Whistling past the graveyard. Earth was celebrating a huge milestone in its history, and that was maybe the third most important thing on her agenda. But how do you tell a planet that history has passed it by? Better to nod and smile, enjoy the moment and the champagne. Once this was over, she’d have to get back to work.
They moved through the expected questions: would the renegotiation of the tariff agreements be overseen by Drummer or former president Sanjrani, would the Transport Union remain neutral in the contested elections on Nova Catalunya, would the Ganymede status talks be held on Luna or Medina. There was even one question about the dead systems—Charon, Adro, and Naraka—where ring gates led to things much stranger than goldilocks-zone planetary systems. Secretary-General Li fended that one off, which was just as well. Dead systems gave Drummer the creeps.
After the Q-and-A was done, Drummer did a dozen photo ops with the secretary-general, high-level administrators from the EMC, and celebrities from the planets—a dark-skinned woman in a bright-blue sari, a pale man in a formal suit, a pair of comically identical men in matching gold dinner jackets.
There was a part of her that enjoyed this too. She suspected that the pleasure she took in Earthers clamoring to get mementos of themselves with the head of the Belters spoke poorly of her in some vague spiritual way. She’d grown up in a universe where people like her were disposable, and she’d lived long enough for fortune’s wheel to lift her up higher than Earth’s sky. Everyone wanted the Belt for a friend, now that the term meant more than a cloud of half-mined-out chunks of debris trapped between Mars and Jupiter. For children born today, the Belt was the thing that tied all humanity together. Semantic drift and political change. If the worst that came out of it was a little schadenfreude on her part, she could live with that.
Vaughn waited in a small antechamber. His face was a network of crags that would have done credit to a mountain range, but he managed to make it work for him. His formal jacket was cut to echo old-style vac suits. The marks of their oppression remade as high fashion. Time healed all wounds, but it didn’t erase the scars so much as decorate them.
“You have an hour before the reception, ma’am,” he said as Drummer sat on the couch and rubbed her feet.
“Understood.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“Encrypted tightbeam and privacy.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said without missing a beat.
When the door slid closed behind him, she turned on the system camera and composed herself. The plan that had been forming in the back of her head all through the ceremonies was in place. All the bits and pieces she’d need to make it happen. And sooner was better than later. Punishment worked best when there wasn’t a gap between misbehavior and consequences, or at least that was what they told her. But there was also a real advantage in giving the offender time to savor their regret.
Best of all was when she could do both.
She hit Record.
“Captain Holden,” she said. “I’m linking you through to the data on an unauthorized transit from Freehold to Auberon that occurred today. I’m also giving you access to the security review of the Freehold system. It’s not much. One habitable planet a little smaller than Mars, another one that’s exploitable as long as you don’t mind too much nitrogen and cyanide in your air. The governor of Freehold is named ….”
She checked the records and coughed with contempt and laughter.
“Payne Houston. I’m assuming that’s his own choice and not what his mommy called him. Either way, I’m sending you under an executive mandate so that you can get going right now. I’ll get Emily Santos-Baca and the security committee to genuflect over this well before you get there, so we’ll be fine with that.
“Your official mission is to carry the message that Freehold’s repeated violations of Transportation Union guidelines have triggered punitive action, and that I’m banning all traffic in and out of Freehold for three years. When he asks whether it’s Earth years, the answer is yes. He’s going to make a point of that, because that’s the kind of idiot he is.
“Your unofficial mission is not to hurry. I want Freehold and all the systems like it to see a gunship moseying toward them for weeks without knowing what it’s going to do when it gets there. I’ll have my staff draw up the usual work agreement. If you can’t take the job, let me know as soon as possible. Otherwise, I’ll have you on the roster to fuel up and make transit in the next fifteen hours.”
She reviewed the message, then sent it out with a copy to Ahmed McCahill, the chair of the security committee. Then it was an executive request to push the Rocinante to the head of the resupply and transit authorization queues. And then Vaughn was knocking discreetly at her door.
He took her grunt as permission to come in, which it was.
“Secretary-General Li is asking whether you’re indisposed, ma’am,” he said. “He’s getting concerned.”
She checked the time. Her hour’s respite had ended twenty minutes ago.
“Tell him I’m on my way,” she said. “And do I have a change of clothes?”
“In the closet, ma’am,” Vaughn said as he slipped out the door again, quiet as a phantom. Drummer changed quickly, shedding the formal jacket and slacks for a bamboo-silk blouse and self-tailoring skirt with a neural net woven into it that was about as intelligent as an insect just to keep the drape right. She considered herself in the mirror with a certain satisfaction. She only wished Saba were here to accompany her. But he’d probably make too many consort-of-the-queen jokes. She shut down the mirror, its screen defaulting back to the image of Earth.
The planet was over half in darkness now, a crescent of white and blue. Belters had tried to kill the Earth, but here it was still spinning. They’d tried to burn the inner planets’ ships, and here was the EMC navy, scraped back together and flying.
And on the other hand, Earth had tried to choke the Belters under its boot for generations, and here was Drummer. Time had made them allies in the great expansion of civilization out to the stars.
At least until something else changed.
Chapter Two: Bobbie
The transit from the slow zone was behind them and Freehold was still weeks away, but an atmospheric landing in a ship as old as the Rocinante wasn’t the trivial thing it had once been. Age showed up in unexpected ways. Things that had always worked before failed. It was something you prepared for as much as you could.
Bobbie squinted at a wall panel on the engineering deck and watched as a long list of data scrolled by, ending with the ship’s reassurance that it could handle at least one more descent without burning up.
“All greens on the atmospheric braking thrusters,” Bobbie said.
“Hmmm?” Alex’s sleepy drawl replied from the panel.
“You awake up there? This is your damn landing prep list. I’m down here doing the work. Could at least seem interested.”
“Yeah, not sleepin’,” the pilot replied, “just got my own list of shit to do.” She could hear his smile.
Bobbie closed the diagnostic screen. Verifying the status on the thrusters was the last item on her work order. And short of putting on a suit and climbing outside to physically look into the nozzles, there wasn’t much more she could do.
“I’m going to do some housekeeping, then head up,” she said.
“Mmhm.”
Bobbie put her tools away and used a mild solvent to wipe up some lubricant she’d spilled. It smelled sweet and pungent, like something she’d have cooked with back when she’d been living alone on Mars. Anxiety pushed her toward preparing more for the mission even after she was prepared. In the old days, this was when she’d have cleaned and serviced her power armor again and again and again until it became a kind of meditation. Now, she went through the ship the same way.
She’d lived on the Rocinante for more years now than anyplace else. Longer than her childhood home. Longer than her tour in the Marines.
The engineering deck was A
mos country, and the mechanic kept a tidy shop. Every tool was in its place, every surface spotless. Other than the oil and solvent, the only other smell in the compartment was the ozone scent that hinted at powerful electricity coursing nearby. The floor vibrated in time with the fusion reactor on the deck below, the ship’s beating heart.
On one bulkhead, Amos painted a sign that read:
SHE TAKES CARE OF YOU
YOU TAKE CARE OF HER
Bobbie patted the words as she walked by and climbed onto the ladder lift that ran up the center of the ship. The Roci was at a very gentle 0.2 g braking burn, and there had been a time when riding the lift instead of climbing the ladder would have felt like admitting defeat, even if the ship was burning ten times that hard. But for the last couple years Bobbie’s joints had been giving her trouble, and proving to herself that she could make the climb had stopped mattering as much.
It seemed to her that the real sign you were getting old was when you stopped needing to prove you weren’t getting old.
The hatches separating each deck slid open at the lift’s approach, and then quietly closed after she’d passed. The Roci might be a decade or two past her sell-by date, but Clarissa tolerated no sticking or squeaking on her ship. At least once a week, Claire made a complete pass through every environmental system and pressure hatch. When Bobbie had mentioned it to Holden, he’d said, Because she broke the ship once, and she’s still trying to fix it.
The lift hummed to a stop on the ops deck, and Bobbie stepped off. The hatch up to the cockpit was open. Alex’s brown and almost entirely bald head poked up over the back of the pilot’s crash couch. The crew spent most of their working time in Operations, and the air felt subtly different. Long hours spent in the crash couches meant the smell of sweat never entirely went away, no matter how hard the air recyclers worked. And, like any room James Holden spent a lot of time in, the comfortable scent of old coffee lingered.
Bobbie ran a finger along the bulkhead, feeling the anti-spalling fabric crackle under the pressure. The dark-gray color had faded, and it was getting harder to tell where the fabric didn’t match because it had been damaged and patched and where it was just aging unevenly. It would need to be replaced soon. She could live with the color, but the crunching meant that it was losing its elasticity. Getting too brittle to do its job.
Both of Bobbie’s shoulders ached, and it was getting trickier to tell the difference between the one that had been explosively dislocated during hand-to-hand training years before and the one that just hurt from decades of not being gentle with her body. She’d picked up a lot of battle scars during her life, and they were getting harder and harder to differentiate from the normal damage of wearing out. Like the discolored patches on the Roci’s bulkheads, everything was just fading to match.
She climbed the short ladder up through the hatch into the cockpit, trying to enjoy the ache in her shoulders the way she’d once enjoyed the burn after an intense workout. As an old drill sergeant had told her, pain is the warrior’s friend. Pain reminds you that you aren’t dead yet.
“Yo,” Alex said as she dropped into the gunner’s chair behind him. “How’s our girl look?”
“Old, but she can still get around.”
“I meant the ship.”
Bobbie laughed and called up the tactical display. Off in the distance, the planet Freehold. The mission. “My brother always complained I spent too much time looking for metaphors.”
“An aging Martian warrior living inside an aging Martian warrior,” Alex said, the smile audible in his voice. “Don’t have to look too hard there.”
“Not too agéd to kick your ass.” Bobbie zoomed in on Freehold on their tactical screen. A mottled marble of brown continents and green oceans, with the occasional white swirl of cloud. “How long?”
“We’ll be there in a week.”
“Talk to Jizz lately? How’s my future baby daddy doing?”
“Giselle is fine, and she says Kit is doing great. Picked planetary engineering as his major at Mariner Tech.”
“It is the hot job market right now,” Bobbie agreed.
She’d been Alex’s best man when he’d married Giselle, and she’d waited at the hospital on Ceres when Kit had been born thirteen months later. And now Kit was going into upper university, and Alex had been divorced for over a decade. He was her best friend, but he was terrible husband material. After his second failure at it Bobbie pointed out that if he just wanted something to hurt, she could break his arm for him and save everyone time.
But for all the unnecessary drama, Alex and Giselle’s short-lived trainwreck of a marriage had produced Kit, and that made the universe a better place. The boy had all of Alex’s laconic charm and all of his mother’s regal good looks. Every time he called her Aunt Bobbie, she wanted to hug him until his ribs cracked.
“When you reply, make sure to tell Jizz I said ‘fuck off,’” Bobbie said. The failure of the marriage wasn’t entirely Giselle’s fault, but Bobbie had picked Alex in the divorce, so acting like she blamed his ex for everything was part of the best-friend pact. Alex pushed against it, but she knew he also appreciated her saying all the things that he couldn’t.
“I’ll send Giselle your love,” Alex said.
“And tell Kit that Aunt Bobbie says hi, and I want new pictures. Everything I have of him is a year old. I wanna see how my little man is filling out.”
“You know it’s creepy to flirt with a kid you’ve known his entire life, right?”
“My love is a pure love,” Bobbie replied, then switched tactical to the mission parameters. Freehold had a population of just under three hundred, all Earth-born. They called themselves an Assembly of Sovereign Citizens, whatever that meant. But the colony-ship manifest had included a lot of firearms and ammunition. And with the weeks the Roci had spent dropping down toward Freehold’s sun, the locals had had plenty of time to work themselves up.
Reading along with her, Alex said, “Captain’ll need some backup down there.”
“Yeah. Talking to Amos about that is the next thing on my list.”
“Taking Betsy?”
“This is probably not a Betsy-level situation, sailor,” Bobbie said. Betsy was Alex’s nickname for the suit of Martian Marine Recon armor she kept in the ship’s cargo bay. She hadn’t put the thing on in years, but she kept it operational and charged anyway. It made her feel warm and comfortable knowing it was there. Just in case.
“Copy that,” Alex said.
“Where is Amos, anyway?”
It was subtle, the difference between Alex being at ease and Alex trying to sound like he was at ease. “Ship thinks he’s in the sick bay,” Alex said.
Clarissa, Bobbie thought. Well, shit.
The Rocinante’s medical bay smelled like antiseptic and vomit.
The antiseptic came from the little floor scrubber that was humming around the room, leaving a trail of shiny decking in its wake. The acid-and-bile smell of vomit came from Clarissa Mao.
“Bobbie,” she with a smile. She was on one of the med bay’s couches, an autodoc cuff around her upper arm that buzzed and hummed and occasionally clicked. Claire’s face would tighten at each click. Injections, maybe, or something worse.
“Hey, Babs,” Amos said. The hulking mechanic sat at Claire’s bedside reading something on his hand terminal. He didn’t look up when Bobbie entered the room, but raised a hand in greeting.
“How’re you feeling today?” Bobbie asked, grimacing internally as she said it.
“I’ll be out of bed in a few minutes,” Claire said. “Did I miss something on the pre-landing check?”
“No, no,” Bobbie replied, shaking her head. She feared that Claire would tear the tubes out of her arm and leap out of bed if she said yes. “Nothing like that. I just need to borrow the lunk for a minute.”
“Yeah?” Amos said, looking at her for the first time. “That okay with you, Peaches?”
“Whatever you need,” she said, gesturing at the med-
bay in general. “You will always find me at home.”
“All right,” Amos stood up, and Bobbie guided him out into the corridor.
Surrounded by the fading gray walls, and with the sick-bay hatch closed behind him, Amos seemed to deflate a little. He leaned his back against the wall and sighed. “That’s tough to watch, you know?”
“How is she?”
“Good days and bad days, same as anyone,” Amos said. “Those aftermarket glands she had put in keep leaking their rat shit into her blood, and we keep filtering it back out. But taking ’em back out would fuck her up worse, so …”
Amos shrugged again. He looked tired. Bobbie had never really been able to figure out what the relationship between the Roci’s mechanic and his tiny counterpart was. They weren’t sleeping together, and it didn’t seem like they ever had. Most of the time they didn’t even talk. But when Claire’s health had started its decline, Amos was usually there by her side in the sick bay. It made Bobbie wonder if he’d do that for her if she got sick. If anyone would.
The big mechanic was looking a little thinner himself these days. Where most big men tended toward pudge in their later years, Amos had gone the other direction. What fat he’d had was gone, and now his arms and neck looked ropey with old muscle just under the skin. Tougher than shoe leather.
“So,” he said, “what’s up?”
“Did you read my briefing on Freehold?”
“Skimmed it.”
“Three hundred people who hate centralized authority and love guns. Holden’s going to insist on meeting them on their turf, because that’s the kind of shit he does. He’ll need backup.”
“Yeah,” Amos agreed. “I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“I was thinking maybe I should take this one,” Bobbie said, nodding her head toward the sick-bay hatch. Not saying, She doesn’t look good. Amos pursed his lips, considering.
“Yeah, okay,” Amos said. “Atmospheric landing will probably shake the damn ship apart. I’ll have plenty to do here.”