LEVIATHAN WAKES

“Did you forget what’s in the engine room?” he asked.

“Hell, Cap,” Amos snorted. “That shit is all frozen. Couple hours with a torch and I can chop it up and chuck it out the airlock. Good to go.”

The mental image of Amos hacking the melted bodies of the ship’s former crew apart with a plasma torch and then cheerfully hurling the chunks out an airlock tipped Holden over the edge into full-fledged nausea. The big mechanic’s ability just to ignore anything that he didn’t want to notice probably came in handy while he was crawling around in tight and greasy engine compartments. His ability to shrug off the horrible mutilation of several dozen people threatened to change Holden’s disgust into anger.

“Forgetting the mess,” he said, “and the very real possibility of infection by what made that mess, there is also the fact that someone is desperately searching for this very expensive and very stealthy ship, and so far Alex can’t find the ship that’s looking.”

He stopped talking and nodded at Amos while the mechanic mulled that over. He could see Amos’ broad face working as he put it together in his head. Found a stealth ship. Other people looking for stealth ship. We can’t see the other people looking for it.

Shit.

Amos’ face went pale.

“Right,” he said. “I’ll set the reactor up to slag her.” He looked down at the time on his suit’s forearm display. “Shit, we’ve been here too long. Better get the lead out.”

“Better had,” Miller agreed.

* * *

Naomi was good. Very good. Holden had discovered this when he’d signed on with the Canterbury, and over the course of years, he’d added it to his list of facts, along with space is cold and the direction of gravity is down. When something stopped working on the water hauler, he’d tell Naomi to fix it, and then never think of it again. Sometimes she’d claim not to be able to fix something, but it was always a negotiating tactic. A short conversation would lead to a request for spare parts or an additional crewman hired on at the next port, and that would be that. There was no problem that involved electronics or spaceship parts she couldn’t solve.

“I can’t open the safe,” she said.

She floated next to the safe in the captain’s quarters, one foot resting lightly on his bunk to stabilize herself as she gestured. Holden stood on the floor with his boot mags on. Miller was in the hatchway to the corridor.

“What would you need?” Holden asked.

“If you won’t let me blast it or cut it, I can’t open it.”

Holden shook his head, but Naomi either didn’t see it or ignored him.

“The safe is designed to open when a very specific pattern of magnetic fields is played across that metal plate on the front,” she said. “Someone has a key designed to do that, but that key isn’t on this ship.”

“It’s at that station,” Miller said. “He wouldn’t send it there if they couldn’t open it.”

Holden stared at the wall safe for a moment, his fingers tapping on the bulkhead beside it.

“What’re the chances cutting it sets off a booby trap?” he said.

“Fucking excellent, Cap,” Amos said. He was listening in from the torpedo bay as he hacked the small fusion reactor that powered one of the six remaining torpedoes to go critical. Working on the ship’s main reactor was too dangerous with the shielding stripped off.

“Naomi, I really want that safe and the research notes and samples it contains,” Holden said.

“You don’t know that’s what’s in there,” Miller said, then laughed. “No, of course that’s what’s in there. But it won’t help us if we get blown up or, worse, if some piece of goo-coated shrapnel makes a hole in our nice suits.”

“I’m taking it,” Holden replied, then pulled a piece of chalk from his suit’s pocket and drew a line around the safe on the bulkhead. “Naomi, cut a small hole in the bulkhead and see if there’s anything that would stop us from just cutting the whole damned thing out and taking it with us.”

“We’d have to take out half the wall.”

“Okay.”

Naomi frowned, then shrugged, then smiled and nodded with one hand.

“All right, then,” she said. “Thinking of taking it to Fred’s people?”

Miller laughed again, a dry humorless rasp that made Holden uneasy. The detective had been watching the video of Julie Mao’s fight with her captors over and over again while they’d waited on Naomi and Amos to finish their work. It gave Holden the disquieting feeling that Miller was storing the footage in his head. Fuel for something he planned to do later.

“Mars would give you your lives back in exchange for this,” Miller said. “I hear Mars is nice if you’re rich.”

“Fuck rich,” Amos said with a grunt as he worked on something below. “They’d build statues of us.”

“We have an agreement with Fred to let him outbid any other contracts we take,” Holden said. “Of course, this isn’t really a contract per se… ”

Naomi smiled and winked at Holden.

“So what is it, sir?” she said, her voice faintly mocking. “OPA heroes? Martian billionaires? Start your own biotech firm? What are we doing here?”

Holden pushed away from the safe and kicked out toward the airlock and the cutting torch that waited there with their other tools.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But it sure feels nice to have choices again.”

* * *

Amos pushed the button again. No new stars flared in the dark. The radiation and infrared sensors remained quiet.

“There’s supposed to be an explosion, right?” Holden asked.

“Fuck, yes,” Amos said, then pushed the button on the black box in his hand a third time. “This isn’t an exact science or anything. Those missile drives are as simple as it gets. Just a reactor with one wall missing. Can’t exactly predict… ”

“It isn’t rocket science,” Holden said with a laugh.

“What?” Amos asked, ready to be angry if he was being mocked.

“You know, ‘it isn’t rocket science,’ ” Holden said. “Like ‘it isn’t hard.’ You’re a rocket scientist, Amos. For real. You work on fusion reactors and starship drives for a living. Couple hundred years ago, people would have been lining up to give you their children for what you know.”

“What the fu-” Amos started, but stopped when a new sun flared outside the cockpit window, then faded quickly. “See? Fucking told you it would work.”

“Never doubted it,” Holden said, then slapped Amos on one meaty shoulder and headed aft down the crew ladder.

“What the fuck was that about?” Amos asked no one in particular as Holden drifted away.

He headed through the ops deck. Naomi’s chair was empty. He’d ordered her to get some sleep. Strapped down to loops inset in the deck was the stealth ship’s safe. It looked bigger cut out of the wall. Black and imposingly solid. The kind of container in which one kept the end of the solar system.

Holden floated over to it and quietly said, “Open sesame.”

The safe ignored him, but the deck hatch opened and Miller pulled himself up into the compartment. His environment suit had been traded in for a stale-smelling blue jumpsuit and his ever-present hat. There was something about the look on his face that made Holden uncomfortable. Even more so than the detective usually made him.

“Hey,” Holden said.

Miller just nodded and pulled himself over to one of the workstations, then buckled in to one of the chairs.