“I don’t know how it’s being done,” Tanaka said. “But I intend to find out.”
“How do you stop it?”
“I’ll find that out too,” she said, and walked away. In the corridor, she copied the list to the two Marines as she led the way toward the pharmacy. “Any of these that are already compounded, we take. Anything we’d need to synthesize more on the Derecho, we take that too.”
“How do we know what those are?”
“Shake a pharmacist,” Tanaka said.
It took longer than Tanaka had wanted to spend, but the supply was also larger. By the end, they had to take wide, blue plastic bags that were meant for the personal effects of patients. By the time they were ready to go, it looked like they’d been shopping at a high-fashion market district. One of the doctors—a small, round-faced man with an unfortunate beard—followed them out toward the hub to the main station flapping his hands in distress. Tanaka did him the favor of ignoring him.
It took the lift a few seconds to arrive. As Tanaka stood there, waiting, one of her guards cleared his throat. “Straight to the dock, sir?”
“Yes,” Tanaka said. And then, “No. Wait.” As the lift chimed, she pulled open one of the bags and grabbed out a familiar glassine packet, filled with pills. “Go ahead. I’ll meet you at the ship.”
“Are you sure, sir?”
“Go.”
She didn’t wait to watch. Anyone on the Derecho stupid enough to disobey her at this point was beyond saving. She stalked to the doctor’s lounge again. This time, more people were there. They turned to look at her like she was a threat. Fair enough.
Ahmadi was exactly where Tanaka had left her, though somehow she’d gotten a fresh cup of tea to ignore. Tanaka touched her shoulder, and she was slow to turn. Tanaka put the packet on the table beside the teacup. Ahmadi’s hand covered it.
“I’ll do what I can,” Tanaka said.
Chapter Thirty-Five: Alex
At first, Alex didn’t notice the sounds of violence. There were several reasons for that: He was on the flight deck at the top of the Rocinante, and the fighting was down by the crew airlock; he was at the end of a long, busy shift, and the fatigue left him a little slower on the uptake than usual; he was watching one of his favorite old neo-noir entertainment feeds, and the detective—played by Shin Jung Park—had just followed the mysterious woman—Anna Reál—into a nightclub on Titan. It was only a few minutes before he’d find the policeman’s body, and maybe an hour before he realized that the mysterious woman was his daughter. Alex had seen this one many times over the years. He knew it well. Rewatching old feeds was a comfort for him. There was a calm that came with knowing what was going to happen.
He couldn’t tell what caught his attention, only that something in the club sounded wrong. He paused the feed, Shin Jung Park with his eyes half closed and his mouth open awkwardly in the middle of ordering a drink. The Roci was just the hum of recyclers and his own heartbeat. When the next shout came, Alex started. It was a girl’s voice lifted in rage. He couldn’t make out individual words, but it was only trouble.
He unstrapped and hauled himself down through ops to the lift. The girl’s voice came again, louder and fast. The only thing he could make out was the word fucking in the middle of a sentence. Then a sound of impact loud enough that the hull rang with it for a few seconds.
“Hey there,” he said as he pulled himself toward the crew airlock. “Something wrong?”
No one answered back, but he heard Amos talking low and calm. Alex’s first thought was that something had happened to Muskrat, and Teresa was losing herself in grief, but that didn’t quite seem right either.
The girl’s voice came again, and it wasn’t Teresa. It was younger, higher. A serrated blade of a voice. You had no fucking right to get involved in it. You are shit to me. You are the same kind of vicious fuck that Cortázar was, and you can get back there and tell her you were wrong. Alex drifted down.
Cara floated at the airlock, her face a mask of rage and pain. Amos blocked her way into the Roci, his arms stretched out to either wall as if he were casually bracing himself there. Jim and Teresa were in the lift shaft, coming up from the crew decks, drawn by the same commotion. Teresa’s eyes were wide and anxious. Jim met Alex’s eyes and nodded.
“I get why you’re pissed, Sparkles,” Amos said. “This part’s rough.”
“Stop saying that!” the smaller girl shouted. “You don’t know shit about me!”