The Mouse Pie was a gas freighter and didn’t match his missing list. The Vento first appeared before the date range he was interested in, and a query to the last dock it had visited confirmed the dates were correct. The Blasphemous Jester was listed as Epstein equipped, but a search of the service records showed that the drive had been out of commission for years. Someone had been using it as a short-hop shuttle in teakettle mode ever since.
On and on and on through the names it went. At one point his terminal beeped with an incoming message. Amos checking in with a cryptic “Visited my friend’s grave. Went okay, but still got some shit to do. Back later.” Holden slurped up another mouthful of noodles that had long since gone cold and now had the consistency of earthworms. How had Miller done shit like this for a living, he wondered. It was shocking to realize how much of investigation was just brute-force solutions. Going through endless lists looking for one thing that doesn’t fit. Talking to every single potential witness over and over. Pounding the pavement, as the gumshoes in Alex’s neo-noir movies might say.
It was thinking about Alex that twigged his memory, and he went back through the list until he found a ship designated the Pau Kant. The last location was marked as 434 Hungaria. A high albedo rock in the Hungaria group, an asteroid group relatively close to the orbit of Mars but with a high inclination. Mars control had caught a ping from the Pau Kant and then lost it shortly after. They’d marked the ship as missing.
But prior to that single and short-lived appearance, the Pau Kant didn’t seem to exist in any other records. He couldn’t find any description of her hull type or drive. Nor were there any owner records he could track down. He’d moved it to his list of ships to look into later, but something about Mars and inner Belt asteroids was making his brain itch.
The Hungaria group wasn’t a terrible place to hide things. 434 Hungaria was about twenty kilometers across. Plenty of mass to mask ships from radar, and the high albedo of the group would clutter up the results of anyone looking for ships with a telescope. The location was intriguing too. If the OPA radicals were collecting ships to pirate colony transports, the inner Belt was not a bad staging area. They’d also launched an attack on Earth in the recent past. That it had failed didn’t mean they weren’t planning more. A bunch of stolen ships hiding in the inner ring was exactly the sort of first step another attempt might take.
The Hungaria asteroids were a long way from Tycho’s current location, and Holden didn’t have a ship. But they were pretty close to Mars, and Alex was there. If he had access to a ship, it wouldn’t be too long a trip to go take a peek. See if the Pau Kant was still out there, tethered to the rock and staying dark. And if it matched any of Monica’s missing ships? Well, that would be interesting to take back to Fred.
Holden put his terminal on the table, angled up to record his face, and said, “Alex. Hey, hope things are going well out there, and that Bobbie is good. So, I’ve been looking into this thing with missing ships? And there’s a suspicious hit out at 434 Hungaria. Any chance you have access to a ship? If you need to rent one, feel free to pull the funds from my account. I’d like you to go see if a ship named the Pau Kant is sitting out there parked and dark. Specs on the transponder code attached to this message.”
He put all the information he had on the Pau and its most recent location from the Mars control records into a file. It wasn’t much to go on, and it felt like a long shot, but Alex would enjoy the flight and Holden was willing to foot the bill so he didn’t feel too bad about asking.
He was pretty sure the burst of energy that came from having made progress would be short-lived, but he wanted to share his success and felt wide-awake, so he called Monica. He got her voice mail. He left her a message to call him back, slurped down the last of his cold and nasty noodles, and immediately fell asleep on his couch.
The next morning he wasn’t on the duty roster to work on the Roci, and Monica hadn’t called him back, so he called again. No answer. On his way to breakfast he dropped by her apartment, but she wasn’t there either. She’d been a little miffed at him, but he didn’t think she’d bail on the whole missing ship story without saying anything. He made another call.
“Tycho security,” a young male voice said.
“Hey, this is Jim Holden. I’m checking on a visiting journalist, Monica Stuart. Has she left the station?”
“One sec. No. Records list her as still on board. Her apartment is —”
“Yeah, actually? I’m at her apartment right now and she’s not answering here or on her hand terminal.”
“My records show that her terminal hasn’t connected to Tychonet since early yesterday.”