She shifted to her own terminal, connecting to the Roci’s system and putting out a series of simple pattern matching requests. It wasn’t hard to do. Most of the information Stuart had been working with was public record. And optical telescopes around the system had been trained on the Free Navy since the moment Marco had started his assault on the Martian convoy. The list of systems where ships had gone missing wasn’t long, but the pattern in it wasn’t obvious either. She tried to remember if anyone on the Pella had talked about any of them: Tasnim, Jerusalem, New Kashmir. Of course, the naming conventions were also a mess. New Kashmir also got called Sandalphon, High Texas, and LM-422. She pulled up alternate names for the other systems. Now that Jim had learned the worst of her past, she was almost eager to start the debriefing with Avasarala’s team, and if there was some clue she could bring from her time on the Pella…

She scowled. Ran the matching schema again with different tolerances. Behind her, Jim yawned. When he sat up, the sheets made a hushing sound. The Roci came back with a list of possibles, and she spooled through them. The Ankara Slough was an approximate match for the Rabia Balkhi, but looking through the differences she saw the drive signatures were wrong. It would have cost less to make a new ship than to swap a whole drive complex out of an existing one. In the front room, Alex said something and Amos answered. And then – to her brief surprise – Bobbie. Jim’s hand touched her shoulder.

“Hey. You all right?”

“Yeah,” Naomi said. “Fine.”

“How long have you been up?”

She checked the time and groaned. “Three and a half hours.”

“Breakfast?”

“God, yes.”

Her back protested when she stood, but only a little. Her mind felt focused and alive and wholly her own for the first time in weeks. Maybe since the first, toxic message from Marcos had come in. She wasn’t at war with herself, and it felt good. But…

Jim’s hair was in wild disarray, but he looked handsome in it. She took his arm. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” she said.

“Would coffee improve whatever it is?”

“Couldn’t hurt,” she said.

In the main room of the suite, Amos and Bobbie were talking about methods of unpowered travel, each of them subtly outdoing the other and both clearly aware of it and having fun. Alex grinned to her and Jim when they sat at the breakfast bar, and then poured them both demitasses of slow-pouring espresso with thick brown crème at the top. Naomi sipped, enjoying the heat and the rich complexity hidden inside the bitterness.

“You’re looking better,” Alex said.

“Feeling better. Thanks. Bobbie, the missing ships you were looking for. They were all MCRN, right? Navy?”