She was sitting up in her hospital bed. Her gown was thick, disposable paper with Bhamini Pal Memorial Hospital printed on it like a pattern, dark blue over light. Her hair was pulled back into a loose bun, and deep bruises darkened her left cheek and her knuckles. When she shifted, the movement was careful. It was the way Alex moved after he’d worked out too hard and felt a little sore. He hadn’t been shot twice – once through her left lung, once in her right leg – and he’d seriously considered taking a wheelchair to go between his room and hers.
“I meant you,” Alex said. “I was having trouble coming up with your name.”
Bobbie chuckled. “Yeah, they’re going to want to talk to you again. I think the version they got was a little muddled.”
“Do you think… Should we not be talking?”
“We’re not under arrest,” Bobbie said. “The only one of the other guys that’s still breathing lawyered up before he got here. I’m pretty sure they’re not going to be looking at us if they want to throw someone in jail.”
“What did you tell them?” Alex asked.
“The truth. That a bunch of thugs broke into my rooms, tied me up, and started taking turns between kicking the shit out of me and asking why I was meeting with Alex Kamal.”
Alex pressed his thumb against his upper lip until it ached a little. Bobbie’s smile carried a load of sympathy.
“I don’t know why that is,” he said. “I don’t have any enemies on Mars. That I know of.”
Bobbie shook her head and Alex noticed again that she was a remarkably attractive woman. He coughed and mentally filed the thought under horrifically inappropriate given the circumstances.
“My guess,” Bobbie said, “is that it was less about who you are than who you’re connected to.”
“Holden?”
“And Fred Johnson. And maybe they can even put the two of us together with Avasarala. She shipped on the Rocinante for a while.”
“For about a minute and a half, years ago.”
“I remember. I was there,” Bobbie said. “Still, one way or another, the most plausible scenario I’ve got is that they thought I was reporting something to you or you were reporting something to me. And, even better, the idea scared them.”
“Don’t mean to look a gift horse in the mouth, but that definition of even better has got some mighty long teeth,” Alex said. “Did you tell them about your investigation?”
“No, I’m not ready to do that.”
“But you think this was related.”
“Oh, hell yes. Don’t you?”
“It’s what I’m hoping for, actually,” Alex said with a sigh. Across the hallway, someone shouted words Alex couldn’t make out. A nurse stalked by, scowling. “So what are we goin’ to do about it?”
“Only thing we can do,” Bobbie said. “Keep digging.”
“Fair enough. So. What exactly are we looking at?”
Bobbie’s expression sharpened. The problem, she said, was ships. The Martian Navy was the newest, best set of ships in the solar system. Earth had more ships, but her Navy was aging, with tech in them that was either generations old or retrofitted, shoehorning more recent designs into older frames. Both fleets had taken heavy losses in the last few years. Whether you called Avasarala’s influence prompting or putting her on a mission, Bobbie had started looking, and what she’d found was interesting.
The seven big Donnager-class ships were easy to keep track of, but the fleet of corvettes that they carried, ships like the Rocinante – they were slippery. Bobbie had started by going back to review the battle data from Io, from outside the Ring, from the incident in the slow zone. Really, when it came to damage reports, there was an embarrassment of riches.
At first, the numbers had seemed to match up. Half a dozen ships lost here, a handful there, the transponder codes decommissioned. But as she looked more deeply, she started running into discrepancies.
The Tsuchi, a corvette assigned to the Bellaire, had been decommissioned and scrapped after Io. A year later, it appeared in a small-group action report near Europa. The supply ship Apalala had been retired from service, and then seven months later, picked up a shipment headed to Ganymede. A load of medical supplies lost to accident appeared briefly on a loading schedule bound for Ceres and then disappeared again. Weapons lost in the fighting around what was now Medina Station appeared in an audit at Hecate Base once and not again.
Someone, Bobbie reasoned, had gone back through the records and doctored the old reports, forging the deaths of ships and then erasing them from the later records, or trying to. She’d found half a dozen hiccups in the data, but any ships that had been successfully erased, she wouldn’t see. That meant someone had to be involved high enough up the naval chain of command that they had access to the files.