He called the number Avasarala had used, and a sculpted young man with a perfect haircut, pale skin, and gigantic teeth appeared. He looked like an expensive store mannequin. “Secretary Avasarala’s office.”
“Gimme Chrissie, kid, and make it snappy.”
The mannequin was stunned into silence for two long breaths. “I’m sorry, but the secretary can’t —”
“Kid,” Amos said with a smirk, “I just called on her private line, right? My name is Amos Burton.” A lie, but one he’d told often enough it had become a sort of truth. “I work for James Holden. I bet if you don’t tell her I’m on the line right now that you’re applying for basic by the end of the day.”
“One moment please,” the mannequin said and then the screen displayed the blue-and-white logo of the UN.
“Burton,” Chrisjen Avasarala said, appearing on the screen less than thirty seconds later. “Why the fuck are you still on my planet?”
“Getting ready to leave, chief, but figured I got one more person to check in on before I go.”
“Was it me? Because I don’t like you enough to consider that charming. I have a flight to Luna waiting on the pad for me so I can go do fucking party arrangements before the Martian prime minister arrives.”
“They make you do that?”
“I do everything, and every second I talk to you costs ten thousand dollars.”
“Really?”
“No, I just made that number up. But I fucking hate flying to Luna so I’ve been putting it off to finish other work anyway. Do you need a ride? If it gets you off my planet, I can give you a ride. What? Did I say something funny?”
“Naw, just reminded me of somebody,” Amos said. “Anyway, I get the feeling this is the only trip down the well I’m ever going to take.”
“I’m crushed,” she said.
“Since I’m here, I figured anything I might want to do, better do it now. Anyone I wanted to see, you know,” Amos continued. “Where did you guys wind up locking Peaches away?”
“Peaches?”
“The Mao girl. Clarissa. She flew with us for a few months back after she stopped trying to kill the captain. And I have to admit, she grew on me a little.”
“You fucked your prisoner?” Avasarala said, her expression evenly divided between amusement and disgust.
“Nah,” Amos said. “I don’t tend to do that with people I like.”
Chapter Thirteen: Holden
T
he systems that the gate network had opened up were scattered across what everyone was pretty sure was the Milky Way galaxy. Cartography was still working out their relative locations, but even the initial findings put some of the new systems tens of thousands of light-years from Earth and with some distinct weirdness about time and location. Confronted by such unimaginably vast distances, it was easy to forget how much space was in just one solar system. Until you tried to find something in it.
Legally, any spaceship on the move had to register a flight plan and run an active transponder. That made ships traveling from place to place relatively easy to track. And with a transponder pinging away so you knew where to point your telescope, an active drive was visible from across the solar system. But ships would power down for repairs in dock, so transponders disappeared off the grid all the time. Ships were decommissioned, so a transponder might go black and never return for entirely legitimate reasons. Newly commissioned ships showed up with brand-new names and ships that were sold registered name changes. Some were cobbled together from scrap, some were built in shipyards, some were salvaged. And all of it was happening scattered across roughly one hundred quintillion square kilometers of space, give or take a few quadrillion. And that was only if you ignored that space had a third dimension.
So, seventeen ships had vanished going through ring gates, and if Holden was right, they were probably back in the home system with new names. In theory, there was a path to the information he wanted, but unless he was interested in spending several hundred lifetimes sifting through the raw data, he’d need help.
Specifically, he needed a computer plowing through a number of different massive databases on new ships, decommissioned ships, sold ships, repaired ships, and lost ships, looking for anything that didn’t add up. Even with a good computer and very smart data sorting software, it was what a programmer would call a nontrivial task.
And, unfortunately, the best software engineer that Holden knew had flown off to parts unknown and wasn’t answering his messages. He didn’t have the skills to do it himself, the time to learn them, or a crew to do it for him. What he had, was money.
After his shift working with Sakai’s people on the Roci refit, Holden called up Fred yet again. “Fred, hey, I have a software problem. Can I hire some of your programming wonks for a short-term gig?”