Nemesis Games

After a couple weeks of his new bad Italian food and cheap cocktails routine, his terminal finally rang with an incoming voice request. He knew it couldn’t be from Naomi. The light lag made a live connection unworkable for any two people not living on the same station. But he still pulled the terminal out of his pocket so fast that he fumbled it across the room.

The bartender – Chip – said, “Had a few too many of my margaritas?”

“The first one was too many,” Holden replied, then climbed under the booth looking for the terminal. “And calling that a margarita should be illegal.”

“It’s as margarita as it gets with rice wine and lime flavor concentrate,” Chip said, sounding vaguely hurt.

“Hello?” Holden yelled at the terminal, mashing the touch screen to open the connection. “Hello?”

“Hi, Jim?” a female voice said. It didn’t sound anything like Naomi.

“Who is this?” he asked, then cracked his head on the edge of the table climbing back out and added, “Dammit!”

“Monica,” the voice on the other end said. “Monica Stuart? Did I catch you at a bad time?”

“Sort of busy right now, Monica,” Holden said. Chip rolled his eyes. Holden flipped him off, and the bartender started mixing him another drink. Probably as punishment for the insult.

“I understand,” Monica said. “But I have something I’d love to run past you. Is there any chance we can get together? Dinner, a drink, anything?”

“I’m afraid I’m on Tycho Station for the foreseeable future, Monica. The Roci is getting a full refit right now. So —”

“Oh, I know. I’m on Tycho too. That’s why I called.”

“Right,” Holden said. “Of course you are.”

“Is tonight good?”

Chip put the drink on a tray, and a waiter from the restaurant out front popped in to carry it away. Chip saw him looking at it and mouthed Want another? at him. The prospect of another night of what the restaurant laughably called lasagna and enough of Chip’s “margaritas” to kill the aftertaste felt like slow death.

The truth was, he was bored and lonely. Monica Stuart was a journalist and had serious problems about only showing up when she wanted something. She always had an ulterior motive. But finding out what she wanted and then saying no would kill an evening in a way that wasn’t exactly like every other evening since Naomi left. “Yeah, okay Monica, dinner sounds great. Not Italian.”

They ate salmon sushi from fish grown in tanks on the station. It was outrageously expensive, but being paid for by Monica’s expense account. Holden indulged himself until his clothes stopped fitting.

Monica ate sparingly, with small precise movements of her chopsticks, almost picking up the rice one kernel at a time. She ignored the wasabi altogether. She’d aged some too, since Holden had last seen her in person. Unlike Fred, the extra years looked good on her, adding a sense of experience and gravitas to her video-star looks.

They’d started the evening talking about little things: how the ship repairs were going, what had happened to the team she’d taken on the Rocinante back when the Ring was a new thing, where Alex and Amos and Naomi had gone. He’d found himself talking more than he meant to. He didn’t dislike Monica, but she wasn’t someone he particularly trusted either. But she knew him, and they’d traveled together, and even more than good food, he was hungry to talk to someone he actually sort of knew.

“So there’s this weird thing,” she said, then dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin.

“Weirder than eating raw fish on a space station with one of the solar system’s most famous reporters?”

“You’re flattering me.”

“It’s habit. I don’t mean anything by it.”

Monica rooted around in the satchel she’d brought and pulled out a flimsy roll-out video screen. She pushed plates out of the way and flattened the screen out on the table. When it came on, it showed the image of a heavy freighter, blocky and thick, heading toward one of the rings inside the slow zone. “Watch this.”

The picture sprang into motion, the freighter burning toward a ring gate at low thrust. He assumed it was the one that led from the solar system to the slow zone and Medina Station, but it could have been any of the others. They all looked pretty much the same. When the ship passed through the gate, the image flickered and danced as the recording equipment was bombarded with high-energy particles and magnetic flux. The image stabilized, and the ship was no longer visible. That didn’t mean much. Light passing through the gates had always behaved oddly, bending the images like refraction in water. The video ended.

“I’ve seen that one before,” Holden said. “Good special effects but the plot’s thin.”

“Actually you kind of haven’t. Guess what happened to that ship?” Monica said, face flushed with excitement.

“What?”

“No, really, guess. Speculate. Give me a hypothesis. Because it never came out the other side.”

Chapter Six: Alex