Part 30 (1/2)

”Even that?” Sarta said, and mimicked the shrug. Wings blushed in anger.

”Everyone knows how it is,” Wings said. ”Sometimes they tell dead men they'll live. Karal, you were there. Andrew and Chuchu? All about how help's coming and then so sorry, so sad?”

”Esa died soldiers,” Karal said, but the point hit home. It was in his hands and the corners of his mouth. And then, like he realized his mistake, he looked over to Naomi. She kept her expression blank and bored, her attention on the seam in the deck and the thin plastic spatula she was dragging through it. The cascade of implications couldn't reach her face.

Sakai had been the name of the new chief engineer on Tycho, and if this was the same man, he'd been one of Marco's. And he'd been caught, or they wouldn't have called him a prisoner. She blew the hair up out of her eyes, s.h.i.+fted over to a new seam and started again.

”Back to work, yeah?” Karal said.

Wings grunted his derision, but went back to his quarters to do as he'd been told. Karal and Sarta went back to flirting, but the moment was gone, and pretty soon it was only Karal and Naomi again, pa.s.sing time.

While she worked, pressing the plastic into the seams, sc.r.a.ping out whatever had gathered there, doing it again, she tried to fit the new information into the larger scheme of things. Marco had hoped she would bring the Rocinante to Ceres. But Sakai had known that the s.h.i.+p needed repair, and must have pa.s.sed that information up to leaders.h.i.+p.

She'd thought that Marco had wanted her s.h.i.+p because of who and what she was. And maybe that was part of it. Or maybe what he'd really wanted was private access to a s.h.i.+p that would be expected and welcome at Tycho Station. For what, she didn't know. The way he nested plans inside his plans, he might have had half a dozen uses for the Roci and for her. And more, there was a question about whether Sakai was in danger. Were they afraid Fred would execute him? Maybe. Maybe something else.

Either way, she knew more now than she'd known before, and, like the bent hasp on the toolbox, it gave her options she hadn't had. She wondered what Jim or Amos or Alex would have done in her place, how they would have taken this one piece of information and used it. An academic question, really, because she knew what Naomi Nagata would do, and it wasn't something any of them could have done.

When the deck was clean, she dropped the spatula into the recycler, stood, and stretched. The thrust gravity made her knees and spine ache, and she wished that wherever they were going, they'd be in a little less of a hurry to get there. It didn't matter.

”Grabbing a shower, me,” she said. ”Tell him I want to talk.”

”Him who?” Karal said.

Naomi hoisted an eyebrow. ”Tell him the mother of his son wants to talk.”

”You've put him in the field?” Naomi said. ”Is that where we are? Child soldiers?”

Marco's smile looked almost sorrowful. ”You think he's a child?”

The exercise machines were empty apart from him. On the float, everyone in the crew would have been spending hours in the resistance gel or strapped into one of the mechs. On the burn, most of the crew were getting more than enough from their own weight. But Marco was there in a sheer exercise gown, straps wrapped around his hands, pulling down on wide bands that fought against him. The muscles in his back rippled with every stroke, and Naomi was certain he was aware of it. She had known many strong people in her life. She could tell the difference between the muscles that grew from work and the kind that came from vanity.

”I think he's crowing about how he's responsible for the rock fall on Earth,” she said. ”Like it's something to be proud of.”

”It is. It's more than you or I could have done at his age. Filip's smart and he's a leader. Give him another twenty years, he could run the solar system. Maybe more.”

Naomi walked over and turned off the exercise sequence. The wide bands in Marco's hands went slack with a barely audible hiss. ”I wasn't done,” he said.

”Tell me that isn't why you brought me here,” she said. ”Tell me that you didn't abduct me in order to show me what a good father you've been and how well our boy turned out. Because you betrayed him.”

Marco's laugh was low and warm and rolling. He started unwrapping his hands. It would have been so easy to hurt him while he did it that she was fairly certain he had a hidden way to defend himself. And if not, the impression that he might was defense enough. She wasn't here to kill him. She was here to push him into saying something.

”Is that what you think?” he asked.

”No,” she said. ”I think you did it to show off. I walked away from you, and you're such a little boy that you still can't stand it. So when your big moment came, you had to have me here to see it happen.”

It was true, as far as it went. She did see a pleasure in him that came from having power over her. Even her weird half-status in the crew was a part of that. Locking her in a cage would have been a tacit admission she was a threat. He wanted her to see that she was powerless, to make the prison walls herself. There had been a time it would have worked. She was betting that he didn't realize that time had pa.s.sed.

And she was betting that it had pa.s.sed. When he narrowed his eyes at her, shaking his head, she still felt the tug of humiliation in her throat, familiar as an old habit. So perhaps the truth was more complicated.

”I brought you home to the winning side because you are the mother of my son, and always will be. Anything beyond that is happy coincidence. That we have the chance to find some sense of closure between us -”

”Bulls.h.i.+t. Closure? You lost. It's closed. You only say it wasn't finished because you hadn't won yet. I left. I sacrificed everything because having nothing away from you was better than having it all and being your puppet.”

He lifted his hands, palms out, in a mocking gesture of peace. It wasn't working. Not yet.

”I hear that you would have done things differently. I don't blame you for that. Not everyone has the strength to be a soldier. I thought you did. I thought I could count on you. And when the burden bore you down, yes, I took our son someplace I knew he'd be safe. You blame me for keeping him away from you. But you'd have done exactly the same to me, if you'd had the power.”

”I would have,” she said. ”I'd have taken him with me, and you'd never have seen either of us again.”

”So how different are we?” Sweat dewed his skin. He took a towel from the rack, dabbing at his face and arms. She knew intellectually that he was beautiful, the way the iridescent wings of a carrion fly would be. She felt the weight of her disgust with herself for letting this man be what he was to her, and knew that was part of what he intended. The dark thoughts stirred in her brain stem. They didn't matter. She was here to solve a puzzle.

He put down the towel. ”Naomi -”

”It's Holden then, isn't it? You brought me here as... what? Insurance against him?”

”I'm not afraid of your Earther f.u.c.k buddy,” Marco said, and Naomi heard the roughness in his voice like an animal scenting a distant fire.

”I think you are,” she said. ”I think you wanted him off the board before you started this, and I was supposed to lead him into the trap. Because you couldn't imagine that I would come alone. That I wouldn't bring a man to be strong for me.”

Marco chuckled, but it had more of an edge to it. He walked across the exercise mat, scooping up his dark robe and shrugging into it. ”You're trying to talk yourself into something, Knuckles.”

”Do you know why I'm with him?”

If Marco were wise, he wouldn't rise to that bait. He'd walk out, leave her alone among the machines. If she'd managed to make him angry, even just a little bit angry, though...

”I a.s.sume you have a kink for powerful men,” Marco said.

”Because he is what you pretend to be.”

She saw it land. She couldn't even say what it was that changed in him, but the Marco she'd seen since being brought here the smooth, world-weary, self-a.s.sured leader of the greatest coup in human history was gone, dropped like a mask. In his place was the rage-filled boy who'd almost destroyed her once. His laugh wasn't low or warm or rolling.

”Well, just wait around, and we'll see how much that does for him. Big Man Holden may think he's unkillable, but everyone bleeds.”

There. That was a datapoint. It was working. It might only have been the rhetoric of the squabble, an empty threat. Or he might have just told her that his plans still involved the Rocinante.

”You can't do anything to him,” she said.

”No?” Marco said, his teeth bared like a chimp. ”Well, maybe you will.”

He turned sharply, stalking out of the room. Leaving her alone the way he should have a few minutes earlier. Or else a decade and a half before.

”You done?” Cyn asked, nodding at the brick of lentil and rice half-eaten on her plate. On the screen in the mess hall, a Martian general was pounding a table, red-faced with pa.s.sion that looked a lot like fear. He was describing the cowardice of the person or persons who had committed this atrocity against not only Earth, but humanity. Every third sentence or so, someone at the end of her table would repeat the general's words in a high, quacking voice, like something from a children's cartoon.

She broke off another piece of the lentil brick and popped it in her mouth. ”Close enough,” she said around it. She put her tray and the rest of the brick into the recycler and walked back toward the lift. Cyn loomed behind her. She was so locked in her own thoughts that she barely noticed he was there until he spoke.

”Heard you had it out with el jefe,” Cyn said. ”Etwas a Filipito?”