The script over the doors of hell, writ small.
Renting a hole by the port was easy. She had enough money to buy anonymous credit, route it through an off-station exchange, and bring it back to a mayfly shadow account. It only felt strange doing it because she hadn’t had to go through those motions in so long. Not since she’d signed on to the Canterbury, and that felt like it had been seven lifetimes ago.
She sat on the thin gel bed and waited for the weeping and nausea to stop. They would, even though at the worst of it, they felt like they might not. Then she took a long shower, changed into a fresh set of clothes purchased from a kiosk. Watching the hard puck of compressed cloth expand into a jumpsuit reminded her of an insect pulling itself out of its shell. It seemed like it should be a metaphor for something.
Her hand terminal showed a half-dozen new messages from Jim. She didn’t play them. If she had, the temptation to reply—to confess to him and take comfort in him, to talk to someone she trusted completely—would have been too much. And then he would have felt obligated to do something. To come and fix things. To insert himself into the messes that she’d made and the things she’d done. The distance between here and there, between Marco and the Rocinante, was too precious to sacrifice. The time for comfort would come later, when she’d done the things she needed to do. When she’d saved Filip. When she’d escaped Marco. So she didn’t play the messages. But she didn’t delete them either.
Even back on with Rokku, Marco had been cultivating himself as a leader. He’d been good at it. No matter how bad things got, he’d always managed to make it seem like each new hurdle was something he’d factored in, every solution—even ones he’d logically had nothing to do with—was somehow his brilliance. He’d explained once how he managed it.
The trick, he said, is to have a simple plan that more or less can’t go wrong so that you always have something, and then stack your risks on that. Have another alternative that won’t work but maybe one time in a hundred, and if it happens, you look like a god. And then one that won’t work but one time in twenty, that if it lands you look like you’re the smartest one in the room. And then one that’s only one time in five, but you look like you knew you could do it. And if everything else fails, you’ve still got the one that would always win.
If there was a single phrase for Marco, that was it: always win.
She wondered more than once over the years where she’d been on that scale. Had she been his one-in-a-hundred or his sure thing? She’d never known, and there was no way that she ever would. It didn’t even matter to her anymore, except the way a missing finger itched sometimes.
And now here she was again, doing what he wanted. He’d made her complicit in his plans, whatever they were. This time, though, she knew who she was dealing with. She wasn’t the girl who he’d tricked into sabotaging the Gamarra. She wasn’t a love-struck teenager in over her head. And Filip wasn’t a baby that could be spirited away and held as hostage against her good conduct. Her silence.
And so maybe—maybe—this was the moment she’d wanted. Maybe calling her in was Marco’s mistake. She pushed the idea away. It was too dangerous, too complicated. Too likely to be what Marco had known she would think.
Digging through the station directory, she took the better part of an hour to find the address, even knowing what she was looking for. She didn’t know what Outer Fringe Exports did, except that they were shady enough that she hadn’t wanted to work with them, and that they were competent enough that they’d known about the Martian claims disputing the salvage of the Rocinante before her crew had. Naomi found their physical address—a different berth than the one she’d been at the last time—and caught a cart.
The warehouses near the port were in a constant state of flux. The pressure of commerce and efficiency kept every space in use with as little downtime between rental agreements, loading, and unloading as could be arranged. The sign on the tempered glass door read OUTER FRINGE EXPORTS, but in a week, a day, an hour, it could have been anything.
A young man at the counter smiled up at her. He had close-cropped hair and skin several shades darker than her own. The steel-rimmed glasses could have been an affectation or an interface device. She’d never seen him before.
“Hi,” she said.
“Miss Nagata,” the man said as if they were old acquaintances. “It’s been some time. I’m sorry to say we don’t have any work that would be suited to your ship at this time.”
“Not what I’m here for,” she said. “I need to charter a ship. And I need to do it very quietly.”
The man’s expression didn’t change. “That can be an expensive problem.”
“It needs to carry a crew no larger than twenty.”
“How long would you need it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would it be hauling cargo?”
“No.”
The man’s eyes lost their focus for a moment. The glasses were an interface, then. Naomi crossed her arms.
One in a hundred, she thought, I show up with my own warship ready to carry people off Ceres. One in twenty, I know how to find someone who will. She wondered what the one-in-five plan was. What was the sure thing.
The man’s focus came back to her.
“I think we may be able to help,” he said.
Chapter Fifteen: Alex
The ride to the hospital was a thing out of a nightmare. As the transport sped through the corridors, the painkillers started to take effect. The combination of ache and sharpness in his body shifted into a deep and troubling sense of simply being wrong. Once, when they were near the emergency admitting entrance, time stuttered as his consciousness slipped away and back again. None of the medics paid him much attention.
They were all focused on Bobbie.
The big woman’s eyes were closed, and a pale plastic tube came out of her mouth, keeping her jaw open. From where he rode, Alex could make out only parts of her gurney’s readout, and he wasn’t sure how to interpret what he was seeing. The medics’ voices were clipped and tense. Words and phrases like attempting to reinflate and stabilizing and maintaining pressure pushed Alex toward the edge of panic. Bobbie’s body, what he could see of it, was limp. He told himself she wasn’t dead. If she were dead, they wouldn’t be trying to save her. He hoped that was true.
At the emergency ward, he found himself wheeled into an automated surgical bed not that different from the ones on the Rocinante. The scan probably took a minute and a half, but it seemed to go on forever. He kept turning to the side, looking for Bobbie, then remembering she was in a different room now. Even then he didn’t understand how much his injuries and painkillers had compromised his mind until the police came and he tried to explain what had happened.
“So how did the woman with the power armor fit into it?” Bobbie asked.
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.