Nemesis Games

She woke up. She didn’t know how much later it was, but there were no more voices from the main room. Jim was curled on his side, his back against her. His breath was deep and slow. She stretched slowly, careful not to disturb him. The aches in her muscles and skin and joints felt a little better, and there was a warmth in her chest. A looseness.

For years, she’d kept her secrets. Held them like she was keeping the pin in a hand grenade. The fear and the shame and the guilt had built up without her even noticing. The things she had done wrong – and there were so many – had grown in power. Not having them gnawing at her ribs from the inside felt strange. Empty, in a way, but a peaceful kind of empty.

Not that she was suddenly made of light and happiness. Cyn was still dead because of her. Filip was still abandoned. Abandoned again. Marco was still as much a pool of anger and hatred. Nothing about that had changed, and everything had. An old picture made into something new by replacing the frame. Jim shifted in his sleep. The thin, dark hairs on the back of his neck had a couple paler ones among them. The first touches of gray.

Something had changed between them. Not just during her sabbatical in hell, but now that she was back from her own personal underworld. She wasn’t sure exactly who they were to each other, she and Jim, except that things would be different now. Because she was different, and her changing wasn’t going to break him. He wouldn’t try to make her stay the Naomi he’d imagined.

Things changed, and they didn’t change back. But sometimes they got better.

She got out of bed slowly, shuffling to the little desk in the corner of the room. Their hand terminals were there, and the little bottle of Jim’s anticancer drugs, since he wasn’t on the Roci. She reached for her terminal, paused, and picked up his. She should ask first, but he was asleep, and she didn’t want to wake him, and she didn’t think he’d mind.

Monica Stuart’s footage of the Rabia Balkhi passing through the ring gate was unexceptional. Nothing in it seemed at all strange, except for the story around it. What had Marco done with it, she wondered. Why had he started his piracy so long before the actual coup that would permit it to go large-scale? Just the effort of doctoring all the logs from Medina would be a risk he didn’t need to take. Maybe it was something to do with the system the Balkhi was heading into…?

She shifted to her own terminal, connecting to the Roci’s system and putting out a series of simple pattern matching requests. It wasn’t hard to do. Most of the information Stuart had been working with was public record. And optical telescopes around the system had been trained on the Free Navy since the moment Marco had started his assault on the Martian convoy. The list of systems where ships had gone missing wasn’t long, but the pattern in it wasn’t obvious either. She tried to remember if anyone on the Pella had talked about any of them: Tasnim, Jerusalem, New Kashmir. Of course, the naming conventions were also a mess. New Kashmir also got called Sandalphon, High Texas, and LM-422. She pulled up alternate names for the other systems. Now that Jim had learned the worst of her past, she was almost eager to start the debriefing with Avasarala’s team, and if there was some clue she could bring from her time on the Pella…

She scowled. Ran the matching schema again with different tolerances. Behind her, Jim yawned. When he sat up, the sheets made a hushing sound. The Roci came back with a list of possibles, and she spooled through them. The Ankara Slough was an approximate match for the Rabia Balkhi, but looking through the differences she saw the drive signatures were wrong. It would have cost less to make a new ship than to swap a whole drive complex out of an existing one. In the front room, Alex said something and Amos answered. And then – to her brief surprise – Bobbie. Jim’s hand touched her shoulder.

“Hey. You all right?”

“Yeah,” Naomi said. “Fine.”

“How long have you been up?”

She checked the time and groaned. “Three and a half hours.”

“Breakfast?”

“God, yes.”

Her back protested when she stood, but only a little. Her mind felt focused and alive and wholly her own for the first time in weeks. Maybe since the first, toxic message from Marcos had come in. She wasn’t at war with herself, and it felt good. But…

Jim’s hair was in wild disarray, but he looked handsome in it. She took his arm. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” she said.

“Would coffee improve whatever it is?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” she said.