Nemesis Games

After walking for a couple hours, getting used to the feel of the gravity and concrete beneath his feet, Amos stopped at a hotel he picked at random and checked in. One thing about him had changed, and that was money. Shipping with the Rocinante, for all its dangers and drama, had turned out to be a profitable gig. With the shares he’d cashed out, Amos didn’t have to worry about how much the hotel would cost; he just asked for a room and told his terminal to pay for anything the hotel charged him.

In his room, he took a long shower. Lydia’s face stared back at him from the bathroom mirror as he brushed his teeth and shaved off the short stubble growing on his head. Getting clean had the feeling of ritual. Like preparations made by a holy man before performing some sacred rite.

When he was done, he sat down nude in the middle of the room’s large bed and looked up Lydia’s obituary.

LYDIA MAALOUF ALLEN, PASSED AWAY WEDNESDAY, APRIL 14TH AT…

Allen. Amos didn’t know that name. As an alias it wasn’t a very good one, since Lydia Maalouf was the name he’d always known her by. Not an alias then. A married name? That was interesting.

SHE IS SURVIVED BY HER HUSBAND OF ELEVEN YEARS, CHARLES JACOB ALLEN…

Over a decade after he’d left, Lydia had married a man named Charles. Amos probed at that idea, like poking a finger into a wound to see if it was infected. To see if it hurt. The only reaction he found was curiosity.

SHE PASSED QUIETLY IN HER PHILADELPHIA HOME, WITH CHARLES AT HER SIDE…

Charles was the last one to see her alive, so he was the first one Amos needed to find. After reading the rest of the obituary several times, he logged on to the public mass transit site and booked a ticket for that night on the high-speed rail to Philadelphia. Then he lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. He was oddly excited by the idea of meeting Lydia’s husband. As if her family was his, and Charles was a person he should always have known, but was only now getting to meet. Sleep eluded him, but the soft bed relaxed the muscles tightening in his back, and the last of the nausea from the shuttle ride faded. The path ahead was clear.

If Lydia had, indeed, died quietly in her own bed with a loving husband at her side, then he would meet this man. See the home she’d lived in. Put flowers on her grave and say his last goodbye. If not, he’d kill some people. Neither possibility excited him more than the other. Either one was fine.

He slept.

Chapter Eight: Holden

Holden ran the video back and watched it again. The ship, an ugly box of metal with additional storage containers strapped to its flanks, made him think of the supply-laden covered wagons in old westerns. It wasn’t far from the truth. The Rabia Balkhi, registered to Captain Eric Khan out of Pallas, was still just goods and people heading into the frontier to stake a claim. Fewer horses, maybe, but more fusion reactors.

Again, the ship passed through the gate, the image wiggled and jumped, the Balkhi was gone.

“So?” Monica asked, her voice rich with anticipation. “What do you think?”

He scratched his arm, deciding what the answer was.

“There are a million reasons an old rust bucket like that might disappear out there,” he said. “Loss of core containment, loss of atmospheric pressure, run into debris. Hell, the radio might have just gone out and they’re living comfortably on a new planet and hoping someone will drop by to check on them.”

“Maybe,” Monica said with a nod. “If there was only one. But four hundred thirty-seven ships have passed through the rings into new solar systems over the last year. And of them, thirteen have just vanished. Poof.” She spread her fingers out like a tiny explosion. Holden did the math in his head. That was something like a three percent rate of loss. Back when he’d been in the Navy, the budgets had assumed about half of a percent loss to mechanical failure, asteroid impacts, sabotage, and enemy action. This was six times that.

“Huh,” he said. “That seems pretty high for ships that were able to fly the year and a half to get to the Ring.”

“Agreed. Way too high. If ships blew up without explanation that regularly, no one would ever fly.”

“So,” Holden said, then paused to order another drink from the table menu. He had a feeling he’d need it. “Why isn’t anyone talking about it? Who’s keeping track of them?”

“No one!” Monica said triumphantly. “That’s the whole thing. No one is tracking them. We have thousands of ships leaving the inner system and streaming toward the gates. They belong to citizens of three different governments, and some who don’t think of themselves as citizens of any government. Most of these people never even filed a flight plan, they just threw their suitcases in a rock hopper and blasted off for the new worlds.”

“Real estate grabs are like that, I guess.”