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.