“Well,” Fred said, speaking slowly as though he were working out the answer as he said it, “the big problem with that is the location of the attacks.”

“Because they happen on the other side of the gates.”

“Exactly,” Fred continued. “If ships were getting nuked as they passed through the Belt, that would be one thing. But on the other side of the gates? Who has access there? Unless you’re thinking the ships were sabotaged in some way. A bomb with a really long fuse?”

“There’s another alternative,” Holden said.

“No, there isn’t,” Fred replied, anticipating his next argument.

“Fred, look, I know you don’t want to think you’ve got people working against your interests on Medina. Doctoring records, maybe. Shutting off sensors when there’re things they don’t want people to see. And I get why that’s hard to swallow.”

“Medina is central to our long-term plans,” Fred said, his words hard as iron. “I’ve placed all of my very best and most loyal people on that station. If the radicals have a fifth column there, then it means that I can’t trust anyone in my organization. I might as well pack it up and retire.”

“There are thousands of people on Medina, I doubt you can vouch for every one of them personally.”

“No, but the people running the station are my people. The most loyal I have. There’s no way something like this could be going on without their knowledge and cooperation.”

“That’s a scary thought.”

“It means I don’t own Medina Station,” Fred said. “It means that the most violent, hard-line, extremist faction of our group controls the choke point of the entire galaxy.”

“So,” Holden said, “how would one go about finding that out?”

Fred leaned back in his chair with a sigh and gave Holden a sad smile. “You know what I think? I think you’re bored, and lonely, and looking for a distraction. Don’t dismantle the organization I spent a lifetime building to give yourself something to do.”

“But ships are missing. Even if it isn’t Medina taking them, something is. I don’t know that we can just ignore that and hope it goes away.”

“Fix your own ship, Jim. Fix your ship and get your crew back together. This thing with the missing ships isn’t your job.”

“Thanks for the coffee,” Holden said, standing up to leave.

“You’re not going to drop it, are you?”

“What do you think?”

“I think,” Fred said, “that if you break any of my stuff, you get to pay for it.”

“Noted,” Holden said with a grin. “I’ll keep you in the loop.”

As he walked out the door, he could picture Miller smiling and saying, You can tell you’ve found a really interesting question when nobody wants you to answer it.

Chapter Nine: Naomi

Once upon a time there had been a Belter girl named Naomi Nagata, and now there was a woman. Even though the difference between the two had been created a day, an hour, a minute at a time, the Venn diagram of the two almost didn’t overlap. What could be cut away, she’d cut years ago. What remained did so in spite of her efforts. For the most part, she could work around them.