Lots of new ships were showing up around Mars and Earth, but that was to be expected. The shipyards were cranking out new and refurbished vessels as fast as the mechanics and engineers could make them. Everyone with two yuan to rub together was making a play for the ring gates and the worlds beyond them, and the biggest group of people who like living on planets and were already physiologically adapted to it came from the two inner worlds. Only a tiny fraction of those ships had gaps in their records that Paula’s program would flag, but even a brief search led Holden to believe that the flagged ships were mostly paperwork errors, not piracy.

There were also a scattering of suspicious new ships in the Belt. Those were more interesting. If the OPA was stealing ships, then the logical place to hide them was in a region of space thick with ships and other metallic bodies. Holden began going through the Belt list one ship at a time.

The Gozerian appeared out of nowhere in the docks at the Pallas refinery in the right date range. The records listed it as a probate transfer, but were vague on who’d died and what relation the new owner had to the old. Holden guessed the answer to those two questions was person who used to own the ship and person who killed them and took it. The transfer of ownership was sketchy enough that it almost certainly was the result of piracy, but the Gozerian was listed as a non-Epstein light-hulled mining ship. A rock hopper. The records from Pallas backed that up, and a search of the list of seventeen missing ships didn’t turn up anything matching its description. No one was going to make a run for the edge of the solar system and then all the way in to a new world in something that didn’t have an Epstein drive. There were much more comfortable places to die of old age.

Holden checked the Gozerian off his list and moved to the next. By the time he’d gone through the entire initial list from Paula it was three a.m., Tycho time, and his shift on the Roci started at eight, so he caught a couple hours of rack time and spent a miserable morning trying to trace maneuvering thruster cables through a fog of sleep deprivation.

By the time his shift was over all he could think about was a little dinner and a lot of sleep, but the data stream from Paula was waiting for him with nearly fifty new ships. So he picked up a carton of noodles on his way home and spent the rest of the evening going through the list.