Ashford’s face flushed red.
“Holden hasn’t had any official status with the OPA since Fred Johnson fired him over his handling of Ganymede. If there’s a question, I can clarify with the other commanders that Holden doesn’t speak for us, but no one’s taking any action. The best thing is to wait and let things cool down.”
Pa looked down, then up again. It didn’t matter that she’d humiliated Bull and Sam in front of the command staff. All that counted was doing this next part right. Bull wanted to reach out, touch her arm, lend her the courage to stand up to Ashford.
It turned out she didn’t need it.
“Sir, if we don’t take the initiative, someone else will, and then it’s going to be too late for clarifications. Denials are fine if they’re believed, but Holden and his crew were known to be working with us previously and they’re claiming to represent us now. We’re four hours’ lag to Ceres. We can’t wait for answers. We have to make the division between us and Holden unequivocal. Mister Baca’s right. We need to engage the Rocinante.”
Ashford’s face was gray.
“I’m not going to start a shooting war,” he said.
“You listening to the same feeds as me, Captain?” Bull asked. “Everyone already thinks we did.”
“The Rocinante’s one ship. We can take her out,” Pa said. “If we fight Earth or Mars, we’ll lose.”
The truth lay on the floor between them. Ashford put a hand to his chin. His eyes were flickering back and forth like he was reading something that wasn’t there. Every second he didn’t respond, his cowardice showed through, and Bull could see that the man knew it. Resented it. Ashford was responsible, and didn’t want the responsibility. He was more afraid of looking bad than of losing.
“Mister Chen,” Ashford said. “Get a tightbeam to the Rocinante. Tell Captain Holden that it’s an urgent matter.”
“Yes, sir,” the communications officer said, and then a moment later, “The Rocinante isn’t accepting the connection, sir.”
“Captain?” the man at the sensor array said. “The Rocinante’s changing course.”
“Where’s she going?” Ashford demanded, his gaze still locked on Bull.
“Um. Toward us? Sir?”
Ashford closed his eyes.
“Mister Corley,” he growled. “Power up the port missile array. Mister Chen, I want tightbeam connections to the Earth and Mars command ships, and I want them now.”
Bull let himself sag back. The sense of urgency giving way to relief and a kind of melancholy. One more time, Colonel Johnson. We dodged the bullet one more time.
“Weapons board is green, sir,” the weapons officer said, her voice crisp and excited as a kid at an arcade.
“Lock target,” Ashford said. “Do I have those tightbeams yet?”
“We’re acknowledged and pending, sir,” Chen said. “They know we want to talk.”
“That’ll do,” Ashford said, and began pacing the bridge like an old-time captain on a wooden quarterdeck. His hands were clasped behind his back.
“We have lock,” the weapons officer said. Then, “The Rocinante’s weapons systems are powering up.”
Ashford sank into his couch. His expression was sour. He’d been hoping, Bull realized, that it might be true. That the OPA might be making a play to control the Ring.
The man was an idiot.
“Should we fire, sir?” the weapons officer asked, the strain in her voice like a dog on a leash. She wanted to. Badly. Bull didn’t think better of her for it. He glanced at Pa, but she was making a point of not looking at him.
“Yes,” Ashford said. “Go ahead. Fire.”
“One away, sir,” the weapons officer said.
“I’m getting an error code,” the operations officer said. “We’re getting feedback from the launcher.”
Bull’s mouth tasted like a penny. If Holden had put a bomb on the Behemoth too, their problems might only be starting.
“Is the missile out?” Pa snapped. “Tell me we don’t have an armed torpedo stuck in the tube.”
“Yes, sir,” the weapons officer said. “The missile is away. We have confirmation.”
“The Rocinante is taking evasive maneuvers.”
“Is she returning fire?” Ashford said.
“No, sir. Not yet, sir.”
“I’m getting errors in the electrical grid, sir. I think something’s shorted out. We might—”
The bridge went dark.
“—lose power. Sir.”
The monitors were black. The lights were off. The only sound was the hum of the air recyclers, running, Bull imagined, off the battery backups. Ashford’s voice came out of the darkness.
“Mister Pa, did we ever test-fire the missile systems?”
“I believe it’s on the schedule for next week, sir,” the XO said. Bull tuned his hand terminal screen to its brightest, lifting it like a torch. He glanced up at the emergency lighting set into the walls all around the room, sitting there as dark as everything else. Another system that hadn’t been tested yet.
A few seconds later, half of the bridge crew pulled flashlights out of recessed emergency lockers. The light level came up as beams played across the room. No one spoke. No one needed to. If the Rocinante fired back, they were a dead target, but the chances were that they wouldn’t lose the whole ship. If they’d waited until they were in pitched battle against Earth or Mars or both, the Behemoth would have died. Instead, they’d just shown the whole system how unprepared they were. It was the first time Bull was really glad to be just the security officer.
“XO?” Bull said.
“Yes.”
“Permission to release the chief engineer from house arrest?”
Pa’s face was monochrome gray in the dim light, and solemn as the grave. Still, he thought he saw a glint of bleak amusement in her eyes.
“Permission granted,” she said.
Chapter Sixteen: Holden
“Well,” Amos said. “That’s just fucking peculiar.”
The message began to repeat.
“This is Captain James Holden. What you’ve just seen is a demonstration of the danger you are in…”
The ops deck was in a stunned silence, then Naomi began working the ship ops panel with a quiet fury. In Holden’s peripheral vision, Monica motioned to her crew and Okju lifted a camera. The tacit decision to let the “no civilians on the ops deck” rule slide suddenly seemed like it might have been a mistake.
“It’s a fake,” Holden said. “I never recorded that. That’s not me.”
“Sort of sounds like you, though,” Amos said.
“Jim,” Naomi said, panic beginning to distort her voice. “That broadcast is coming from us. It’s coming from the Roci right now.”
Holden shook his head, denying the assertion outright. The only thing more ridiculous than the message itself was the idea that it was coming from his ship.
“That broadcast is coming from us,” Naomi said, slamming her hand against her screen. “And I can’t stop it!”
Everything seemed to recede from Holden, the noises in the room coming from far away. He recognized it as a panic reaction, but he gave in to it, accepted the short moment of peace it brought. Monica was shouting questions at him he could barely hear. Naomi was furiously pounding on her workstation, flipping through menu screens faster than he could follow. Over the ship’s comm, Alex was shouting demands for orders. From across the room, Amos was staring at him with a look of almost comical puzzlement. The two camera operators, equipment still clutched in one hand, were trying to belt themselves into crash couches with the other. Cohen floated in the middle of the room, lips pursed in a faint frown.
“This was the setup,” Holden said. “This is what it was for.”
Everything: the Martian lawsuit, the loss of his Titania job, the camera crew going to the Ring, all leading to this. The only thing he couldn’t imagine was why.
“What do you mean?” Monica asked, pushing close to get into th
e shot with him. “What setup?”
Amos put a hand on her shoulder and shook his head once.
“Naomi,” Holden said, “is the only system you’ve lost control of comms?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“Then kill it. If you can’t, help Amos isolate the entire comm system from the power grid. Cut it out of the damn ship if you have to.”
She nodded again and then turned to Amos.
“Alex,” Holden said. Monica started to say something to him, but he held up one finger to silence her, and she closed her mouth with a snap. “Get us burning toward the Behemoth. We’re not really claiming the Ring for the OPA, but as long as everyone thinks we are, they’re the team least likely to shoot us.”
“What can you tell me about what’s going on?” Monica said. “Are we in danger here? Is this dangerous?” Her usual smirk was gone. Open fear had replaced it.
“Strap in,” Holden said. “All of you. Do it now.”
Okju and Clip were already belted into crash couches, and Monica and Cohen quickly followed suit. The entire documentary crew had the good sense to stay quiet.
“Cap,” Alex said. His voice had taken on the almost sleepy tone he got when in a high-stress situation. “The Behemoth just lit us up with their targeting laser.”
Holden belted himself into the combat ops station and warmed it up. The Roci began counting ships within their threat radius. It turned out to be all of them. The ship asked him if any should be marked as hostiles.
“Your guess is as good as mine, honey.”
“Huh?” Naomi asked.
“Um,” Alex said. “Are you guys warming up the weapons?”
“No,” Holden said.
“Oh, I’m really sorry to hear that,” Alex said. “Weapons systems are coming online.”
“Are we shooting at anyone?”
“Not yet?”
Holden told the Roci to mark anything that hit them with a targeting system as hostile and was relieved when the system actually responded. The Behemoth shifted to red on the display. Then, after a moment’s thought, he told the ship to lump all the Martians and Earth ships into two groups. If they wound up fighting with one ship in a group, they’d be fighting them all.
There were too many. The Roci was caught between Fred Johnson’s two-kilometer-long OPA overcompensation and most of the remaining Martian navy. And beyond the Martians, the Ring.
“Okay,” he said, desperately trying to think of what to do now. They were as far from a hiding spot as it was possible to be in the solar system. It was a two-month trip just to the nearest rock bigger than their ship. He doubted he could outrun three fleets and all their torpedoes for two months. Or two minutes, really, if it came to that. “How’s that radio coming?”
“Down,” Amos said. “Easy enough to just pull the plug.”
“Do we have any way to tell everyone that the broadcast wasn’t us? I will happily signal full and complete surrender at this point,” Holden said.
“Not without turning it back on,” Amos replied.
“Everyone out there is probably trying to contact us,” Holden said. “The longer we don’t answer, the worse this will look. What about the weapons?”
“Warmed up, not shooting,” Amos said. “And not responding to us.”
“Can we pull power on those too?”
“We can,” Amos said, looking pained. “But damn, I sure don’t want to.”
“Fast mover!” Naomi yelled.
“Holy shit,” Alex said. “The OPA just fired a torpedo at us.”
On Holden’s panel, a yellow dot separated from the Behemoth and shifted to orange as it took off at high g.
“Go evasive!” Holden said. “Naomi, can you blind it?”
“No. No laser,” she replied, her voice surprisingly calm now. “And no radio. Countermeasures aren’t responding.”
“Fuck me,” Amos said. “Why did someone drag us all the way out here just to kill us? Coulda done that at Ceres, saved us the trip.”
“Alex, here’s your course.” Holden sent the pilot a vector that would take them right through the heart of the Martian fleet. As far as he knew, the Martians only wanted to arrest him. That sounded okay. “Has the Behemoth fired again?”
“No,” Naomi replied. “They’ve gone dark. No active sensors, no drives.”
“Kinda big and kinda close to be trying for sneaky,” Alex said without any real humor. “Here comes the juice.”
While the couches pumped them full of drugs to keep the high g from killing them, apropos of nothing Cohen said, “Fucking bitch.”
Before Holden could ask what he meant, Alex opened up the Roci’s throttle and the ship took off like a racehorse feeling the spurs. The sudden acceleration slammed Holden into his couch hard enough to daze him for a second. The ship buzzed him back to his senses when a missile proximity alarm warned him the Behemoth’s torpedo was getting closer. Helpless to do anything about it, Holden watched the orange dot that meant all their deaths creeping ever closer to the fleeing Rocinante. He looked up at Naomi, and she was looking back, as helpless as he was, all her best tricks taken away when the comm array was powered down.
The gravity dropped suddenly. “Got an idea,” Alex said over the comm, then the ship jerked through several sharp maneuvers, and the gravity went away again. The Rocinante had added a new alarm to her song. A collision warning was sounding. Holden realized he’d never actually heard a collision alarm outside of drills. When do spaceships run into each other?
He turned on the exterior cameras to a field of uniform black. For a second, he thought they were broken, but then Alex took control of them, panning out along the vast expanse of a Martian cruiser’s skin. The target lock buzzer cut out, the missile losing them.
“Put this Martian heavy between us and the missile,” Alex said, almost whispering it, as though the missile might hear if he spoke too loud.
“How close are we to them?” Holden asked, his voice matching Alex’s.
“’Bout ten meters,” Alex said, pride in his voice. “More or less.”
“This is really going to piss them off if the missile keeps coming,” Amos said. Then, almost meditatively, “I don’t even know what a point defense cannon does at a range like this.”
As if in answer, the cruiser hit them with a targeting laser. Then all of the other Martian ships did as well, adding a few dozen more alarms to the cacophony.
“Shit,” Alex said, and the gravity came back like a boulder rolled onto Holden’s chest. None of the Martian ships fired, but the original missile shot back into view on the scope. The Martians were guiding it in, now that the Behemoth seemed to be out of action. Holden marveled that he’d lived just long enough to finally see real Martian-OPA cooperation. It wasn’t as gratifying as he’d hoped.
Martian ships whipped past on both sides as the Rocinante accelerated through the main cluster of their fleet. Holden could imagine the targeting arrays and point defense cannons swiveling to track them as they went by. Once past them, there was nothing but the Ring and infinite star-speckled black all around it.
The plan came to mind with the sick, sinking feeling of something horrible he’d always known and tried to forget. The missile was coming, and even if they avoided it, there would be others. He couldn’t dodge forever. He couldn’t surrender. For all he knew, his weapons might start firing at any second. For a moment, the ops deck seemed to go still, time slowing the way it did when something catastrophic was happening. He was intensely aware of Naomi, pressed back in her couch. Monica and Okju, their eyes wide with fear and thrust. Clip, his hand pressed awkwardly into the gel by his side. Cohen’s slack jaw and pale face.
“Huh,” Holden gurgled to himself, the g forces crushing his throat when he vocalized. He signaled Alex to cut thrust, and the gravity dropped away again.
“The Ring,” Holden said. “Aim for the Ring. Go.”
The gravity came back with a slap, and Holden rotated his chair to his w
orkstation and brought up the navigational console. Watching the rapidly approaching orange dot out of the corner of his eye, he built a navigational package for Alex that would take them at high speed to the Ring, then spin them for a massive and almost suicidally dangerous deceleration burn just before they went in. He could slide them in under the velocity cap that had stopped the Y Que and all the fast-moving probes since. With any luck, the missile would be caught by whatever was on the other side, and the Roci, going slower, wouldn’t. The ship warned him that such high-g forces had a 3 percent chance to kill one of the crew members even during a short burn.
The missile would kill them all.
Holden sent the nav package to Alex, half expecting him to refuse. Hoping. Instead, the Roci accelerated for an endless twenty-seven minutes, followed by a nauseating zero-g spin that lasted less than four seconds, and a deceleration burn that lasted four and a half minutes and knocked every single person on the ship unconscious.
“Wake up,” Miller said in the darkness.
The ship was in free fall. Holden began coughing furiously as his lungs attempted to find their normal shape again after the punishing deceleration burn. Miller floated beside him. No one else seemed to be awake yet. Naomi wasn’t moving at all. Holden watched her until he could see the gentle rise and fall of her rib cage. She was alive.
“Doors and corners,” Miller said. His voice was soft and rough. “I tell you check your doors and corners, and you blow into the middle of the room with your dick hanging out. Lucky sonofabitch. Give you this, though, you’re consistent.”
Something about the way he spoke seemed saner than usual. More controlled. As if guessing his thoughts, the detective turned to look at him. Smiled.
“Are you here?” Holden asked. His mind was still fuzzy, his brain abused by thrust and oxygen loss. “Are you real?”
“You’re not thinking straight. Take your time. Catch up. There’s no hurry.”
Holden pulled up the exterior cameras and blew out one long exhale that almost ended in a sob. The OPA missile was floating outside the ship, just over a hundred meters from the nose of the Roci. The torpedo’s drive was still firing, its tail a furious white torch stretching nearly a kilometer behind it. But the missile hung in space, motionless.