For five more days, Holden and Miller lay on their backs in sick bay while the solar system burned down around them. The reports of Eros' death ran from massive ecological collapse brought about by war-related supply shortages, to covert Martian attack, to secret Belt bioweapon laboratory accident. Analysis from the inner planets had it that the OPA and terrorists like them had finally shown how dangerous they could be to innocent civilian populations. The Belt blamed Mars, or the maintenance crews of Eros, or the OPA for not stopping it.
And then a group of Martian frigates blockaded Pallas, a revolt on Ganymede ended in sixteen dead, and the new government of Ceres announced that all ships with Martian registry docked on station were being commandeered. The threats and accusations, all set to the constant human background noise of war drums, moved on. Eros had been a tragedy and a crime, but it was finished, and there were new dangers popping up in every corner of human space.
Holden turned off his newsfeed, fidgeted in his bunk, and tried to wake Miller up by staring at him. It didn't work. The massive radiation exposure had failed to give him superpowers. Miller began to snore.
Holden sat up, testing the gravity. Less than a quarter g. Alex wasn't in a hurry, then. Naomi was giving him and Miller time to heal before they arrived at Julie's magical mystery asteroid.
Shit.
Naomi.
The last few times she'd come into sick bay had been awkward. She never brought the subject of his failed romantic gesture back up, but he could feel a barrier between them now that filled him with regret. And every time she left the room, Miller would look away from him and sigh, which just made it worse.
But he couldn't avoid her forever, no matter how much he felt like an idiot. He swung his feet off the edge of the bed and pressed down on the floor. His legs felt weak but not rubbery. The soles of his feet hurt, but quite a bit less than nearly everything else on his body. He stood up, one hand still on the bed, and tested his balance. He wobbled but remained upright. Two steps reassured him that walking was possible in the light gravity. The IV tugged at his arm. He was down to just one bag of something a faint blue. He had no idea what it was, but after Naomi's description of how close to death he'd come, he figured it must be important. He pulled it off the wall hook and held it in his left hand. The room smelled like antiseptic and diarrhea. He was happy to be leaving.
"Where you going?" Miller asked, his voice groggy.
"Out." Holden had the sudden, visceral memory of being fifteen.
"Okay," Miller said, then rolled onto his side.
The sick bay hatch was four meters from the central ladder, and Holden covered the ground with a slow, careful shuffle, his paper booties making a whispery scuffing sound on the fabric-covered metal floor. The ladder itself defeated him. Even though ops was only one deck up, the three-meter climb might as well have been a thousand. He pressed the button to call the lift, and a few seconds later, the floor hatch slid open and the lift climbed through with an electric whine. Holden tried to hop on but managed only a sort of slow-motion fall that ended with his clutching the ladder and kneeling on the lift platform. He stopped the lift, pulled himself upright, and started it again, then rode it up to the next deck in what he hoped was a less beaten and more captain-like pose.
"Jesus, Captain, you still look like shit," Amos said as the lift came to a stop. The mechanic was sprawled across two chairs at the sensor stations and munching on what looked like a strip of leather.
"You keep saying that."
"Keeps bein' true."
"Amos, don't you have work to do?" Naomi said. She was sitting at one of the computer stations, watching something flash by on the screen. She didn't look up when Holden came onto the deck. That was a bad sign.
"Nope. Most boring ship I ever worked, Boss. She don't break, she don't leak, she don't even have an annoying rattle to tighten down," Amos replied as he sucked down the last of his snack and smacked his lips.
"There's always mopping," Naomi said, then tapped out something on the screen in front of her. Amos looked from her to Holden and back again.
"Oh, that reminds me. I better get down to the engine room and look at that... thing I've been meaning to look at," Amos said, and jumped to his feet. "'Scuse me, Cap."
He squeezed past Holden, hopped on the lift, and rode it sternward. The deck hatch closed behind him.
"Hey," Holden said to Naomi once Amos was gone.
"Hey," she said without turning around. That wasn't good either. When she'd sent Amos away, he'd hoped she wanted to talk. It didn't look like it. Holden sighed and shuffled over to the chair next to her. He collapsed into it, his legs tingling like he'd run a kilometer instead of just walking twenty-odd steps. Naomi had left her hair down, and it hid her face from him. Holden wanted to brush it back but was afraid she'd snap his elbow with Belter kung fu if he tried.
"Look, Naomi," he started, but she ignored him and hit a button on her panel. He stopped when Fred's face appeared on the display in front of her.
"Is that Fred?" he said, because he couldn't think of anything even more idiotic to say.
"You should see this. Got it from Tycho a couple hours ago on the tightbeam after I sent them an update on our status."
Naomi tapped the play button and Fred's face sprang to life.
"Naomi, sounds like you guys have had a tough time of it. The air's full of chatter on the station shutdown, and the supposed nuclear explosion. No one knows what to make of it. Keep us informed. In the meantime, we managed to hack open that data cube you left here. I don't think it'll help much, though. Looks like a bunch of sensor data from the Donnager, mostly EM stuff. We've tried looking for hidden messages, but my smartest people can't find anything. I'm passing the data along to you. Let me know if you find anything. Tycho out."
The screen went blank.
"What does the data look like?" Holden asked.
"It's just what the man said," Naomi said. "EM sensor data from the Donnager during the pursuit by the six ships, and the battle itself. I've dug through raw stuff, looking for anything hidden inside, but for the life of me, I can't find a thing. I've even had the Roci digging through the data for the last couple hours, looking for patterns. She has really good software for that sort of thing. But so far, nothing."
She tapped on the screen again and the raw data began spooling past faster than Holden could follow. In a small window inside the larger screen, the Rocinante's pattern-recognition software worked to find meaning. Holden watched it for a minute, but his eyes quickly unfocused.
"Lieutenant Kelly died for this data," he said. "He left the ship while his mates were still fighting. Marines don't do that unless it matters."
Naomi shrugged and pointed at the screen with resignation.
"That's what was on his cube," she said. "Maybe there's something steganographic, but I don't have another dataset to compare it to."
Holden began tapping on his thigh, his pain and romantic failures momentarily forgotten.
"So let's say that this data is all that it is. There's nothing hidden. What would this information mean to the Martian navy?"
Naomi leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes in thought, one finger twisting and untwisting a curl of hair by her temple.
"It's mostly EM data, so lots of engine-signature stuff. Drive radiation is the best way to keep track of other ships. So that tells you where which ships were during the fight. Tactical data?"
"Maybe," Holden said. "Would that be important enough to send Kelly out with?"
Naomi took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
"I don't think so," she said.
"Me either."
Something tapped at the edge of his conscious mind, asking to be let in.
"What was that thing with Amos all about?" he said.
"Amos?"
"Him showing up at the airlock with two guns when we arrived," he said.
"There was some trouble on our trip back to the ship."
"Trouble for who?" Holden asked. Naomi actually smiled at that.
"Some bad men didn't want us to hack the lockdown on the Roci. Amos talked it over with them. You didn't think it was because we were waiting for you, did you, sir?"
Was there a smile in her voice? A hint of coyness? Flirtation? He stopped himself from grinning.
"What did the Roci say about the data when you ran it?" Holden asked.
"Here," Naomi replied, and hit something on her panel. The screen began displaying long lists of data in text. "Lots of EM and light spectrum stuff, some leakage from damaged - "
Holden yelped. Naomi looked up at him.
"I'm such an idiot," Holden said.
"Granted. Elaborate?"
Holden touched the screen and began scrolling up and down through the data. He tapped one long list of numbers and letters and leaned back with a grin.
"There, that's it," he said.
"That's what?"
"Hull structure isn't the only recognition metric. It's the most accurate, but it's also got the shortest range and" - he gestured around him at the Rocinante - "is the easiest to fool. The next best method is drive signature. Can't mask your radiation and heat patterns. And they're easy to spot even from really far away."
Holden turned on the screen next to his chair and pulled up the ship's friend/foe database, then linked it to the data on Naomi's screen.
"That's what this message is, Naomi. It's telling Mars who killed the Donnager by showing them what the drive signature was."
"Then why not just say, 'So-and-so killed us,' in a nice easy-to-read text file?" Naomi asked, a skeptical frown on her face.
Holden leaned forward and paused, opened his mouth, then closed it and sat back again with a sigh.
"I don't know."
A hatch banged open with a hydraulic whine; then Naomi looked past Holden to the ladder and said, "Miller's coming up."
Holden turned to watch the detective finish the slow climb up from the sick bay deck. He looked like a plucked chicken, pink-gray skin stippled with gooseflesh. His paper gown went poorly with the hat.
"Uh, there's a lift," Holden said.
"Wish I'd known that," Miller replied, then dragged himself up onto the ops deck with a gasp. "We there yet?"
"Trying to figure out a mystery," Holden said.
"I hate mysteries," Miller said, then hauled himself to his feet and made his way to a chair.
"Then solve this one for us. You find out who murdered someone. You can't arrest them yourself, so you send the information to your partner. But instead of just sending the perp's name, you send your partner all the clues. Why?"
Miller coughed and scratched his chin. His eyes were fixed on something, like he was reading a screen Holden couldn't see.
"Because I don't trust myself. I want my partner to arrive at the same conclusion I did, without my biasing him. I give him the dots, see what it looks like when he connects 'em."
"Especially if guessing wrong has consequences," Naomi said.
"You don't like to screw up a murder charge," Miller said with a nod. "Looks unprofessional."
Holden's panel beeped at him.
"Shit, I know why they were careful," he said after reading his screen. "The Roci thinks those were standard light-cruiser engines built by the Bush Shipyards."
"They were Earth ships?" Naomi said. "But they weren't flying any colors, and... Son of a bitch!"
It was the first time Holden had ever heard her yell, and he understood. If UNN black ops ships had killed the Donnager, then that meant Earth was behind the whole thing. Maybe even killing the Canterbury in the first place. It would mean that Martian warships were killing Belters for no reason. Belters like Naomi.
Holden leaned forward and called up the comm display, then tapped out a general broadcast. Miller caught his breath.
"That button you just pressed doesn't do what I think it does, does it?" he said.
"I finished Kelly's mission for him," Holden said.
"I have no idea who the fuck Kelly is," Miller said, "but please tell me that his mission wasn't broadcasting that data to the solar system at large."
"People need to know what's going on," Holden said.
"Yes, they do, but maybe we should actually know what the hell is going on before we tell them," Miller replied, all the weariness gone from his voice. "How gullible are you?"
"Hey," Holden said, but Miller got louder.
"You found a Martian battery, right? So you told everyone in the solar system about it and started the single largest war in human history. Only turns out the Martians maybe weren't the ones that left it there. Then, a bunch of mystery ships kill the Donnager, which Mars blames on the Belt, only, dammit, the Belt didn't even know it was capable of killing a Martian battle cruiser."
Holden opened his mouth, but Miller grabbed a bulb of coffee Amos had left behind on the console and threw it at his head.
"Let me finish! And now you find some data that implicates Earth. First thing you do is blab it to the universe, so that Mars and the Belt drag Earth into this thing, making the largest war of all time even bigger. Are you seeing a pattern here?"
"Yes," Naomi said.
"So what do you think's going to happen?" Miller said. "This is how these people work! They made the Canterbury look like Mars. It wasn't. They made the Donnager look like the Belt. It wasn't. Now it looks like the whole damn thing's Earth? Follow the pattern. It probably isn't! You never, never put that kind of accusation out there until you know the score. You look. You listen. You're quiet, fercrissakes, and when you know, then you can make your case."
The detective sat back, clearly exhausted. He was sweating. The deck was silent.
"You done?" Holden said.
Miller nodded, breathing heavily. "Think I might have strained something."
"I haven't accused anyone of doing anything," Holden said. "I'm not building a case. I just put the data out there. Now it's not a secret. They're doing something on Eros. They don't want it interrupted. With Mars and the Belt shooting at each other, everyone with the resources to help is busy elsewhere."
"And you just dragged Earth into it," Miller said.
"Maybe," Holden said. "But the killers did use ships that were built, at least in part, at Earth's orbital shipyards. Maybe someone will look into that. And that's the point. If everyone knows everything, nothing stays secret."
"Yeah, well," Miller said. Holden ignored him
"Eventually, someone'll figure out the big picture. This kind of thing requires secrecy to function, so exposing all the secrets hurts them in the end. It's the only way this really, permanently stops."
Miller sighed, nodded to himself, took off his hat, and scratched his scalp.
"I was just going to put 'em out an airlock," Miller said.
BA834024112 wasn't much of an asteroid. Barely thirty meters across, it had long ago been surveyed and found completely devoid of useful or valuable minerals. It existed in the registry only to warn ships not to run into it. Julie had left it tethered to wealth measured in the billions when she flew her small shuttle to Eros.
Up close, the ship that had killed the Scopuli and stolen its crew looked like a shark. It was long and lean and utterly black, almost impossible to see against the backdrop of space with the naked eye. Its radar-deflecting curves gave it an aerodynamic look almost always lacking in space-going vessels. It made Holden's skin crawl, but it was beautiful.
"Motherfucker," Amos said under his breath as the crew clustered in the cockpit of the Rocinante to look at it.
"The Roci doesn't even see it, Cap," Alex said. "I'm pourin' ladar into it, and all we see is a slightly warmer spot on the asteroid."
"Like Becca saw just before the Cant died," Naomi said.
"Her shuttle's been launched, so I'm guessin' this is the right stealth ship someone left tied to a rock," Alex added. "Case there's more than one."
Holden tapped his fingers on the back of Alex's chair for a moment as he floated over the pilot's head.
"It's probably full of vomit zombies," Holden finally said.
"Want to go see?" said Miller.
"Oh yeah," Holden said.