“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
T
he 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.