“I meant you,” Alex said. “I was having trouble coming up with your name.”
Bobbie chuckled. “Yeah, they’re going to want to talk to you again. I think the version they got was a little muddled.”
“Do you think… Should we not be talking?”
“We’re not under arrest,” Bobbie said. “The only one of the other guys that’s still breathing lawyered up before he got here. I’m pretty sure they’re not going to be looking at us if they want to throw someone in jail.”
“What did you tell them?” Alex asked.
“The truth. That a bunch of thugs broke into my rooms, tied me up, and started taking turns between kicking the shit out of me and asking why I was meeting with Alex Kamal.”
Alex pressed his thumb against his upper lip until it ached a little. Bobbie’s smile carried a load of sympathy.
“I don’t know why that is,” he said. “I don’t have any enemies on Mars. That I know of.”
Bobbie shook her head and Alex noticed again that she was a remarkably attractive woman. He coughed and mentally filed the thought under horrifically inappropriate given the circumstances.
“My guess,” Bobbie said, “is that it was less about who you are than who you’re connected to.”
“Holden?”
“And Fred Johnson. And maybe they can even put the two of us together with Avasarala. She shipped on the Rocinante for a while.”
“For about a minute and a half, years ago.”
“I remember. I was there,” Bobbie said. “Still, one way or another, the most plausible scenario I’ve got is that they thought I was reporting something to you or you were reporting something to me. And, even better, the idea scared them.”
“Don’t mean to look a gift horse in the mouth, but that definition of even better has got some mighty long teeth,” Alex said. “Did you tell them about your investigation?”
“No, I’m not ready to do that.”
“But you think this was related.”
“Oh, hell yes. Don’t you?”
“It’s what I’m hoping for, actually,” Alex said with a sigh. Across the hallway, someone shouted words Alex couldn’t make out. A nurse stalked by, scowling. “So what are we goin’ to do about it?”
“Only thing we can do,” Bobbie said. “Keep digging.”
“Fair enough. So. What exactly are we looking at?”
Bobbie’s expression sharpened. The problem, she said, was ships. The Martian Navy was the newest, best set of ships in the solar system. Earth had more ships, but her Navy was aging, with tech in them that was either generations old or retrofitted, shoehorning more recent designs into older frames. Both fleets had taken heavy losses in the last few years. Whether you called Avasarala’s influence prompting or putting her on a mission, Bobbie had started looking, and what she’d found was interesting.
The seven big Donnager-class ships were easy to keep track of, but the fleet of corvettes that they carried, ships like the Rocinante—they were slippery. Bobbie had started by going back to review the battle data from Io, from outside the Ring, from the incident in the slow zone. Really, when it came to damage reports, there was an embarrassment of riches.
At first, the numbers had seemed to match up. Half a dozen ships lost here, a handful there, the transponder codes decommissioned. But as she looked more deeply, she started running into discrepancies.
The Tsuchi, a corvette assigned to the Bellaire, had been decommissioned and scrapped after Io. A year later, it appeared in a small-group action report near Europa. The supply ship Apalala had been retired from service, and then seven months later, picked up a shipment headed to Ganymede. A load of medical supplies lost to accident appeared briefly on a loading schedule bound for Ceres and then disappeared again. Weapons lost in the fighting around what was now Medina Station appeared in an audit at Hecate Base once and not again.
Someone, Bobbie reasoned, had gone back through the records and doctored the old reports, forging the deaths of ships and then erasing them from the later records, or trying to. She’d found half a dozen hiccups in the data, but any ships that had been successfully erased, she wouldn’t see. That meant someone had to be involved high enough up the naval chain of command that they had access to the files.
There was protocol, of course, that laid out who was supposed to have access to the records, but she’d been in the process of looking into how that actually played out in practice when Alex had dropped her a line and suggested dinner.
“If you’re up for it,” Bobbie said, “that’s what I’d want you to look at. Just who could have changed the information. Then I can start looking at them.”
“Keep going down the road you were already on,” Alex said.
“Only with maybe some friends in the Navy.”
“That’s one way we can go. It ain’t the only one, though.”
Bobbie sat forward, caught her breath, and leaned back. “What else are you thinking?”
“Someone hired the gentlemen who messed us up. Seems like findin’ out what we can about them might also be worth our time.”
Bobbie grinned. “That was the part I was planning to do.”
“Well, all right, then,” Alex said, and a man stepped into the doorway. He was huge. His shoulders brushed the doorframe on both sides, and his face was thick and heavy with a distress that could have been fear or anger. The bouquet of daffodils in his hand seemed tiny, and would until they were in a vase.
“Hey,” he said. “I was just…”
“Come in,” Bobbie said. “Alex, this is my brother Ben. Benji, this is Alex Kamal.”
“Good to meet you,” the massive man said, enfolding Alex’s hand in his grip and shaking gently. “Thank you for everything you’ve done.”
“Betcha?” Alex said.
The bed creaked as Bobbie’s brother sat at its foot. He looked sheepishly at his sister. Now that she’d said the words, Alex could see the resemblance in them. Bobbie wore the look better.
“The doctor says you’re doing well,” Ben said. “David wanted me to tell you he’s thinking of you.”
“That’s sweet, but David doesn’t think about anything but terraforming and boobs,” Bobbie said.
“I’ve cleaned out the guest room,” Ben said. “When they release you from the hospital, you’re coming to stay with us.”
Bobbie’s smile grew sharper. “I don’t actually see that happening.”
“No,” her brother said. “No, this isn’t a discussion. I told you from the beginning that Innis Shallow was a dangerous place, especially for someone living by herself. If Alex hadn’t saved you—”
“Not sure I was actually saving anyone,” Alex said, but Ben scowled and kept right on going over the words.
“—you could have been killed. Or worse.”
“Worse than killed?” Bobbie said.
“You know what I mean.”
Bobbie leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “Yes, I do, and I think that’s bullshit too. I am in no more danger in Innis Shallow than I would be up in Breach Candy.”
“How can you even say that?” her brother demanded, his jaw slipping forward. “After what you’ve just been through, it should be obvious that…”
Alex sidestepped toward the door. Bobbie caught his eye, and the brief smile, gone as soon as it was there, was eloquent. I’m sorry and Thank you and We’ll talk about the important stuff when he’s gone. Alex nodded and retreated to the hallway, the buzz-saw tones of siblings lecturing each other following after him.