“He’s a guy I work with on the Roci refits. But anyway, I thought that sounded like a great idea so I hired a local data wonk to write a database mining script to track all the new ship names that show up on the registries and try to find an origin point.”

“A data wonk.”

“Freelance coder. Whatever the name is for that kind of work, yeah, and anytime now I’ll start getting a stream of data that includes all the mysteriously appearing ships. Our missing seventeen should be a subset of that. At least it’ll be a smaller number of ships than, you know, all of them.”

Monica stood up and walked away several steps, not speaking. Holden blew on his tea and waited. When she finally turned back around, the look on her face was carefully controlled incredulity. “You’ve involved Fred Johnson, some engineer here on Tycho, and a fucking hacker in this? Are you that stupid?”

Holden sighed and stood up. “I first heard about this from you, so I’ll do you the courtesy of letting you know where the investigation goes —”

“And now you’re leaving?” The incredulous look on Monica’s face only deepened.

“Well, funny thing. I don’t have to put up with being called stupid by someone I’m trying to help.”

Monica lifted her palms in a placating gesture that he suspected she didn’t really mean.

“Sorry,” she said, “but you just involved three new people, one of whom is the highest-profile member of the OPA, in my… our investigation. What on earth made you think that was a good idea?”

“You know me, right?” Holden said, not sitting again but not heading straight for the door either. “I’m not a guy who hides things. I don’t think Fred is the bad guy, but if he is then his reaction to our searching will tell us something. Secrecy is the potting soil in which all this conspiracy shit grows. Trust me. The roaches don’t like it when you start shining a light on them.”

“And what if they decide to get rid of the guy with the light?”

“Well,” Holden said with a grin, “that’ll be interesting too. They won’t be the first ones to try, and I’m still here.”

The following day the data from Paula’s program began trickling in. He authorized his terminal to transfer the remaining payment for her services and began going through the list.