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.