Naomi frowned at him, her face shifting between angry and concerned. “Why?”
Holden pulled out his hand terminal and called up an orbital map of the solar system. “See this, all the way on this edge? This is the Ring.” He scrolled the display to the other edge of the solar system. “And this is Uranus. They are literally the two spots furthest from each other in the universe that have humans near them.”
“And?” Naomi said.
Holden took a deep breath. He could feel a surge of the anxiety he always tried to deny leaping up in him, and he pushed it back down.
“And I know I don’t talk about it much, but something really unpleasant and really big with a really high body count knows my name, and it’s connected to the Ring.”
“Miller,” Naomi said.
“The Ring opened, and he knew when it happened. It was the closest thing to making sense he’s done since…”
Since he rose from the dead. The words didn’t fit in his throat, and Naomi didn’t make him say them. Her nod was enough. She understood. In an act of legendary cowardice, he was running away to the other side of the solar system to avoid Miller and the Ring and everything that had to do with them. If they had to transport black market human organs or drugs or sexbots or whatever was in those crates, he’d do it. Because he was scared.
Her eyes were unreadable. After all this time, she could still keep her thoughts out of her expression when she wanted to.
“Okay,” Naomi said, and pushed the entry door open for him.
At the outer edge of Ceres where the spin gravity was greatest, Holden almost felt like he could have been on Luna or Mars. Loading gantries fed into the skin of the station like thick veins, waiting for the mechs to load in the cargo. Poorly patched scars marked the walls where accidents had marred them. The air smelled of coolant and the kind of cheap air filters that reminded Holden of urinal cakes. Amos lounged on a small electric power lift, his eyes closed.
“We get the job?”
“We did,” Naomi said.
Amos cracked an eye open as they came near. A single frown line drew itself on his broad forehead.
“We happy about that?” he asked.
“We’re fine with it,” Naomi said. “Let’s get the lift warmed up. Cargo’s due in ten minutes and we probably want to get it off station as quickly as we can without raising suspicion.”
There was a beauty in the efficiency that came from a crew that had flown together as long as they had. A fluidity and intimacy and grace that grew from long experience. Eight minutes after Holden and Naomi had come in, the Roci was ready to take on cargo. Ten minutes later, nothing happened. Then twenty. Then an hour. Holden paced the gantry nearest the entry hatch with an uncomfortable tingling crawling up the back of his neck.
“You sure we got this job?” Amos asked.
“These guys seemed really sketchy to me,” Naomi said over the comm from her station in ops. “I’d think we’ve been scammed, except we haven’t given anyone our account numbers.”
“We’re on the clock here, boss,” Alex said from the cockpit. “These loading docks charge by the minute.”
Holden bit back his irritation and said, “I’ll call again.”
He pulled out his terminal and connected to the export company’s office. Their messaging system responded, as it had the last three times he’d requested a connection. He waited for the beep that would let him leave another message. Before he could, his display lit up with an incoming connection request from the same office. He switched to it.
“Holden here.”
“This is a courtesy call, Captain Holden,” the voice on the other end said. The video feed was the Outer Fringe Exports logo on a gray background. “We’re withdrawing the contract, and you might want to consider leaving that dock very, very soon.”
“You can’t back out now,” Holden said, trying to keep his voice calm and professional against the rising panic he felt. “We’ve signed the deal. We’ve got your deposit. It’s non-refundable.”
“Keep it,” his caller said. “But we consider your failure to inform us of your current situation as a prior breach.”
Situation? Holden thought. They couldn’t know about Miller. He didn’t think they could. “I don’t—”
“The party that’s tracking you left our offices about five minutes ago, so you should probably get off Ceres in a hurry. Goodbye, Mr. Holden—”
“Wait!” Holden said. “Who was there? What’s going on?”
The call ended.
Amos was rubbing his pale, stubble-covered scalp with both hands. He sighed and said, “We got a problem, right?”
“Yep.”
“Be right back,” Amos replied, and climbed off the forklift.
“Alex? How long till we can clear this dock?” Holden asked. He loped across the bay to the entry hatch. There didn’t seem to be any way to lock it from his side. Why would there be? The bays were temporary rental space for loading and unloading cargo. No need for security.
“She’s warmed up,” Alex replied, not asking the obvious question. Holden was grateful for that. “Gimme ten to run the decouplin’ sequence, that should do it.”
“Start now,” Holden said, hurrying back toward the airlock. “Leave the ’lock open till the last minute. Amos and I will be out here making sure no one interferes.”
“Roger that, Cap,” Alex replied, and dropped the connection.
“Interferes?” Naomi said. “What’s going on… Okay, why is Amos going out there with a shotgun?”
“Those sketchy, scary gangster types we just signed on with?”
“Yes?”
“They just dropped us. And whatever scared them into doing it is coming here right now. I don’t think guns are an overreaction.”
Amos ran down the ramp, holding his auto-shotgun in his right hand and an assault rifle in his left. He tossed the rifle to Holden, then took up a cover position behind the forklift and aimed at the bay’s entry hatch. Like Alex, he didn’t ask why.
“Want me to come out?” Naomi asked.
“No, but prepare to defend the ship if they get past me and Amos,” Holden replied, then moved over to the forklift’s recharging station. It was the only other cover in the otherwise empty bay.
In a conversational tone, Amos said, “Any idea what we’re expecting here?”
“Nope,” Holden said. He clicked the rifle to autofire and felt a faint nausea rising in his throat.
“All right, then,” Amos said cheerfully.
“Eight minutes,” Naomi said from his hand terminal. Not a long time, but if they were trying to hold the bay under hostile fire, it would seem like an eternity.
The entry warning light at the cargo bay entrance flashed yellow three times, and the hatch slid open.
“Don’t shoot unless I do,” Holden said quietly. Amos grunted back at him.
A tall blond woman walked into the bay. She had an Earther’s build, a video star’s face, and couldn’t have been more than twenty. When she saw the two guns pointed at her, she raised her hands and wiggled her fingers. “Not armed,” she said. Her cheeks dimpled into a grin. Holden tried to imagine why a supermodel would be looking for him.
“Hi,” Amos said. He was grinning back at her.
“Who are you?” Holden said, keeping his gun trained on her.
“My name’s Adri. Are you James Holden?”
“I can be,” Amos said, “if you want.” She smiled. Amos smiled back, but his weapon was still in a carefully neutral position.
“What’ve we got down there?” Naomi asked, her voice tense in his ear. “Do we have a threat?”
“I don’t know yet,” Holden said.
“You are, though, right? You’re James Holden,” Adri said, walking toward him. The assault rifle in his hands didn’t seem to bother her at all. Up close, she smelled like strawberries and vanilla. “Captain James Holden, of the Rocinante?”
“Yes,” he said.
She held out a
slim, throwaway hand terminal. He took it automatically. The terminal displayed a picture of him, along with his name and his UN citizen and UN naval ID numbers.
“You’ve been served,” she said. “Sorry. It was nice meeting you, though.”
She turned back to the door and walked away.
“What the fuck?” Amos said to no one, dropping the muzzle of his gun to the floor and rubbing his scalp again.
“Jim?” Naomi said.
“Give me a minute.”
He paged through the summons, jumping past seven pages of legalese to get to the point: The Martians wanted their ship back. Official proceedings had been started against him in both Earth and Martian courts challenging the salvage claim to the Rocinante. Only they were calling it the Tachi. The ship was under an order of impound pending adjudication, effective immediately.
His short conversation with Outer Fringe Exports suddenly made a lot more sense.
“Cap?” Alex said through the connection. “I’m getting a red light on the docking clamp release. I’m puttin’ a query in. Once I get that cleared, we can pop the cork.”
“What’s going on out there?” Naomi asked. “Are we still leaving?”
Holden took a long, deep breath, sighed, and said something obscene.
The longest layover the Rocinante had taken since Holden and the others had gone independent had been five and a half weeks. The twelve days that the Roci spent in lockup seemed longer. Naomi and Alex were on the ship most of the time, putting inquiries through to lawyers and legal aid societies around the system. With every letter and conversation, the consensus grew. Mars had been smart to begin legal proceedings in Earth courts as well as their own. Even if Holden and the Roci slipped the leash at Ceres, all major ports would be denied them. They’d have to skulk from one gray-market Belter port to the next. Even if there was enough work, they might not be able to find supplies to keep them flying.
If they took the case before a magistrate, they might or might not lose the ship, but it would be expensive to find out. Accounts that Holden had thought of as comfortably full suddenly looked an order of magnitude too small. Staying on Ceres Station made him antsy; being on the Roci left him sad.
There had been any number of times in his travels on the Roci that he’d imagined—even expected—it all to come to a tragic end. But those scenarios had involved firefights or alien monstrosities or desperate dives into some planetary atmosphere. He’d imagined with a sick thrill of dread what it would be like if Alex died, or Amos. Or Naomi. He’d wondered whether the three of them would go on without him. He hadn’t considered that the end might find all of them perfectly fine. That the Rocinante might be the one to go.
Hope, when it came, was a documentary streamcast team from UN Public Broadcasting. Monica Stuart, the team lead, was an auburn-haired freckled woman with a professionally sculpted beauty that made her seem vaguely familiar when he saw her on the screen of the pilot’s deck. She hadn’t come in person.
“How many people are we talking about?” Holden asked.
“Four,” she said. “Two camera jockeys, my sound guy, and me.”
Holden ran a hand across eight days’ worth of patchy beard. The sense of inevitability sat in his gut like a stone.
“To the Ring,” he said.
“To the Ring,” she agreed. “We need to make it a hard burn to get there before the Martians, the Earth flotilla, and the Behemoth. And we’d like some measure of safety once we’re out there, which the Rocinante would be able to give us.”
Naomi cleared her throat, and the documentarian shifted her attention to her.
“You’re sure you can get the hold taken off the Roci?” Naomi asked.
“I am protected by the Freedom of Journalism Act. I have the right to the reasonable use of hired materials and personnel in the pursuit of a story. Otherwise, anyone could stop any story they didn’t like by malicious use of injunctions like the one on the Roci. I have a backdated contract that says I hired you a month ago, before I arrived at Ceres. I have a team of lawyers ten benches deep who can drown anyone that objects in enough paperwork to last a lifetime.”
“So we’ve been working for you all along,” Holden said.
“Only if you want to get that docking lock rescinded. But it’s more than just a ride I’m looking for. That’s what makes it reasonable that I can’t just hire a different ship.”
“I knew there was a but,” Holden said.
“I want to interview the crew too. While there are a half dozen ships I could get for the trip out, yours is the one that comes with the survivors of Eros.”
Naomi looked across at him. Her eyes were carefully neutral. Was it better to be here, trapped on Ceres while the Roci was pulled away from him by centimeters, or flying straight into the abyss with his crew? And the Ring.
“I have to think about it,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”
“I respect that,” Monica said. “But please don’t take long. If we’re not going with you, we’ve still got to go with someone.”
He dropped the connection. In the silence, the deck seemed larger than it was.
“This isn’t coincidence,” Holden said. “We just happen to get locked down by Mars, and the only thing that can get us out of the docking clamps just happens to be heading for the Ring? No way. We’re being manipulated. Someone’s planning this. It’s him.”
“Jim—”
“It’s him. It’s Miller.”
“It’s not Miller. He can barely string together a coherent sentence,” Naomi said. “How is he going to engineer something like this?”
Holden leaned forward and the seat under him shifted. His head felt like it was stuffed with wool.
“If we leave, they can still take her away from us,” he said. “Once this story is done, we won’t be in any better position than we are right now.”
“Except that we wouldn’t be locked on Ceres,” Naomi said. “And it’s a long way out there. A long way back. A lot could change.”
“That wasn’t as comforting as you meant it to be.”
Naomi’s smile was thin but not bitter.
“Fair point,” she said.
The Rocinante hummed around them, the systems running through their automatic maintenance checks, the air cycling gently through the ducts. The ship breathing and dreaming. Their home, at rest. Holden reached out a hand, lacing his fingers with Naomi’s.
“We still have some money. We can take out a loan,” she said. “We could buy a different ship. Not a good one, but… It wouldn’t have to be the end of it all.”
“It would be, though.”
“Probably.”
“No choice, then,” Holden said. “Let’s go to Nineveh.”
Monica and her team arrived in the early hours of the morning, loading a few small crates of equipment that they carried themselves. In person, Monica was thinner than she seemed on screen. Her camera crew were a sturdy Earth woman named Okju and a brown-skinned Martian man who went by Clip. The cameras they carried looked like shoulder-mounted weapons, alloy casings that could telescope out to almost two meters or retract to fit around the tightest corner in the ship.
The soundman was blind. He had a dusting of short white hair and opaque black glasses. His teeth were yellowed like old ivory, and his smile was gentle and humane. According to the paperwork, his name was Elio Casti, but for some reason the documentary team all called him Cohen.
They assembled in the galley, Holden’s four people and Monica’s. He could see each group quietly considering the other. They’d be living in one another’s laps for months. Strangers trapped in a metal-and-ceramic box in the vast ocean of the vacuum. Holden cleared his throat.
“Welcome aboard,” he said.
Chapter Seven: Melba
If the Earth-Mars alliance hadn’t collapsed, if there hadn’t been a war—or two wars depending on how the line between battles was marked—civilian ships like the Cerisier would have had no place in the great convoy.
The ships lost at Ganymede and in the Belt, the skirmishes to control those asteroids best placed to push down a gravity well. Hundreds of ships had been lost, from massive engines of war like the Donnager, the Agatha King, and the Hyperion to countless small three- and four-person support ships.
Nor, Melba knew, were those the only scars. Phobos with its listening station had become a thin, nearly invisible ring around Mars. Eros was gone. Phoebe had been subjected to a sustained nuclear hell and pushed into Saturn. The farms at Ganymede had collapsed. Venus had been used and abandoned by the alien protomolecule. Protogen and the Mao-Kwikowski empire, once one of the great shipping and transport companies in the system, had been gutted, stolen, and sold.
The Cerisier began her life as an exploration vessel. Now she was a flying toolshed. The bays of scientific equipment were machine shops now. What had once been sealed labs were stacked from deck to deck with the mundane necessities of environmental control networks—scrubbers, ducting, sealants, and alarm arrays. She lumbered through the uncaring vacuum on the fusion plume of her Epstein drive. The crew of a hundred and six souls was made of a small elite of ship command—no more than a dozen, all told—and a vast body of technicians, machinists, and industrial chemists.
Once, Melba thought, this ship had been on the bleeding edge of human exploration. Once it had burned through the skies of Jovian moons, seeing things humanity had never seen before. Now it was the handservant of the government, discovering nothing more exotic than what had been flushed into the water reclamation tanks. The degradation gave Melba a sense of kinship with the ship’s narrow halls and gray plastic ladders. Once, Clarissa Melpomene Mao had been the light of her school. Popular and beautiful, and suffused with the power and influence of her father’s name. Now her father was a numbered prisoner in a nameless prison, allowed only a few minutes of external connection every day, and those to his lawyer, not his wife or children.
And she was Melba Koh, sleeping on a gel couch that smelled of someone else’s body in a cabin smaller than a closet. She commanded a team of four electrochemical technicians: Stanni, Ren, Bob, and Soledad. Stanni and Bob were decades older than her. Soledad, three years younger, had been on two sixteen-month tours. Ren, her official second, was a Belter and, like all Belters, passionate about environmental control systems the way normal people were with sex or religion. She didn’t ask how he’d ended up on an Earth ship, and he didn’t volunteer the information.