ship?”
“I would be happy to let you and your friends off anywhere between here and there,” Holden said. “Because unless you’ve decided to turn to piracy and throw me out the airlock, that ship is where we’re going.”
“I thought as much,” Fred said. “Can we at least agree to be careful approaching it?”
Holden felt a little bubble of rage rise up in him. He wanted to shout at Fred, to punish him for taking this moment and soiling it with doubt. With the possibility that it was a trap and not Naomi coming home at last. Holden took the great glowing sense of release and tried to put it aside and his anger with it.
“Yes,” he said. “You’re right. It could be a trap.”
“It may not be,” Fred said. “I hope it isn’t. But…”
“But we’re living in interesting times,” Holden said. “It’s okay. I get it. I’ll be careful. We’ll be careful. But if it is her, and she really is in trouble, she’s my first priority. That’s just the way it is.”
“I know,” Fred said, and the way he said it meant I know, and everyone who knows anything about you does too. Which is why you should be careful.
Holden turned to the monitor and pulled up the nav data. As he watched, Mfume laid in the course that would get him to Naomi. Or whatever else was on that ship. Fred’s seed of doubt had already taken root. He didn’t know whether to be grateful or resent the old man. Between the distances and their respective velocities, it looked like it would be tricky. Naomi had been burning hard toward Earth, and the speed the Chetzemoka had built up was almost all in the wrong direction to reach him. If it wasn’t a trap and Naomi was in trouble, he could still be too late. The UN force might be able to help, but she was already peeling away from their flight path.
Which still didn’t leave him entirely without resources. He flipped to comms and started recording.
“Alex, since you’re in the neighborhood and it went so well the last time I asked you to check out a mystery ship, I was wondering if you’d be interested in making a little detour.”
Chapter Forty-three: Alex
The worst thing was not knowing. The newsfeeds were awash with information, but very little of it matched up. Four billion were dead on Earth. Or seven. The ash and vapor that had turned the blue marble to white was starting to thin already – much sooner than the models predicted. Or the surface of the Earth wouldn’t see daylight and blue skies for years. It was the dawn of a resurgence of natural flora and fauna driven by the human dieback or it was the final insult that would crash a perennially overstressed ecosystem.
Three more colony ships had been captured on their way to the ring gate and turned back or boarded and the crews spaced, or else seven had, or it was only one. Ceres Station’s announcement that Free Navy ships could use the docks was a provocation or a proof that the OPA was unified or the station administration was giving in to fear. All around the system, ships were turning off their transponders, and the systems for visual tracking of the exhaust plumes were getting dusted off and reprogrammed in languages that contemporary systems could parse. Alex told himself it was temporary, that in a few months, maybe a year, everyone would run with transponders again. That the Earth would be the center of human civilization and culture. That he would be back on the Roci with Holden and Naomi and Amos.
He told himself that, but he was getting less and less persuasive. Not knowing was the worst thing. The second-worst thing was being chased by a bunch of top-of-the-line warships that really wanted to kill you.
In the display, one of their escort missiles went from green to amber to flashing red.
“Shit,” Bobbie said. “Lost one.”
“It’s all right. We’ve got plenty more.”
In the past hours, the Pella and her pack had come up with the bright idea of coordinating their comm lasers to hit a particular missile and then pumping energy into it until the controls overheated. The missiles failed inert, or they would have figured the enemy strategy out when the escorting cloud had cooked off in a massive chain reaction. Instead, they’d lost four missiles in half an hour and put together what was happening. Bobbie and the Razorback’s antiquated and underpowered system had designed a rolling pattern formation for the missiles that kept any one of them from being in an uninterrupted sightline for more than a few seconds at a time. Watching it on the cameras reminded Alex of documentaries he’d seen about deep sea fish on Earth, vast schools roiling and yet staying together. Only for him, it was their little group of remaining missiles.
Ever since the announcement by the Free Navy, the prime minister had been back in the cabin, using their own tightbeam for what sounded like a hundred furious conversations that all seemed to have the same timbre. Alex couldn’t quite make out all the words and he made conscious effort not to listen in case someone asked later what he knew. But the phrases not substantiated and significant failure and still investigating all came through enough times that Alex started to recognize them, kind of like hearing a song often enough that the lyrics became clearer.
His monitor was divided between a large-scale map of the solar system highlighting the parts of it critical to him – the Razorback, the UN military escort burning out to meet them, the Rocinante, the Pella and its pack, Tycho Station, Mars, Earth, Luna – and a smaller inset that was the Razorback’s internal systems diagnostics. The little pinnace hadn’t been intended for full interplanetary travel, and with Earth and Mars where they were, they were going to be cutting it pretty close. The reactor had enough fuel pellets to burn for months, but once they ran out of ejection mass, the drive wouldn’t do them much good. So far, they were still inside the error bars. Which, for him, meant that even if they ran out, they’d be going slow enough that someone could come throw a tether on them. Rescued by professionals was still firmly in his win column.
The navigation system threw an alert to his monitor. He opened it.