Leviathan Wakes - James S. A. Corey [66]
Do something, a mentor of a decade earlier said to his young officers. It doesn’t have to be right, it just has to be something.
“Someone is going to investigate what happened to the Donnager,” Holden said. “Martian ships are speeding to that spot as we speak. They’ll already know the Tachi got away, because our transponder is blabbing our survival to the solar system at large.”
“No it ain’t,” Alex said.
“Explain that, Mr. Kamal.”
“This is a torpedo bomber. You think they want a nice transponder signal to lock on to when they’re makin’ runs on an enemy capital ship? Naw, there’s a handy switch up in the cockpit that says ‘transponder off.’ I flipped it before we flew out. We’re just another moving object out of a million like us.”
Holden was silent for two long breaths.
“Alex, that may be the single greatest thing anyone has ever done, in the history of the universe,” he said.
“But we can’t land, Jim,” Naomi said. “One, no port is going to let a ship with no transponder signal anywhere near them, and two, as soon as they make us out visually, the fact that we’re a Martian warship will be hard to hide.”
“Yep, that’s the downside,” Alex agreed.
“Fred Johnson,” Holden said, “gave us the network address to get in touch with him. I’m thinking that the OPA might be the one group that would let us land our stolen Martian warship somewhere.”
“It ain’t stolen,” Alex said. “It’s legitimate salvage now.”
“Yeah, you make that argument to the MCRN if they catch us, but let’s try and make sure they don’t.”
“So, we just wait here till Colonel Johnson gets back to us?” Alex asked.
“No, I wait. You two prep Lieutenant Kelly for burial. Alex, you were MCRN. You know the traditions. Do it with full honors and record it in the log. He died to get us off that ship, and we’re going to accord him every respect. As soon as we land anywhere, we’ll bounce the full record to MCRN command so they can do it officially.”
Alex nodded. “We’ll do it right, sir.”
Fred Johnson replied to his message so fast that Holden wondered if he’d been sitting at his terminal waiting for it. Johnson’s message consisted only of coordinates and the word tightbeam. Holden aimed the laser array at the specified location—it was the same one Fred had beamed his first message from—then turned on his mic and said, “Fred?”
The coordinates given were more than eleven light-minutes away. Holden prepared to wait twenty-two minutes for his answer. Just to have something to do, he fed the location up to the cockpit and told Alex to fly in that direction at one g as soon as they’d finished with Lieutenant Kelly.
Twenty minutes later the thrust came up and Naomi climbed the ladder. She’d stripped off her vacuum suit and was wearing a red Martian jumpsuit that was half a foot too short for her and three times too big around. Her hair and face looked clean.
“This ship has a head with a shower. Can we keep it?” she said.
“How’d it go?”
“We took care of him. There’s a decent-sized cargo bay down by engineering. We put him there until we can find some way to send him home. I turned off the environment in there, so he’ll stay preserved.”
She held out her hand and dropped a small black cube into his lap.
“That was in a pocket under his armor,” she said.
Holden held up the object. It looked like some sort of data-storage device.
“Can you find out what’s on it?” he asked.
“Sure. Give me some time.”
“And Amos?”
“Blood pressure’s steady,” Naomi said. “That’s got to be a good thing.”
The comm console beeped at them, and Holden started the playback.
“Jim, news of the Donnager has just started hitting the net. I admit I am extremely surprised to be hearing from you,” said Fred’s voice. “What can I do for you?