“Huh,” Holden said, frowning at her door. The quiet on the other side had taken on an ominous feel. What if they decide to get rid of the guy with the light? He wasn’t the only one who fit that description. “So she hasn’t so much as paid for a sandwich in over a day. That strikes me as not good.”
“Want me to send a team?”
“Please do that.”
By the time the security team arrived and opened the door to Monica’s apartment, Holden was expecting the worst. He wasn’t disappointed. The rooms had been methodically searched. Monica’s clothes and personal effects were scattered across the floor. The hand terminal she used for interviews had been crushed under someone’s heel, but the screen still flickered when Holden touched it. The team found no traces of blood, which was about the only positive sign.
Holden called Fred while the team finished their forensic sweep. “It’s me,” he said as soon as the OPA chief answered. “You’ve got a bigger problem than radicals on Medina.”
“Really?” Fred said, his voice weary. “And what is that?”
“You’ve got them on Tycho.”
Chapter Fourteen: Naomi
T
erryon Lock was supposed to be a new kind of place in the emptiness of the Jovian system. A Belter home world, they figured. Modular, so it could grow or contract at need. Outside the control of Earth or Mars or anybody. A free city in space, with its own governance, its own environmental controls. Naomi had seen the plans when they first spilled out over the networks. Rokku had them printed on thin plastics and stuck to the walls of the ship. Terryon Lock was the new Jerusalem until the security forces at Ganymede shut it down. No colonies without permission. No homes. No safe havens, not even if they built it themselves.
She hadn’t even been pregnant when it happened. She didn’t know that it would define her.
Filip was eight months old when the Augustín Gamarra died. The Gamarra had left Ceres Station, burning for a Coalition Navy research station on Oshima with a payload of organics and hydroponic equipment. Ten hours out, burning at a leisurely one-quarter g, the ship’s magnetic bottle lost containment, spilling the fusion core into the ship. For a fraction of a second, the Gamarra had been as bright as the sun and two hundred thirty-four people died. No wreckage survived, and the official investigation into the event had never been closed because no conclusion could be reached. Accident or sabotage. Mischance or murder.
They had gone from the hidden cell at the back of the club to a private apartment up even nearer the center of spin. The air had the too-clean ozone smell of a recently replaced recycling filter. Filip sat at the small table, his hands folded. She sat on the edge of the tiny foam-and-gel sofa. She looked at the boy’s dark eyes and tried to connect them in her mind with the ones she remembered. His lips with the toothless, delighted smile. She couldn’t tell if the resemblance was really there, or if it was only her imagination. How much did someone change between not-quite-a-toddler and not-quite-an-adult? Could it really be the same boy? It wasn’t anyone else.
The hole wasn’t abandoned. There were clothes in the locker, food and beer in the little refrigerator. The pale walls showed chips at the corners where the damage of minor accidents had built up over the course of years. He didn’t tell her who the apartment belonged to, and she didn’t ask.
“Why didn’t you bring the Rocinante?” Filip asked. There was a tentative quality to his voice. Like the question was only a stand-in for other ones he wanted to ask. That she wanted to be able to answer. Why did you go? Didn’t you love us?
“It’s in dock for repairs. Will be for months.”
Filip nodded once, sharply. She could see Marco in the movement.
“That’s going to complicate things.”
“Marco didn’t tell me you wanted the ship,” Naomi said, hating the implicit apology in the words. “All he said was that you were in trouble. That you were avoiding the law, and that I could… that I could help.”
“We’ll have to come up with something,” he said.
The hospitals at Ceres Station were some of the best in the Belt when Naomi had been coming near to term. Neither of them had the money to travel to Europa or Ganymede for the duration of a pregnancy. Ceres had been closer to Rokku’s claims than Tycho Station. Childbirth was a greater danger for Belters than for someone who’d lived under constant gravity, and Naomi’s pregnancy had already had two scares. She and Marco had lived in a cheap rental near the hospital, one of dozens that catered to Belters who came for the medical care. The terms of the agreement were open-ended, letting them stay until they didn’t need the doctors, nurses, expert systems, and pharmaceuticals that the medical complex boasted.