Nemesis Games / Игры Немезиды (by James S. A. Corey, 2015) - аудиокнига на английском

Nemesis Games Prologue: Filip The twin shipyards of Callisto stood side by side on the hemisphere of the moon that faced permanently away from Jupiter. The sun was only the brightest star in the endless night, the wide smear of the Milky Way brighter by far. All along the ridges of the craters, harsh white work lights glared down onto buildings, loaders, scaffolds. The ribs of half-built ships arced up over the regolith of stone dust and ice. Two shipyards, one civilian and one military, one Earth-based and one owned by Mars. Both protected by the same anti-meteor rail-gun defenses, both dedicated to building and repairing the vessels that would take humanity out to the new worlds beyond the rings when and if the fight on Ilus got worked out. Both in a lot more trouble than they guessed. Filip slid forward, the rest of his team close behind him. The suit LEDs had been gouged out, the ceramic plating scoured until nothing was smooth enough to cast a reflection. Even the heads-up display was dimmed almost to the point of invisibility. The voices in Filip’s ears – ship traffic, security feeds, civilian chatter – were picked up on passive. He listened while transmitting nothing in return. The targeting laser strapped to his back was powered down. He and his team were shadows among shadows. The faint countdown timer in the left of his visual field passed the fifteen-minute mark. Filip patted air barely thicker than vacuum with an open palm, the Belters’ physical idiom to move forward slowly. Around him, his team followed. High in the void above them, too distant to see, the Martian naval vessels guarding the shipyard spoke in clipped, professional tones. As thinly as their fleet had been stretched, they had only two ships in orbit. Probably only two. It was possible that there were others hidden in the black, hugging their own waste heat and shielded from radar. Possible but unlikely. And life, as Filip’s father said, was risky work. Fourteen minutes, thirty seconds. Two secondary timers appeared beside it, one with a forty-five second counter, the other with two minutes. “Transport ship Frank Aiken , you are cleared to approach.” “Message received, Carson Lei ,” Cyn’s familiar growl came. Filip could hear the old Belter’s smile in the words. “Coyos sabe best ai sus bebe come we low?” Somewhere up there, the Frank Aiken was painting the Martian ships with innocuous ranging lasers set at the same frequency as the one strapped to Filip’s own back. When the Martian comm officer spoke, there was nothing in his voice that showed fear. “Don’t copy you, Frank Aiken . Please repeat.” “Sorry, sorry.” Cyn laughed. “You fine upstanding gentlefolk know any good bars a poor Belter crew could get a drink once we get to the surface?” “Can’t help you, Frank Aiken ,” the Martian said. “Maintain course.” “Sabez sa. Solid as a stone, straight as a bullet, us.” Filip’s crew topped the crater ridge, looking down at the no-man’s-land of the Martian military yard; it was just as he had expected it to be. He picked out the warehouses and supply depots. He pulled off the targeting laser, set the base into the dirty ice, and powered it up. The others, spread along the line wide enough that none of the guards would be out of all their sight lines, did the same. The lasers were old, the tracking platforms strapped to them salvaged from a dozen different sources. Before the tiny red LED on its base turned green, the first of his two secondary timers reached zero. The security alert tritone sounded on the civilian channel, followed by a woman’s anxious voice. “We’ve got a runaway loading mech on the field. It’s… ah, shit. It’s heading for the meteor array.” The panic and alarm cascaded in his ears as Filip moved his team along the rim of the crater. Thin puffs of dust rose around them and didn’t fall, widening instead like a mist. The loader mech, failing to respond to overrides, trundled across the no-man’s-land and into the wide eyes of the meteor defense cannons, blinding them, if only for a few minutes. Four Martian marines emerged from their bunker, as protocol demanded. Their powered armor let them slide over the surface like they were skating on ice. Any one of them could kill his whole team and suffer nothing worse than a moment’s pity. Filip hated them all and each one individually on principle. The repair crews were already scrambling for the damaged array. The whole thing would be back in order within the hour. Twelve minutes, forty-five seconds. Filip paused, looking back at his team. Ten volunteer soldiers, the best the Belt had to offer. Apart from himself, none of them knew why the mission to raid the Martian supply depot was important or what it was leading to. All of them ready to die if he told them to, because of who he was. Because of who his father was. Filip felt it in his belly and in his throat. Not fear, pride. It was pride. Twelve minutes, thirty-five seconds. Thirty-four. Thirty-three. The lasers they’d placed came to life, painting the four marines, the bunker with the backup team, the perimeter fences, the workshops, and the barracks. The Martians turned, their armor so sensitive that even the gentle caress of invisible beams of light was noticed. As they moved they lifted their weapons. Filip saw one recognize the team, gun shifting away from the lasers and toward them. Toward him. He caught his breath. Eighteen days before, a ship – Filip didn’t even know which one – out in the Jovian system somewhere had made a hard burn, topping out at ten, maybe fifteen gs. At the nanosecond specified by the computers, the ship had released a few dozen lengths of tungsten with four disposable, short-burn rockets at the center of mass and cheap single-frequency sensors tied to them. They were barely complicated enough to be called machines. Six-year-old children built things more sophisticated every day, but accelerated as they were to one hundred and fifty kilometers per second, they didn’t need to be complex. Just shown where to go. In the time it took for the signal to propagate from Filip’s eye, down his optic nerve, and into his visual neocortex, it was over. He was aware of the thump, of the ejecta plumes where the marines had been, of the two brief new stars that had been warships overhead, only after the enemy was dead. He changed his suit radio to active. “Ichiban,” he said, proud that his voice was so calm. Together, they bounced down the crater’s side, shuffling their feet. The Martian shipyards were like something from a dream, plumes of flame rising from the shattered workshops as the stored volatile gasses vented as fire. Soft snow billowed from the barracks as the released atmosphere sprayed out and froze. The marines were gone, their bodies ripped apart and scattered. A cloud of dust and ice filled the crater, only the guidance of his HUD showing him where the targets were. Ten minutes, thirteen seconds. Filip’s team divided. Three went to the middle of the open space, finding a place large enough to begin unfolding the thin black carbon structure of the evacuation scaffold. Two others unstrapped recoilless machine pistols, ready to shoot anyone who emerged from the rubble. Two more ran toward the armory, and three came with him, to the supply sheds. The building loomed up from the dust, stark and forbidding. The access doors were shut. A loading mech lay toppled on its side, the driver dead or dying. His tech specialist went to the door controls, prying the housing open with a powered cutting bar. Nine minutes, seven seconds. “Josie,” Filip said. “Trabajan, sa sa?” Josie replied curtly. “I know you’re working,” Filip said. “If you can’t open it —” The great access doors shifted, shuddered, and rose. Josie turned back and flicked the suit’s helmet lights on so that Filip could see the expression on his craggy face. They went into the warehouse. Towers of curved ceramic and steel made great piles, denser than mountains. Hair-thin wire hundreds of kilometers long stood on plastic spools taller than Filip. Massive printers waited, ready to fashion the plates that would fit together over the emptiness, define a volume and make it a bubble of air and water and complex organics that passed for a human environment. Emergency lights flickered, giving the wide space the eerie glow of disaster. He moved forward. He didn’t remember drawing his gun, but it was in his hand. Miral, not Josie, was strapping into a loader. Seven minutes. The red-and-white strobe of the first emergency vehicles flickered in the chaos of the shipyard, the light coming from everywhere and nowhere. Filip shuffled down the rows of welding rigs and metal printers. Tubs of steel and ceramic dust finer than talcum. Spiral-core mounts. Layers of Kevlar and foam strike armor piled up like the biggest bed in the solar system. In one open corner of the space, an entire Epstein drive lay disassembled like the universe’s most complex jigsaw puzzle. Filip ignored it all. The air wasn’t thick enough to carry the sound of gunfire. His HUD brought up a fast-mover alert in the same moment that a bright patch appeared on the steel beam to his right. Filip dropped, his body seeping down in the microgravity more slowly than it would have under burn. The Martian jumped down the aisle. Not the powered armor of the guards, but a technical exoskeleton. Filip aimed for the center of mass and emptied half his clip. The rounds flared as they left the muzzle, burning their own fuel, tracing lines of fire and red-gray exhaust through the thin Callistan air. Four hit the Martian, and gouts of blood drifted down in a frozen red snowfall. The exoskeleton flipped to emergency alert status, its LEDs turning a grim amber. On some frequency, it was reporting to the yard’s emergency services that something terrible had happened. Its mindless devotion to duty was almost funny, in context. Miral’s voice was soft in his ear. “Hoy, Filipito. Sa bo?te sa palla?” It took Filip a moment to find the man. He was in his loader, his blackened vacuum suit becoming one with the huge mech as if they’d been made for each other. Only the dim split circle symbol of the Outer Planets Alliance still just visible beneath the grime marked Miral as anything but an ill-kept Martian mech driver. The canisters he’d been talking about were still lashed to their pallets. A thousand liters each, four of them. On the curving face: High Density Resonance Coating. The energy-absorbent coating helped Martian military ships avoid detection. Stealth tech. He’d found it. A fear he hadn’t known he was carrying fell away. “Yes,” Filip said. “That’s it.” Four minutes, thirty-seven seconds. The loading mech’s whirring was distant, the sound carried by the vibrations in the structure’s flooring more than the thin atmosphere. Filip and Josie moved toward the doors. The flashing lights were brighter, and had taken on a kind of directionality. Filip’s suit radio filtered through frequencies crowded with screaming voices and security alerts. The Martian military was ordering back the relief vehicles from the civilian shipyard, concerned that the first responders might be terrorists and enemies in disguise. Which was fair. Under other circumstances, they might have been. Filip’s HUD had the outlines of the buildings, the half-built evac scaffold, its best guess on the locations of the vehicles given IR and light trace data too subtle for Filip’s eyes. He felt like he was walking through a schematic drawing, everything defined by edges, all surfaces merely implied. As he shuffled onto the regolith, a deep shudder passed through the ground. A detonation, maybe. Or a building finally completing its long, slow collapse. Miral’s loading mech appeared in the open door, backlit by the warehouse lights. The canisters in its claws were anonymous and black. Filip moved toward the scaffold, switching to their encrypted channel as he shuffled. “Status?” “Small trouble,” Aaman said. He was with the scaffold. Filip’s mouth flooded with the metal taste of fear. “No such thing here, coyo,” he said, fighting to sound calm. “What is it?” “Some of the ejecta crap’s fouling the scaffold. I’ve got grit in the joints.” Three minutes, forty seconds. Thirty-nine. “I’m coming,” Filip said. Andrew’s voice cut in. “We’re taking fire in the armory, bosslet.” Filip ignored the diminutive. “How much?” “Plenty some,” Andrew said. “Chuchu’s down, and I’m pretty pinned. Might need a hand.” “Hang tight,” Filip said, his mind racing. His two guards stood by the evac scaffold, ready to shoot anybody that wasn’t them. The three builders were struggling with a brace. Filip jumped over to them, catching himself on the black frame. On the line, Andrew grunted. Once he saw the stuck connector, black grit fouling it, the problem was clear. In atmosphere, it would have just taken a hard breath to clean it. Not an option here. Aaman was digging frantically with a blade, flipping out tiny bit after tiny bit, trying to empty the thin, complex channels where the metal fit together. Three minutes. Aaman hauled the brace into place and tried to force the connection. It was close, very close, but when he tugged back, it came apart. Filip saw the man cursing, flecks of spit dotting the inside of his faceplate. If they’d only brought a can of air, Filip thought… Which, of course, they had. He plucked the knife from Aaman’s hand and shoved the blade into his suit’s wrist where the articulation made it thinnest. A bright pain told him he’d gone just a little too far. That was fine. His suit alarm blinked into place, and he ignored it. He leaned forward, pressing the tiny opening in his suit to the clogged connector, the escaping air scattering the dirt and ice. A single drop of blood spat out, freezing into a perfect crimson sphere and bouncing away from the material. He stepped back, and Aaman slid the connection together. When he tugged this time, it held. The injured suit sealed the hole as soon as he pulled the knife out. Filip turned back. Miral and Josie had cut the canisters free of their pallets and strapped one to the scaffold. The flashing emergency lights had dimmed, the relief vehicles passing them by in the haze and confusion. Heading, likely, for the firefight at the armory. It was where Filip would have seen the greatest threat too, if he hadn’t known better. “Bosslet,” Andrew said, his voice thin and anxious. “Cutting close here.” “No preoccupes,” Filip said. “Ge gut.” One of the two guards put a hand on his shoulder. “You want me to go fix that?” she asked. Should I go save them? Filip lifted a fist and shook it gently back and forth. No. She stiffened when she understood what he was saying, and for a moment, he thought she’d disobey. Her choice. Mutiny now was its own punishment. Josie slid the last canister into place, tightened down the straps. Aaman and his people fit the last brace in position. One minute, twenty seconds. “Bosslet!” Andrew screamed. “I’m sorry, Andrew,” Filip said. There was a moment of stunned silence and then a stream of obscenity and invective. Filip changed frequencies. The emergency services for the military shipyards were shouting less. A woman’s voice speaking crisp, calm German was delivering commands with the almost-bored efficiency of someone well accustomed to crisis, and the voices answering her took their professionalism from hers. Filip pointed to the scaffold. Chuchu and Andrew were dead. Even if they weren’t dead, they were dead. Filip pulled himself into his position on the scaffold, fitted the straps around his waist and under his crotch, across his chest, then laid his head back against the thick padding. Fifty-seven seconds. “Niban,” he said. Nothing happened. He turned his radio back to the encrypted channel. Andrew was weeping now. Wailing. “Niban! Andale!” Filip shouted. The evac scaffold bucked under him, and he suddenly had weight. Four chemical rockets under high burn lit the ground below him, scattering the empty pallets and knocking Miral’s abandoned loading mech on its back. Acceleration pushed the blood down into Filip’s legs, and his vision narrowed. The sounds of the radio grew thinner, more distant, and his consciousness flickered, stuttered. His suit clamped down on his thighs like being squeezed by a giant, forcing the blood back up out of them. His mind returned a bit. Below, the crater was an oblong blister of dust on the face of the moon. Lights moved in it. The towers at the crater’s edge had gone dark, but flickered now as the systems tried to reboot. The shipyards of Callisto reeled like a drunkard, or a person struck in the head. The countdown timer slid to two seconds, then one. At zero, the second strike came. Filip didn’t see the rock hit. As with the tungsten slugs, it was going much too fast for mere human sight, but he saw the dust cloud jump like someone had surprised it, and then the vast shock wave, blooming out so powerfully that even in the barely-extant atmosphere it was visible. “Brace,” Filip said, though there was no need. Everyone on the scaffold was already braced. In a thicker atmosphere, it would have been death for all of them. Here, it was little worse than a bad storm. Aaman grunted. “Problem?” Filip asked. “Pinch? rock holed my foot,” Aaman said. “Hurts.” Josie answered. “Gratia sa didn’t get your cock, coyo.” “Not complaining,” Aaman said. “No complaints.” The scaffold rockets exhausted themselves; the acceleration gravity dropped away. Below them, death had come to the shipyards. There were no lights now. Not even fires burning. Filip turned his gaze to the bright smear of stars, the galactic disk shining on them all. One of those lights wasn’t a star, but the exhaust plume of the Pella , coming to collect its wayward crew. Except Chuchu. Except Andrew. Filip wondered why he didn’t feel bad about the loss of two people under his command. His first command. His proof that he could handle a real mission, with real stakes, and come through clean. He didn’t mean to speak. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was only a sigh that passed his lips. Miral chuckled. “No shit, Filipito,” the older man said. And then, a moment later, “Feliz cumplea?os, sabez?” Filip Inaros lifted his hands in thanks. It was his fifteenth birthday. Chapter One: Holden A year after the Callisto attacks, almost three years after he and his crew had headed out for Ilus, and about six days after they’d gotten back, James Holden floated next to his ship and watched a demolition mech cut her apart. Eight taut cables anchored the Rocinante to the walls of her berth. Only one of many in the Tycho Station repair dock, and the repair section was only one of many in the massive construction sphere. Around them in the kilometer-wide volume of the sphere a thousand other projects were going on, but Holden only had eyes for his ship. The mech finished cutting and pulled off a large section of the outer hull. Beneath lay the skeleton of the ship, sturdy ribs surrounded by a tangled confusion of cabling and conduit, and under that, the second skin of the inner hull. “Yeah,” Fred Johnson said, floating next to him, “you kind of fucked her up.” Fred’s words, flattened and distorted by the comm system of their vacuum suits, were still a punch to the gut. That Fred, the nominal leader of the Outer Planets Alliance and one of the three most powerful people in the solar system, was taking a personal interest in his ship’s condition should have been reassuring. Instead, Holden felt like he had a father checking over his homework to make sure he hadn’t screwed anything up too badly. “Interior mount’s bent,” a third voice said over the comm. A sour-faced man named Sakai, the new chief engineer at Tycho after the death of Samantha Rosenberg at what everyone was now calling the Slow Zone Incident. Sakai was monitoring the repairs from his office nearby through the mech’s suite of cameras and x-ray scanners. “How did you do that?” Fred pointed at the rail-gun housing along the ship’s keel. The barrel of the gun ran nearly the entire length of the ship, and the support struts that attached it to the frame were visibly buckling in places. “So,” Holden said, “have I ever told you the one about the time we used the Roci to drag a heavy freighter to a higher planetary orbit using our rail gun as a reaction drive?” “Yeah, that’s a good one,” Sakai said without humor. “Some of those struts might be fixable, but I’m betting we’re going to find enough micro-fracturing in the alloy that replacing them all is the better bet.” Fred whistled. “That won’t be cheap.” The OPA leader was the Rocinante crew’s on-again, off-again patron and sponsor. Holden hoped they were in the on-again phase of the rocky relationship. Without a preferred client discount, the ship’s repair was going to get noticeably more expensive. Not that they couldn’t afford it. “Lots of badly patched holes in the outer hull,” Sakai continued. “Inner looks okay from here, but we’ll go over it with a fine-toothed comb and make sure it’s sealed.” Holden started to point out that the trip back from Ilus would have involved a lot more asphyxiation and death if the inner hull hadn’t been airtight, but stopped himself. There was no reason to antagonize the man who was now responsible for keeping his ship flying. Holden thought of Sam’s impish smile and habit of tempering her criticism with silliness, and felt something clench behind his breastbone. It had been years, but the grief could still sneak up on him. “Thank you,” he said instead. “This won’t be fast,” Sakai replied. The mech jetted off to another part of the ship, anchored itself on magnetic feet, and began cutting another section of the outer hull away with a bright flash. “Let’s move to my office,” Fred said. “At my age, you can only take an e-suit so long.” Many things about ship repair were made easier by the lack of gravity and atmosphere. The trade-off was forcing technicians to wear environment suits while they worked. Holden took Fred’s words to mean the old man needed to pee and hadn’t bothered with the condom catheter. “Okay, let’s go.” Fred’s office was large for something on a space station, and smelled of old leather and good coffee. The captain’s safe on the wall was done in titanium and bruised steel, like a prop from an old movie. The wall screen behind his desk showed a view of three skeletal ships under construction. Their design was large, bulky, and functional. Like sledgehammers. They were the beginnings of a custom built OPA naval fleet. Holden knew why the alliance felt the need to create its own armed defensive force, but given everything that had happened over the past few years, he couldn’t help but feel like humanity kept learning the wrong lessons from its traumas. “Coffee?” Fred asked. At Holden’s nod, he began puttering around the coffee station on a side table, fixing two cups. The one he held out to Holden had a faded insignia on it. The split circle of the OPA, worn almost to invisibility. Holden took it, waved at the screen, and said, “How long?” “Six months is our current projection,” Fred said, then sat in his chair with an old man’s grunt. “Might as well be forever. A year and a half from now human social structures in this galaxy will be unrecognizable.” “The diaspora.” “If that’s what you want to call it,” Fred said with a nod. “I call it the land rush. A whole lot of covered wagons heading for the promised land.” Over a thousand worlds open for the taking. People from every planet and station and rock in the solar system rushing to grab a piece. And back in the home system, three governments racing to build enough warships to control it all. A welding array flared to life on the skin of one of the ships so brightly that the monitor dimmed in response. “If Ilus was anything, it was a warning that a lot of people are going to die,” Holden said. “Was anyone listening?” “Not really. You familiar with the land rush in North America?” “Yeah,” Holden said, then took a sip of Fred’s coffee. It was delicious. Earth grown, and rich. The privileges of rank. “I got your covered wagon reference. I grew up in Montana, you know. That frontier shit is still the story the people there tell about themselves.” “So you know that the mythology of manifest destiny hides a lot of tragedy. Many of those covered wagons never made it. And more than a few of the people who did wound up as cheap labor for the railroads, mines, and rich farmers.” Holden drank his coffee and watched the ship construction. “Not to mention all the people who were living there before the covered wagons showed up and gave everyone a nifty new plague. At least our version of galactic destiny doesn’t displace anything more advanced than a mimic lizard.” Fred nodded. “Maybe. Seems that way so far. But not all thirteen hundred systems have good surveys yet. Who knows what we’ll find.” “Killer robot things and continent-sized fusion reactors just waiting for someone to flip the switch so they can blow half the planet into space, if memory serves.” “Based on our sample of one. It could get weirder.” Holden shrugged and finished off his coffee. Fred was right. There was no way to know what might be waiting on all of those worlds. No telling what dangers lay in store for the would-be colonists rushing to claim them. “Avasarala isn’t happy with me,” Holden said. “No, she is not,” Fred agreed. “But I am.” “Come again?” “Look, the old lady wanted you to go out there and show everyone in the solar system how bad it all was. Scare them into waiting for the government to tell them it was okay. Put the control back in her hands.” “It was pretty scary,” Holden said. “Was I not clear on that?” “Sure. But it was also survivable. And now Ilus is getting ready to send freighters full of lithium ore to the markets here. They’ll be rich. They may wind up being the exception, but by the time everyone figures that out, people will be on all those worlds looking for the next gold mine.” “Not sure what I could have done differently.” “Nothing,” Fred agreed. “But Avasarala and Prime Minister Smith on Mars and the rest of the political wonks want to control this. And you’ve made sure they can’t.” “So why are you happy?” “Because,” Fred said, his grin wide, “I’m not trying to control it. Which is why I’ll wind up in control of it. I’m playing the long game.” Holden got up and poured himself another cup of Fred’s delicious coffee. “Yeah, you’re going to need to parse that for me,” he said, leaning against the wall next to the coffee pot. “I’ve got Medina Station, a self-sustaining craft that everyone going through the rings has to go past, handing out seed packs and emergency shelters to any ship that needs them. We’re selling potting soil and water filters at cost. Any colony that survives is going to do so in part because we helped them. So when it comes time to organize some sort of galactic governing body, who are they going to turn to? The people who want to enforce hegemony at the barrel of a gun? Or the folks who were and are there to help out in a crisis?” “They turn to you,” Holden said. “And that’s why you’re building ships. You need to look helpful at the beginning when everyone needs help, but when they start looking for a government, you want to look strong.” “Yes,” Fred said, leaning back in his chair. “The Outer Planets Alliance has always meant everything past the Belt. That’s still true. It’s just… expanded a bit.” “It can’t be that simple. No way Earth and Mars just sit back and let you run the galaxy because you handed out tents and bag lunches.” “Nothing ever is,” Fred admitted. “But that’s where we’ll start. And as long as I own Medina Station, I control the center of the board.” “Did you actually read my report?” Holden asked, not able to keep all the disbelief out of his voice. “I’m not underestimating the dangers left on those worlds —” “Forget what got left behind,” Holden said. He put down his half-empty coffee cup and stalked across the room to lean across Fred’s desk. The old man sat back with a frown. “Forget the robots and railroad systems that still work after being powered down for a billion years or so. The exploding reactors. Forget lethal slugs and microbes that crawl into your eyes and blind you.” “How long is this list?” Holden ignored him. “The thing you should be remembering is the magic bullet that stopped it all.” “The artifact was a lucky find for you, given what was —” “No, it wasn’t. It was the scariest fucking answer to Fermi’s paradox I can think of. Do you know why there aren’t any Indians in your Old West analogy? Because they’re already dead. The whatever-they-were that built all that got a head start and used their protomolecule gate builder to kill all the rest. And that’s not even the scary part. The really frightening part is that something else came along, shot the first guys in the back of the head, and left their corpses scattered across the galaxy. The thing we should be asking is, who fired the magic bullet? And are they going to be okay with us taking all of the victims’ stuff?” Fred had given the crew two suites in the management housing level of Tycho Station’s habitation ring. Holden and Naomi shared one, while Alex and Amos lived in the other, though in practice that usually just meant they slept there. When the boys weren’t partaking of Tycho’s many entertainment options, they seemed to spend all their time in Holden and Naomi’s apartment. When Holden came in, Naomi was sitting in the dining area scrolling through something complex on her hand terminal. She smiled at him without looking up. Alex was sitting on the couch in their living room. The wall screen was on, the graphics and talking heads of a newsfeed playing, but the sound was muted and the pilot’s head lay back and his eyes were closed. He snored quietly. “Now they’re sleeping here too?” Holden asked, sitting down across the table from Naomi. “Amos is picking up dinner. How did your thing go?” “You want the bad news or the worse news?” Naomi finally looked up from her work. She cocked her head to one side and narrowed her eyes at him. “Did you get us fired again?” “Not this time. The Roci ’s pretty beat up. Sakai says —” “Twenty-eight weeks,” Naomi said. “Yeah. Have you bugged my terminal?” “I’m looking at the spreadsheets,” she said, pointing at her screen. “Got them an hour ago. He’s— Sakai’s pretty good.” Not as good as Sam hung in the air between them, unspoken. Naomi looked back down at the table, hiding behind her hair. “So, yeah, that’s the bad news,” Holden said. “Half a year of downtime, and I’m still waiting for Fred to come out and say that he’s paying for it. Or some of it. Any of it, really.” “We’re still pretty flush. The UN’s payment came through yesterday.” Holden nodded the comment away. “But forgetting money for a minute, I still can’t get anyone to listen to me when it comes to the artifact.” Naomi gave him a Belter shrug of her hands. “Because this time it would be different? They’ve never listened before.” “Just once I’d like to be rewarded for my optimistic view of humanity.” “I made coffee,” she said, pointing at the kitchen with a tilt of her head. “Fred gave me some of his, which was good enough that I am ruined for lesser coffees from now on. Yet another way in which my meeting with him was unsatisfying.” The door to the apartment slid open, and Amos stomped in carrying a pair of large sacks. A curry and onion scent filled the air around him. “Chow,” he said, then dumped the bags on the table in front of Holden. “Hey, Cap’n, when do I get my ship back?” “Is that food?” Alex said in a loud, groggy voice from the living room. Amos didn’t answer; he was already taking foam cartons out of the bags and setting them around the table. Holden had thought he was too annoyed to eat, but the spicy smell of Indian food changed his mind. “Not for a long time,” Naomi said to Amos around a mouthful of bean curd. “We bent the mount.” “Shit,” Amos said, sitting and grabbing a pair of chopsticks. “I leave you guys alone for a couple weeks and you fuck my girl up.” “Alien superweapons were used,” Alex said, walking into the room, sleep-sweaty hair standing out from his skull in every direction. “The laws of physics were altered, mistakes were made.” “Same shit, different day,” Amos replied and handed the pilot a carton of curried rice. “Turn the sound up. That looks like Ilus.” Naomi turned up the sound on the video feed, and the voice of a newscaster filled the apartment. “— partial power restored, but sources on the ground say this setback will —” “Is that real chicken?” Alex asked, grabbing at one of the cartons. “Splurgin’ a bit, are we?” “Shush,” Amos said. “They’re talking about the colony.” Alex rolled his eyes, but said nothing as he piled spicy strips of chicken on his plate. “— in other news, a draft report detailing the investigation into last year’s attack on the Callisto shipyards was leaked this week. While the text is not finalized, the early reports suggest that a splinter faction of the Outer Planets Alliance was involved, and places blame for the high casualty —” Amos shut off the sound with an angry stab at the table’s controls. “Shit, wanted to hear more about what’s going on with Ilus, not some dumbass OPA cowboys getting themselves blown up.” “I wonder if Fred knows who was behind that,” Holden said. “The OPA hardliners are having trouble getting over their ‘us against the solar system’ theology.” “What did they want there anyway?” Alex said. “Callisto didn’t have any of the heavy munitions. No nukes. Nothing worth a raid like that.” “Oh, now we’re expecting this shit to make sense?” Amos asked. “Gimme that naan.” Holden sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I know it makes me a na?ve idiot, but after Ilus I actually thought we might get a moment’s peace. No one needing to blow anyone else up.” “This is what that looks like,” Naomi said, then stifled a burp and put her chopsticks down. “Earth and Mars are in a prickly detente, the legitimate wing of the OPA is governing instead of fighting. The colonists on Ilus are working with the UN instead of everyone shooting each other. This is as good as it gets. Can’t expect everyone to be on the same page. We’re still humans after all. Some percentage of us are always going to be assholes.” “Truer words were never spoken, boss,” Amos said. They finished eating and sat in companionable silence for several minutes. Amos pulled beers out of the small refrigerator and handed them around. Alex picked his teeth with his pinky fingernail. Naomi went back to her repair projections. “So,” she said after a few minutes poring over the numbers, “the good news is that even if the UN and the OPA decide that we’re responsible for our own repair bills, we’ll be able to cover them with just what we have in the ship’s emergency fund.” “Lots of work flyin’ colonists out through the rings,” Alex said. “When we’re flyin’ again.” “Yeah, because we can stuff so much compost in our tiny cargo hold,” Amos said with a snort. “Plus, broke-as-hell-and-desperate is maybe not the customer base we should be chasing.” “Let’s face it,” Holden said, “if things keep going the way they are, finding work for a private warship may get pretty tough.” Amos laughed. “Let me get a preemptive I-told-you-so in here. Since when that turns out not to be true, like it always does, I might not be there to say it.” Chapter Two: Alex The thing Alex Kamal liked most about the long haul was how it changed the experience of time. The weeks – sometimes months – spent on the burn were like stepping out of history into some small, separate universe. Everything narrowed down to the ship and the people in it. For long stretches, there would be nothing but the basic maintenance work to do, and so life lost all its urgency. Everything was working according to the plan, and the plan was for nothing critical to happen. Traveling through the vacuum of space gave him an irrational sense of peace and well-being. It was why he could do the job. He’d known other people, usually young men and women, whose experience was different. Back when he’d been in the Navy there had been a pilot who’d done a lot of work in the inner planets, running between Earth, Luna, and Mars. He’d transferred in for a trip out to the Jovian moons under Alex. Just about the time an inner planet run would have ended, the young man started falling apart: getting angry over trivial slights, eating too much or not at all, passing restlessly through the ship from command center to engine room and back again like a tiger pacing its cage. By the time they’d reached Ganymede, the ship’s doctor and Alex agreed to start putting sedatives in the guy’s food just to keep things from getting out of hand. At the end of the mission, Alex had recommended the pilot never be assigned a long run again. Some kinds of pilots couldn’t be trained as much as tested for. Not that there weren’t stresses and worries that he carried with him. Ever since the death of the Canterbury , Alex had carried a certain amount of baseline anxiety. With just the four of them, the Rocinante was structurally undercrewed. Amos and Holden were two strong masculine personalities that, if they ever locked horns, could blow the crew dynamic apart. The captain and the XO were lovers, and if they ever broke up, it would mean the end of more than just the job. It was the same sort of thing he’d always worried about, whatever crew he was with. With the Roci , it had been the same worries for years now without any of them ever being how it went off the rails, and that in itself was a kind of stability. As it was, Alex always felt relieved to get to the end of a run and he always felt relieved to start the next one. Or if not always , at least usually . The arrival at Tycho Station should have been a relief. The Roci was as compromised as Alex had ever seen her, and the shipyards at Tycho were some of the best in the system, not to mention the friendliest. The final disposition of their prisoner from New Terra was now soundly someone else’s problem, and he was off the ship. The Edward Israel , the other half of the New Terran convoy, was burning its way safely sunward. The next six months were nothing but repair work and relaxation. By any rational standard, there should have been less to worry about. “So what’s bugging you?” Amos asked. Alex shrugged, opened the little food refrigeration unit that the suite provided, closed it, shrugged again. “Something’s sure as shit bugging you.” “I know.” The lights had the yellow-blue clearness that mimicked early morning, but Alex hadn’t slept. Or not much. Amos sat at the counter and poured himself a cup of coffee. “We’re not doing one of those things where you need me to ask you a bunch of questions so you can get comfortable talking about your feelings, are we?” Alex laughed. “That never works.” “So let’s not do it.” On the burn, Holden and Naomi tended to fold in on each other, not that either of them noticed doing it. It was a natural pattern for lovers to take more comfort in one another than in the rest of the crew. If it had been different, Alex would have been worried about it. But it left him and Amos with mostly one another as company. Alex prided himself on being able to get along with almost anyone on a crew, and Amos was no exception. Amos was a man without subtext. When he said he needed some time alone, it was because he needed some time alone. When Alex asked if he wanted to come watch the newly downloaded neo-noir films out of Earth that he subscribed to, the answer was always and only a response to the question. There was no sense of backbiting, no social punishment or isolation games. It just was what it was, and that was it. Alex wondered sometimes what would have happened if Amos had been the one to die on the Donnager , and he’d spent the last few years with their old medic, Shed Garvey. It probably wouldn’t have gone as well. Or maybe Alex would have adjusted. Hard to know. “I’ve been having dreams that… bother me,” Alex said. “Nightmares, like?” “No. Good dreams. Dreams that are better than the real world. Where I feel bad waking up from them.” “Huh,” Amos said thoughtfully and drank his coffee. “Have you ever had dreams like that?” “Nope.” “The thing is, Tali’s in all of them.” “Tali?” “Talissa.” “Your ex-wife.” “Yeah,” Alex said. “She’s always there and things are always… good. I mean, not like we’re together. Sometimes I’m back on Mars. Sometimes she’s on the ship. She’s just present, and we’re good, and then I wake up and she’s not here and we aren’t. And…” Amos’ brow lowered and his mouth rose, squeezing his face into something smaller and thoughtful. “You want to hook back up with your ex?” “No, I really don’t.” “You horny?” “No, they’re not sex dreams.” “You’re on your own, then. That’s all I got.” “It started back there,” Alex said, meaning on the other side of the rings, orbiting above New Terra. “She came up in conversation, and ever since then… I failed her.” “Yup.” “She spent years waiting on me, and I just wasn’t the man I wanted to be.” “Nope. You want some coffee?” “I really do,” Alex said. Amos poured a cup for him. The mechanic didn’t add sugar, but knew to leave a third of the cup for cream. One of the little intimacies of crew life. “I don’t like how I left things with her,” Alex said. It was a simple statement, and not revelation, but it had the weight of a confession. “Nope,” Amos agreed. “There’s a part of me that thinks this is a chance.” “This?” “The Roci being in dry dock for so long. I could go to Mars, see her. Apologize.” “And then ditch her again in order to get back before the ship drive goes back online?” Alex looked down into his coffee. “Leave things in a better place.” Amos’ shrug was massive. “So go.” A flood of objections crowded his mind. The four of them hadn’t been apart since they’d become a crew, and splitting the group now felt like bad luck. The repair crew on Tycho might need him or want him or make some change to the ship that he wouldn’t know about until it became a critical point somewhere down the line. Or worse, leaving might mean never coming back. If the universe had proved anything in these last few years, it was that nothing was certain. The chime of a hand terminal saved him. Amos fished the device out of his pocket, looked at it, tapped the screen, and scowled. “I’m going to need a little privacy now.” “Sure,” Alex said. “Not a problem.” Outside their suite, Tycho Station stretched in long gentle curves. It was one of the crown jewels of the Outer Planets Alliance. Ceres was larger, and Medina Station held the weird null-zone between rings, but Tycho Station was what the OPA had taken pride in from the start. The wide sweeping lines, more like a sailing ship than any actual craft that she served, weren’t functional. The station’s beauty was a boast. Here are the minds that spun up Eros and Ceres; here is the shipyard that built the largest vessel in the history of humanity. The men and women who, not so many generations ago, had braved the abyss beyond Mars for the first time were smart and powerful enough to make this. Alex made his way down a long promenade. The people who passed him were Belters, their bodies longer than Earth standard, their heads wider. Alex himself had grown up in the relatively low Martian gravity, but even he didn’t quite match the physiology that a childhood rich in null g gave. Plants grew in the empty spaces of the wide corridors, vines crawling up against the spin gravity as they would have against the normal pull on Earth. Children scampered through the halls, ditching school the way he had back in Londres Nova. He drank his coffee and tried to cultivate the peace of being on the burn. Tycho Station was just as artificial as the Roci . The vacuum outside its hull was no more forgiving. But the calm wouldn’t come. Tycho Station wasn’t his ship, wasn’t his home. These people walking past him as he went to the common area and looked up through the massive and multilayered clear ceramic at the glittering spectacle of the shipyards weren’t his family. And he kept wondering what Tali would have thought of all this. If she could have come to a place that saw the beauty in it the way he hadn’t been able to with the life she’d wanted on Mars. When he hit the bottom of his cup, he turned back. He ambled along with the flow of foot traffic, making way for the electric carts and exchanging the small, civilized courtesies in the polyglot linguistic catastrophe that was the Belter argot. He didn’t think too much about where he was going until he got there. The Roci lay half-dressed in the vacuum. With the outer skin cut away and her inner hull shining fresh in the work lights, she looked small. The scars of their adventures had, for the most part, been borne by the outer hull. Those scars were gone now, and only the deeper injuries remained. He couldn’t see them from here, but he knew what they were. He’d been on the Rocinante as long as he’d been on any ship in his career, and he loved her better than any of them. Even than his first. “I’ll be back,” he said to the ship, and as if in answer, a welding rig lit up at the curve of her drive cone, brighter for a moment than the unshielded sun in a Martian sky. The suite Naomi and Holden shared was just down the corridor from the one where he and Amos slept, its door with the same homey fake wood texturing and the number set into the wall just as bright. Alex let himself in, stepping into the conversation already going on. “— if you think it’s called for,” Naomi said, her voice coming from the suite’s main room. “But I think the evidence is pretty strong that you cleaned the last of that out. I mean, Miller hasn’t been back, has he?” “No,” Holden said, nodding to Alex. “But just the idea that we had some of that goo in the ship for so long and didn’t even know it creeps me out. Doesn’t it creep you out?” Alex held out his coffee cup, and Holden took it and filled it automatically. No sugar, room for cream. “It does,” Naomi said, coming to the kitchen. “Just not enough to take the whole damned bulkhead out over it. The replacements are never as strong as the originals. You know that.” Alex had met Naomi Nagata back on the Canterbury . He could still see the rawboned, angry girl who Captain McDowell had introduced as their new junior engineer. She’d hidden behind her hair for almost a year. Now, she had the first few threads of white among the black. She stood taller, more at home in her own skin. Surer of herself and stronger than he would have guessed she could be. And Holden, the swaggering, self-impressed executive officer who swept into civilian work wearing his dishonorable discharge like a boast had become this man handing him the cream and cheerfully admitting the irrationality of his fears. Time had changed all of them, he supposed. Only he wasn’t sure how he had been affected. Too close to the question, he guessed. Except Amos. Nothing changed Amos. “What about you, Alex?” He grinned and let his Mariner Valley drawl thicken. “Well, shoot, I figure it didn’t kill us when it was here, it ain’t gonna kill us now it’s gone.” “Fine,” Holden said with a sigh. “It’ll save us money,” Naomi said, “and we’ll be better off.” “I know,” Holden said. “But I’m still going to feel weird about it.” “Where’s Amos?” Naomi asked. “Is he still catting around?” “No,” Alex said. “He hit the brothels hard enough to burn through his petty cash the first few days in port. Since then, we’ve just been passing the time.” “We’ll need to find something to keep him busy while we’re on Tycho,” Holden said. “Hell, we’ll need to find something to keep all of us busy.” “We could look for work on the station,” Naomi said. “I don’t know what they’re hiring for.” “We’ve got offers from a half-dozen places for paid debriefings on New Terra,” Holden said. “So does every other person that came back through the Ring,” Naomi said, laughter in her voice. “And the feed there and back still works.” “You’re saying we shouldn’t do it?” Holden said, his tone vaguely hurt. “I’m saying I can find a lot of things I’d rather get paid for than talking about myself.” Holden deflated, just a little. “Fair point. But we’re stuck here for a long time. We’re going to have to do something.” Alex took a deep breath. Here it was. The moment. His resolve wavered. He poured the cream into the cup, the blackness of the coffee resolving into a gentle tan. The lump in his throat felt as big as an egg. “So,” he said. “I’ve… ah… I’ve been thinking about things —” The suite door opened and Amos stepped in. “Hey, Cap’n. I’m gonna need some time off.” Naomi tilted her head, her brows coming together, but it was Holden who spoke. “Time off?” “Yeah, I got to go back to Earth for a little bit.” Naomi sat at the stool by the breakfast bar. “What’s the matter?” “Don’t know,” Amos said. “Maybe nothing, but I kinda need to go look to find out. Be sure. You know.” “Is anything wrong?” Holden asked. “Because if it’s a thing, we can wait for the Roci to be fixed up, and we can all go together. I’ve been looking for an excuse to get Naomi back down to Earth so the family can meet her.” The annoyance that crossed the engineer’s face was almost faster than Alex’s refresh rate. Moments like that made him nervous. The way Holden could push Naomi past her comfort zone and not even know he was doing it. But she recovered even before Amos could speak. “May have to keep looking for your excuse, Cap. There’s a little time pressure on my thing. Lady I used to spend time with died. I just need to go make sure everything there’s on the up-and-up.” “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Naomi said at the same moment Holden said, “Taking care of her estate?” “Sure, something like that,” Amos said. “Anyway, I booked transport to Ceres and then down the well, but I need to cash out some of my shares for spending money while I’m there.” The room went still for a moment. “You’re coming back, though,” Naomi said. “Plan to,” Amos said. It struck Alex that the answer was more honest than a yes. Amos planned to, but things happened. In all the time they’d spent in all their runs on the Cant or the Roci , Alex had never heard Amos talk about his life back on Earth except in the most general terms. He wondered if it was because the past wasn’t worth mentioning or was too painful to talk about. With Amos, it could have been both at the same time. “Of course,” Holden said. “Just tell me how much you need.” The negotiation was brief, the transfer made on their hand terminals. Amos grinned and slapped Alex on the shoulder. “All right. You got the place to yourself.” “When are you shipping out?” Alex asked. “’Bout an hour. I should go get in line.” “All right,” Alex said. “Take care of yourself, partner.” “You bet,” Amos said and was gone. The three remaining crewmen of the Roci stood silently in the kitchen, Holden looking shocked, Naomi amused. Alex felt like he was about halfway between them. “Well that was weird,” Holden said. “You think he’s going to be okay?” “It’s Amos,” Naomi said. “I’m more worried about whoever he’s going to check on.” “Fair point,” Holden said, then hitched himself up to sit on the counter and faced Alex. “Anyway. You were saying you’d been thinking about something?” Alex nodded. I was thinking about how hard it is to break up family and about the family I broke up before, and that I need to see my ex-wife again and try to find some sort of resolution to who we were to each other and all the things we did. Seemed kind of anticlimactic now. “Well, seeing how we’re going to be in dock for a good long time, I was thinking I might take a trip to Mars. Check in on the old digs.” “Okay,” Holden said. “But you’ll come back before the repairs are done, right?” Alex smiled. “Plan to.” Chapter Three: Naomi The Golgo table was set for opening throws, the first and second goals untouched and the field still empty. The throbbing bass line from the Blauwe Blome’s main room was a vibration in the deck and a murmur that wasn’t too loud to talk over. Naomi hefted the steel ball in her hand, feeling the subtle play between mass and weight, different at every gravity. Across from her, Malikah and her teammates from the repair crew waited. One of them was drinking a Blue Meanie, the bright azure fluid staining his mouth like lipstick. It was three years – no, four? – since Naomi had played a game of Golgo, and these people played every Thursday. Naomi hefted the ball again, sighed, and spun it. Instantly, the opposition balls sprang out to hold her short, matching her spin and trying to co-opt her throw. It was the sort of response you played against a beginner. Naomi was rusty, but she wasn’t a beginner. The table registered, ending the throw, and Naomi’s marker appeared, well past the field’s half mark. Her team cheered, Malikah’s groaned. Everyone smiled. It was a friendly game. Not all of them were. “Next up, next up!” one of Naomi’s new teammates shouted, waving his wide, pale hand. His name was Pere or Paar. Something like that. She retrieved the steel ball and tossed it to him. He grinned at her, his eyes only flickering down her body and back. Poor little shit. Naomi stood back, and Malikah moved to stand with her. “You still got it,” Malikah said. She had a beautiful voice, the accents of Ceres Station mellowing the harsher tones of the deep Belt. “Spent a lot of time playing it when I was here last,” Naomi said. “You never forget what you did when you were young, right?” “Even if you want to.” Malikah laughed, and Naomi laughed with her. Malikah lived in a set of rooms three levels down and thirty degrees spinward from the club. The last time Naomi had been in it, the walls had been draped with silk patterned in brown and gold and the air had been rich with the artificial sandalwood incense that wouldn’t clog the air recyclers. Naomi had slept in a bag on the deck for two nights, falling asleep to recorded harp music and the murmuring voices of Malikah and Sam. Only Sam was dead now, and Naomi was back together with Jim, and humanity was heir to a thousand suns within a two-year burn. Being there, laughing with Malikah and the repair crews, Naomi couldn’t tell if she was more astounded by how much things had changed or how little. Malikah touched Naomi’s shoulder, her brow furrowed. “Bist aj??” “Was thinking,” Naomi said, falling into the rhythm of Belter slang only roughly. Golgo wasn’t the only thing she was rusty with. Malikah’s mouth turned down at the corners even as the Golgo table erupted in shouts of glee and dismay. For a moment, Sam was there too. Not the actual woman with her red hair and cheerful obscenity and habit of using childish terms – boo-boo, owie – to describe things like meteoroid-breached hulls. Only the space where she had been, and the two women sharing the knowledge that someone was missing. Paar-or-Pere passed the ball on to the next player – Sakai, the new chief engineer – while the opposing team clapped him mockingly on the back. Naomi moved forward to assess the damage. Being around Belters – just Belters – was weirdly comforting. She loved her crew, but they were two Earthers and a Martian. There were some conversations that she could never have with them. She could tell when Jim arrived without turning around. The players across the table from her all looked past her as one. Their eyes went wide, and an air of excitement washed over them. No one said it, but they might as well have – Hey! Look! It’s James Holden! It was easy to forget that Jim was who he was. He’d started two wars, and played some role in ending them both. He’d captained the first human ship through the Ring, or the first one that survived anyway. He’d been on the alien base in the center of the slow zone and come back. He’d survived Eros Station and the death of the Agatha King . He’d been to New Terra, the first human colony on a nonhuman planet, and forged a weird, awkward peace there. It was almost embarrassing, seeing everyone react to that Holden: the one on the screens and in the newsfeeds. She knew Jim was nothing like that James Holden, but there was no point saying it. Some things stayed secrets even when you told them. “Hello my love,” Jim said, putting his arm around her. In his other hand, he had a grapefruit martini. “For me?” she said, taking the cocktail. “Hope so. I wouldn’t drink it on a dare.” “Hoy, coyo!” Paar-or-Pere said, holding up the steel ball. “Want a throw?” The laughter around the table was buoyant. Some of it was delight – James Holden playing Golgo with us! – and some was cruel – Watch the big shot suck . None of it had anything to do with the actual man. She wondered if he knew how much he changed the nature of a room just by walking into it. At a guess, he probably didn’t. “No,” Jim said with a grin. “I’m terrible at this. Wouldn’t know where to start.” Naomi leaned in toward Malikah. “I should go. Thank you so much for having me.” It meant I am grateful to you for letting me be here with other Belters like I belong . “You are todamas welcome, coya-mis,” Malikah said. It meant, Sam’s death wasn’t your fault, and if it was I forgive you. Naomi took Jim’s elbow and let him steer her out to the main bar. The music rose as they passed through the doorway, light and sound joining in a sensory assault. On the dance floor, people moved together in pairs or in groups. There had been a time, long before she’d met Jim, when the idea of getting very, very drunk and throwing herself into the press of bodies would have been an attractive one. She could remember the girl she used to be with fondness, but it wasn’t a youth she cared to recapture. She stood at the bar and finished her martini. It was too loud to talk, so she amused herself watching people notice Jim, the game of is-it-or-isn’t-it in their expressions. Jim, for his part, was amiably bored. The idea that he was the center of attention was foreign to him. It was part of what she loved about him. When her glass was empty, she put her hand on his, and they pressed out to the public corridor outside the club. Men and women waiting to get in – Belters, almost to a person – watched them leave. It was night on Tycho Station, which didn’t mean much. The station was built on three rotating eight-hour shifts: leisure, work, sleep. Who you knew depended on what shift you worked, like three different cities that all occupied the same space. A world that would always be two-thirds strangers. She put her arm around Jim’s waist and pulled him in against her until she could feel his thigh moving against hers. “We need to talk,” she said. He tensed a little, but kept his voice light and airy. “Like man-and-woman talk?” “Worse,” she said. “XO and captain.” “What’s up?” They stepped into a lift, and she pushed the button for their deck. The lift chimed, the doors moving gently closed, as she gathered her thoughts. It wasn’t really that she didn’t know what needed to be said. He wasn’t going to like this any more than she did. “We need to look at hiring on more crew.” She knew enough about Jim’s silences to recognize this one. She looked up into his blank expression, his eyes blinking a fraction more quickly than usual. “Really?” he said. “Seems to me that we’re doing just fine.” “We are. We have been. The Roci ’s a military design. Smart. A lot of automation, a lot of redundancy. That’s why we’ve been able to run her at a third of her standard crew for this long.” “That and we’re the best damned crew in the sky.” “That doesn’t hurt. Looking at skills and service, we’ve got a strong group. But we’re brittle.” The lift shifted, the complex forces of station spin and car acceleration making the space feel unsteady. She was sure it was just the movement. “I’m not sure what you mean by brittle,” Jim said. “We’ve been on the Rocinante since we salvaged her off the Donnager . We’ve had no change in staff. No turnover. Name me one other ship you can think of where that’s true. There were runs where the Canterbury had a quarter of the staff on their first mission together. And…” The doors slid open. They stepped out, moving aside to let another couple go in. Naomi heard the others murmuring to each other as the lift doors closed. Jim was quiet as they walked back toward their suite. When he finally spoke, his voice was low and thoughtful. “You’re thinking one of them may not come back? Amos? Alex?” “I’m thinking that a lot of things happen. Take a high burn, and sometimes people stroke out. The juice helps, but it’s not a guarantee. People have been known to shoot at us. Or we’ve been disabled in a decaying orbit. You remember all that happening, right?” “Sure, but —” “If we lose someone, we go from running at a third of a standard crew to a quarter. Add to that the loss of nonredundant skills.” Holden stopped, his hand on the door to their rooms. “Wait, wait, wait. If we lose someone?” “Yes.” His eyes were wide and shocked. Little wrinkles of distress gathered at the corners. She reached up to smooth them away, but they didn’t go. “So you’re trying to get me prepared for one of my crew dying?” “Historically speaking, humans are pretty much at a hundred percent on that.” Jim started to say something, faltered, opened the suite door, and walked in. She followed, closing the door behind them. She wanted to let it drop, but if she did, she didn’t know when they’d pick it back up. “If we were running a traditional crew, we’d have two people in every position. If anyone got killed or disabled, someone else would be right there to step in.” “I’m not adding four more people to our ship, much less eight,” Jim said, walking into the bedroom. Running from the conversation. He wouldn’t actually leave. She waited for the silence and the distress and the worry that he’d made her angry to pull him back. It took about fifteen seconds. “We don’t run this like a regular crew because we’re not a regular crew. We got the Roci when everyone in the system was shooting at us. We had stealth ships blowing a battleship out from under us. We lost the Cant and then we lost Shed . You can’t go through that and just be normal.” “Meaning what exactly?” “This ship isn’t a crew. We don’t run it like a crew. We run it like a family.” “Right,” she said. “And that’s a problem.” They looked at each other across the room. Jim’s jaw worked, objections and arguments getting stalled at his tongue. He knew she was right, and he wanted her to be wrong. She saw him realize there was no way out. “Fine,” he said. “When the others get back, let’s talk about doing some interviews. Taking a couple people on for a mission or two. If they shake down right, we can look at keeping them on permanently.” “That sounds good,” Naomi said. “It’s going to change the balance on the ship,” Holden said. “Everything changes,” she said, putting her arms around him. They ordered food from a fusion Indian restaurant, curry and genetically modified rice and textured fungal protein mostly indistinguishable from beef. For the rest of the evening, Holden tried to be cheerful, tried to hide his unease from her. It didn’t even start to work, but she appreciated the effort. After dinner, they watched the entertainment feeds until the time came in the comfortable rhythm of their day that she turned off the screen and drew him back to the bed. Sex with Holden had started off as a thrilling thing, years ago when they were first seeing exactly how stupid a captain and an XO sleeping together would be. Now, it was richer and calmer and more playful. And more comforting. After, lying on the big gel-form mattress with the sheets in ropes at the foot, Naomi’s mind wandered. She thought of the Roci and of Sam, of a book of poetry she’d read when she was a girl and a musical group one of the senior engineers had roped her into on the Canterbury . Her recollections had started taking on the surreal confusion of dreams when Jim’s voice brought her back almost to wakefulness. “I don’t like having them gone.” “Hmm?” “Alex and Amos. I don’t like having them gone. If they get in trouble, we’ll be here. I can’t even just fire up the Roci and go get them.” “They’ll be fine,” she said. “I know. I sort of know.” He propped himself up on one elbow. “Are you really not worried?” “A little maybe.” “I mean, I know they’re grown-ups, but if something happened. If they didn’t come back…” “It would be hard,” Naomi said. “We four have been what we rely on for a lot of years now.” “Yeah,” Jim said. And then a moment later, “Do you know who this lady was Amos went back to check on?” “No. I don’t.” “You think she was his lover?” “I don’t know,” Naomi said. “I got the feeling it was more of a surrogate mom thing.” “Hmm. Maybe. I don’t know why I was thinking lover.” His voice had started taking on the fuzzy edges of sleep. “Hey, can I ask an inappropriate question?” “If memory serves.” “Why didn’t you and Amos ever get together? I mean back on the Cant .” Naomi laughed, rolled over, put her arm across his chest. Even after shipping with him all this time, she liked the way his skin smelled. “Are you serious? Have you paid any attention at all to his sexuality?” “I don’t think Amos and I are supposed to do that.” “It’s not a place you want to be,” Naomi said. “Hmm. Okay. I was just thinking, you know. How much he followed you around back on the Cant . And he’s never talked about leaving the Roci .” “He’s not staying on the Roci for me,” Naomi said. “He’s staying for you.” “Me?” “He’s using you as his external, aftermarket conscience.” “No, he’s not.” “It’s what he does. Finds someone who has a sense of ethics and follows their lead,” Naomi said. “It’s how he tries not to be a monster.” “Why would he try not to be a monster?” The sleep-slurred words were like a blanket. “Because he is one,” Naomi said, her consciousness flickering across the line. It’s why we get along. The message came two days later, and without warning. Naomi was in an EVA suit, inspecting the work with Chief Engineer Sakai. He was in the process of explaining why they were looking at a different ceramic alloy for the connections between inner and outer hull when a priority message popped into her HUD. She felt a rush of fear, the aftermath of her talk with Holden. Something had happened to Alex. Or Amos. “Hold on,” she said, and Sakai answered with a raised fist. She started the message. A flat transmission screen popped on with the split circle of the OPA, and when it flickered away, Marco was there. The years had thickened his face a degree, softened the curve of his jaw. His skin had the same richness and depth she remembered, and his hands, folded on the table wherever he’d recorded this, were as delicate. He smiled with the mixture of sorrow and amusement that was like falling backward through time. The message halted, cut off by the suit’s medical systems. Warnings for increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure. She chinned the override, and his voice stuttered softly into her ears, smoothing as the feed cohered. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to hear from me. If it helps, I’d just point out that I haven’t done it before this. And I’m not doing it lightly now.” Shut it off , she thought. Stop the feed. Erase it. It would all be lies anyway. Lies or only what parts of the truth served him. Forget it ever came. Marco looked away from the camera as if he’d read her mind, or known what she would be thinking. “Naomi, I don’t agree with your decision to leave, but I’ve always respected it. Even when you showed up in the news so everyone knew where you were, I didn’t reach out. And I’m not coming to you now for myself.” The words were all crisp and warm and careful: the flawless grammar of someone speaking a second language so well it sounded uncanny. He had none of his Belter patois. So there was another way the years had changed him. “Cyn and Karal send their love and respect, but they’re the only ones who know I’m reaching out. And why. They’re on Ceres Station right now, but they can’t stay long. I need you to meet their team there and— No. I’m sorry. That’s wrong. I shouldn’t have put it that way. It’s just that I’m at loose ends. I don’t know what to do, and you’re the only one I can turn to. It’s Filip. He’s in trouble.” Chapter Four: Amos His throat ached. Amos swallowed, trying to force the lump away with a mouthful of saliva, but all that got him was a thick new pain like swallowing sand. The Roci ’s med bay had shot him full of all the booster vaccines and bacterial prophylactics three months ago, right on schedule. He didn’t figure he could be sick. But there it was, a spot in the back of his throat that felt like he’d swallowed a golf ball and it got stuck halfway down. All around him, the citizens and travelers of the Ceres Station Spaceport milled like ants on their hill, their voices making an undifferentiated roar that was just as good as silence. It amused Amos that this metaphor was one that no one on Ceres would actually understand. Himself, he hadn’t seen an ant in close on two decades, but the childhood memories of watching them take down a cockroach or clean the carcass of a rat were vivid and sharp. Like the roaches and the rats, ants had learned to live with their human neighbors without much trouble. When the concrete of human cities spread across the globe and half the animals on Earth were on endangered lists, no one had worried about the ants. They were doing fine, thanks, and spilled fast food was just as plentiful and delicious as dead forest animals had once been. Adapt or die. If Amos could be said to have a philosophy, it would be that. The concrete replaces the forest. You get in its way, you get paved over. If you can find a way to live in the cracks, you can thrive anywhere. There were always cracks. The anthill of Ceres bustled around him. There were people at the top of the food chain buying snacks at the kiosks or tickets for the shuttles and long-flight ships leaving the station. The people in the cracks were there too. A girl no older than ten with long dirty hair and a pink jumpsuit two sizes too small eyed the travelers without staring at them. Waiting for someone to set their luggage or their hand terminal down long enough to be snatched away. She saw Amos looking at her and bolted for a maintenance hatch set low in the wall. Living in the cracks, but living. Adapting, not dying. He swallowed again, grimacing at the ache. His hand terminal beeped, and he looked up at the flight board that dominated the station’s public space. Bright yellow letters against black, a font designed for legibility over beauty. His long-haul flight to Luna was confirmed for a launch window in three hours. He tapped on his terminal’s screen to let the automated system know he’d be on board when it left, and walked off looking for something to kill three hours. There was a bar by the gate. So that was easy. He didn’t want to get drunk and miss his flight, so he stuck to beer, drinking slowly and methodically and waving at the bartender as he approached the bottom of one glass so that the next was waiting when he finished. He was aiming for fuzzy and relaxed, and he knew exactly how to get there in the shortest possible time. The bar didn’t offer much in the way of entertainments or distractions, so he could focus on the glass, the bartender, the next drink. The lump in his throat thickened with each swallow. He ignored it. The other patrons in the bar were quiet, reading hand terminals or whispering in small groups as they drank. Everyone on the way to somewhere else. This place wasn’t a destination; it was something you bumped into in your travels, accidental and forgettable. Lydia was dead. He’d spent twenty years thinking about her. The tattoo of her face over his heart was some of that, of course. Every look in a mirror without his shirt on was a reminder. But beyond that, every day had choices in it. And every choice he made started with the little voice in his head asking what Lydia would want him to do. When he’d received the message from Erich, he realized he hadn’t seen or spoken to her in over two decades. That meant she was twenty years older than when he’d left. How old had she been then? He could remember the gray in her hair, the lines around her eyes and mouth. Older than him. But he’d been fifteen, and “older than him” had been a wide space most people fell into. And now she was dead. Maybe someone twenty years older than the woman he remembered was old enough to die of natural causes. Maybe she’d died in a hospital, or her own bed, warm and comfortable and surrounded by friends. Maybe she’d had a cat sleeping on her feet. Amos hoped that was true. Because if it wasn’t – if it was anything other than natural causes – he was going to kill every single person even remotely involved. He examined the idea in his mind, rotating it this way and that, waiting to see if Lydia stopped him. He took another long swallow of beer and burned his throat. He really hoped he wasn’t getting sick. You’re not sick, Lydia’s voice said in his mind, you’re sad. Grieving. The lump in your throat. The hollow space behind your sternum. The empty feeling in your stomach no matter how much beer you put there. That’s grief. “Huh,” Amos said out loud. “Need something, buddy?” the bartender asked with professional disinterest. “Another,” Amos said, pointing at the half-full beer he still had. You don’t process grief well , another voice said. Holden, this time. That was the truth. That’s why Amos trusted the captain. When he said something, it was because he believed it. No need to analyze it or figure out what he really meant by it. Even when the captain fucked up, he was acting in good faith. Amos hadn’t met many people like that. The only really strong emotion Amos had felt in longer than he could remember was anger. That was always there, waiting for him. Processing his grief that way was simple and direct. He understood it. The man sitting a few stools away at the bar had the rough, rawboned look of a rock jock. He’d been nursing the same beer for an hour. Every time Amos ordered another, the man shot him a glance that was half annoyance, half envy. Coveting his apparently bottomless credit account. It would be so easy. Say something to him, cutting and loud, put him in a position where backing down embarrassed him in front of everyone. The poor fucker would feel obligated to take the bait, and then Amos would be free to process his grief all over the guy. Some time in stir might even be a nice way to unwind. That guy didn’t kill Lydia , Holden’s voice said. But maybe someone else did , Amos thought. And I need to find out. “Need to cash out here, amigo,” Amos said to the bartender, waving his hand terminal at him. He pointed at the rock jock. “Put that guy’s next two on my tab.” The rock jock frowned, looking for the insult, but when he couldn’t find it he said, “Thanks, brother.” “Anytime, hermano. You be safe out there.” “Sa sa,” the jock said, finishing off his beer and reaching for one of the two Amos had just bought. “Do the same, sabe dui?” Amos missed his bunk on the Roci. The long-haul transport was named the Lazy Songbird , but its birdlike qualities began and ended at the white letters painted on its side. From the outside, it looked like a giant garbage can with a drive cone on one end and a tiny ops deck on the other. From the inside, it looked like the inside of a giant garbage can except that it was divided into twelve decks, fifty people to a deck. The only privacy to be had was thin curtains in the shower stalls, and people only ever seemed to use the head when uniformed crew members were around. Ah , Amos thought, Prison rules. He selected a bunk, just a crash couch with a little storage under it and a tiny entertainment screen on the bulkhead next to it, as far from the head and the commissary as possible. He tried to stay out of high traffic areas. The people sharing his space were a family of three on one side, and an ancient crone on the other. The crone spent the entire flight high on little white pills, staring at the ceiling all day and tossing and sweating through fever dreams all night. Amos introduced himself to her. She offered him some pills. He declined. This ended their association. The family on the other side was much nicer. Two men in their early thirties and their daughter of about seven. One of the men was a structural engineer named Rico. The other a stay-at-home dad called Jianguo. The girl’s name was Wendy. They eyed Amos with some suspicion when he first claimed the bunk, but he smiled and shook their hands and bought Wendy an ice cream bar from a commissary vending machine and then didn’t follow up by being creepy. He knew what men who had too much interest in little kids were like, and so he knew how not to ever be mistaken for one of them. Rico was traveling to Luna to take one of the new job openings at the Bush orbital shipyards. “Lots of coyos heading downwell. Beaucoup jobs now, everybody trying to grab a ring for themselves. New colonies. New worlds.” “That’ll dry up when the rush dies down,” Amos said. He was lying back on his couch, half listening to Rico rattle on, half watching a video feed on his wall screen with the sound off. Rico gave a Belter shrug of the hands and tilted his head toward his daughter, sleeping in her bunk. “For her, sabe? Later is for later. For now I put some yuan aside. School, ring trip, whatever she needs.” “I hear that. Later is later.” “Oh, hey, they’re cleaning the head. Gonna grab a shower.” “What’s with that, man?” Amos asked. “What’s the rumpus?” Rico cocked his head, like Amos had asked why space was a vacuum. In fairness, Amos knew the answer, but it was interesting to see whether Rico did too. “Long-haul gangs, coyo. Price of flying on the cheap. Sucks to be poor.” “The crew watches for that shit, right? Anyone gets in a tussle, they gas us all, tie up the perps. No fuss, no muss.” “Don’t watch the showers. No cameras. If you don’t pay when the shakedown comes, that’s where they get you. Better to go when crew is around.” “No shit,” Amos said, pretending surprise. “Haven’t seen the shakedown yet.” “You will, hombre. Watch Jian and Wendy while I’m out, yeah?” “Both eyes, brother.” Rico was right. After the first rush of the flight, when the initial bustle of people finding bunks, deciding they hated their neighbor, then finding a new one was over, people were mostly settled in. The Belters bunking on Belter decks. The inners on decks split between Earth and Mars. Amos was on a Belter deck, but he seemed to be the only one mixing. Prison rules for sure. On the sixth day, a small group of toughs from a deck up came down the lift together and fanned out through the compartment. With fifty people on the deck, it took them a while to hit everyone. Amos pretended to sleep in his crash couch and watched them out of the corner of his eye. It was a basic scam. A tough walked up to a passenger, explained about in-flight insurance policies, then took a credit transfer with a cheap disposable terminal. All the threats were implied. Everyone paid. It was a stupid racket, but simple enough that it worked anyway. One of the extortionists who looked like he wasn’t a day over fourteen headed their direction. Rico started to pull out his hand terminal, but Amos sat up in bed and waved him off. To the junior extortionist he said, “We’re all good over here. No one in this corner pays.” The thug stared at him without speaking. Amos smiled back. He didn’t particularly want to be gassed and tied up, but if that’s how it had to happen, he’d live with it. “Dead man,” the thug said. He put as much macho as he could into it, and Amos respected the commitment. But much scarier people than a skinny pubescent Belter had tried intimidating him. Amos nodded as if considering the threat. “So there was this one time I got caught in a reactor crawlspace when a coolant pipe blew,” he said. “What?” the kid asked, baffled. Even Rico and Jianguo were looking at Amos like he’d lost his mind. Amos shifted, and the couch’s gimbals squeaked as they reoriented. “See, the coolant is radioactive as fuck. Hits the open air and it vaporizes. Getting it on your skin ain’t good for you, but you can survive that. Washes off, mostly. You don’t want to breathe it in though. Get a bunch of radioactive particles down in the lungs where you can’t get ’em out? Yeah, you pretty much melt from the inside.” The kid glanced over his shoulder, looking for support dealing with the crazy ranting guy. The rest of team extortion was still busy. “So,” Amos continued, leaning forward, “I had to get into a maintenance airlock, open an emergency locker, and get a rebreather strapped to my face without breathing any of that shit in.” “So what? You still —” “The point of this little tale of woe is that I learned some facts about myself.” “Yeah?” The situation had gotten weird enough that the kid actually seemed interested in finding out. “I learned that I can hold my breath for almost two minutes while engaging in stressful physical activity.” “So —” “So you need to ask yourself, how much damage can I do to you in two minutes before the knockout gas gets me. Because I’m betting it’s a lot.” The kid didn’t respond. Rico and Jianguo seemed to be holding their breath. Wendy was staring at Amos with a wide-eyed grin. “There a problem?” One of the junior thug’s buddies had finally come over to check on him. “Yeah, he —” “No problem,” Amos said. “Just explaining to your associate here that this corner of the room doesn’t pay for insurance.” “Says you?” “Yeah. Says me.” The senior thug looked Amos over, sizing him up. They were about the same height, but Amos outweighed him by a solid twenty-five kilos. Amos stood up and spread himself out a little, making the point. “What crew you run with?” senior thug asked, mistaking him for a rival banger. “Rocinante ,” Amos replied. “Never heard of ’em.” “Yeah, you have, but context is everything, ain’t it?” “Might be you fucked up, coyo,” the thug said. Amos gave an expansive Belter shrug of the hands. “I guess we’ll find out sooner or later.” “Sooner or later,” the thug agreed, then grabbed his junior partner and headed off to the rest of his crew. When they took the lift to the next deck, they left junior behind. He openly stared at Amos from across the room, not trying to hide anything. Amos sighed and grabbed his towel out of his duffel. “Gonna go take a shower.” “You crazy,” Jianguo said. “No crew in there. They’ll jump you.” “Yep.” “Then why?” “Because,” Amos said, standing up and throwing the towel over his shoulder, “I hate waiting.” As soon as Amos walked toward the head with his prominently displayed towel, junior started talking on his hand terminal. Calling the troops. The head was five flimsy sheet plastic shower stalls against one bulkhead, and ten vacuum flush toilets against the other. Sinks lined the bulkhead directly across from the door. The open space in the middle had benches for sitting while you waited your turn in the shower or dressed afterward. Not the best space for hand-to-hand. Lots of hard projections to get mashed into, and the benches were a tripping hazard. Amos tossed his towel onto a sink and leaned against it, arms crossed. He didn’t have to wait long. A few minutes after junior had made the call he and five of the thugs from team extortion filed into the room. “Only six? I’m a little insulted.” “You not a little anything,” the oldest one said. The leader then, speaking first. “But big dies too.” “True that. So how does this go? I’m on your turf, so I’ll respect the house rules.” The leader laughed. “You funny, man. Dead soon, but funny.” He turned to junior thug and said, “Your beef, coyo.” Junior pulled a shiv out of his pocket. No weapons made it into the passenger compartment through security, but this was a jagged piece of metal torn off of something in the ship then sharpened down. Prison rules, again. “I’m not going to disrespect you,” Amos said to him. “I killed my first guy at about your age. Well, a few guys really, but that’s not the issue. I know to take you and that knife seriously.” “Good.” “No,” Amos said sadly, “it really isn’t.” Before anyone could move, Amos crossed the space between them and grabbed junior’s knife arm. The ship was only at about a third of a g thrust, so Amos yanked the kid off the floor and spun, hitting the edge of a shower stall with the kid’s arm. His body kept traveling and Amos didn’t let go, so the arm folded around the impact point. The sound of tendons in his elbow snapping was like hitting wet plywood with a hammer. The knife drifted to the floor from nerveless fingers, and Amos let go of the arm. There was a long second where the five thugs stared at the knife on the floor at Amos’ feet, and he stared back at them. The emptiness in his belly was gone. The hollow space behind his sternum, gone. His throat had stopped hurting. “Who’s next?” he said, flexing his hands, his face in a grin he didn’t know he had. They came in a rush. Amos spread his arms and welcomed them like long-lost lovers. “You okay?” Rico asked. He was dabbing at a small cut on Amos’ head with an alcohol swab. “Mostly.” “They okay?” “Less so,” Amos said, “but still mostly. Everyone will walk out of there when they wake up.” “You didn’t have to do that for me. I would have paid.” “Didn’t,” Amos said. At Rico’s puzzled look he added, “Didn’t do it for you. And Rico? That money goes into the Wendy fund, or I come looking for you too.” Chapter Five: Holden One of Holden’s grandfathers had spent his youth riding in rodeos. All of the pictures they had of him were of a tall, muscular, robust-looking man with a big belt buckle and a cowboy hat. But the man Holden had known when he was a child was thin, pale, and hunched over. As if the years had stripped away everything extraneous and rendered the younger man down into the skeletal older man he became. It struck him that Fred Johnson had been rendered. He was still a tall man, but the heavy muscles he’d once had were mostly gone, leaving loose skin at the backs of his arms and on his neck. His hair had gone from mostly black to mostly gray to mostly not there at all. That he could still project an air of absolute authority meant that very little of it had come from his physicality in the first place. Fred had two glasses and a bottle of something dark on the desk when Holden sat. He offered a drink with a small tilt of his head, and Holden accepted with a nod. While Fred poured, Holden leaned back in his chair with a long sigh, then said, “Thank you.” Fred shrugged. “I was looking for an excuse.” “Not the drink, but thanks for that too. Thank you for helping with the Roci . The money from Avasarala came, but we have damage we didn’t know about when I wrote the bill. Without our favored client discount, we’d been in trouble.” “Who says you’re getting a discount?” Fred said as he handed Holden the drink, but he smiled as he said it. He sank into his own chair with a grunt. Holden hadn’t realized coming in how much he was dreading the conversation. Even if he knew it was just good business negotiation, it felt like asking for a handout. That the answer had been yes was good. That Fred hadn’t made him squirm about it was even better. Made him feel more like he was sitting with a friend. “You look old, Fred.” “I feel old. But it’s better than the alternative.” Holden raised his glass. “Those who aren’t with us.” “Those who aren’t with us,” Fred repeated, and they both drank. “That list is getting longer every time I see you.” “I’m sorry about Bull, but I think he may have saved the solar system. From what I knew of him, he’d think that was pretty kick-ass.” “Bull,” Fred said, raising his glass again. “And Sam,” Holden added, raising his own. “I’m leaving soon, so I wanted to check in with you.” “Wait. Leaving? Like leaving leaving, or like Bull and Sam leaving?” “You’re not rid of me yet. I need to get back out to Medina Station,” Fred said. He poured himself a little more bourbon, frowning down at the glass like it was a delicate operation. “That’s where all the action is.” “Really? I thought I heard something about the UN secretary-general and the Martian prime minister having a sit-down. I thought you’d be heading to that.” “They can talk all they want. The real power’s in the geography. Medina’s in the hub where all the rings connect. That’s where the power is going to be for a good long time.” “How long do you think the UN and Mars keep letting you run that show? You have a head start, but they have a bunch of really dangerous ships to throw at you if they decide they want your stuff.” “Avasarala and I are back channeling a lot of this. We’ll keep it from getting out of hand.” Fred paused to take a long drink. “But we have two big problems.” Holden put down the glass. He was starting to get the sense that him asking for – and getting – the discount on repairs might not actually have been the end of the negotiation after all. “Mars,” Holden said. “Yes, Mars is dying,” Fred agreed with a nod. “No stopping that. But we also have a bunch of OPA extremists making noise. The Callisto attack last year was their work. The water riot on Pallas Station. And there have been other things. Piracy’s up, and more of those ships have a split circle painted on them than I’d like.” “I’d think any problems they had would be solved by everyone getting their own free planet.” Fred took another pull of his drink before he answered. “Their position is that the Belter culture is one adapted to space. The prospect of new colonies with air and gravity reduces the economic base that Belters depend on. Forcing everyone to go down a gravity well is the moral equivalent of genocide.” Holden blinked. “Free planets are genocide?” “They argue that being adapted to low g isn’t a disability, it’s who they are. They don’t want to go live on a planet, so we’re killing them off.” “Okay, I can see not wanting to spend six months pumped full of steroids and bone growth stimulators. But how are we killing them?” “For one thing, not all of them can tolerate that. But that’s not really the point. It’s that this,” Fred said, waving at the space station around them, “is pretty much over once everyone has a planet. For generations, at the minimum. Maybe forever. No reason to dump resources into the outer planets or mining the Belt when we can find the same stuff down a well and get free air and water to boot.” “So once they don’t have anything anyone wants, they’ll just starve to death out here?” “That’s how they see it,” Fred said. He and Holden shared a quiet moment while they drank. “Yeah,” Holden finally said. “Well, they’ve got a point. But I don’t know what they can do about it.” “There are people trying to figure that out. But it’s ramping up.” “Callisto and Pallas.” “And more recently they ran an attack on Earth with an old mothballed heavy freighter.” Holden laughed. “I haven’t read that Earth got bombed, so that must not have worked.” “Well, it was a suicide attack, and the suicide half worked. The UN fleet in high orbit patrol reduced the freighter to gas a tenth of an AU from the planet. No damage, not much press. But it’s possible those were all preliminary. That they’re planning some big showy statement about how the Belt can’t be ignored. The thing that scares the shit out of me is that no one can figure out what it will be.” The gently sloping main corridor of the Tycho Station habitation ring was filled with workers. Holden didn’t pay much attention to the station schedules, but he assumed the crowds passing him meant it was shift change. Either that, or an orderly evacuation with no alarms sounding. “Yo! Holden,” someone said as they passed. “Hey,” Holden said, not sure who he was saying it to. Celebrity was not something he’d figured out how to handle, yet. People would point, stare, whisper to each other when he walked by. He knew it generally wasn’t intended as insult. Just the surprise people felt when someone they’d only seen on video screens before suddenly appeared in the real world. Most of the murmured conversations, when he could overhear them, consisted of Is that James Holden? I think that’s James Holden . “Holden,” a woman walking toward him down the corridor said, “what’s up?” There were fifteen thousand people on Tycho, working in three different shifts. It was like a small city in space. He couldn’t remember if the woman speaking to him was someone he should know or not, so he just smiled and said, “Hey, how’s it going?” “Same same,” she said as they passed. When he reached the door to his apartment it was a relief that the only person inside was Naomi. She sat at the dining table, a steaming mug of tea in front of her, a distant look in her eyes. Holden couldn’t tell if she was melancholy or solving a complex engineering problem in her head. Those looks were confusingly similar. He pulled himself a cup of water out of the kitchen tap, then sat across from her waiting for her to speak first. She looked up through her hair at him and gave him a sad smile. Melancholy, then, not engineering. “Hey,” she said. “Hey.” “So I have a thing.” “Is it a thing I can fix?” Holden asked. “Point me at the thing.” Naomi sipped at her tea, buying time. Not a good sign, because it meant this was something she wasn’t sure how to talk about. Holden felt his stomach muscles tightening. “That’s kind of the problem, actually,” she said. “I need to go do something, and I can’t have you involved in it. At all. Because if you are, you’ll try to fix it and you can’t do that.” “I don’t understand,” Holden said. “When I come back, I promise full and complete disclosure.” “Wait. Come back? Where are you going?” “Ceres, to start,” Naomi said. “But it may be more than that. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone.” “Naomi,” Holden said, reaching across the table to take her hand. “You’re scaring the shit out of me right now. There’s no way you can jet off to Ceres without me. Especially if it’s something bad, and I’m getting the feeling it’s something really bad.” Naomi put down her tea, and gripped his hand in both of hers. The fingers that had been holding the mug were warm, the others cool. “Except that is what’s happening. There’s no negotiation on this. So, either I go because you understand and will give me the space to handle this on my own, or I go because we’ve broken up and you no longer get any vote in what I do.” “Wait, what?” “Have we broken up?” Naomi asked. She squeezed his hand. “No, of course not.” “Then thank you for trusting me enough to let me handle this on my own.” “Is that what I just said?” Holden asked. “Yeah, pretty much.” Naomi stood up. She had a packed duffel on the floor next to her chair that Holden hadn’t seen. “I’ll be in touch when I can, but if I can’t, don’t read anything into it. Okay?” “Okay,” Holden replied. The whole scene had taken on a vaguely dreamlike feel. Naomi, standing at the end of the table holding her olive-green duffel bag, seemed very far away. The room felt bigger than it was, or else Holden had shrunk. He stood up too, and vertigo made him dizzy. Naomi dropped the duffel on the table and wrapped both arms around him. Her chin was against his forehead when she whispered, “I’ll be back. I promise.” “Okay,” he said again. His brain had lost the ability to form any other words. After one last tight squeeze, she picked up her bag and walked to the door. “Wait!” he said. She looked back. “I love you.” “I love you too,” she said, and then was gone. Holden sat back down, because it was that or sink to the floor. He finally pulled himself out of the chair a minute or an hour later; it was hard to tell. He had almost called Amos to join him for a drink when he remembered Amos and Alex were gone too. Everyone was. It was strange how nothing could change while everything did. He still got up every morning, brushed his teeth, put on a fresh set of clothes, and ate breakfast. He arrived at the repair docks by nine a.m. local time, put on a vacuum suit, and joined the crew working on the Rocinante . For eight hours he’d climb through the skeletal ribs of the ship, attaching conduit, installing replacement maneuvering thrusters, patching holes. He didn’t know how to do everything that needed to be done, but he wanted to, so he shadowed the technicians doing the really complicated work. It all felt very normal, very routine, almost like still having his old life. But then he’d return to his apartment eight hours later and no one would be there. He was truly alone for the first time in years. Amos wouldn’t come by asking him to hit a bar. Alex wouldn’t watch the video streams sitting on his couch and making sarcastic comments to the screen. Naomi wouldn’t be there to ask about his day and compare notes on how the repairs were coming. The rooms even smelled empty. It wasn’t something about himself he’d ever had to face before, but Holden was coming to realize how much he needed family. He’d grown up with eight parents, and a seemingly endless supply of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. When he’d left Earth for the Navy, he’d spent four years at the academy with roommates and classmates and girlfriends. Even after his dishonorable discharge, he’d gone straight to work for Pur’N’Kleen on the Canterbury and a whole new loose-knit family of coworkers and friends. Or if not family, at least people . The only two people he’d been close with on Tycho were Fred, so busy with his political machinations he barely had time to breathe, and Sam, who’d died in the slow zone years ago. The new Sam – Sakai – was a competent engineer and seemed to take fixing his ship seriously, but had expressed no interest in any association outside of that. So Holden spent a lot of time in bars. The Blauwe Blome was too noisy and too filled with people who knew Naomi but not him. The places close to the docks were full of boisterous workers coming off shift and picking a fight with a famous guy seemed like a great way to blow off steam. Anyplace else with more than four people in it at a time turned into line up to have your picture taken with James Holden then ask him personal questions for an hour . So, he found a small restaurant nestled in a side corridor between a residential section and a strip of commercial shopping outlets. It specialized in what the Belters were calling Italian food and had a small bar in a back room that everyone seemed to ignore. Holden could sit at a tiny table skimming the latest news on his hand terminal, reading messages, and finally check out all the books he’d downloaded over the last six years. The bar served the same food as the restaurant out front, and while it was not something anyone from Earth would have mistaken for Italian, it was edible. The cocktails were mediocre and cheap. It might almost have been tolerable if Naomi hadn’t seemingly fallen out of the universe. Alex sent regular updates about where he was and what he was up to. Amos had his terminal automatically send a message letting Holden know his flight had landed on Luna, and then New York. From Naomi, nothing. She still existed, or at least her hand terminal did. The messages he sent arrived somewhere. He never got a failed connection from the network. But the successfully received message was his only reply. After a couple weeks of his new bad Italian food and cheap cocktails routine, his terminal finally rang with an incoming voice request. He knew it couldn’t be from Naomi. The light lag made a live connection unworkable for any two people not living on the same station. But he still pulled the terminal out of his pocket so fast that he fumbled it across the room. The bartender – Chip – said, “Had a few too many of my margaritas?” “The first one was too many,” Holden replied, then climbed under the booth looking for the terminal. “And calling that a margarita should be illegal.” “It’s as margarita as it gets with rice wine and lime flavor concentrate,” Chip said, sounding vaguely hurt. “Hello?” Holden yelled at the terminal, mashing the touch screen to open the connection. “Hello?” “Hi, Jim?” a female voice said. It didn’t sound anything like Naomi. “Who is this?” he asked, then cracked his head on the edge of the table climbing back out and added, “Dammit!” “Monica,” the voice on the other end said. “Monica Stuart? Did I catch you at a bad time?” “Sort of busy right now, Monica,” Holden said. Chip rolled his eyes. Holden flipped him off, and the bartender started mixing him another drink. Probably as punishment for the insult. “I understand,” Monica said. “But I have something I’d love to run past you. Is there any chance we can get together? Dinner, a drink, anything?” “I’m afraid I’m on Tycho Station for the foreseeable future, Monica. The Roci is getting a full refit right now. So —” “Oh, I know. I’m on Tycho too. That’s why I called.” “Right,” Holden said. “Of course you are.” “Is tonight good?” Chip put the drink on a tray, and a waiter from the restaurant out front popped in to carry it away. Chip saw him looking at it and mouthed Want another? at him. The prospect of another night of what the restaurant laughably called lasagna and enough of Chip’s “margaritas” to kill the aftertaste felt like slow death. The truth was, he was bored and lonely. Monica Stuart was a journalist and had serious problems about only showing up when she wanted something. She always had an ulterior motive. But finding out what she wanted and then saying no would kill an evening in a way that wasn’t exactly like every other evening since Naomi left. “Yeah, okay Monica, dinner sounds great. Not Italian.” They ate salmon sushi from fish grown in tanks on the station. It was outrageously expensive, but being paid for by Monica’s expense account. Holden indulged himself until his clothes stopped fitting. Monica ate sparingly, with small precise movements of her chopsticks, almost picking up the rice one kernel at a time. She ignored the wasabi altogether. She’d aged some too, since Holden had last seen her in person. Unlike Fred, the extra years looked good on her, adding a sense of experience and gravitas to her video-star looks. They’d started the evening talking about little things: how the ship repairs were going, what had happened to the team she’d taken on the Rocinante back when the Ring was a new thing, where Alex and Amos and Naomi had gone. He’d found himself talking more than he meant to. He didn’t dislike Monica, but she wasn’t someone he particularly trusted either. But she knew him, and they’d traveled together, and even more than good food, he was hungry to talk to someone he actually sort of knew. “So there’s this weird thing,” she said, then dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin. “Weirder than eating raw fish on a space station with one of the solar system’s most famous reporters?” “You’re flattering me.” “It’s habit. I don’t mean anything by it.” Monica rooted around in the satchel she’d brought and pulled out a flimsy roll-out video screen. She pushed plates out of the way and flattened the screen out on the table. When it came on, it showed the image of a heavy freighter, blocky and thick, heading toward one of the rings inside the slow zone. “Watch this.” The picture sprang into motion, the freighter burning toward a ring gate at low thrust. He assumed it was the one that led from the solar system to the slow zone and Medina Station, but it could have been any of the others. They all looked pretty much the same. When the ship passed through the gate, the image flickered and danced as the recording equipment was bombarded with high-energy particles and magnetic flux. The image stabilized, and the ship was no longer visible. That didn’t mean much. Light passing through the gates had always behaved oddly, bending the images like refraction in water. The video ended. “I’ve seen that one before,” Holden said. “Good special effects but the plot’s thin.” “Actually you kind of haven’t. Guess what happened to that ship?” Monica said, face flushed with excitement. “What?” “No, really, guess. Speculate. Give me a hypothesis. Because it never came out the other side.” Chapter Six: Alex “Hey, Bobbie,” Alex said to his hand terminal’s camera. “I’m gonna be downstairs in Mariner for a week or two, stayin’ with a cousin. I was wondering if you wanted to get lunch while I’m in town.” He ended the message and sent it, put his hand terminal back in his pocket, fidgeted, took it out again. He started paging back through his contacts, looking for another distraction. With every minute, he came closer to the thin exosphere of home. They were already inside the orbit of Phobos and the now invisibly thin scatter of gravel that people called the Deimos Ring. The drop ship didn’t have screens, but from here he’d have been able to see the massive steel of Hecate Base spilling up the side of Olympus Mons. He’d been a boot there after he joined the Navy. Mariner Valley had been one of the first large-scale settlements on Mars. Five linked neighborhoods that burrowed into the sides of the vast canyons, huddling under the stone and regolith. The network of bridges and tubes that linked them were called Haizhe because the westernmost bridge structures and the trailing tubes made a figure like a cartoon jellyfish. The later high-speed line to Londres Nova was a spear in the jellyfish’s crown. Three waves of Chinese and Indian colonists dug deep into the dry soil there, eking out a thin, perilous existence, pushing the limits of human habitation and ability. His family had been one of them. He’d been an only child to older parents. He had no nieces or nephews, but the variety of Kamal cousins in the Valley were enough that he could go from one guest room to another for months without wearing out his welcome at any one of them. The drop ship shuddered, the atmosphere outside thick enough now to cause turbulence. The acceleration alarm chimed pleasantly and a recorded voice instructed him and the other passengers to check the straps on their gel couches and put any objects more than two kilos into the lockers set into the wall at their sides. The braking burn would commence in thirty seconds, and reach a maximum burn of three gs. The automated concern made that sound like a lot, but he supposed some folks would be impressed. He put his hand terminal in the locker, cycled it closed, and waited for the braking rockets to push him back into his couch. In one of the other compartments, a baby was crying. The countdown tones began, a music of converging intervals distinguishable in any language. When the tones resolved into a gentle and reassuring chord, the burn kicked in, pressing him into the gel. He dozed as the ship rattled and shook. The atmosphere of Mars wasn’t thick enough to use it for aerobraking on their steep descent path, but it could still generate a lot of heat. Half-awake, he ran through the math of landing, the numbers growing more and more surreal as the light sleep washed over him. If something had gone wrong – a change in the burn, an impact shudder passing through the ship, a shift in the couch’s gimbals – he’d have been awake and alert in an instant. But nothing happened, so nothing happened. As homecomings went, it wasn’t bad. The port proper was at the base of the valley. Six and a half kilometers of stone rose up from the pads, the strip of sky above them hardly more than thirty degrees from rim to rim. The processing station was one of the oldest buildings in Mariner, its massive clear dome built with the dual purposes of blocking radiation and providing a view that would impress with its scale. The canyons ran to the east, rugged and craggy and beautiful. Lights glittered from the canyon’s sides where the neighborhoods impinged out from the rock, the homes of the insanely wealthy trading the safety of deep stone for the status of an actual exterior window. A transport flier passed, hugging low to the ground where the relatively thick air gave its gossamer wings a little more purchase. Once upon a time, the data said, Mars had been the home of its own biosphere. Rain had fallen here. Rivers had flowed. Not, perhaps, in the geologic eyeblink of human history, but once. And would, the terraformers promised, again. Not in their lifetimes or their children’s, but one day. Alex waited in the customs queue, looking up. The pull of the planet, only about one-third g, felt strange. No matter what the math said, thrust gravity felt different than being down a well. Between the magnificence of the canyons and the eeriness of his weight, Alex felt the anxiety growing in his chest. He was here. He was home. The man processing the arriving travelers wore a thick mustache, white with a tinge of red. His eyes were bloodshot and his expression glum. “Business or pleasure?” “Neither one,” Alex drawled, “I’m here to see the ex-wife.” The man gave a quick smile. “That going to be a business meeting, or pleasure?” “Let’s call it not-business,” Alex said. The processor stroked the screen of his terminal, nodded toward the camera. As the system confirmed that he was who he claimed to be, Alex wondered why he’d said that. He hadn’t said that Tali was a shrew, he hadn’t insulted her, but he’d leaned on the assumption for a quick joke. He felt like she deserved better from him. Probably she did. “’Joy your stay,” the processing man said, and Alex was free to enter the world he’d left. His cousin Min stood in the waiting area. She was ten years younger than him, the last vestiges of youth falling from her and the first comfortable heft of middle age creeping in. Her smile belonged to a little girl he’d known once. “Hey there, podner,” she said, the Mariner drawl probably half a degree thicker than it normally was. “What brings you round these parts?” “More sentiment than sense,” Alex said, opening his arms. They embraced for a moment. “You got any luggage?” Min asked. “Traveling light.” “Fair enough. I’ve got a cart down at the front.” Alex hoisted an eyebrow. “You didn’t need to do that.” “They’re cheaper than they used to be. The kids aren’t back from lower U for another four hours. You got anything you want to do before we’ve got them underfoot?” “The only two things I’ve been looking forward to were seeing people and a bowl of Hassan’s noodles.” The look of embarrassment passed over Min’s face and vanished again in an eyeblink. “There’s a great noodle shop over on the south face. Garlic sauce that’ll knock you sideways. But Hassan packed it in about four years ago.” “Ah. No, it’s all right. The thing about Hassan’s wasn’t that they were good.” “Well, now that’s truth.” “It’s just that they were his.” The cart was a common electric, wider and tougher than the ones they used on stations. The tires were clear polymer that wouldn’t streak the floors of the corridors. Alex slid into the passenger’s seat, Min taking the controls. They talked about small, domestic things – who in the family was getting married, who was getting divorced, who was moving and where. A surprising number of Min’s siblings were on ships headed for the Ring, and though she didn’t say it outright, he had the sense that she was more interested in hearing about what he’d seen on the other side of it than in him. They passed down a long access tunnel and then across one of the linking bridges to Bunker Hill. It was the neighborhood where Alex had grown up. His father’s ashes were in the crypt at the synagogue, his mother’s had been scattered over the Ophir Chasmata. The first girl he’d ever kissed had lived in rooms two corridors down from the place Min’s family was in now. His best friend growing up had been an ethnic Chinese boy named Johnny Zhou who’d lived with an older brother and sister on the other side of the canyon. Driving along the corridors now, the memories flooded him. The curve of the corridor where the Lone Star Sharabaghar had held weekend dance and drinking contests. The time when he was nine that he’d been caught stealing gum from the bodega at the corner of Dallas corridor and Nu Ren Jie. Getting violently sick in the bathrooms at the Alamo Mall Toll Plaza. A thousand things like them probably happened every day. The only thing that made Alex’s experiences different at all was that they were his. He didn’t recognize for a while what was making him uncomfortable. Like the difference between thrust and planetary gravity, the emptiness of the corridors was almost too subtle to notice at first. Even as Min drove deeper into the neighborhood, it was the lights he noticed, and then the locks. All along the corridors, scattered like a handful of thrown sand, rooms and businesses were closed, the windows dark. That in itself didn’t mean much, but Alex noticed first one, then a few, then – like flowers in a meadow – a sudden spread of the clunky external locks that landlords and security put on doors when the units weren’t in use. He kept up his end of the banter with his cousin, but he started counting as they drove. In the next hundred doors – homes, businesses, maintenance closets, schools – twenty-one weren’t in use. As Min pulled the cart to a halt at her own doorway, he mentioned it. “Yup,” she said with a lightness that seemed forced. “Ghost world.” Somewhere in the years he’d been gone, Talissa had moved. The old rooms they’d had together were in Ballard, tucked in between the naval station and the old water processing plant. According to the local directories, she was in Galveston Shallow now. It wasn’t the neighborhood he’d imagined for her, but things changed. Maybe she’d come into money. He hoped so. Anything that had made her life better, he was in favor of. The corridors of Galveston Shallow were wide. Half the light came down shafts from the surface, the actual light of the sun strung through a series of transparent shielding to keep the radiation to a minimum. The wide, sloping ceilings gave the place a sense of being natural, almost organic, and the smell of the mechanical air recyclers was nearly hidden by the rich, loamy scents of growing plants. Wide swaths of greenery filled the common areas with devil’s ivy and snake plant. The sorts of things that cranked out a lot of oxygen. The moisture in the air was strange and soothing. This, Alex realized, was the dream of Mars made real, if small. The terraforming project would make the whole planet like this someday, if it worked. Flora and fauna and air and water. Someday, centuries after he was gone, people might walk on the surface of Mars, surrounded by plants like these. Might feel the real sun against their skins. He was distracting himself. He checked his position on his hand terminal against Tali’s new address. His heart was going faster than usual and he wasn’t sure what to do with his hands. He wondered what she’d say, how she’d look at him. Anger or joy would both be justified. Still, he hoped for joy. His plan – find the place, gather himself, and ring the bell – failed because as soon as he turned the last curve to her rooms, he saw her. She was kneeling in among the plants in the common space, a trowel in one hand. She wore thick canvas work pants smeared with soil and a pale brown shirt with a wealth of pockets and loops for gardener’s tools, most of them empty. Her hair was a rich brown, so free of gray it had to be dyed. Her face was wider, thicker at the cheeks. Time had been kind to her. She wasn’t beautiful. Maybe she’d never been beautiful, but she was handsome and she was Talissa. Alex felt a smile twitch at his lips, born more from anxiety than pleasure. He pushed his hands into his pockets and ambled over, trying to seem casual. Tali looked up from her work, then down. Her shoulders tensed and she looked up again, staring in his direction. He lifted a hand, palm out. “Alex?” she said as he reached the edge of the garden space. “Hey, Tali,” he said. When she spoke, the only thing in her voice was a flat disbelief. “What are you doing here?” “I had some downtime while my ship’s getting fixed up. Thought I’d come back to the old stompin’ ground. Touch base with folks. You know.” Talissa nodded, her mouth taking the uneven curl that meant she was thinking hard. Maybe he should have reached out with a message before he came. Only it had seemed to him this was a meeting that should be face-to-face. “Well,” she said. “All right.” “I don’t want to interrupt. But, maybe when you’re done, I could buy you a cup of tea?” Tali rolled back onto her heels and tilted her head. “Alex, stop it. What are you doing here?” “Nothing,” he said. “No. Something. You’re here for something.” “Really, I’m not. I just —” “Don’t,” she said, conversationally. “Don’t bullshit me. No one just shows up at their ex-wife’s house out of the blue because they thought a cup of tea sounded nice.” “Well, all right,” Alex said. “But I thought…” Tali shook her head and turned back to digging through the black soil. “Thought what? That we’d get a drink together, talk about old times, get a little maudlin? Maybe fall into bed for nostalgia’s sake?” “What? No. I’m not —” “Please don’t make me be the bad guy here. I have a rich, full, complex life that you chose not to be a part of. I have a lot on my plate just now that I don’t actually want to share with you, and comforting the guy who walked out on me umpteen years ago because he’s… I don’t know, having his midlife crisis? It’s not my priority, and it’s not something that’s fair to expect of me.” “Oh,” Alex said. His belly felt like he’d swallowed a tungsten slug. His face felt flushed. She sighed, looking up at him. Her expression wasn’t cruel. Wasn’t even unkind. Tired, maybe. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We’re a couple people who used to know each other. At this point, we’re maybe even a little less than that.” “I understand. I’m sorry.” “I didn’t put you in this position. You put me in it. I was just working with my plants.” “I know. I didn’t mean to discomfort you. Not now, and not before.” “Not before? Before, when you walked out on me?” “It wasn’t what I meant to have happen, and it wasn’t about you or —” She shook her head sharply, grimacing as she did. “No. Not going to do this. Alex? We’re talking about the past. That’s the conversation I just said I don’t want to have. All right?” “All right.” “Okay.” “Sorry if things are… rough.” “I’ll be fine,” she said. He lifted his hand again, the same gesture he’d made walking up to her, but with a different meaning now. He turned. He walked away. The humiliation was like a weight on his chest. The urge to turn back, to have one last look in case maybe she was looking at him was almost too much to resist. He resisted it. She was right. It was why he’d appeared on her doorstep without warning. Because he’d known that if she said no, he had to respect that, and somewhere in the back of his mind, he’d thought that if they were there, breathing the same air, it would be harder for her to turn him away. And maybe it had been. Maybe what he’d done was actually make it worse for her. The first bar he came to was named Los Compadres, and the air inside it smelled of hops and overheated cheese. The man behind the bar looked barely old enough to drink, his sallow skin set off by ruddy hair and a mustache that could generously be called aspirational. Alex took a high stool and ordered a whiskey. “Little early in the day for celebration,” the barkeep said as he poured. “What’s the occasion?” “It turns out,” Alex said, exaggerating his Mariner Valley drawl just a little for the effect, “that sometimes I’m an asshole.” “Hard truth.” “It is.” “You expect drinking alone to improve that?” “Nope. Just observing the traditions of alienated masculine pain.” “Fair enough,” the barkeep said. “Want some food with it?” “I’d look at a menu.” Half an hour later, he was only halfway through the drink. The bar was starting to fill up, which meant maybe twenty people in a space that would have taken seventy. Ranchero music played from hidden speakers. The thought of going back to his cousin’s and pretending to be cheerful was only a half a degree worse than continuing to sit in the bar, waiting for his self-pity to fade. He kept trying to think about what he could have said or done differently that would have made any difference. So far the best he’d come up with was Don’t walk out on your wife , which was about the same as saying Be someone else . His hand terminal buzzed. He pulled it up. A written message tagged from Bobbie Draper. HEY, ALEX. SORRY IT TOOK SO LONG TO GET BACK TO YOU. THINGS ARE WEIRDLY BUSY. YES, IF YOU’RE IN TOWN, I’D LIKE TO MEET WITH YOU. MAY HAVE A FAVOR TO ASK, IF YOU’RE UP FOR IT. SWING BY ANYTIME. Her address was in Londres Nova. Alex tapped it, and the screen shifted to a map. He wasn’t far from the express tube. He could be out there by supper. He touched the bar top with his hand terminal, paid for the drink, and stretched. In the corridor, a cart had broken down, and half a dozen maintenance workers were clumped around it. A woman with skin the color of milk walking past did a subtle double take when Alex nodded. Wondering, he guessed, whether he was the pilot for James Holden. He walked on before she could ask the question. Yeah. It would be good to see Bobbie. Chapter Seven: Amos The spaceport had been built a kilometer outside Lovell City a century before. Now, it was the geographical heart of Luna’s largest metropolis, though you wouldn’t have been able to tell that from space. Luna boasted very few actual domes. The constant rain of micro-meteors turned a dome into a randomly firing atmosphere ejection port. So as the shuttle descended, the only visible signs of the city were the occasional surface access points and the spaceport itself. The docks weren’t the originals, but they were still damned old. The decking had all been white once. Gray pathways marked where years of boots and carts had worn down tracks. The union office looked down over the long hall through pockmarked windows, and the air had the gunpowder stink of lunar dust. The extortion boys showed up at the disembarking area in force to stare Amos down as he left the ship. He smiled and waved and kept Rico, Jianguo, and Wendy close to him until they were out of the long flight terminal. “Hermano,” Rico said, shaking hands with Amos. “Where you headed to now?” “Down the well,” Amos said. “You fellas take care of that little girl, right? And good luck with the new jobs.” Jianguo hugged Wendy close. “We will. Xie xie usted ha hecho.” Rico and Jianguo stared at him like they expected something else, but Amos had nothing left to say so he turned and walked away toward the terminal for planetary drops. The waiting area was housed in a large false dome designed to impress the tourists. The whole thing was underground, but the massive chamber was covered floor to ceiling with ultra-high-definition video screens showing the outside view. The hills and craters of the lunar surface stretched off in all directions, but it was the blue-and-green half-circle hanging in the sky that drew the most attention. It was beautiful at this distance. The cities nothing but firefly twinkles on the dark side. Where the sun struck the Earth, almost nothing man had made was visible from the lunar orbit. The planet looked clean, unspoiled. It was a pretty lie. Seemed like a fact of the universe that the closer you got to anything, the worse it looked. Take the most beautiful person in the solar system, zoom in on them at the right magnification and they were an apocalyptic cratered landscape crawling with horrors. That’s what the Earth was. A shining jewel from space, up close a blasted landscape covered with mites living by devouring the dying. “One ticket to New York,” he said to the automated kiosk. The drop to Earth was short enough that no one tried to run an extortion racket on him, so that was nice. The flight itself was bumpy and nauseating, so that was less nice. One thing about space: it might be a big radiation-filled vacuum that’d kill you in a heartbeat if you weren’t paying attention, but at least it never had turbulence. There weren’t any windows on the shuttle, but the front of the cabin had a big viewscreen showing the descent through the forward external cameras. New York grew from a gray smudge to a visible cityscape. The spaceport on the artificial land mass south of Staten Island went from a silver postage stamp to a vast network of landing pads and launching rails surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean just past the entrance to Lower New York Bay. Tiny toy ships of suitable size for bobbing in a child’s bath grew into the vast solar-powered cargo ships that crawled back and forth across the oceans. Everything visible on the descent was clean and technologically sleek. That was a lie too. By the time the shuttle landed he was ready to get into the grunge of the city if only to see something that was honest about itself. When he stood up in the full gravity of Earth to walk off the shuttle, he wanted it to feel wrong, oppressive after all his years away. But the truth was that something deep in him, maybe down at the genetic level, rejoiced. His ancestors had spent a few billion years building all their internal structures around the constant of one g downward pull, and his organism breathed a sigh of relief at the amazing rightness of it. “Thank you for flying with us,” a pleasantly nondescript face said from the video screen next to the exit. The voice was carefully crafted to have no specific regional dialect or obvious gender markers. “We hope to see you again soon.” “Go fuck yourself,” Amos said to the screen with a smile. “Thank you, sir,” the face replied, actually seeming to look him in the eye. “TransWorld Interplanetary takes your comments and suggestions seriously.” A short tube ride from the landing pad to the spaceport visitors center later and he was in the customs line to enter New York City and officially walk on Earth soil for the first time in twenty-some years. The visitor center stank of too many bodies pressed too tightly together. But under it there was a faint, not-unpleasant odor of rotting seaweed and salt. The ocean, just outside, seeped into everything. An olfactory reminder to everyone passing through the Ellis Island of the space age that Earth was absolutely unique to the human race. The birthplace of everything. The salt water flowing in everyone’s veins first pulled from the same oceans right outside the building. The seas had been around longer than humans, had helped create them, and then when they were all dead, it’d take their water back without a thought. That, at least, wasn’t a lie. “Citizenship, guild, or union docs,” the bored-looking man at the customs kiosk said. It appeared to be the only job left in the building not done by a robot. Computers, it seemed, could be programmed to do almost anything but sense when someone was up to no good. Amos had no doubt a full body scanner was looking him over, measuring his heart rate, his skin moisture levels, his respiration. But all of those things could be faked with drugs or training. The human behind the counter would be looking to see if he just seemed wrong. Amos smiled at him. “Sure,” he said, then pulled up his UN citizenship records on his hand terminal and the customs officer’s computer grabbed them and compared them to the database. The officer read his screen, his face betraying nothing. Amos hadn’t been home in almost three decades. He waited to be directed off to the additional security line for a more thorough search. It wouldn’t be the first unfamiliar finger up his ass. “Okay,” the customs officer said. “Have a good one.” “You do the same,” Amos replied, not able to fully keep the surprise off his face. The customs guy waved an impatient hand at him, telling him to move along. The person waiting behind him in line cleared their throat loudly. Amos shrugged and moved across the yellow line that legally separated Earth from the rest of the universe. “Amos Burton?” someone said. An older woman in an inexpensive gray suit. It was the sort of thing mid-level bureaucrats and cops wore, so he wasn’t surprised when the next thing she said was, “You need to come with us now.” Amos smiled at her and considered his options. Half a dozen other cops were converging on him in the tactical body armor high-risk entry teams wore. Three of them had tasers out, the other three semiautomatic handguns. Well, at least they were taking him seriously. That was sort of flattering. Amos raised his hands over his head. “You got me, Sheriff. What are the charges?” The plainclothes officer didn’t respond, and two members of the tactical team pulled his hands behind his back and cuffed him. “I’m wondering,” Amos said, “because I just got here. Any crimes I’m going to commit are theoretical at this point.” “Shush now,” the woman said. “You’re not under arrest. We’re going to take a ride.” “And if I don’t want to?” “Then you’ll be under arrest.” The port authority police station was pretty much exactly like every other police station Amos had ever spent time in. Sometimes the walls were industrial taupe; sometimes they were government green. But the concrete walls and glass-fronted offices looking out over a crowded bull pen of desks would have been just as comfortable on Ceres as it was on Earth. Even the burnt-coffee smell was the same. The plainclothes cop took him past the desk sergeant with a nod and deposited him in a small room that didn’t look like the interrogation rooms he was used to. Other than a table and four chairs, the only other furnishing was a massive video screen covering most of one wall. Plainclothes sat him in a chair across from it, then left the room, closing the door behind her. “Huh,” Amos said, wondering if this was some new interrogation technique in the cop playbook. He leaned back in the chair to get comfortable, maybe try to catch some shut-eye after the nauseating shuttle ride. “What is this? Nap time? Someone wake him the fuck up,” a familiar voice said. Chrisjen Avasarala was on the screen, looking down on him, her face four times its real size on the giant monitor. “Either I’m not in any trouble, or I’m in all of it,” Amos said with a grin. “How you doin’, Chrissie?” “Good to see you too. Call me that again and I’ll have an officer beat you gently with a cattle prod,” Avasarala replied, though Amos thought he caught a hint of a smile on her face. “Sure thing, Madam Uber Secretary. This a social call, or…?” “Why,” Avasarala said, all traces of humor gone, “are you on Earth?” “Came to pay respects to a friend who died. Did I forget to file a form or something?” “Who? Who died?” “None of your fucking business,” Amos said with a false amiability. “Holden didn’t send you?” “Nope,” Amos replied, feeling the anger start to warm his belly like a slug of good scotch. He tested the restraints, calculating his odds of getting out of them. Of fighting his way past a room full of cops. It made him smile without realizing it. “If you’re here for Murtry, he isn’t on Earth right now,” Avasarala said. “He claims you beat him half to death in the Rocinante ’s airlock during the flight back. Do you mean to finish the job?” “Murtry swung first, so technically, that was self-defense. And if I’d wanted him dead, don’t you think he’d be dead? It’s not like I quit hitting him because I was tired.” “So what, then? If you have a message for me from Holden just spit it out. If Holden is sending messages to someone else, tell me who and what they are right now.” “Holden didn’t send me to do shit,” Amos said. “Am I repeating myself? I feel like I’m repeating myself.” “He —” Avasarala started, but Amos cut her off. “He’s the captain of the ship I sail on, he ain’t the boss of my fucking life. I’ve got personal shit to do, and I came here to do it. Now either book me for something or let me go.” Amos hadn’t realized Avasarala was leaning forward in her chair until she relaxed back into it. She let out a long breath that turned into a sigh. “You’re fucking serious, aren’t you?” “Not known for my comic stylings.” “All right. But you understand my concern.” “That Holden is up to something? Have you met that guy? He’s never done anything secretly in his life.” Avasarala laughed at that. “True. But if he’s sending his hired killer to Earth, we —” “Wait, what?” “If Holden was —” “Forget Holden. You called me his hired killer. Is that how you guys think of me? The killer on Holden’s payroll?” Avasarala frowned. “You’re not?” “Well, mostly I’m a mechanic. But the idea that the UN has a file on me somewhere that lists me as the Rocinante ’s killer? That’s kind of awesome.” “You say that kind of thing, it doesn’t make me think we’re wrong, you know.” “So,” Amos said, shrugging with his shoulders like an Earther, his hands still behind his back, “we done here?” “Mostly,” Avasarala said. “How was everyone when you left? Good?” “Roci got beat to shit during the Ilus thing. But crew’s good. Alex is trying to reconnect with an ex. Captain and Naomi are still rubbing uglies pretty regular. Same same, mostly.” “Alex is on Mars?” “Well, his ex is. I assume he’d head over there, but he was still on Tycho last I saw him.” “That’s interesting,” Avasarala said. “Not the part where he’s reconnecting with his ex-wife, though. No one ever tries that without seeming like an asshole.” “Right?” “Well,” Avasarala said, then looked up at someone offscreen. She smiled and accepted a steaming cup from a disembodied hand, then took a long sip and sighed with pleasure. “Thank you for meeting with me, Mr. Burton.” “Oh, it was my pleasure.” “Please keep in mind that my name is pretty closely connected with the Rocinante , Captain Holden, and his crew at this point.” “So?” Amos said with another shrug. “So,” Avasarala said, then put her steaming cup down and leaned forward again. “If you’re about to do something I’ll need to cover up later, I’d appreciate a call first.” “You got it, Chrissie.” “Honestly. Fucking stop that,” she said with a smile. The screen went black, and the woman who’d stopped him at the port came in. Amos pointed to the screen with his chin. “I think she likes me.” The street level view of New York wasn’t all that different from the Baltimore streets he’d grown up on. Lots of tall buildings, lots of automated street traffic, lots of people stratified into two distinct groups: those who had someplace to be, and those who didn’t. The employed scuttled from public transit to office buildings and back again at shift change. They bought things from street vendors, the simple fact of having currency a mark of status. Those on basic drifted and bartered, living on the excess created by the productive, and adding to it where they could with under-the-table industry too small for the government to notice. Drifting among them like ghosts, invisible to anyone not from their world, was a third group. The ones who lived in the cracks. Thieves looking for an easy score. Pushers and con artists and prostitutes of every age group, every point on the spectrum of gender and sexual orientation. The kind of people Amos had once been. A corner pusher saw him looking and frowned back, seeing Amos for what he was without recognizing him. It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be in town long enough for it to get to anyone who’d come demanding to know where he fit in their ecosystem. After walking for a couple hours, getting used to the feel of the gravity and concrete beneath his feet, Amos stopped at a hotel he picked at random and checked in. One thing about him had changed, and that was money. Shipping with the Rocinante , for all its dangers and drama, had turned out to be a profitable gig. With the shares he’d cashed out, Amos didn’t have to worry about how much the hotel would cost; he just asked for a room and told his terminal to pay for anything the hotel charged him. In his room, he took a long shower. Lydia’s face stared back at him from the bathroom mirror as he brushed his teeth and shaved off the short stubble growing on his head. Getting clean had the feeling of ritual. Like preparations made by a holy man before performing some sacred rite. When he was done, he sat down nude in the middle of the room’s large bed and looked up Lydia’s obituary. LYDIA MAALOUF ALLEN, PASSED AWAY WEDNESDAY, APRIL 14TH AT… Allen. Amos didn’t know that name. As an alias it wasn’t a very good one, since Lydia Maalouf was the name he’d always known her by. Not an alias then. A married name? That was interesting. SHE IS SURVIVED BY HER HUSBAND OF ELEVEN YEARS, CHARLES JACOB ALLEN… Over a decade after he’d left, Lydia had married a man named Charles. Amos probed at that idea, like poking a finger into a wound to see if it was infected. To see if it hurt. The only reaction he found was curiosity. SHE PASSED QUIETLY IN HER PHILADELPHIA HOME, WITH CHARLES AT HER SIDE… Charles was the last one to see her alive, so he was the first one Amos needed to find. After reading the rest of the obituary several times, he logged on to the public mass transit site and booked a ticket for that night on the high-speed rail to Philadelphia. Then he lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. He was oddly excited by the idea of meeting Lydia’s husband. As if her family was his, and Charles was a person he should always have known, but was only now getting to meet. Sleep eluded him, but the soft bed relaxed the muscles tightening in his back, and the last of the nausea from the shuttle ride faded. The path ahead was clear. If Lydia had, indeed, died quietly in her own bed with a loving husband at her side, then he would meet this man. See the home she’d lived in. Put flowers on her grave and say his last goodbye. If not, he’d kill some people. Neither possibility excited him more than the other. Either one was fine. He slept. Chapter Eight: Holden Holden ran the video back and watched it again. The ship, an ugly box of metal with additional storage containers strapped to its flanks, made him think of the supply-laden covered wagons in old westerns. It wasn’t far from the truth. The Rabia Balkhi , registered to Captain Eric Khan out of Pallas, was still just goods and people heading into the frontier to stake a claim. Fewer horses, maybe, but more fusion reactors. Again, the ship passed through the gate, the image wiggled and jumped, the Balkhi was gone. “So?” Monica asked, her voice rich with anticipation. “What do you think?” He scratched his arm, deciding what the answer was. “There are a million reasons an old rust bucket like that might disappear out there,” he said. “Loss of core containment, loss of atmospheric pressure, run into debris. Hell, the radio might have just gone out and they’re living comfortably on a new planet and hoping someone will drop by to check on them.” “Maybe,” Monica said with a nod. “If there was only one. But four hundred thirty-seven ships have passed through the rings into new solar systems over the last year. And of them, thirteen have just vanished. Poof.” She spread her fingers out like a tiny explosion. Holden did the math in his head. That was something like a three percent rate of loss. Back when he’d been in the Navy, the budgets had assumed about half of a percent loss to mechanical failure, asteroid impacts, sabotage, and enemy action. This was six times that. “Huh,” he said. “That seems pretty high for ships that were able to fly the year and a half to get to the Ring.” “Agreed. Way too high. If ships blew up without explanation that regularly, no one would ever fly.” “So,” Holden said, then paused to order another drink from the table menu. He had a feeling he’d need it. “Why isn’t anyone talking about it? Who’s keeping track of them?” “No one!” Monica said triumphantly. “That’s the whole thing. No one is tracking them. We have thousands of ships leaving the inner system and streaming toward the gates. They belong to citizens of three different governments, and some who don’t think of themselves as citizens of any government. Most of these people never even filed a flight plan, they just threw their suitcases in a rock hopper and blasted off for the new worlds.” “Real estate grabs are like that, I guess.” “So here they are, heading off alone or in handfuls, and all of them with the incentive to get wherever it is first. Only something’s stopping them. Disappearing them. Or, some of them anyway.” “Clearly,” Holden said, “you have a theory.” “I think it’s the protomolecule.” Holden sighed and rubbed his face with both hands. His drink arrived, and he sipped at it for a minute. The cold of the ice and the bite of the gin filled his mouth. Monica stared at him, practically bouncing with impatience. He said, “No, it’s not. The protomolecule is gone. It’s dead. I fired the last processing node into a star.” “How do you know that? Even if it was the last of the ring-building weapon, we know whoever made all this did it with protomolecule tools. And what else can it be? I’ve read the reports. All those robots and things that woke up on Ilus? The protomolecule attacks us for taking its stuff.” “No, it doesn’t,” Holden said. “That’s not what happened. Without knowing it, I’d brought a node of the original infection with me that was still trying to connect with whatever sent it out in the first place. It woke a lot of stuff up in the process. We shut it down, and, you know, shot it into a star to avoid that happening again.” “How can you be sure?” At the sushi bar, one of the chefs barked out an announcement, and half a dozen people around him applauded. Holden took a deep breath, letting it out slowly through his teeth. “I guess I can’t be. How do you prove a negative?” “I know a way that maybe you can,” Monica said. The look on her face made Holden think whatever she was about to say next was the entire reason for their conversation. It felt a little like watching a hunting cat track a steak. “Fred Johnson still has what may be the only remaining sample of the protomolecule. The one you took off the secret Mao-Kwikowski ship.” “The one I… Hey, how do you know that?” Holden said. “And how many other people know that?” “I don’t disclose sources, but I think we should get it and see if we can wake it up. Get your ghost Miller to come back and find out if the protomolecule is using the gates to destroy our ships.” Half a dozen responses crashed together in Holden’s mind, ranging from That is the worst idea I’ve ever heard to Are you even listening to what you’re saying? It took a few seconds for one to win out. “You want me to do a s?ance ?” “I wouldn’t call it a —” “No,” Holden said. “Just no.” “I can’t just let this drop. If you won’t help —” “I didn’t say I wouldn’t help. I said I’m not going to go commune with a bit of killer alien goo in hopes that it starts telling me its old cop stories. We don’t want to poke that stuff. We should leave it alone.” Monica’s expression was open and interested. He wouldn’t have been able to see her annoyance and disappointment if he hadn’t known to look. “What then?” she asked. “You know the old joke about hearing hoofbeats, right?” “I guess I don’t.” “Long story, but the point is that if you hear hoofbeats in the distance, your first guess is that they’re horses, not zebras. And you’re hearing hoofbeats and jumping straight to unicorns.” “So what are you saying?” “I’m saying let’s go see if we can find some horses or zebras before we start a unicorn hunt.” An intriguing new mystery didn’t mean Holden no longer had a day job, but it did give him something to think about other than missing Naomi. And Amos. And Alex. But mostly Naomi. As he crawled along the exposed ribs of the Rocinante ’s flank with a plasma torch in his hand and looked for cracks, he pondered where ships could go when they disappeared. Monica was right; the number was too high to be just random system failures. There were a lot of other possibilities, even discounting her protomolecule unicorn theory. But Holden had stopped believing in coincidence about when he’d first started spending time with Detective Miller. And the other big thing going on was that radical OPA factions were launching attacks on inner planet holdings like Callisto. And even Earth. A violent faction of the OPA was dead set against colonization. And, now, colony ships loaded with supplies were vanishing without a trace. Also, Medina Station – nee Behemoth nee Nauvoo and the hub of all the ring gates – was solidly in the control of the OPA. It made a compelling narrative, even if he didn’t have any actual evidence that it was true. In that scenario, the ships would be boarded by OPA pirate crews, the supplies taken, and the colonists… spaced? A gruesome idea if it were true, and still not the most horrific thing humans had ever done to each other. But that left the ships. They’d keep the ships, and then they’d have to make them disappear. That meant changing the transponder codes. The fact that the Rocinante was no longer the Tachi was proof that the OPA had that ability. “Sakai,” Holden said, chinning the radio frequency to the private channel he and the chief engineer shared. “Yo, you around?” “Problem?” he replied in a tone of voice that sounded like he was daring Holden to have a problem. Holden had learned not to be offended by it. Impatience was Sakai’s default state. “More of a riddle.” “I hate riddles,” Sakai said. “Let’s say you’re trying to figure out if someone has stolen a bunch of ships and changed the transponder codes. How would you find those ships, if you had to?” The engineer huffed thoughtfully for a moment. “Don’t look for the missing ships,” Sakai replied. “Look for the new ones that show up out of nowhere.” “Yes, good. That,” Holden said, “is exactly right. Thanks.” He stopped at a cracked weld between the inner hull and one of the ship’s ribs and started touching it up with the torch. His faceplate darkened, turning the world into a black place with one bright blue light in it. While he worked, he thought through how you’d track the magically appearing new ships down. The public ship registry was a good place to start, but you’d drown in data trying to do it manually. If Naomi were here, he had no doubt she’d have been able to build a program to find what he wanted in ten minutes on her hand terminal. He, sadly, didn’t have her programming skills, but Fred had software engineers on the payroll, and if he — “Why?” Sakai said. It had been so long since the engineer had spoken that it took Holden a moment to remember the context for the question. “Why what? Why do I want to know how to find lost ships?” “Yeah.” “So I have this reporter friend who’s looking into some missing ships. I said I’d give her a hand. Just trying to think of ways to actually do that.” “Stuart,” Sakai said. It was half statement, half question. “I heard she was on the station.” “Yeah, my old buddy Monica. Truth is, I think she’s snipe hunting, but I said I’d help. And I need something to do that isn’t feeling lonely and sorry for myself.” “Yeah,” Sakai said, then after a long moment added, “So shit hasn’t gone weird enough for you to believe in snipes?” There was a video message light blinking on his home console. Holden tried his hardest not to hope it was from Naomi and still felt a crushing disappointment when Alex’s round face appeared on the screen. “Hi boss,” the pilot said. “So the thing where I meet up with my ex-wife and we have a tearful reconciliation? Yeah, that was a failure. Probably shoulda thought that one through a little better. But I’m plannin’ on stopping by to see Bobbie before I leave, so there’s a bright spot. How’s my girl? You guys gettin’ her all polished up and pretty for my return? I’ll check in again when I can. Kamal out.” Holden almost started his reply off by asking for a report on the ex-wife situation, but the little Naomi voice that now lived in his head said Don’t be nosey , so instead he replied, “Thanks for checking in. Give Bobbie my best. The Roci ’s still months from ready, so take your time.” He sat for a minute trying to think of something else to say, then just cut the dead air off the end of the message and sent it. It was strange how a person could be so vitally important in your life, and yet you had nothing to say to them when they weren’t sharing the same air. Normally, he and Alex would talk about the ship, about the other two crew members, about jobs. With them all split up and the Roci in dry dock, there wasn’t much left to say that wasn’t a personal invasion. Thinking about that looked like the beginning of a long dark road to bitter loneliness, so he decided to go investigating instead. He kind of wished he had a hat. “Back so soon?” Fred said when Holden was ushered into his office by one of the OPA leader’s minions. “I know my coffee is good, but…” Holden grabbed a chair and stretched out while Fred puttered with the coffee maker. “So Monica Stuart is on Tycho.” “Yeah. You think someone like that lands on this station without me knowing about it?” “No,” Holden admitted. “But do you know why she’s here?” The coffee maker started hissing to itself, and the office was filled with a rich, bitter smell. While the coffee brewed, Fred leaned over his desk tapping on the terminal. “Something with missing ships, right? That’s what our intel team says.” “Have your people looked into it at all?” “Honestly? No. I’d heard rumblings about it, but we’re buried here. Every ship with a functioning Epstein is heading through for the gates. We’ve got our hands full keeping them from running into each other going through the rings. Most of them are going into unexplored systems with no other ships or stations. We don’t hear back from a few, sort of seems like the obvious thing happening.” Holden accepted a steaming mug from Fred with a grateful nod and took a sip. The old man’s coffee didn’t disappoint. “I get that,” Holden said after another drink. “And I think her theory on it is pretty far-fetched, but it’s the kind of thing that will get public traction if we don’t find a better answer first.” “She has a theory already?” “She thinks it’s the protomolecule. The robots and tech waking up on Ilus is her one datapoint.” “You told me that was a onetime thing,” Fred said, frowning over his coffee mug. When he spoke again his words blew steam in front of them, like a whisp of dragon breath. “Is Miller back?” “No, he’s not back. As far as I know, there isn’t an active protomolecule culture in existence in the universe. But —” “But I’ve got the inactive stuff you gave me.” “Right, and Monica knows about it somehow,” Holden said. Fred’s frown only deepened at that. “I’ve got a leak somewhere.” “Yeah, you totally do, but that isn’t the part that worries me.” Fred’s eyebrows went up in a nonverbal question. “Monica,” Holden continued, “has decided that we should take out the goo and use it like some sort of Ouija board to summon the ghost of Miller.” “But that’s stupid,” Fred said. “Right? So I think we should exhaust all other possibilities before we leap right to tinkering with alien viruses.” “First time for everything, I guess,” Fred said, only lightly coating the words in sarcasm. “You have alternate theories?” “I do,” Holden said, “but you won’t like it.” “I also still have bourbon if we need anesthetic for this operation.” “It may get there,” Holden replied, then drank off the rest of his coffee to give himself time. No matter how much Fred had aged over the last half decade, Holden found himself still intimidated by the man. It was hard to broach topics Fred might take offense to. “More?” Fred asked, pointing at his empty cup. Holden declined with a shake of his head. “So there’s that radical extremist faction of the OPA that you were telling me about,” Holden said. “I don’t think —” “They’ve had at least two public attacks. One on Martian interests, and one on Earth itself.” “Both of which failed.” “Maybe,” Holden said. “But we’re assuming we know what their goals were, and that seems like a bad assumption to make. Maybe blowing up a big chunk of a Martian shipyard and forcing the UN home fleet to fire a bunch of missiles at an ancient freighter are wins to them.” “Okay,” Fred said with a grudging nod. “Fair enough.” “But there’s a third leg to this. Sure, the radicals think Earth and Mars will abandon them once the new worlds are colonized, but that means the colonists themselves are part of the problem.” “Agreed.” “So, what if this radical OPA wing decides that in addition to blowing up some of the inner planets’ shit, they can send a message by taking out some colony ships?” “Well,” Fred said, speaking slowly as though he were working out the answer as he said it, “the big problem with that is the location of the attacks.” “Because they happen on the other side of the gates.” “Exactly,” Fred continued. “If ships were getting nuked as they passed through the Belt, that would be one thing. But on the other side of the gates? Who has access there? Unless you’re thinking the ships were sabotaged in some way. A bomb with a really long fuse?” “There’s another alternative,” Holden said. “No, there isn’t,” Fred replied, anticipating his next argument. “Fred, look, I know you don’t want to think you’ve got people working against your interests on Medina. Doctoring records, maybe. Shutting off sensors when there’re things they don’t want people to see. And I get why that’s hard to swallow.” “Medina is central to our long-term plans,” Fred said, his words hard as iron. “I’ve placed all of my very best and most loyal people on that station. If the radicals have a fifth column there, then it means that I can’t trust anyone in my organization. I might as well pack it up and retire.” “There are thousands of people on Medina, I doubt you can vouch for every one of them personally.” “No, but the people running the station are my people. The most loyal I have. There’s no way something like this could be going on without their knowledge and cooperation.” “That’s a scary thought.” “It means I don’t own Medina Station,” Fred said. “It means that the most violent, hard-line, extremist faction of our group controls the choke point of the entire galaxy.” “So,” Holden said, “how would one go about finding that out?” Fred leaned back in his chair with a sigh and gave Holden a sad smile. “You know what I think? I think you’re bored, and lonely, and looking for a distraction. Don’t dismantle the organization I spent a lifetime building to give yourself something to do.” “But ships are missing. Even if it isn’t Medina taking them, something is. I don’t know that we can just ignore that and hope it goes away.” “Fix your own ship, Jim. Fix your ship and get your crew back together. This thing with the missing ships isn’t your job.” “Thanks for the coffee,” Holden said, standing up to leave. “You’re not going to drop it, are you?” “What do you think?” “I think,” Fred said, “that if you break any of my stuff, you get to pay for it.” “Noted,” Holden said with a grin. “I’ll keep you in the loop.” As he walked out the door, he could picture Miller smiling and saying, You can tell you’ve found a really interesting question when nobody wants you to answer it. Chapter Nine: Naomi Once upon a time there had been a Belter girl named Naomi Nagata, and now there was a woman. Even though the difference between the two had been created a day, an hour, a minute at a time, the Venn diagram of the two almost didn’t overlap. What could be cut away, she’d cut years ago. What remained did so in spite of her efforts. For the most part, she could work around them. “Enjoy your stay on Ceres,” the customs agent said, his eyes already flicking to the man standing behind her. She nodded, smiling politely through the spill of her hair, and walked out into the wide corridors of the spaceport. Another face among the millions. Ceres Station was the biggest city in the Belt. Six million people, more or less, in a hollowed asteroid hundreds of kilometers in diameter. She’d heard that the port traffic alone could add as many as a million transient bodies on a given day. For most of her life, it had been the symbol of inner planetary colonialism. The tower of the enemy on native Belter ground. Outside the spaceport proper, the corridors were warm bordering on hot, the entropic load of the city trapped by the thermos-bottle vacuum of space. Moisture thickened the air, and the smell of bodies and dried piss was like seeing an old friend’s smile. Three-meter-high screens shouted advertisements for machine rigs one second and high fashion the next, their clamor only a thread in the constant, roaring symphony of voices and carts and machinery. A public newsfeed was showing images of fighting somewhere on Earth. Another little insurgent cult or traditional ethnic conflict calling for its due in blood again, important only because it was on Earth. Even for Belters who’d called the float their home for generations, Earth carried a symbolic load. The mother of humanity with her boot firmly on Belter necks. On the screen, a pale-skinned man with blood sheeting down from a scalp wound held up a book. Probably a holy book. He was shouting, his mouth squared by rage. Kill as many people in the Belt, and it wouldn’t have been news. Even now. She turned spinward, looking for a food kiosk serving something appealing. There were the usual corporate products, the same at any station. Now that the OPA ran Ceres, there were also other options. Dhejet and egg curry, cow-style noodle bowl, red kibble. The foods of her childhood. Belter foods. The kitchen on the Rocinante had been designed by someone in the Martian Navy, and the food stocks it accepted were always nourishing, usually good, and sometimes excellent. But they weren’t her food. She opted for red kibble from a scarred kiosk with adhesive from generations of nightclub flyers caking its sides. It came in a brown pressed-shred container that fit in her left palm with a plastic spatula like a flattened spoon to eat with. The first bite filled her mouth with cumin and her mind with dust-covered memory. For a moment, she was in her bunk on Tio Kriztec’s ship, huddled over the white ceramic bowl she had loved then and forgotten for years, eating quietly while the others sang in the galley. She couldn’t have been more than six at the time, but the memory was fresh and bright. She took another bite, savoring it. As she did, she saw the man following her. He was thin, even for a native. His hair, a dirty gray that flowed back from his head like the folded wings of a bird. He stood maybe fifteen meters away, watching the newsfeed with an air of mild boredom. She couldn’t have said what drew her attention to him and left her certain that he was there because of her. Something about the casual way he didn’t look toward her, maybe, or the angle of his stance. Naomi turned spinward again, moving quickly without running, forcing him to keep up. As she walked, she scanned the crowd around her. If she was right, there might be others working in a team. She slid easily through the gaps in the press of bodies, finding the places that opened for a moment as people crossed her path and each other’s. She had spent six months on Ceres when she was thirteen and between ships, but the station was still a long way from home territory for her. She did her best, making for a side corridor that she was almost certain ran between the wider pathways. And maybe she was wrong. Maybe the man, whoever he was, had just happened to be there when she was feeling particularly anxious. She didn’t look back until her side corridor rejoined the larger flow of foot traffic from the next gate over. She took the ground in at a glance, and found the place she needed. A currency-changing booth four meters away with opaque privacy walls made a little space in the flow of people like a stone in a river. Without pausing, she walked to the dead space at its far side and leaned against it, her shoulder blades taking in the cool of the metal. The air was thick enough that she was sweating a little, a dampness at her collarbone and the fringes of her hair. She made herself small and unobtrusive, and counted slowly backward from a hundred. At thirty-two, Wings hurried past her, his chin high, scanning the crowd before him. The bright metallic taste of fear filled her mouth, and she turned back into the booth, and then past it the other way, down the corridor she’d just left. As she retraced her steps, her mind raced through possibilities. Marco had finally decided to end their standoff, and the threat to Filip had been bait for the trap. Or the security forces had been waiting all this time, and she was about to get caught at last. Or someone who’d watched the newsfeeds from Ilus too much had decided to stalk her. Or Marco was just sending his men to check up on her. The last wasn’t least likely. Back in the main corridor, she flagged down a cart and paid for a trip up three levels to an open park. The woman driving the cart didn’t look at her twice, which was a relief. Naomi sat back against the hard formed plastic and finished her kibble. The tires hissed against the decking as they took the ramp up, closer to the center of spin and farther from the port. “Go du-es someplace precise?” the driver asked. “Don’t know where I’m going,” Naomi said. “Know when I’m there.” She’d met Marco when she was sixteen and finishing her distributed classwork equivalency on Hygeia Station. On Luna, her work would have gotten her engineering placements at any of the big shipyards. Since it was just an equivalency, she’d known she had another three, maybe four terms before she could get the jobs, even if she already knew how to do the work. Marco had been part of a salvage and mining crew that based its repairs at Hygeia Station, then looped out into the Belt proper, scraping out rare metals and taking care, sometimes, of the wrecks of old ships that crossed their paths. And maybe, the rumor was, some wrecks that were very, very new. His captain had been an old man named Rokku who’d hated the Inner Planets as much as anyone in the Belt. The crew was the deepest flavor of OPA there was, not a military cell because no one had asked them yet. Naomi had been living with Tia Margolis, another of her adopted aunts, and trading out unlicensed work at the refining station for air, water, food, network access, and a place to sleep. At the time, Marco and his cohort had seemed like a bastion of stability. A crew that had been working the same ship together for seven missions was as good as family to her. And Marco himself had been amazing. Dark eyes, dark soft hair, a Cupid’s bow mouth, and a beard that felt against her palm the way she imagined it would to stroke a wild animal. He’d haunted the corridors outside the station bar, too young still to buy, but more than charming enough to get older people to buy for him on the few occasions he couldn’t convince the merchants to bend the rules directly. The others on Rokku’s crew – Big Dave, Cyn, Mikkam, Karal – had all outranked Marco on the ship and followed his lead on shore. There hadn’t been a particular moment when she’d become part of their crew. She’d just fallen into orbit with the others, been at the same places, laughed at the same jokes, and then at some point she was expected. When they cracked the seal on a storage gate and made it into a temporary invitation-only club, she was invited. And then before long she was helping to crack the seal. Hygeia Station hadn’t been at its best in those days. The Earth-Mars alliance had looked solid as stone back then. The taxes and tariffs on basic supplies hovered just below too expensive to sustain life. And sometimes above it. The ships that ran there ran on air so lean they courted anoxia, and the black market in usable hydroponics was a live and active one. Hygeia Station, while nominally the property of an Earth-based business conglomerate, was in practice a ragged autonomous zone held together by habit, desperation, and the bone-deep Belter respect for infrastructure. When Marco was there, even the old, cracked ceramic decking seemed a little less crappy. He was the kind of person who changed what everything around him meant. There had been a Belter girl named Naomi who would have sworn she’d follow him anywhere. She was a woman now, and she’d have said that wasn’t true. But here she was. Bistro Rzhavchina was high up toward the center of spin. Doors of rusted steel painted in sealant blocked the way in, and a bouncer half a head taller than her and twice as wide across the shoulders glowered as she passed through them. He didn’t stop her. Up this far, more of the station’s spin felt like lateral pull. Water poured on the slant. It wasn’t only the cheapness of the real estate that made these corridors thicker with Belters. The Coriolis here started to have an effect just north of subliminal, and that wasn’t a thing that Earthers and Martians ever became really comfortable with. Living in spin was a source of Belter pride, a mark of who they were and how they were different. Dark music filled the place, the rhythm like a constant, low-level assault. The floor was sticky where it wasn’t covered with peanut shells, and the smell of salt and cheap beer filled the air. Naomi went to the back, taking a seat sheltered from as many lines of sight as she could manage. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty people sat or stood around the place. She could still feel their gazes on her. Her jaw slid forward a degree, her mouth taking on a scowl that was protective coloration as much as actual displeasure. The wall she rested against vibrated with the bass. She ordered a drink from the table’s system and paid with a preloaded chit. Before the thin-faced boy behind the bar could deliver it, the metal doors to the corridor opened again and Wings came in. His movements were tight and anxious, his expression closed and angry. He hadn’t followed her here. This was where he headed back to after he failed. Naomi faded back another centimeter. Wings sat at the bar, stood up, sat again. A door hidden by shadows at the back of the club opened. The man who came out was huge. The muscles of his neck and torso were so large and defined, she could have used him as an anatomy lesson. His steel-gray hair was cut close to the scalp, white lines of scar crossing behind his left ear like the map of a river delta. A massive tattoo of the OPA’s split circle logo decorated the side of his neck. He went to the bar where Wings was waiting. Wings’ hands were already out in apology. Naomi couldn’t hear what he said, but the gist was clear enough. He’d seen her. He’d lost her. He was sorry. Please don’t rip his kneecaps off. She let herself smile a little. The big man tilted his head, nodded, said something that seemed to relieve Wings enough that he managed a smile. The big man turned slowly, squinting into the gloom of the club. When his gaze reached her, it stopped. The boy at the bar started forward, her drink on a tray. The big man put a hand on the boy’s chest, pushing him back. Naomi sat up a little straighter, looking up into the big man’s eyes as he reached the table. They were as pale as she remembered. “Knuckles,” he said. “Cyn,” Naomi replied, and then his massive arms were around her lifting her up. She returned the embrace. The smell and heat of his skin was like hugging a bear. “God, you haven’t changed at all, have you?” “Only got better, uhkti. Bigger and brighter.” He put her down with a thump. His smile drew lines all across his face like ripples in a pool. She patted his shoulder and his grin grew wider. At the bar, Wings’ eyes were big as saucers. Naomi waved at him. The man sent to follow her hesitated, then waved back. “So what did I miss?” Naomi asked as Cyn led her to the door at the back of the club. “Only all of it, sa sa?” Cyn rumbled. “How much did Marco say?” “Very damned little.” “Always the way. Always the way.” Past the thin door, a corridor snaked back into the raw stone of the asteroid. The sealant was old, gray, and flaking, and cold radiated out from the stone. Three men leaned against the wall, guns in their hands. The oldest was Karal. The younger two she didn’t know. She kissed Karal’s cheek as she passed. The others looked at her with a mix of distrust and awe. The hidden hallway ended at a steel door. “Why so secret?” she asked. “You know the OPA runs Ceres now.” “There’s OPA and there’s OPA,” Cyn said. “And you’re that other one,” she said, but with warmth in her voice that covered her unease. “Always,” Cyn agreed. The door slid open, and Cyn ducked to pass through. It was impossible to see around his bulk. Naomi followed. “Got here and no further,” Cyn said over his shoulder. “And best we don’t float too long. Plan had us back with Marco a month ago.” “Marco’s not here?” “Nobody here but us chickens.” There was a smile in the words. The chamber they stepped into was wide and cold. A portable scrubber moved stale air and left the smell of rubber. Formed plastic shelves held rations and water. A thin laminate table had five stools around it, and an old network repeater hung from a hook by its wires. A set of bunks leaned against the wall four high. There were bodies curled under the blankets, but if they were sleeping, Cyn didn’t take notice of them. His voice carried at the same volume. “Thing is, better we don’t be where anyone can reach us when it all comes down, sa sa?” “When what comes down?” Naomi said. Cyn sat at the table, reached out a long arm, and pulled an unlabeled bottle from the shelves. He pulled the cork from its neck with his teeth. “Ay, Knuckles,” he said with a laugh, “you said he didn’t tell you much, you weren’t singing low, were you?” Naomi sat on one of the stools as Cyn poured amber liquid into two glasses. The fumes smelled of alcohol and butter and burned sugar. Naomi felt her mouth responding to the scent. The taste was like coming home. “Nothing like Tia Margolis’ brandy,” Cyn said with a sigh. “Nothing, ever,” Naomi said. “So, now that I’m here, why don’t you fill me in?” “Well,” Cyn said. “It’s these pinch? ring gates. You know better than anyone. Another thousand inner planets, and a whole new set of reasons they may as well fuck the Belt, que si? And half the Belt sucking the Butcher’s cock and making themselves out noble and official and political. So we, and by we I mean Marco, yeah? We decide about two, three years ago —” “We don’t talk about it,” a young man’s voice said sharply. Cyn looked at the door. Thick with dread, Naomi turned too. The boy looked terribly old and terribly young at the same time. His skin was darker than Marco’s, and his hair had more curl. The eyes were the same, though. And the mouth. Something huge – larger than oceans – moved in her chest. Emotions she’d buried rose up, and the rip threatened to pull her away. She tried to hide it, but she had to put a hand flat on the table to steady herself. He stepped into the room. The sand-colored shirt was large on him, but she could see that his body was in the place between the coltish growth of adolescence and the thickening muscle of a man. One of the figures on the bunk stirred and turned, but didn’t otherwise react. “We don’t talk about it until we’re safely back. Not even in here. Not at all. Sabez?” “Savvy m?,” Cyn said. “Just thought since —” “I know what you thought. It passes, but we don’t talk about it.” For the first time, the young man’s eyes turned to hers. Her own struggle was mirrored in his eyes. She wondered what she looked like to him. What was in his mind and heart where hers was joy and guilt and a venomous regret. This was the moment she hadn’t allowed herself to want. She’d known it was coming since the message from Marco arrived on Tycho. She wasn’t ready for it. He made a small, quick smile and nodded to her. “Filip,” she said carefully, as if the word were fragile. When he answered, his voice could have been her echo. “Mother.” Chapter Ten: Amos The high-speed rail station in Philadelphia was near the center of a middle-income commercial area. Wage earners wandered the streets between strip malls, buying the semi-fashionable clothes and petty luxuries only available to those with currency. Only not too much currency. High-end shopping would be somewhere else, protected by security designed to keep people like these out. Even on Earth, there were people with money, and then there were people with money . It was weird for Amos to think that he might have enough in his account to pass for the latter. It amused him to imagine wandering over to some highbrow shopping center in his unstylish Belt-made clothes just to give the sales staff a fit when he dropped a couple grand on something useless. Maybe a nice solid platinum drink shaker. For that once or twice a year when he felt like drinking a martini. Maybe later. After. He headed out of the mall and toward the residential district that his hand terminal’s map said Lydia’s old house was in. At the short, tunnel-like exit he was accosted by a boy of eleven or twelve wearing a cheap paper jumpsuit, the kind that basic kiosks dispensed for free with a thumbprint. The boy offered him a variety of sexual services at rock-bottom prices. Amos grabbed the boy by the chin and tilted his face up. There were the fading yellow marks of a not-too-recent beating on his cheek, and the telltale pink around the eyelids of a pixie dust habit. “Who’s your walker?” Amos said. The boy yanked back away from his hand. “Don’t touch for free, man.” “No troubles. I’m not a grabber. Just who’s walking you? He around?” “Don’t know what you mean.” The boy started looking around for an escape route. “Yeah, okay. Get lost.” Amos watched the boy run off and felt something pressing at his stomach like the onset of a cramp. He couldn’t help out every street kid he came across. There were too many of them, and he had other work to do. Frustrating, that. Maybe the kid would find his pimp and tell him about the big scary guy who grabbed his face. Then the pimp would come looking for him, to teach him a lesson about not fucking with the merchandise. The thought put a smile back on Amos’ face and made the knot in his stomach go away. Lydia’s house was thirty-seven blocks from the train station in a low-income neighborhood, but not in a government housing block. Someone was paying actual money for the place, which was interesting. Amos didn’t think Lydia could have cleaned up her records enough to qualify for job training. Maybe the husband was a citizen with the skills and clean background to get a straight job. That was interesting too. What kind of guy living an honest citizen’s life marries an aging gangster like Lydia? Amos walked at a leisurely pace, still sort of hoping the pimp would track him down and make an appearance. An hour and a half later his hand terminal told him he’d reached his destination. The house didn’t look like much. Just a small one-level that from the street was an almost exact copy of every other small single-story house in the neighborhood. A tiny garden filled the narrow space between the house and the sidewalk. It looked lovingly tended, though Amos couldn’t remember Lydia ever owning a plant. He walked up the narrow path through the garden to the front door and rang the bell. A small, elderly man with a fringe of white hair opened a moment later. “Can I help you, son?” Amos smiled, and something in his expression made the man take a nervous half step back. “Hi, I’m an old friend of Lydia Maalouf. I just found out she’d passed, and I was hoping to pay my respects.” He worked his face for a minute, trying to find a version of his smile that didn’t scare little old men. The old man – Charles, the obituary had said – shrugged after a minute and gestured for Amos to come into the house. On the inside it was recognizably Lydia’s space. The plush furnishings and brightly colored wall hangings and curtains reminded Amos of the apartment she’d had back in Baltimore. Pictures lined the shelves and tabletops. Snapshots of the life she’d had after Amos left. Two dogs in a field of grass, grinning and lolling their tongues at the camera. Charles, more hair on his head, but still silvery white, digging in the garden. Lydia and Charles together in a restaurant, candles on the table, smiling over their wineglasses. It looked like a good life, and Amos felt something in his belly relax when he saw them. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but it was probably a good thing. “You got a name?” Charles said. “Want some tea? Was making some when you rang.” “Sure, I’d take some tea,” Amos said, ignoring the first question. He stayed in the cozy living room while Charles banged around in the kitchen. “It’s been a couple months since the funeral,” Charles said. “Were you up the well?” “Yeah, working in the Belt most recently. Sorry it took a while to make it back down.” Charles came back out of the kitchen and handed him a steaming mug. From the flavor, it was green tea, unsweetened. “Timothy, right?” Charles said, as if he were asking about the weather. Amos felt his jaw clench. Adrenaline dumped into his bloodstream. “Not for a long time now,” he replied. “She talked about your mom, some,” Charles said. He seemed relaxed. Like he knew whatever was going to happen was inevitable. “My mom?” “Lydia took care of you after your mom died, right?” “Yeah,” Amos said. “She did.” “So,” Charles said, then took another sip of his tea. “How does this go?” “Either I ask if I can take some of those roses out front to lay on her grave…” “Or?” “Or I just take them because no one lives here anymore.” “I don’t want any trouble.” “I need to know how it happened.” Charles looked down, took a deep breath, and nodded. “She had what they called an ascending aortic aneurysm. Went to sleep one night, never woke up. I called the EMTs the next day but they said she’d been dead for hours by then.” Amos nodded. “Were you good to her, Charles?” “I loved her, boy,” he replied, a hint of steel in his voice. “You can do what you want here, I can’t stop you. But I won’t have you questioning that. I loved her from the moment we met to our last kiss goodnight. I still do.” The old man’s voice didn’t quaver a bit, but his eyes were watery and his hands trembled. “Can I sit?” Amos asked. “Suit yourself. Let me know if you want more tea. Pot’s full.” “Thank you, sir. I’m sorry about rousting you like that. But when I heard, I worried —” “I know who Lydia was before we met,” Charles said, sitting down on a small couch facing him. “We were always honest with each other. But no one ever bothered us here. She just had a leaky artery and it gave out one night while she was sleeping. Nothing else.” Amos rubbed his scalp for a moment, waiting to see if he believed the old guy. Seemed like he did. “Thanks. And, again, I’m sorry if I came on strong,” Amos said. “So, can I take a few of those roses?” “Sure,” Charles said with a sigh. “Ain’t my garden much longer anyway. Take what you want.” “You moving?” “Well, the guy who was doling Lydia stopped when she died. We had a little set aside, but not much. I’ll be going on basic pretty soon, so that means the government block.” “Who was floating her?” Amos asked, already knowing the answer. “Kid named Erich. Runs a crew in Lydia’s old hometown. Somebody you used to know, I guess.” “Used to,” Amos agreed. “Does he know about you? That Lydia was married?” “Sure. He kept in touch. Checked up on us.” “And he cut you off after she died.” It wasn’t a question, and Charles didn’t answer, just sipped at his tea. “So,” Amos said, standing up, “got a thing I need to go do. Don’t start moving out yet. One way or another, I’ll make sure you’ve got the money to keep this place.” “You don’t have to do that.” “Sort of do.” “For her,” Charles said. “For her.” The high-speed to Baltimore took less time than the walk to the station had. The city itself hadn’t changed at all in the two decades Amos had been away. The same cluster of commercial high-rises, the same sprawl of basic and minimal-income housing stretching out until it hit the orderly blocks of middle-class houses on the outskirts. The same rotting seaweed smell of the drowned eastern shore, with the decaying shells of old buildings sticking out of the murky water like the ribs of some long-dead sea monster. As much as the realization bothered him, Amos had to admit it looked like home. He took an automated electric cab from the train station to his old neighborhood. Even at the street level, the city looked the same, more or less. The streetlights had been swapped out for a different, boxy design. Some of the streets had changed from pedestrian-exclusive to mixed use. The thugs and dealers and sex workers were different faces now, but they were all on pretty much the same corners and stoops their predecessors had worked. New weeds growing in all the city’s cracks, but they were the same cracks. He had the cab let him out at a corner coffee stand that was licensed to accept basic ration cards. It was in the exact same location as the last place he’d ever eaten in Baltimore before he left. The cart and the franchise brand were different, but the assortment of rolls and muffins looked identical. “Tall cup and a corn muffin,” he said to the girl working the cart. She looked so surprised when his terminal transferred actual money instead of basic ration credits that she almost dropped his food. By the time his Ceres New Yuan routed through the network and into UN dollars, with every exchange and transfer tacking on fees, he wound up paying triple for his snack. The muffin tasted like it had been recycled from old, previously eaten corn muffins. And the coffee could have passed for a petroleum product, but he leaned against a wall beside the stand and took his time finishing both. He tossed what was left into recycling and thanked the girl. She didn’t reply. His space money and foreign clothes left her staring at him like some sort of alien creature. Which, he supposed, he sort of was. He had no idea where to start looking for Erich. But he didn’t have to walk far before a teenage girl with machine-quality braids and expensive cotton pants drifted out of a shadowy doorway. “Hey,” he said. “You got a minute?” “For you, Mongo?” “Name’s not Mongo,” Amos said with a smile. He could see fear in her eyes, but it was well hidden. She was used to dangerous strangers, but part of that was she knew they were dangerous. “Should be, brute like you.” “You’re local. Help a guy out.” “You need herbage? Dust? I got neuros, that’s your thing. Make you fly outta this shithole.” “Don’t need your stuff to fly, little bird. Just a question.” She laughed and gave him her middle finger. He wasn’t a customer, so he wasn’t anything. She was already turning back to her dim doorway. Amos grabbed her upper arm, firmly but gently. There was a spark of real fear in her eyes. “Gonna ask, little bird. You answer. Then I let you fly.” “Fuck you, Mongo.” She spat at him and tried to pull her arm out of his grip. “Stop that. Just gonna hurt yourself. All I want to know is, who runs your crew? Looking to talk to a guy called Erich. Messed-up arm? If your crew ain’t with him, just point me at someone who is, sabe?” “Sabe ?” She stopped struggling. “Speak English, asshole.” “Erich. Looking for Erich. Just point me and I’m gone.” “Or maybe I bleed you out,” a new voice said. Someone big came out of the same doorway his little bird used. A mountain of a man with scars around his eyes and his right hand inside the pocket of his baggy sweatshirt. “Let her go.” “Sure,” Amos said, and turned little bird loose. She bolted for the steps up to her doorway. The walking mountain gave him a nasty grin. Taking Amos’ compliance for fear. “Now get gone.” “Naw,” Amos said, smiling back. “Need to find Erich. Big boss now from what I hear. He running your crew? Or can you point me at a crew working for him?” “I fucking told you to —” Whatever else the mountain was about to say turned into a gurgle after Amos punched him in the throat. While the mountain was trying to remember how to breathe, Amos yanked up the bruiser’s sweatshirt and plucked out the pistol he had tucked in his belt. He stomped on the back of the mountain’s leg to drop him to his knees. He didn’t point the pistol at him, just held it casually in his right hand. “So, this is how it goes,” Amos said in a voice low enough the mountain would hear him but no one else would. Embarrassment was the number one reason people fought. Reduce how embarrassed the mountain was, reduce the likelihood he’d continue fighting. “I need to find Erich, and either you’re my friend on that, or you’re not. Do you want to be my friend?” The mountain nodded, but he wasn’t talking yet. “See, I like making new friends,” Amos said and patted the thug on his beefy shoulder. “Can you help your new pal find his other friend, Erich?” The mountain nodded again and managed to rasp out, “Come with me.” “Thanks!” Amos said, and let him up. The mountain shot a look at the dim doorway, probably signaling little bird to call ahead to someone – hopefully Erich’s crew – with a warning. That was all right. He wanted Erich to feel safe when they met. If he had a lot of guys with guns with him, he’d be more likely to relax and listen to reason. The mountain led him through his old neighborhood and down toward the docks and the crumbling stone monolith of the failed arcology project there. He was limping a little, like his knee was bothering him. A couple of guys with baggy coats that only sort of hid the heavy weapons underneath nodded at them as they went in, and then fell in step behind them. “An escort and everything,” Amos said to one of them. “Don’t do nothing stupid,” came the reply. “Fairly sure I’m a few decades late on that one, but I take your point.” “Gun,” the other guard said, holding out his hand. Amos dropped the pistol he’d liberated from the mountain into it without a word. From the outside, the old arcology structure was falling apart. But once inside, the look changed dramatically. Someone had replaced the water-damaged flooring with new tile. The walls were painted and clean. The rotting wood doors off the main corridor had been replaced with composites and glass that could take the damp air. It looked like nothing so much as a high-end corporate office building. Whatever Erich was up to, he was doing well for himself. They stopped at an elevator, and the mountain said, “He’s up on the top floor. I’m gonna bail, okay?” His voice still rasped, but it sounded a lot better. “Thanks a lot for the help,” Amos said without sarcasm. “Take care of that throat. Ice it up when you get back and try not to talk too much. If it’s still bugging you in three days, steroid spray’ll do it.” “Thanks,” the mountain croaked and left. The elevator dinged and opened, and one of his two remaining guards pointed inside. “After you.” “Gracias,” Amos said and leaned against the back wall of the car. The guards followed, one of them sliding a metal card into the elevator controls and hitting the top button. On the way up, Amos entertained himself by figuring out how he’d get the gun away from the guard closest to him and kill the other. He had a pretty workable strategy in mind when the elevator dinged again and the doors slid open. “This way,” one guard said, and pointed down a hallway. “The club level,” Amos replied. “Fancy.” The top floor had been redesigned with plush furnishings and a maroon velvet carpet. At the end of the hall the guards opened a door that looked like wood but seemed heavy enough that it was probably steel core. Still fancy, but not at the cost of security. After the luxury of the hallway, the office on the other side of the door was almost utilitarian. A metal desk dominated by screens for a variety of network decks and terminals, a wall screen with an ocean view pretending to be a window, and a big rubber ball instead of an office chair. Erich always had been twitchy sitting still too long. “Timmy,” Erich said, standing behind the desk like it was a barricade. The two guards moved off to flank the door. “People call me Amos now.” Erich laughed. “Guess I knew that, right?” “Guess you did,” Amos said. Erich looked good. Healthy in a way he’d never looked as a kid. He even had a middle-aged man’s spare tire around the gut. He still had the small, shriveled left arm. And from the way he was standing, he looked like he’d still walk with a limp. But now, surrounded by his success and his well-fed chubbiness, they looked like trophies of a past life instead of disabilities in the current one. “So,” Erich said, “kind of wondering what you’re doing in town.” “He beat up Troy,” one of the guards said. “And Laci says he manhandled her some too.” “Did he kill anyone?” Erich asked. When neither guard answered, he said, “Then he’s still being polite.” “That’s right,” Amos agreed with an amiable nod. “Not here to mess up your shit, just here to chat.” “So,” Erich said, sitting back down on his rubber ball chair, “let’s chat.” Chapter Eleven: Alex Three days after he’d seen Talissa – for what he had to think now was the last time – and gone afterward to eat with Bobbie Draper, Alex knew it was time to go home. He’d had dinners with family and a couple old friends; he’d seen the ways his old hometown had changed and the ways it hadn’t. And he’d determined once again that sometimes a broken thing couldn’t be fixed. That was the closest he was going to get to having it be okay. But before he left, there was one more person he was going to disappoint. The express tube to Londres Nova hummed to itself, the advertisements above the seats promising to make the lives of the riders better in a hundred different ways: technical certifications, improved undergarments, tooth whitening. The facial-recognition software didn’t seem to know what to make of him. None of the ads spoke to him. The closest was a thin lawyer in an olive-green suit offering to help people find passages to the new systems beyond the Ring. Start a new life in the off-world colonies! We can help! Across from him, a boy of about seventeen was staring quietly into space, his eyes half-open at the edge of boredom and sleep. When Alex had been about the boy’s age, he’d been deciding whether to go into the Navy or apply for upper university. He’d been dating Kerry Trautwine even though Mr. Trautwine was a religious zealot who hated him for not belonging to the right sect. He’d spent his nights playing battle simulations with Amal Shah and Korol Nadkarni. This boy across from him was traveling the same corridors that Alex had, eating at some of the same restaurants, thinking about sex in likely more or less the same terms, but he also lived in a different universe. Alex tried to imagine what it would have been like to include travel to an alien planet in among his options at seventeen. Would he have still enlisted? Would he have met Talissa? A gentle, mechanical voice announced their arrival at the Aterpol terminal. The boy’s eyes opened, roused back to full consciousness, and he shot a distrustful look at Alex. The deceleration pushed Alex’s back, feeling almost like a long attitude burn. Almost but not quite. Aterpol was the downtown of Londres Nova, the only station with connections to all of the neighborhoods that made up the city. The vaulted ceilings curved over the common areas, the access doors along the walls double-sealed to keep air from leaking into the evacuated tubes. The terminal itself opened into a wide public park with real trees rising from the soil into the artificial twilight. Benches made to look like wood and iron stood scattered along the winding paths, and a pond filled the air with the smells of algae and moisture. The reassuring breeze-murmur of the air recyclers passed under everything like a constant and eternal prayer. Windows rose up along the walls, light streaming out of them or not. The rooms that looked out over Alex as he walked were businesses and apartments, restaurants and maintenance halls. Alex crossed the park to the farther gates, where the local tubes ran to the other neighborhoods. Innis Shallow, where Bobbie lived, didn’t have the best reputation. The worst that Mars had to offer wasn’t as bad as an iffy sector on Ceres Station, though, and regardless anyone who took on Bobbie was either suicidal or had an army behind them. At the Innis Shallow station, Alex shrugged into his jacket and went on foot. There were carts for rent and a girl of no more than fourteen with a scavenged rickshaw calling on the corner. It was a short walk, though, and Alex was dreading the conversation at the end of it. He’d walked the same path three days before, still smarting from his abortive meeting with Tali, following his hand terminal’s directions to Bobbie’s rooms. He hadn’t seen the former marine since Luna the night that the Ring had lifted itself off the ruins of Venus and flown out toward the far edge of the system, and he’d been looking forward to anything that would distract him from the day he’d been having until then. Bobbie was living in a very pleasant side corridor with its own greenway in the center and lights that had been fashioned to look like wrought-iron lamps from someone’s imagined 1800s London. He’d only had to stand at her door for a few seconds before it opened. Bobbie Draper was a big woman, and while years of civilian life had lost her a little of her muscle definition, she radiated competence and strength the way a fire did heat. Every time he saw her, he remembered a story from ancient history about the native Samoans armed with rocks and spears driving the gun-toting Spanish conquistadors into the sea. Bobbie was a woman who made that shit seem plausible. “Alex! Come in. I’m sorry the place is a mess.” “Ain’t worse than my cabin at the end of a long run.” The main room was wider than the ops deck back on the Roci , and done in shades of terra-cotta and gray that shouldn’t have worked together, but did. The dining table didn’t seat more than four, and there were only two chairs beside it. Through an archway across from the front door, a wall monitor was set to a slowly shifting spray of colors, like Monet’s water lilies animated. Where most places would have had a couch, a resistance-training machine dominated the space, a rack of chrome free weights beside it. A spiral staircase led up and down in the den’s corner, bamboo laminate steps glowing warmly in the light. “Fancy digs,” Alex had said. Bobbie’s glance at her own rooms seemed almost apologetic. “It’s more than I need. A lot more than I need. But I thought I’d like the space. Room to stretch out.” “You thought you would?” She shrugged. “It’s more than I need.” She put on a brown leather jacket that looked professional and minimized the breadth of her shoulders, then led him to a fish shack with shredded trout in black sauce that had been some of the best he’d ever had. The beer was a local brew, served cold. Over the course of two hours, the sting of Talissa’s voice and his feeling of self-loathing lost their edges, if they didn’t quite vanish. Bobbie told stories about working veterans’ outreach. A woman who’d come in to get psychiatric help for her son who wouldn’t stop playing console games since he’d finished his deployment. Bobbie had made contact with the boy’s first drill sergeant, and now the kid had a job at the shipyards. Or the time a man came in claiming that the sex toy lodged in his colon was service related. When Bobbie laughed, Alex laughed with her. Slowly, he’d started taking his turn too. What it had been like on the far side of the Ring. Watching Ilus or New Terra or whatever the hell they wound up calling it as it went through its paroxysms. What it had been like shipping back with a prisoner, which led into the first time they’d shipped a prisoner – Clarissa Mao, daughter of Jules-Pierre and sister to the protomolecule’s patient zero, that one had been – and how Holden and Amos and Naomi were all doing these days. That had been when the ache hit. The homesickness for his crew and their ship. He enjoyed Bobbie’s wit and the easy physicality of her company, but what he’d really wanted – then and in the days since – was to be back on the Rocinante . Which was why the end of their conversation had been so awkward for him. “So, Alex,” Bobbie said, her attempt to make the words as casual and friendly as everything that had gone before flagging them at once, “are you still in touch with anyone over at the naval yard?” “I know a few guys still serving at Hecate, sure.” “So I was wondering if I could get you to do a little favor for me.” “Sure, of course,” Alex said. And then a fraction of a second later, “What is it?” “I’ve got a kind of hobby thing going on,” she said, looking pained. “It’s… unofficial.” “Is it for Avasarala?” “Sort of. The last time she was through, we had dinner, and some of the things she said got me thinking. With the new worlds opening up, there’s a lot of change going on. Strategies shifting. Like that. And one of the big resources Mars has – one of the things that there’s going to be a market for – is the Navy.” “I don’t understand,” Alex said, leaning back in his chair. “You mean like mercenary work?” “I mean like things going missing. Black market. We’ve been through a couple pretty major wars in the last few years. A lot of ships got scrapped. Some of them it seems like we just lost track of. And the Navy’s stretched pretty thin. I don’t know how much energy they’re putting into tracking things right now. You know there was an attack on the Callisto shipyards?” “Saw something about that, yeah.” “So that’s an example, right? Here’s a big incident, and the first response is all about identifying who was behind it and rebuilding the defenses.” “Sure,” Alex said. “You’d want to do that, right?” “So figuring out exactly what was lost in the attack is on someone’s to-do list, but it’s not the top. And with all the shit going on, it may never get to the top. And everyone kind of knows that, even if they aren’t saying it.” Alex drank, put down the bottle, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “So if there’s a profiteer on the base, they could take the opportunity to lift some equipment that survived, sell it on the black market, and call it lost.” “Exactly. I mean to some degree, that’s always happening, but right now, with things a little chaotic and getting weirder all the time?” “And with Mars losing a lot of its people to colony ships.” “Yeah, that too,” Bobbie said. Her expression was hard. Alex sat forward, his elbows on the table. The smell of trout and black sauce still hung in the air, though the plates were gone by then. On the screen at the front of the restaurant, a young woman in a parody of business wear danced to a computer-generated pop tune. Alex hadn’t been able to make out the language; at a certain speed every language sounded equally meaningless. “You’re telling me that you’re investigating the sources of black market military equipment flowing off Mars.” “Weapons,” Bobbie said. “Medical supplies. Ammunition. Power suits. Even ships.” “And you’re doing it on your own, for fun, because of something Chrisjen Avasarala said to you.” “I’m kind of working for her.” Alex laughed. “I’m almost afraid to point this out, but you started off saying you needed a favor. You haven’t told me what the favor is.” “A lot of the guys on Hecate won’t talk to me. I’m a marine, they’re Navy. There’s that whole thing. But you know them, and even if you don’t, you’re one of them in a way I’m not going to manage this lifetime. I was wondering, as a favor, if you could help me dig a little.” Alex had nodded at the time, but what he’d said was “Let me think about it.” And now, because it was Bobbie and because he needed something in his life to actually have a moment of real closure, he was going to see her one last time to tell her the answer was no. He had a ship to get back to. If there was something he could do for her from there, he’d be pleased to lend a hand. His first priority now was getting off Mars and not coming back. He reached the end of her corridor. The iron lanterns were glowing, creating the illusion of a street back on Earth centuries before. The echo of a place that neither he nor Bobbie had ever been, and still it was pleasant and comforting. He walked slowly, listening to the almost-silent chucking of the recyclers as if, just behind them, he could catch the murmur of the flowing Thames. Somewhere nearby a man shouted once and briefly. It was Innis Shallow after all. Alex walked a little faster. At Bobbie’s door, he paused. It was closed, but not solidly. A black smudge, perfectly round and dented into the flesh of the panel, marked it just where the latch met the frame. A thin line of light at the door’s edge showed where the frame had bent, the ceramic shattering. The man’s voice came again, a low mutter rising to a final, powerful snap. It was coming from inside Bobbie’s rooms. Alex’s heart beat triple time as he pulled out his hand terminal and tapped quickly, quietly to the local system’s emergency services link. He thumbed in an alert request and a confirmation, but didn’t fill in the details screen. There wasn’t time for it. He stood before the door, his hands in fists, wishing as hard as he’d ever wished anything that Amos was there too. He pushed the door open and rushed in. Bobbie was at the table, sitting in one of the two chairs. Her arms were behind her. Her legs were splayed out before her, too long for the chair to accommodate. There was blood on her mouth and down the side of her neck. A man in gray coveralls was pointing a gun at the back of her head. Two other men, dressed in the same gray, turned toward Alex. Both of them had automatic pistols in their fists. A fourth man, this one in a causal suit the color of ash and a bright blue shirt, turned to Alex, his expression equal parts surprise and annoyance. When he saw Alex, his eyes went wide. “Fuck!” the man in the suit said, the syllable almost lost in the noise of cracking wood. Bobbie moved faster than Alex could follow, shrugging the chair she was bound to into splinters and grabbing the gunman behind her by the wrist. He screamed and something wet happened to his arm. One of the pistol men fired wildly, the stuttering report assaulting Alex’s ears. He rushed forward shouting and barreled into the man in the suit. Together, they staggered back. The other man’s knee rammed into Alex’s groin, and the world dissolved into blinding pain. Alex slid to his knees, trying to hold the man by his suit jacket. The guns continued their barrage and the stink of spent powder filled the air. The man in the suit dug for a shoulder holster, and Alex grabbed his arm. The man’s wrist was like holding concrete. There was a gun in his fist. Someone shouted, and the roar of gunfire became the roar of something else, deeper and more animal. Alex pulled himself forward, the pain in his testicles fading to merely excruciating. He bit the solid wrist, sinking teeth into the raw silk sleeve and digging until his incisors met. The man in the suit didn’t even cry out, just brought his other hand down hard on Alex’s temple. Everything got a little quieter, a little more distant. Alex felt his grip slip off the man’s arm, felt himself falling back, landing hard on his tailbone. The pain was there, but foggy. The man in the suit lifted his pistol to point at Alex. The barrel looked wide as a cave. Oh , Alex thought, I die like this. The man’s head twitched forward in a curt nod and he crumpled. Then it was Bobbie standing before him, a six-kilo free weight curled in one hand. The chrome had blood on it and what looked like hair. No one was shooting guns anymore. “Hey,” Alex said. “You all right?” Bobbie asked, sitting next to him. One of the gunmen staggered past her, cradling his forearm, and bolted out the door. She didn’t go after him. “Little achy,” Alex said, then rolled to his side and retched. “It’s okay,” Bobbie said. “You did really well.” “Been a long time since hand-to-hand. I probably could have done better if I’d had some practice.” “Yeah, well. There were four of them with guns and two of us without. All things considered, we did okay.” She blew out a long breath, her head sinking low. Alex tried to sit up. “You all right?” “Got shot a couple times,” she said. “Smarts.” “Shit. You’re hurt?” “Yeah. I’m going to get over to the console there in a minute. Call emergency services before blood loss makes me woozy.” “I already did that,” Alex said. “Before I came in.” “Good planning.” “Not sure planning had much to do with it,” Alex said. And then, “Bobbie? Stay with me here.” “I’m here,” she said, her voice sleepy. “I’m all right.” In the distance, Alex heard the rising tritone of sirens. Breath by breath, they grew closer. For a long moment, he thought the deck was being shaken, then realized it was just his body, trembling. At the side of the room, one of the gunmen lay slumped against the wall. His neck was at a strange angle, and blood was drying on his chest. He wasn’t bleeding though. Dead, then. The man in the suit coughed and gagged, choking. The sirens got louder. There were voices now too. A woman identifying herself as police and warning them that people were coming in. “I was coming to tell you,” Alex said. “I’ll stay. I’ll help.” “Thanks.” “This was about the black market stuff, wasn’t it?” Alex said. “I guess you’ve been asking the right questions.” Bobbie managed a smile. Looking at her now, there was a lot of blood on her shirt. “Don’t know,” she said. “All they asked me about was you.” Chapter Twelve: Amos “Want some coke?” Erich asked. “Not synth. Real stuff that came from a plant.” “Nope. But I’d take a drink if one is handy,” Amos replied. The pleasantries were just ritual, but ritual was important. In Amos’ experience the more dangerous any two people were, the more carefully polite their social interactions tended to be. The loud, blustering ones were trying to get the other guy to back down. They wanted to stay out of a fight. The quiet ones were figuring out how to win it. “Tatu, bring the El Charros,” Erich said, and one of the two guards slipped out the door. To Amos he added, “Been on a tequila kick lately.” “I haven’t,” Amos said. “Earth is still the only place you can get good tequila. The Belter stuff is undrinkable.” “Not a lot of blue agave up there, I guess.” Amos shrugged and waited. Tatu returned with a tall skinny bottle and two narrow shot glasses. Erich filled both then lifted one in salute. “To old friends.” “Old friends,” Amos repeated and tossed back his shot. “Another?” Erich asked, pointing at the bottle. “Sure.” “Seen much of the neighborhood?” “Just what was between here and the train station.” “Hasn’t changed much,” Erich said, then paused while they both drank off their shots. He refilled their glasses. “Faces change, but the corners stay the same.” “Funny, I was just thinking that same thing on my way in. Things have changed for you though.” “Not the important ones,” Erich said with a grin and wiggled his small, withered left arm. Amos gestured at the room, the guards, the renovated building around them. “When I left, you were running for your life. So, at least one thing’s different.” “You guys can go,” Erich said to Tatu and his partner. They slipped out quietly and shut the door behind them. That seemed like a good sign. Either it meant that Erich was sure Amos wasn’t there to kill him, or Erich had a way of protecting himself that didn’t require other people. It wouldn’t be a gun under the desk. That was too direct for Erich. Amos started casually scanning for wires or suspicious lumps on his chair or the floor beneath it. Erich poured two more shots of tequila then said, “I learned something important from you, when you left.” “Do tell.” “I’ll never be the toughest guy in any room, unless I’m by myself,” Erich said, waving his small arm again. “But I’m usually the smartest. Executing a plan can be subcontracted out. Making the plan in the first place, not as much.” “True enough,” Amos agreed. “It’s why I’ll never be the captain of a ship.” Erich reacted to that. He didn’t change his expression or flinch, but Amos could see the words getting taken in and filed as important. “But always useful, you,” Erich said. “You were always useful. You on a crew now?” “You haven’t seen me in the news?” “I have. You look different. Shaved your head, got your nose broke a few more times. But I’ll never forget a name.” “Well, not this one anyway,” Amos said, and then tossed his shot back in a toast to Erich. “Gracias for that, by the way.” “So, you still with that crew?” Erich said. “I am. Why?” “Because you’re sitting in my office right now drinking my tequila. Still playing that out in my head. Useful guy like you can always get work. If that’s what you want, I’ve got it. But if you’re not here looking for work, what are you looking for?” Amos grabbed the bottle and poured himself another drink. Erich tried very hard not to look nervous. He’d had a lot of practice, because he almost pulled it off. Time can change a lot. Erich had gone from twitchy little hacker with a price on his head to the boss of a respectable chunk of Baltimore’s harbor-front property. But some things don’t change. Some tells never go away. While Erich sat very still and looked him in the eye without blinking, the tiny hand on his deformed left arm opened and closed like a baby grabbing at a toy just out of reach. “Went to Lydia’s house,” Amos said, sipping slowly at the tequila. “Not Lydia’s house anymore. She’s dead,” Erich said. “That what this is about? I treated her like you would have after you left.” “Yeah?” Amos asked, eyebrows going up. “Well,” Erich admitted with an embarrassed look to the side. “Not exactly like you would have.” “Thank you for that too,” Amos said. “You didn’t kill me once when you had every reason to, and after that, you couldn’t have stayed,” Erich said, leaning forward. His left hand had stopped clenching. “Walking away from her was part of the favor you did for me. I never forgot that. And she helped me, at first. Helped me build what I have now. Taught me to use brains to beat brawn. She never lacked for a thing it was in my power to give.” “And I appreciate that,” Amos repeated. Erich’s eyes narrowed and his right hand came up from under the desk with a short-barreled automatic in it. Amos found himself surprised and a little proud of his friend. Erich rested his hand on the desk, the gun pointed away from Amos, more a warning than a threat. “If you’ve got some beef you came here to settle,” Erich said, “you won’t be the first guy to leave this office in a bag.” Amos raised his hands a little in mock surrender. “Not even armed, chief. I came here to talk.” “So talk.” “What you did for Lydia was real nice,” Amos said, putting his hands back down slowly but keeping his eye on the gun. “But you’re wrong. She’s not all dead. Some of her’s left.” Erich cocked his head to the side, frowning. “Gonna need to walk me through that one.” “There’s an old man loved her and lived with her and kissed her goodnight before she died. A house with a little rose garden they worked together. Maybe some dogs. I saw a picture, but not sure if they’re still around.” “I still don’t get it,” Erich said. Amos rubbed his thumb against his knuckle, trying to find the words. It wasn’t a thought he’d said out loud before, and if he screwed it up and Erich misunderstood, there was a chance they’d wind up trying to kill each other. So it was worth thinking about some. “It’s like this. The old man keeps the house until he dies. He’s the only thing she left behind. He’s the last bit of her. He keeps the house.” Erich put the little gun flat on the desk and poured himself another drink. He leaned back, holding the glass with his right hand. He couldn’t pick the weapon back up without dropping the drink and he couldn’t do that faster than Amos could reach him. It was a signal, and Amos felt the tension leave the muscles in his neck and shoulders. “That’s more sentimental than I would have guessed,” Erich said. “I’m not sentimental about much,” Amos agreed. “But when I am, I’m pretty passionate.” “So I’ve heard the request. What’s the payoff for me? I had something of a debt to Lydia, but I don’t owe the old man shit. What does this win me, I keep him on the dole?” Amos sighed, and gave his oldest friend a sad smile. “Really?” “Really.” “I don’t kill you, kill those two guys outside. I don’t dismantle this organization from the top down and rebuild it with someone who’ll owe me a favor.” “Ah,” Erich said. “There he is.” Amos had to admit, Erich had grown some stones. He didn’t even look down at the gun on the desk as he was being threatened. Just gave Amos his own version of the tragic smile. “There who is?” Amos asked. “Timmy.” “Yeah, I guess. It wouldn’t be my first choice, though. So how’s this go?” “Costs me almost nothing to keep the old man’s house,” Erich said, then shook his head as if disagreeing with himself. “But even if it did, I’d still do it. Just to keep Timmy off my streets.” “Again, thanks.” Erich shooed the gratitude away with a wave of his good hand, then stood up and walked to the office’s large screen pretending to be a window. The gun still lay on the desk, ignored now. Amos considered it briefly, then leaned farther back in his chair and put his hands behind his head, elbows spread out wide. “Funny, right?” Erich said, pointing out the window at something Amos couldn’t see. “All those new faces and old corners. Shit changes and doesn’t. I did, you didn’t.” “I live on a spaceship and fight alien monsters sometimes,” Amos said with a shrug of his elbows. “So that’s different.” “Anything out there scarier than a hype with no money when you’re holding his fix? Scarier than a street boss thinks you skimmed?” Erich laughed and turned around, putting his back to the window. “Fuck that. Anything out there scarier than a life on basic?” “No,” Amos admitted. “So you got what you wanted,” Erich said, his voice going flat and dead. “Get the fuck out of my city or it’s open season.” Amos stood. He was closer to the gun than Erich now. Could feel it pull at him like gravity. He could pick it up, kill Erich, kill the two guards waiting outside. By the end of the day he’d own a chunk of Erich’s old territory and have the muscle and credibility to take the rest. In a flash, the whole scenario played out in his mind. Instead, he hooked his thumbs in his pants pockets and backed toward the door. “Thanks for the drink,” he said. “I forgot how good tequila was.” “I’ll have Tatu give you a couple bottles on the way out. To take with you,” Erich said. “Shit, I won’t turn that down.” “It was good to see you,” Erich said, then paused a moment. “The gun was empty.” “Yeah?” “Fl?chette turret hidden in the light,” Erich said, with a flick of his eyes at the inset LED housing above them. “Poisoned darts. I say a word, it kills everyone in the room isn’t me.” “Nice. Thanks for not saying it.” “Thanks for still being my friend.” It felt like goodbye, so Amos gave Erich one last smile, and left the room. Tatu was waiting in the corridor with a box full of tequila bottles. The guards must have been monitoring the whole thing. “Need help on your way out?” the guard asked. “Naw,” Amos replied and hoisted the box over one shoulder. “I’m good at leaving.” Amos let his hand terminal take him to the nearest flophouse and got a room. He dumped his booze and bag on the bed and then hit the streets. A short walk took him to a food cart where he bought what the sign optimistically called a Belgian sausage. Unless the Belgians were famous for their flavored bean curd products, the optimism seemed misplaced. Not that it mattered. Amos realized that while he knew the orbital period of every Jovian moon by heart, he had no idea where Belgium was. He didn’t think it was a North American territory, but that was about the best he could do. He was hardly in a position to criticize assertions about their cuisine. He walked toward the old rotting docks he played on as a child, not for any reason more profound than needing a destination and knowing which direction the water was. He finished the last of his sausage and then, not seeing a convenient recycling bin, he chewed up and swallowed the wrapper too. It was made of spun corn starch and tasted like stale breakfast cereal. A small knot of teens passed him, then paused and turned to follow. They were in that awkward age between being a victim on legs and capable of real adult crimes. The right age for petty theft and running for the dealers mixed with the occasional mugging when opportunity presented itself without too much risk. Amos ignored them and climbed down onto the rusting steel of an old bayfront jetty. The teens hung back, arguing in quiet but tense voices. Probably deciding if the reward of a solitary mark with an outsider’s credit balance – it being an article of faith that anyone from outside the docks of Baltimore had more money than anyone in them – was worth the risk of taking on a man of his size. He knew the calculus of that equation well. He’d been in on that very argument himself, once upon a time. He continued to ignore them and listened instead to the gentle lap of the water against the pilings of his jetty. In the distance, the sky lit up with a line of fire like a lightning bolt drawn with a ruler. A sonic boom rolled across the bay a few moments later, and Amos had a sudden and intense memory of sitting on those very docks with Erich, watching the rail-gun supply lifts fired into orbit, and discussing the possibility of leaving the planet. To everyone outside the gravity well, Amos was from Earth. But that wasn’t true. Not in any way that mattered. Amos was from Baltimore. What he knew about the planet outside of a few dozen blocks of the poor district would fit on a napkin. The first steps he’d ever taken outside the city were when he’d climbed off a high-speed rail line in Bogot? and onto the shuttle that had flown him to Luna. He heard quiet footsteps on the jetty behind him. The discussion was over. The yeas outweighing the nays. Amos turned around and faced the approaching teens. A few of them held improvised clubs. One had a knife. “Not worth it,” he said. He didn’t flex or raise his fists. He just shook his head. “Wait for the next one.” There was a tense moment as they stared at him and he stared back. Then, moving as though they’d reached some sort of telepathic consensus, they drifted away in a group. Erich was wrong about him being the same. The man he’d once been wasn’t a collection of personality traits. He was the things he knew, the desires of his heart, the skills he had. The person he’d been before he left knew where the good basement booze was brewed. Which dealers had a consistent supply of quality black market marijuana and tobacco. The brothels that serviced the locals, and the ones that were there only to rob thrill-seeking poverty tourists. That person knew where to rent a gun for cheap, and that the price tripled if you used it. Knew it was cheaper to rent time in a machine shop and make your own. Like the shotgun he’d used the first time he killed a man. But the person he was now knew how to keep a fusion reactor running. How to tune the magnetic coils to impart maximum energy to ionized exhaust particles, and how to fix a hull breach. That guy didn’t care about these streets or the pleasures and risks they offered. Baltimore could look exactly the same, and be as foreign to him as the mythical land of Belgium. And in that moment, he knew it was his last time on Earth. He was never coming back. He woke up in his rented flop the next morning with half a bottle of tequila on his nightstand and the first hangover he’d had in years. For a moment he thought he’d been so drunk he wet the bed, but realized that in the stifling heat of the room he’d sweated out about a liter. His throat felt dry and his tongue swollen. He rinsed off the night’s sweat and drank steaming-hot water out of the shower, tilting his head back to let it fill his mouth. After decades of filtered and sterilized ship and space station water, he marveled at all the flavors in it. He hoped not too many of them were microbes or heavy metals. He pulled the remaining tequila bottles out of their box and stuffed them into his duffel bag, wrapping his clothes around them to protect them. Then he picked up his hand terminal and started looking for a hop back to Luna, then a connecting long flight to Tycho. He’d said goodbye to Lydia, or the pieces of her that she’d left behind anyway. He’d said a goodbye of sorts to Erich. There was no one left on the entire planet he gave half a shit about. Well, no. That wasn’t true. Maybe half . He called the number Avasarala had used, and a sculpted young man with a perfect haircut, pale skin, and gigantic teeth appeared. He looked like an expensive store mannequin. “Secretary Avasarala’s office.” “Gimme Chrissie, kid, and make it snappy.” The mannequin was stunned into silence for two long breaths. “I’m sorry, but the secretary can’t —” “Kid,” Amos said with a smirk, “I just called on her private line, right? My name is Amos Burton.” A lie, but one he’d told often enough it had become a sort of truth. “I work for James Holden. I bet if you don’t tell her I’m on the line right now that you’re applying for basic by the end of the day.” “One moment please,” the mannequin said and then the screen displayed the blue-and-white logo of the UN. “Burton,” Chrisjen Avasarala said, appearing on the screen less than thirty seconds later. “Why the fuck are you still on my planet?” “Getting ready to leave, chief, but figured I got one more person to check in on before I go.” “Was it me? Because I don’t like you enough to consider that charming. I have a flight to Luna waiting on the pad for me so I can go do fucking party arrangements before the Martian prime minister arrives.” “They make you do that?” “I do everything, and every second I talk to you costs ten thousand dollars.” “Really?” “No, I just made that number up. But I fucking hate flying to Luna so I’ve been putting it off to finish other work anyway. Do you need a ride? If it gets you off my planet, I can give you a ride. What? Did I say something funny?” “Naw, just reminded me of somebody,” Amos said. “Anyway, I get the feeling this is the only trip down the well I’m ever going to take.” “I’m crushed,” she said. “Since I’m here, I figured anything I might want to do, better do it now. Anyone I wanted to see, you know,” Amos continued. “Where did you guys wind up locking Peaches away?” “Peaches?” “The Mao girl. Clarissa. She flew with us for a few months back after she stopped trying to kill the captain. And I have to admit, she grew on me a little.” “You fucked your prisoner?” Avasarala said, her expression evenly divided between amusement and disgust. “Nah,” Amos said. “I don’t tend to do that with people I like.” Chapter Thirteen: Holden The systems that the gate network had opened up were scattered across what everyone was pretty sure was the Milky Way galaxy. Cartography was still working out their relative locations, but even the initial findings put some of the new systems tens of thousands of light-years from Earth and with some distinct weirdness about time and location. Confronted by such unimaginably vast distances, it was easy to forget how much space was in just one solar system. Until you tried to find something in it. Legally, any spaceship on the move had to register a flight plan and run an active transponder. That made ships traveling from place to place relatively easy to track. And with a transponder pinging away so you knew where to point your telescope, an active drive was visible from across the solar system. But ships would power down for repairs in dock, so transponders disappeared off the grid all the time. Ships were decommissioned, so a transponder might go black and never return for entirely legitimate reasons. Newly commissioned ships showed up with brand-new names and ships that were sold registered name changes. Some were cobbled together from scrap, some were built in shipyards, some were salvaged. And all of it was happening scattered across roughly one hundred quintillion square kilometers of space, give or take a few quadrillion. And that was only if you ignored that space had a third dimension. So, seventeen ships had vanished going through ring gates, and if Holden was right, they were probably back in the home system with new names. In theory, there was a path to the information he wanted, but unless he was interested in spending several hundred lifetimes sifting through the raw data, he’d need help. Specifically, he needed a computer plowing through a number of different massive databases on new ships, decommissioned ships, sold ships, repaired ships, and lost ships, looking for anything that didn’t add up. Even with a good computer and very smart data sorting software, it was what a programmer would call a nontrivial task. And, unfortunately, the best software engineer that Holden knew had flown off to parts unknown and wasn’t answering his messages. He didn’t have the skills to do it himself, the time to learn them, or a crew to do it for him. What he had, was money. After his shift working with Sakai’s people on the Roci refit, Holden called up Fred yet again. “Fred, hey, I have a software problem. Can I hire some of your programming wonks for a short-term gig?” “Your ship need an update?” Fred asked. “Or is this something that will piss me off?” “Something that’ll piss you off. So, who’s available for custom script writing?” Paula Gutierrez had the elongated body and slightly oversized head of a low-g childhood. Her smile was sharp and professional. She was a freelance software engineer who’d taken a six-month consulting job on Tycho five years before and then just stayed on the station picking up the odd bit of piecework. On Holden’s hand terminal, her wide face filled the screen with dark bushy eyebrows and blindingly white teeth. “So, that’s what I’m looking for, and I need it as fast as possible,” Holden said after laying out his requirements. “Doable?” “Very,” Paula said. “Tycho keeps all the traffic databases mirrored local, so don’t even have to sweat the lag. Gonna cost you for speed, though.” “Cost me what?” “Fifteen hundred an hour, ten hours minimum. Know up front I don’t argue about billing and I don’t give discounts.” “That,” Holden said, “sounds like a lot.” “That’s because I’ve got you over a barrel and I’m gouging the shit out of you.” “Okay, how soon will I start seeing output?” Paula shrugged with her eyebrows, then looked down at something off camera. “Call it twenty hours from now before you start getting data sent to you. Want me to collate or stream it as it comes in?” “Send it straight to me, please. Going to ask me why I want it?” Paula laughed. “I never do.” Monica was renting a small suite of rooms on the visitors’ level of Tycho. They were expensive, and to Holden’s surprise, not any nicer than the company quarters Fred had set aside for his crew. Not many companies treated their own as well as they treated guests. But courtesy dictated that he act like the rooms were something special to make Monica feel good about the investment, so he made impressed noises at the open spaces and quality of the furnishings. “So what did Fred say?” Monica asked once he took a seat at her dining table and sipped at the tea she’d made. “He doesn’t think there’s much to go on, honestly.” “I mean about using the protomolecule sample to try and get in touch with Detective Miller.” “Yeah,” Holden replied, putting the tea back on the table and pushing it away. The first sip had left his tongue feeling scalded and rough. “I mentioned that but only so he’d know he had a leak somewhere. That was always a nonstarter as an investigation tool. No one’s letting that shit out of its bottle anytime soon.” “Then I’m wasting my time here, is what you’re saying.” “No,” Holden said. “Not at all. I think the missing ship thing is legitimate. I just don’t think it’s an alien conspiracy. It’s much more likely to be associated with this hard-line OPA wing. I’m looking into it, if that’s a story you want to pursue.” Monica spun her hand terminal around on the tabletop, already impatient with him for changing the subject. “I made my name with the story on the Behemoth . Aliens and wormhole gates and a protomolecule ghost that only talked to the most famous person in the solar system. I don’t think my follow-up to that can be Humans Still Shitty to Each Other . Lacks panache.” “So, is this about finding those missing ships? Or is it about finding another batch of alien weirdness to make you more famous?” “That sounded awfully judgmental for a guy who’s managed to shoehorn himself into every major news piece for the last six years.” “Ouch,” Holden said, then let the uncomfortable silence stretch a while. Monica kept spinning her hand terminal but not looking him in the eye. “Sorry,” she finally said. “It’s okay. Look, I’m going through this weird empty-nest thing, and it’s left me kind of restless. And because I’m looking to latch onto something, I’m going to go find those missing ships. Probably won’t be an alien conspiracy, but I’m going to do it anyway. Want to help?” “Not sure what that looks like, to be honest. I was hoping to just ask the omniscient aliens. Do you know how big space is?” “I’ve given it some thought,” Holden said. “I have this plan. I talked to Fred about the OPA angle, but he doesn’t like that idea so he’s rejecting it out of hand. Still, that got me thinking. The OPA isn’t going to throw a bunch of ships away. Belters just don’t think that way. They recycle everything.” “So?” “So how do you find pirated ships? Chief Engineer Sakai suggested looking for the new ships that turn up rather than hunting the missing ones.” “Sakai suggested…” “He’s a guy I work with on the Roci refits. But anyway, I thought that sounded like a great idea so I hired a local data wonk to write a database mining script to track all the new ship names that show up on the registries and try to find an origin point.” “A data wonk.” “Freelance coder. Whatever the name is for that kind of work, yeah, and anytime now I’ll start getting a stream of data that includes all the mysteriously appearing ships. Our missing seventeen should be a subset of that. At least it’ll be a smaller number of ships than, you know, all of them.” Monica stood up and walked away several steps, not speaking. Holden blew on his tea and waited. When she finally turned back around, the look on her face was carefully controlled incredulity. “You’ve involved Fred Johnson, some engineer here on Tycho, and a fucking hacker in this? Are you that stupid?” Holden sighed and stood up. “I first heard about this from you, so I’ll do you the courtesy of letting you know where the investigation goes —” “And now you’re leaving ?” The incredulous look on Monica’s face only deepened. “Well, funny thing. I don’t have to put up with being called stupid by someone I’m trying to help.” Monica lifted her palms in a placating gesture that he suspected she didn’t really mean. “Sorry,” she said, “but you just involved three new people, one of whom is the highest-profile member of the OPA, in my… our investigation. What on earth made you think that was a good idea?” “You know me, right?” Holden said, not sitting again but not heading straight for the door either. “I’m not a guy who hides things. I don’t think Fred is the bad guy, but if he is then his reaction to our searching will tell us something. Secrecy is the potting soil in which all this conspiracy shit grows. Trust me. The roaches don’t like it when you start shining a light on them.” “And what if they decide to get rid of the guy with the light?” “Well,” Holden said with a grin, “that’ll be interesting too. They won’t be the first ones to try, and I’m still here.” The following day the data from Paula’s program began trickling in. He authorized his terminal to transfer the remaining payment for her services and began going through the list. Lots of new ships were showing up around Mars and Earth, but that was to be expected. The shipyards were cranking out new and refurbished vessels as fast as the mechanics and engineers could make them. Everyone with two yuan to rub together was making a play for the ring gates and the worlds beyond them, and the biggest group of people who like living on planets and were already physiologically adapted to it came from the two inner worlds. Only a tiny fraction of those ships had gaps in their records that Paula’s program would flag, but even a brief search led Holden to believe that the flagged ships were mostly paperwork errors, not piracy. There were also a scattering of suspicious new ships in the Belt. Those were more interesting. If the OPA was stealing ships, then the logical place to hide them was in a region of space thick with ships and other metallic bodies. Holden began going through the Belt list one ship at a time. The Gozerian appeared out of nowhere in the docks at the Pallas refinery in the right date range. The records listed it as a probate transfer, but were vague on who’d died and what relation the new owner had to the old. Holden guessed the answer to those two questions was person who used to own the ship and person who killed them and took it. The transfer of ownership was sketchy enough that it almost certainly was the result of piracy, but the Gozerian was listed as a non-Epstein light-hulled mining ship. A rock hopper. The records from Pallas backed that up, and a search of the list of seventeen missing ships didn’t turn up anything matching its description. No one was going to make a run for the edge of the solar system and then all the way in to a new world in something that didn’t have an Epstein drive. There were much more comfortable places to die of old age. Holden checked the Gozerian off his list and moved to the next. By the time he’d gone through the entire initial list from Paula it was three a.m., Tycho time, and his shift on the Roci started at eight, so he caught a couple hours of rack time and spent a miserable morning trying to trace maneuvering thruster cables through a fog of sleep deprivation. By the time his shift was over all he could think about was a little dinner and a lot of sleep, but the data stream from Paula was waiting for him with nearly fifty new ships. So he picked up a carton of noodles on his way home and spent the rest of the evening going through the list. The Mouse Pie was a gas freighter and didn’t match his missing list. The Vento first appeared before the date range he was interested in, and a query to the last dock it had visited confirmed the dates were correct. The Blasphemous Jester was listed as Epstein equipped, but a search of the service records showed that the drive had been out of commission for years. Someone had been using it as a short-hop shuttle in teakettle mode ever since. On and on and on through the names it went. At one point his terminal beeped with an incoming message. Amos checking in with a cryptic “Visited my friend’s grave. Went okay, but still got some shit to do. Back later.” Holden slurped up another mouthful of noodles that had long since gone cold and now had the consistency of earthworms. How had Miller done shit like this for a living, he wondered. It was shocking to realize how much of investigation was just brute-force solutions. Going through endless lists looking for one thing that doesn’t fit. Talking to every single potential witness over and over. Pounding the pavement, as the gumshoes in Alex’s neo-noir movies might say. It was thinking about Alex that twigged his memory, and he went back through the list until he found a ship designated the Pau Kant . The last location was marked as 434 Hungaria. A high albedo rock in the Hungaria group, an asteroid group relatively close to the orbit of Mars but with a high inclination. Mars control had caught a ping from the Pau Kant and then lost it shortly after. They’d marked the ship as missing. But prior to that single and short-lived appearance, the Pau Kant didn’t seem to exist in any other records. He couldn’t find any description of her hull type or drive. Nor were there any owner records he could track down. He’d moved it to his list of ships to look into later, but something about Mars and inner Belt asteroids was making his brain itch. The Hungaria group wasn’t a terrible place to hide things. 434 Hungaria was about twenty kilometers across. Plenty of mass to mask ships from radar, and the high albedo of the group would clutter up the results of anyone looking for ships with a telescope. The location was intriguing too. If the OPA radicals were collecting ships to pirate colony transports, the inner Belt was not a bad staging area. They’d also launched an attack on Earth in the recent past. That it had failed didn’t mean they weren’t planning more. A bunch of stolen ships hiding in the inner ring was exactly the sort of first step another attempt might take. The Hungaria asteroids were a long way from Tycho’s current location, and Holden didn’t have a ship. But they were pretty close to Mars, and Alex was there. If he had access to a ship, it wouldn’t be too long a trip to go take a peek. See if the Pau Kant was still out there, tethered to the rock and staying dark. And if it matched any of Monica’s missing ships? Well, that would be interesting to take back to Fred. Holden put his terminal on the table, angled up to record his face, and said, “Alex. Hey, hope things are going well out there, and that Bobbie is good. So, I’ve been looking into this thing with missing ships? And there’s a suspicious hit out at 434 Hungaria. Any chance you have access to a ship? If you need to rent one, feel free to pull the funds from my account. I’d like you to go see if a ship named the Pau Kant is sitting out there parked and dark. Specs on the transponder code attached to this message.” He put all the information he had on the Pau and its most recent location from the Mars control records into a file. It wasn’t much to go on, and it felt like a long shot, but Alex would enjoy the flight and Holden was willing to foot the bill so he didn’t feel too bad about asking. He was pretty sure the burst of energy that came from having made progress would be short-lived, but he wanted to share his success and felt wide-awake, so he called Monica. He got her voice mail. He left her a message to call him back, slurped down the last of his cold and nasty noodles, and immediately fell asleep on his couch. The next morning he wasn’t on the duty roster to work on the Roci , and Monica hadn’t called him back, so he called again. No answer. On his way to breakfast he dropped by her apartment, but she wasn’t there either. She’d been a little miffed at him, but he didn’t think she’d bail on the whole missing ship story without saying anything. He made another call. “Tycho security,” a young male voice said. “Hey, this is Jim Holden. I’m checking on a visiting journalist, Monica Stuart. Has she left the station?” “One sec. No. Records list her as still on board. Her apartment is —” “Yeah, actually? I’m at her apartment right now and she’s not answering here or on her hand terminal.” “My records show that her terminal hasn’t connected to Tychonet since early yesterday.” “Huh,” Holden said, frowning at her door. The quiet on the other side had taken on an ominous feel. What if they decide to get rid of the guy with the light? He wasn’t the only one who fit that description. “So she hasn’t so much as paid for a sandwich in over a day. That strikes me as not good.” “Want me to send a team?” “Please do that.” By the time the security team arrived and opened the door to Monica’s apartment, Holden was expecting the worst. He wasn’t disappointed. The rooms had been methodically searched. Monica’s clothes and personal effects were scattered across the floor. The hand terminal she used for interviews had been crushed under someone’s heel, but the screen still flickered when Holden touched it. The team found no traces of blood, which was about the only positive sign. Holden called Fred while the team finished their forensic sweep. “It’s me,” he said as soon as the OPA chief answered. “You’ve got a bigger problem than radicals on Medina.” “Really?” Fred said, his voice weary. “And what is that?” “You’ve got them on Tycho.” Chapter Fourteen: Naomi Terryon Lock was supposed to be a new kind of place in the emptiness of the Jovian system. A Belter home world, they figured. Modular, so it could grow or contract at need. Outside the control of Earth or Mars or anybody. A free city in space, with its own governance, its own environmental controls. Naomi had seen the plans when they first spilled out over the networks. Rokku had them printed on thin plastics and stuck to the walls of the ship. Terryon Lock was the new Jerusalem until the security forces at Ganymede shut it down. No colonies without permission. No homes. No safe havens, not even if they built it themselves. She hadn’t even been pregnant when it happened. She didn’t know that it would define her. Filip was eight months old when the August?n Gamarra died. The Gamarra had left Ceres Station, burning for a Coalition Navy research station on Oshima with a payload of organics and hydroponic equipment. Ten hours out, burning at a leisurely one-quarter g, the ship’s magnetic bottle lost containment, spilling the fusion core into the ship. For a fraction of a second, the Gamarra had been as bright as the sun and two hundred thirty-four people died. No wreckage survived, and the official investigation into the event had never been closed because no conclusion could be reached. Accident or sabotage. Mischance or murder. They had gone from the hidden cell at the back of the club to a private apartment up even nearer the center of spin. The air had the too-clean ozone smell of a recently replaced recycling filter. Filip sat at the small table, his hands folded. She sat on the edge of the tiny foam-and-gel sofa. She looked at the boy’s dark eyes and tried to connect them in her mind with the ones she remembered. His lips with the toothless, delighted smile. She couldn’t tell if the resemblance was really there, or if it was only her imagination. How much did someone change between not-quite-a-toddler and not-quite-an-adult? Could it really be the same boy? It wasn’t anyone else. The hole wasn’t abandoned. There were clothes in the locker, food and beer in the little refrigerator. The pale walls showed chips at the corners where the damage of minor accidents had built up over the course of years. He didn’t tell her who the apartment belonged to, and she didn’t ask. “Why didn’t you bring the Rocinante ?” Filip asked. There was a tentative quality to his voice. Like the question was only a stand-in for other ones he wanted to ask. That she wanted to be able to answer. Why did you go? Didn’t you love us? “It’s in dock for repairs. Will be for months.” Filip nodded once, sharply. She could see Marco in the movement. “That’s going to complicate things.” “Marco didn’t tell me you wanted the ship,” Naomi said, hating the implicit apology in the words. “All he said was that you were in trouble. That you were avoiding the law, and that I could… that I could help.” “We’ll have to come up with something,” he said. The hospitals at Ceres Station were some of the best in the Belt when Naomi had been coming near to term. Neither of them had the money to travel to Europa or Ganymede for the duration of a pregnancy. Ceres had been closer to Rokku’s claims than Tycho Station. Childbirth was a greater danger for Belters than for someone who’d lived under constant gravity, and Naomi’s pregnancy had already had two scares. She and Marco had lived in a cheap rental near the hospital, one of dozens that catered to Belters who came for the medical care. The terms of the agreement were open-ended, letting them stay until they didn’t need the doctors, nurses, expert systems, and pharmaceuticals that the medical complex boasted. Naomi could still remember the shape of the bed there, the cheap plastic curtains with a printed starscape that Marco hung across the doorway. The smell of it made her sick, but he’d been so pleased with himself she’d tolerated it. And even that late in the process, almost everything made her sick. She’d spent her days sleeping and feeling the baby shifting inside her. Filip had been restless as a fetus. She hadn’t felt like a child having a child. She’d felt like a woman in control of her fate. “How many do you need to get out?” Naomi asked. “Fifteen, all told.” “Including you?” “Sixteen.” She nodded. “Any cargo?” “No,” he said, and then seemed about to go on. After a moment, he looked away. Ceres had still been under Earth control back then. Most of the people living on the base were Belters who’d taken contract with one of the Martian or Earther corporations. Earth security by Belters. Earth traffic control by Belters. Martian bioresearch by Belters. Marco had laughed at it all, but the laughter had an edge. He’d called Ceres humanity’s largest shrine to Stockholm syndrome. Everyone flying with Rokku had paid part of their share into the OPA, Naomi included. And the OPA looked after them in the last days of her pregnancy, local women bringing food to the hole, local men taking Marco out to the bars so that he had someone besides her to talk to. Naomi didn’t think anything of it apart from being grateful. Those nights when Marco was out drinking with the local men and she was alone in her bed with Filip, her mind moving in the silence had carried an almost transcendent contentment. Or at least that was how she remembered it now. At the time, without knowing what was still to come, the experience might have been different. “Where do you need to be?” “We don’t talk about that,” Filip said. Naomi brushed her hair back from her eyes. “You brought me here because it’s secure, sa sa? So is it that you don’t want to be overheard by someone else, or that you think telling me compromises you? Because if you don’t trust me enough to ask for what you want, you don’t trust me enough for me to be here.” The words seemed to carry more nuance than they could bear, as if the simple logistical facts also meant something about why she’d left. About who they were to each other. It was like she could feel the words creaking, but she didn’t know what Filip heard in them, or what she should have said differently. For a moment, there was a flicker in his expression. Sorrow or hatred or pain, it was gone too quickly to identify. A new stratum of guilt settled onto her, bearing her down. Compared to what she already had, it was trivial. “He said I should tell you once we were off the station,” Filip said. “Apparently he didn’t know I’d be arranging passage on a different ship. Plans change. It’s what they do.” Filip’s gaze fixed on her, his eyes hard as marbles. She realized she’d been quoting Marco without meaning to. Maybe Filip thought it was a slap, that she was making a claim on his father by using his words. She didn’t know. She didn’t know him. She had to keep reminding herself of that. “There’s a rendezvous point.” “Is there a time?” “Yes.” “How long?” She saw We don’t talk about it floating in his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was smaller, younger. More vulnerable. “Soon.” “How soon?” He looked away. “Very.” She’d known, back then, that there were hard-core OPA factions on Ceres, but it hadn’t bothered her. Radical OPA was still OPA, and that made them family. The crazy uncle who got drunk and started fights, maybe, but with Earth cranking up tariffs and Mars lowering the prices it would pay for ore, the sense of being under siege put Belters on the side of Belters first. And after shipping with Rokku for a while, talk of killing Earthers and Martians became a kind of white noise. The birth had been hard. Thirty hours of labor. The muscles of her abdominal wall, made weaker by a lifetime of inconstant g, had shredded themselves. If they had been in Rokku’s ship or even back on Hygeia Station, she might have died, and the baby with her. But the medical complex on Ceres had seen it all before, and worse. A gray-haired woman with a cathedral of tattoos on her hands and arms had been in her room the whole time, singing little tunes in Swahili and Arabic. Naomi could still see her and hear her voice, though she’d forgotten the woman’s name. If she’d ever known it. Filip had drawn his first, exhausted, angry breath at five in the morning, the day after she’d gone into the complex. The pediatric autodoc scanned him, considered for the longest five seconds of Naomi’s life, and declared the baby safely within standard error. The gray-haired woman had placed him on Naomi’s breast and sung a blessing. It hadn’t occurred to her then to wonder where Marco was. She had assumed he was in a waiting area somewhere, ready to pass out some equivalent of cigars as soon as news of her came. Of her and their son. Maybe that had even been true. “Do we need to be there, or is off station enough?” Naomi asked. “Off station at minimum. Better to be there, but not here solid.” “And where are we going?” “Hungaria cluster.” They were a group of minor asteroids. High albedo. No station, but an open-access storage facility. As close to the inner planets as Belt rocks got. “Are we meeting someone there?” “Not there. There’s a ship a few days in. Sunward. But locked to Hungaria. Pella , it’s called.” “And after that?” Filip made the hand shrug of a Belter. Apparently she could know that much, but no more. She wondered what would happen if she pushed, and knew it was an experiment she wouldn’t make. I’m sorry , she thought. I loved you more than I have ever loved anything. I would have stayed if I could. I would have taken you with me. Filip looked at her and then away. She’d spent most of the weeks following the birth in recovery. The baby kept her from sleeping very long at a stretch, but apart from one week of frankly hellish colic, he was neither harder nor easier than she’d been led to expect. The worst thing she suffered was boredom, and Marco helped with that. The local group he’d been drinking with were mechanics and technicians at the port, and Marco brought her engineering problems that they were trying to solve. They were the sort of work consultants would do for half a month’s credit. She did them from goodwill and the need to do something intellectually challenging. While Filip napped in the little plastic crib, she customized diagnostic programs for water recyclers. She built virtual timing sequencers for shear force detection units. She designed software overrides for testing the containment limits of magnetic bottles. The kind of limits that, before long, would fail on the Gamarra . “All right,” Naomi said. “I’ll see what I can do.” “Do you have access to another ship?” Filip asked. “I may be able to charter something.” “You can’t just hire a charter. This has to be untraceable.” Meaning, she knew, that whatever was going to happen, it would mean people with guns coming after Filip and Cyn and all the others. Maybe security forces, maybe a rival faction, maybe something else that she hadn’t anticipated yet. But there would be consequences. And there would be violence. “I may be able to charter something discreetly,” Naomi said. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll be sure it doesn’t come back to you.” Filip swallowed. For a moment, she saw a glimmer of fear in him. He was sixteen years old now. A year younger than when she’d met his father. Three years younger than when she’d held him to her breasts to feed. “I would have looked for you if he’d let me,” Naomi said. The words came out of her from a need she couldn’t control. He was a boy. He was carrying whatever burden Marco had put on him already. Making him responsible for how she felt too wasn’t a kindness. She rose to her feet. “You don’t need to do anything about that. Just I would have. If he’d let me.” If he’d let me . The words were heavy and toxic as lead. I would have done what I wanted, except he still controlled me. Still does. After all these years, and all these changes, and everything I have done and become, I wouldn’t have left you to him except that Marco still controls me. Constrains me. Punishes me for not letting him rule me outright. “All right,” Filip said. His expression was empty. Naomi nodded. Her hands were in fists so tight the knuckles ached. She made herself relax. “Give me a day. I’ll know more.” “Come to the club,” Filip said. “If we’re not there, just wait and we’ll make contact. We need to stay moving.” I thought I could stay with you , she thought, and then hated herself for the disappointment she felt. This wasn’t a reunion. Her unfinished business with Filip might be what brought her here, but he was doing something else. Something that had brought his long-lost mother back into his world. If she wanted to sit with him and eat sweets and share stories the way they never had, that was her problem. “Fair enough,” Naomi said. She hesitated, then turned to the door. As she reached it, he spoke again, his voice tight. Like the words were hard to say. “Thank you for coming.” She felt it in her sternum, someone taking a hammer to the bones over her heart. Filip watched her from the table. He looked so much like his father. She tried to imagine that she had ever been that young herself. Tried to imagine that at that age she would have known how to pick words that were that perfectly empty and heartwarming and cruel. She felt the smile press her lips out a millimeter. It was an expression of sorrow more than joy. “He told you to say that,” she said. “Didn’t he?” There were a hundred ways to unpack the boy’s silence. After the Gamarra , Marco had come home drunk and happy from his celebration. She’d told him to be quiet, not to wake the baby. Marco had swooped her up in his arms, twirling her in the little room until her ankle hit the bed and she yelped with pain. He’d put her down then, rubbing the little injury. Kissing it. He’d looked up at her with a smile that asked as much as it promised, and she’d thought about whether they could make love quietly enough that Filip would keep sleeping. That was what she’d been thinking of when he destroyed her. “Managed it, us. You, que si?” “Managed what?” she asked, leaning back against the gel of the bed. “Got even for Terryon Lock,” Marco said. “Stood up for the Belt. For us. For him.” Marco nodded toward the baby. Filip’s thumb had been in his sleep-slack mouth, his eyes so closed they seemed like they’d never open again. She’d known before she understood what she knew. An electric cold washed her heart, her belly, all her body. Marco sensed it. The memory of his quizzical smile looking up past her knee was still burned in her mind. “What did I manage?” she said. “Perfect crime,” he said. “First of many.” She understood. The Gamarra had been killed with her code. The people who died there were dead because of her, and all of Rokku’s rough talk and ranting had stopped being empty banter. Marco was a killer now. She was too. They’d gone on to make love anyway, him too warm and dangerous to refuse, her too much in shock even to understand how much she wanted to object. She hated the fact, but they had. It was the beginning of the dark times, but looking back, all the rest of it – the depression, the fear, the loss of Filip, her failed suicide – had all been implicit in that night. The script over the doors of hell, writ small. Renting a hole by the port was easy. She had enough money to buy anonymous credit, route it through an off-station exchange, and bring it back to a mayfly shadow account. It only felt strange doing it because she hadn’t had to go through those motions in so long. Not since she’d signed on to the Canterbury , and that felt like it had been seven lifetimes ago. She sat on the thin gel bed and waited for the weeping and nausea to stop. They would, even though at the worst of it, they felt like they might not. Then she took a long shower, changed into a fresh set of clothes purchased from a kiosk. Watching the hard puck of compressed cloth expand into a jumpsuit reminded her of an insect pulling itself out of its shell. It seemed like it should be a metaphor for something. Her hand terminal showed a half-dozen new messages from Jim. She didn’t play them. If she had, the temptation to reply – to confess to him and take comfort in him, to talk to someone she trusted completely – would have been too much. And then he would have felt obligated to do something. To come and fix things. To insert himself into the messes that she’d made and the things she’d done. The distance between here and there, between Marco and the Rocinante , was too precious to sacrifice. The time for comfort would come later, when she’d done the things she needed to do. When she’d saved Filip. When she’d escaped Marco. So she didn’t play the messages. But she didn’t delete them either. Even back on with Rokku, Marco had been cultivating himself as a leader. He’d been good at it. No matter how bad things got, he’d always managed to make it seem like each new hurdle was something he’d factored in, every solution – even ones he’d logically had nothing to do with – was somehow his brilliance. He’d explained once how he managed it. The trick, he said, is to have a simple plan that more or less can’t go wrong so that you always have something, and then stack your risks on that. Have another alternative that won’t work but maybe one time in a hundred, and if it happens, you look like a god. And then one that won’t work but one time in twenty, that if it lands you look like you’re the smartest one in the room. And then one that’s only one time in five, but you look like you knew you could do it. And if everything else fails, you’ve still got the one that would always win. If there was a single phrase for Marco, that was it: always win. She wondered more than once over the years where she’d been on that scale. Had she been his one-in-a-hundred or his sure thing? She’d never known, and there was no way that she ever would. It didn’t even matter to her anymore, except the way a missing finger itched sometimes. And now here she was again, doing what he wanted. He’d made her complicit in his plans, whatever they were. This time, though, she knew who she was dealing with. She wasn’t the girl who he’d tricked into sabotaging the Gamarra . She wasn’t a love-struck teenager in over her head. And Filip wasn’t a baby that could be spirited away and held as hostage against her good conduct. Her silence. And so maybe – maybe – this was the moment she’d wanted. Maybe calling her in was Marco’s mistake. She pushed the idea away. It was too dangerous, too complicated. Too likely to be what Marco had known she would think. Digging through the station directory, she took the better part of an hour to find the address, even knowing what she was looking for. She didn’t know what Outer Fringe Exports did, except that they were shady enough that she hadn’t wanted to work with them, and that they were competent enough that they’d known about the Martian claims disputing the salvage of the Rocinante before her crew had. Naomi found their physical address – a different berth than the one she’d been at the last time – and caught a cart. The warehouses near the port were in a constant state of flux. The pressure of commerce and efficiency kept every space in use with as little downtime between rental agreements, loading, and unloading as could be arranged. The sign on the tempered glass door read OUTER FRINGE EXPORTS, but in a week, a day, an hour, it could have been anything. A young man at the counter smiled up at her. He had close-cropped hair and skin several shades darker than her own. The steel-rimmed glasses could have been an affectation or an interface device. She’d never seen him before. “Hi,” she said. “Miss Nagata,” the man said as if they were old acquaintances. “It’s been some time. I’m sorry to say we don’t have any work that would be suited to your ship at this time.” “Not what I’m here for,” she said. “I need to charter a ship. And I need to do it very quietly.” The man’s expression didn’t change. “That can be an expensive problem.” “It needs to carry a crew no larger than twenty.” “How long would you need it?” “I don’t know.” “Would it be hauling cargo?” “No.” The man’s eyes lost their focus for a moment. The glasses were an interface, then. Naomi crossed her arms. One in a hundred , she thought, I show up with my own warship ready to carry people off Ceres. One in twenty, I know how to find someone who will. She wondered what the one-in-five plan was. What was the sure thing. The man’s focus came back to her. “I think we may be able to help,” he said. Chapter Fifteen: Alex The ride to the hospital was a thing out of a nightmare. As the transport sped through the corridors, the painkillers started to take effect. The combination of ache and sharpness in his body shifted into a deep and troubling sense of simply being wrong. Once, when they were near the emergency admitting entrance, time stuttered as his consciousness slipped away and back again. None of the medics paid him much attention. They were all focused on Bobbie. The big woman’s eyes were closed, and a pale plastic tube came out of her mouth, keeping her jaw open. From where he rode, Alex could make out only parts of her gurney’s readout, and he wasn’t sure how to interpret what he was seeing. The medics’ voices were clipped and tense. Words and phrases like attempting to reinflate and stabilizing and maintaining pressure pushed Alex toward the edge of panic. Bobbie’s body, what he could see of it, was limp. He told himself she wasn’t dead. If she were dead, they wouldn’t be trying to save her. He hoped that was true. At the emergency ward, he found himself wheeled into an automated surgical bed not that different from the ones on the Rocinante . The scan probably took a minute and a half, but it seemed to go on forever. He kept turning to the side, looking for Bobbie, then remembering she was in a different room now. Even then he didn’t understand how much his injuries and painkillers had compromised his mind until the police came and he tried to explain what had happened. “So how did the woman with the power armor fit into it?” Bobbie asked. She was sitting up in her hospital bed. Her gown was thick, disposable paper with Bhamini Pal Memorial Hospital printed on it like a pattern, dark blue over light. Her hair was pulled back into a loose bun, and deep bruises darkened her left cheek and her knuckles. When she shifted, the movement was careful. It was the way Alex moved after he’d worked out too hard and felt a little sore. He hadn’t been shot twice – once through her left lung, once in her right leg – and he’d seriously considered taking a wheelchair to go between his room and hers. “I meant you,” Alex said. “I was having trouble coming up with your name.” Bobbie chuckled. “Yeah, they’re going to want to talk to you again. I think the version they got was a little muddled.” “Do you think… Should we not be talking?” “We’re not under arrest,” Bobbie said. “The only one of the other guys that’s still breathing lawyered up before he got here. I’m pretty sure they’re not going to be looking at us if they want to throw someone in jail.” “What did you tell them?” Alex asked. “The truth. That a bunch of thugs broke into my rooms, tied me up, and started taking turns between kicking the shit out of me and asking why I was meeting with Alex Kamal.” Alex pressed his thumb against his upper lip until it ached a little. Bobbie’s smile carried a load of sympathy. “I don’t know why that is,” he said. “I don’t have any enemies on Mars. That I know of.” Bobbie shook her head and Alex noticed again that she was a remarkably attractive woman. He coughed and mentally filed the thought under horrifically inappropriate given the circumstances . “My guess,” Bobbie said, “is that it was less about who you are than who you’re connected to.” “Holden?” “And Fred Johnson. And maybe they can even put the two of us together with Avasarala. She shipped on the Rocinante for a while.” “For about a minute and a half, years ago.” “I remember. I was there,” Bobbie said. “Still, one way or another, the most plausible scenario I’ve got is that they thought I was reporting something to you or you were reporting something to me. And, even better, the idea scared them.” “Don’t mean to look a gift horse in the mouth, but that definition of even better has got some mighty long teeth,” Alex said. “Did you tell them about your investigation?” “No, I’m not ready to do that.” “But you think this was related.” “Oh, hell yes. Don’t you?” “It’s what I’m hoping for, actually,” Alex said with a sigh. Across the hallway, someone shouted words Alex couldn’t make out. A nurse stalked by, scowling. “So what are we goin’ to do about it?” “Only thing we can do,” Bobbie said. “Keep digging.” “Fair enough. So. What exactly are we looking at?” Bobbie’s expression sharpened. The problem, she said, was ships. The Martian Navy was the newest, best set of ships in the solar system. Earth had more ships, but her Navy was aging, with tech in them that was either generations old or retrofitted, shoehorning more recent designs into older frames. Both fleets had taken heavy losses in the last few years. Whether you called Avasarala’s influence prompting or putting her on a mission, Bobbie had started looking, and what she’d found was interesting. The seven big Donnager -class ships were easy to keep track of, but the fleet of corvettes that they carried, ships like the Rocinante – they were slippery. Bobbie had started by going back to review the battle data from Io, from outside the Ring, from the incident in the slow zone. Really, when it came to damage reports, there was an embarrassment of riches. At first, the numbers had seemed to match up. Half a dozen ships lost here, a handful there, the transponder codes decommissioned. But as she looked more deeply, she started running into discrepancies. The Tsuchi , a corvette assigned to the Bellaire , had been decommissioned and scrapped after Io. A year later, it appeared in a small-group action report near Europa. The supply ship Apalala had been retired from service, and then seven months later, picked up a shipment headed to Ganymede. A load of medical supplies lost to accident appeared briefly on a loading schedule bound for Ceres and then disappeared again. Weapons lost in the fighting around what was now Medina Station appeared in an audit at Hecate Base once and not again. Someone, Bobbie reasoned, had gone back through the records and doctored the old reports, forging the deaths of ships and then erasing them from the later records, or trying to. She’d found half a dozen hiccups in the data, but any ships that had been successfully erased, she wouldn’t see. That meant someone had to be involved high enough up the naval chain of command that they had access to the files. There was protocol, of course, that laid out who was supposed to have access to the records, but she’d been in the process of looking into how that actually played out in practice when Alex had dropped her a line and suggested dinner. “If you’re up for it,” Bobbie said, “that’s what I’d want you to look at. Just who could have changed the information. Then I can start looking at them.” “Keep going down the road you were already on,” Alex said. “Only with maybe some friends in the Navy.” “That’s one way we can go. It ain’t the only one, though.” Bobbie sat forward, caught her breath, and leaned back. “What else are you thinking?” “Someone hired the gentlemen who messed us up. Seems like findin’ out what we can about them might also be worth our time.” Bobbie grinned. “That was the part I was planning to do.” “Well, all right, then,” Alex said, and a man stepped into the doorway. He was huge. His shoulders brushed the doorframe on both sides, and his face was thick and heavy with a distress that could have been fear or anger. The bouquet of daffodils in his hand seemed tiny, and would until they were in a vase. “Hey,” he said. “I was just…” “Come in,” Bobbie said. “Alex, this is my brother Ben. Benji, this is Alex Kamal.” “Good to meet you,” the massive man said, enfolding Alex’s hand in his grip and shaking gently. “Thank you for everything you’ve done.” “Betcha?” Alex said. The bed creaked as Bobbie’s brother sat at its foot. He looked sheepishly at his sister. Now that she’d said the words, Alex could see the resemblance in them. Bobbie wore the look better. “The doctor says you’re doing well,” Ben said. “David wanted me to tell you he’s thinking of you.” “That’s sweet, but David doesn’t think about anything but terraforming and boobs,” Bobbie said. “I’ve cleaned out the guest room,” Ben said. “When they release you from the hospital, you’re coming to stay with us.” Bobbie’s smile grew sharper. “I don’t actually see that happening.” “No,” her brother said. “No, this isn’t a discussion. I told you from the beginning that Innis Shallow was a dangerous place, especially for someone living by herself. If Alex hadn’t saved you —” “Not sure I was actually saving anyone,” Alex said, but Ben scowled and kept right on going over the words. “— you could have been killed. Or worse.” “Worse than killed?” Bobbie said. “You know what I mean.” Bobbie leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “Yes, I do, and I think that’s bullshit too. I am in no more danger in Innis Shallow than I would be up in Breach Candy.” “How can you even say that?” her brother demanded, his jaw slipping forward. “After what you’ve just been through, it should be obvious that…” Alex sidestepped toward the door. Bobbie caught his eye, and the brief smile, gone as soon as it was there, was eloquent. I’m sorry and Thank you and We’ll talk about the important stuff when he’s gone . Alex nodded and retreated to the hallway, the buzz-saw tones of siblings lecturing each other following after him. When he got back to his recovery bed, the police were waiting, and this time he gave a statement that was, at least, coherent. Even if he left some of the background issues vague. For the most part, family was a metaphor on long-haul ships. Now and then, there’d be a group that was actually related by blood, but that was almost always Belters. On military and corporate assignments, there might be a handful of married couples, and now and then someone would have a baby. People would wind up on the same ship who were cousins. They were the exception, and the rule was that family was a way of talking about need. The need for friendship, the need for intimacy, the need for human contact that ran so deeply into the genome that anyone without it seemed not entirely human anymore. It was camaraderie writ large, a synonym for loyalty that was stronger than the concept it echoed. Alex’s experience of real family – of blood relations – was more like having a lot of people who had all wound up on the same mailing list without knowing quite why they signed up for it. He’d loved his parents when they were alive, and he still loved his memory of them. His cousins were always happy to see him, and he was glad of their welcome and their company. Seeing Bobbie and her brother together and feeling even in that brief moment the deep and unbridgeable mismatch of character between them drove something home to Alex. A mother could love her daughter more than life itself the way the stories told, or she could hate the girl’s guts. Or both. A sister and brother could get along or fight each other or pass by in a kind of uncomfortable indifference. And if real relationship-by-blood shared descent could mean any of those things, maybe family was always a metaphor. He was still thinking about it when he got to Min’s hole. Her boys and the girl that she and her husband had adopted were all there, sharing a meal of fish and noodles when he arrived, and they all greeted him like they knew him, like his injuries were important to them, like they cared. He sat at the table for a little bit, making jokes and minimizing the assault and its aftermath, but what he wanted to do – what he did as soon as his sense of etiquette allowed – was excuse himself and head back to the guest room they’d set aside for him. A message was waiting for him from the Roci . From Holden. Seeing the familiar blue eyes and tousled brown hair was weirdly displacing. Alex felt like part of him was already on the way back to the Rocinante , and he was a little surprised not to be there already. “Alex. Hey, hope things are going well out there, and that Bobbie is good.” “Yeah,” Alex said to the playback. “Funny you’d ask.” “So, I’ve been looking into this thing with missing ships? And there’s a suspicious hit out at 434 Hungaria. Any chance you have access to a ship? If you need to rent one, feel free to pull the funds from my account. I’d like you to go see if a ship named the Pau Kant is sitting out there parked and dark. Specs on the transponder code attached to this message.” Alex paused the playback, the skin at the back of his neck tickling. Missing ships was turning into a motif to his day, and it made him uneasy. He played the rest of Holden’s message, rubbing his chin as he did it. There was a lot less to it than he wanted to know. The records on the Pau Kant didn’t show it as a Martian vessel, or anything else in particular. Alex set his hand terminal to record, saw what he looked like in the display, combed his fingers through his hair, and started the message. “Hey, Captain. Got your thing about the Pau Kant . I was wondering if I could get a little more information about that. I’m sort of in the middle of somethin’ a mite odd myself.” He described what had happened to him and Bobbie in lighter tones than he actually felt. He didn’t want to scare Holden when there was nothing the man could do to protect him or Bobbie. Apart from saying that the attackers seemed to have been spooked that Alex had appeared on the scene, he left out the details of Bobbie’s investigation and Avasarala’s. It might have been paranoia, but transmitting that information without another couple levels of encryption seemed like asking for trouble. He did ask what other ships were supposed to have gone missing, and how it might relate to Mars before he signed off. Maybe whatever Holden was looking into was just coincidence. Maybe the Pau Kant and the missing Martian warships were totally unrelated. Wasn’t where Alex would put his money, though. He checked to see if there was anything from Amos or Naomi, and felt a little let down when there wasn’t. He recorded brief messages for the both of them and sent them out. In the main room of the apartment the kids’ voices were loud, three conversations going on at the same time, each fighting to be heard over the others. Alex ignored them, accessing the local directory and looking up old names. People he could think of from his time in the service. There were dozens. Marian Costlow. Hannu Metzinger. Aaron Hu. He checked the directory against them, old friends and acquaintances and enemies, looking for who was still on Mars, still in the Navy, still someone who might remember him well enough to go out for a few beers and talk. By the end of the evening, he had three, and he sent messages to each of them, then requested a connection to Bobbie. A few seconds later, she appeared on his screen. Wherever she was, it wasn’t the hospital. She had on a shirt with a green collar instead of the blue patient’s gown, and her hair had been washed and braided back. “Alex,” she said. “Sorry about my brother. He means well, but he’s kind of a dick.” “Everybody’s related to someone,” he said. “You wind up at his place or your own?” “Neither one,” she said. “I need to hire a cleanup crew to get the blood off my floor, and I’m doing a solid security audit to figure out how they got in.” “Yeah. Wouldn’t feel safe until that’s done,” Alex agreed. “Right? And if there is a follow-up attack, I’m sure as hell not staying where it’s going to catch Ben and his wife in the crossfire. I popped for a hotel room. They’ve got their own security, and I can pay for extra surveillance.” Min’s voice rose in the background, calling for calm. There was laughter in her tones, and he heard it echoed in the protests of her children. A tightness like a hand closed over his heart. He hadn’t thought about a follow-up attack. He should have. “They got a spare room at that hotel?” he asked. “Probably. You want me to find out?” “Nah, I’ll just pack up and head over, if that’s all right. They don’t, someone will.” And whoever it is, it won’t be Min , he thought but didn’t say. “I got a few people I thought I’d try chatting up in the next few days. See if anything seems likely.” “I really appreciate this, Alex,” Bobbie said. “We should talk about how to manage that safely. I don’t want you walking into a trap.” “Wouldn’t make me happy either. Also, you don’t have access to a ship, do you?” Bobbie blinked at the non sequitur. “What kind of ship?” “Something small and fast,” Alex said. “May need to get out to the Belt, take a gander at something for Holden.” “Well, actually, yeah,” Bobbie said. “Avasarala gave me the old racing pinnace we took from Jules-Pierre Mao back in the day. It’s pretty much just been sucking dock fees, but I could probably get it polished up.” “You’re kiddin’. She gave you the Razorback ?” “Not kidding. I think it was her way of paying me without actually paying me. She’d probably be confused that I haven’t sold it yet. Why? What’s up?” “I’ll let you know when I hear more,” Alex said. “Maybe something, maybe nothing.” But either way , he thought, it’ll get you and me both where it’s hard as hell to have someone make a follow-up attack. Chapter Sixteen: Holden The security footage from Tycho Station covered almost all of the public spaces. The wide, open common corridors, the thinner access ways. Gantries and maintenance corridors. It seemed like the only places the eyes of station security didn’t reach were the businesses and personal quarters. Even the storage lockers and tool shops had cameras logging whoever went in or out. It should have made things easy. It didn’t. “This has got to be it,” Holden said, tapping a finger against the screen. Under his nail, Monica’s doorway opened. Two people came out. They wore light blue jumpsuits with no signs or insignia, dark, close-fitting caps, and work gloves. The crate they wheeled between them was the same formed plastic and ceramic that food and environmental services used to transport biological materials: raw fungal matter to be textured and flavored, then the foods that were made from them, and – when needed – the processed fecal remains taken back as substrate for the fungus. Magnetic clamps held it to the cart, and the indicator on the side showed it was sealed. It was big enough, maybe, to hold a woman. Or a woman’s body. They’d gone in an hour earlier. Monica had gone in twenty minutes before. Whatever happened, she had to have been in that box. Fred, scowling and hunched over, marked the crate as an item of interest and put a follow order on it. Holden couldn’t tell what the older man was thinking, but his eyes were flat with anger. Anger and something else. “You recognize them?” Holden asked. “They’re not in the system.” “Then how did they get on the station?” Fred glanced at him. “Working on that.” “Right. Sorry.” On-screen, the two men – Holden was pretty sure they were both men – took the crate to a maintenance corridor, the trace clicking over from camera to camera automatically. In the narrower space, the crate bumped against the walls and tried to bind up where the corridor turned. “Doors and corners,” Holden said. “What?” “Nothing.” The security trace showed men and cart entering a warehouse. Pallets of similar crates filled the space. The men guided the cart to a half-filled one, unlocked the clamps, and hauled the crate up and onto the pallet with its siblings. Fred split the display, holding the trace on the cart, but adding one to each of the two men. One panel showed the storage space; the other followed the two figures out to the common corridors. In the warehouse, a pair of mech drivers came, logged in from lunch, and resumed the task of piling on crates. In the common corridor, the two men went into a lavatory and didn’t come out. The trace on them flickered forward until the green border that marked a live feed framed the images. A short call to the warehouse manager verified that the two men hadn’t holed up there; they’d just disappeared. The cart, still going through the older records, was buried in among others just like it. Fred advanced the feed. Mech drivers came and went. Pallets filled and were piled on top of each other. “Present status,” Fred said, and the security feed skipped forward without moving away from the warehouse camera. Whatever had been in the crate was still there. “Well,” Fred said, rising to his feet, “this is about to turn into an unpleasant day. You coming?” The environmental controls in the warehouse showed no anomalies, but Holden couldn’t help imagining he smelled something under the oil and ozone. A smell like death. The mech driver was a fresh-faced young woman with straight brown hair the same color as her skin. Her expression as she moved the crates back out from the pallet spoke of excitement and curiosity and barely constrained dread. With every crate that came off, Holden’s gut went tighter. Monica had told him that involving other people in his investigation was dangerous. He couldn’t help thinking that whatever they found in the next few minutes was going to be his fault. And so fixing it would be his responsibility. Assuming it could be fixed. “That’s the one,” Fred said to the mech driver. “Put it over here.” She maneuvered the container to the empty decking. Its magnetic clamps engaged with a deep thump. The indicator still showed that it was sealed. Even if Monica had been put into the thing alive, her air would have run out hours ago. The mech backed away, settling onto titanium and ceramic haunches. Fred stepped forward, lifted his hand terminal, and tapped in an override. The indicator on the crate shifted. Fred flipped open the lid. The smell was rich and organic. Holden had a sudden powerful memory of being fourteen at his family compound on Earth. Mother Sophie had kept an herb garden by the kitchen, and when she’d turned the dirt before planting, it smelled just like this. The crate was filled to the brim with the soft, crumbling beige of raw fungal protein. Fred leaned forward, pressing his hand deep. Looking for a hidden body. When he pulled his arm back, dust clung to it up to the elbow. He shook his head no. It was an Earth gesture. “Are you sure it’s the right crate?” Holden asked. “I am,” Fred said. “But let’s check anyway.” For the next hour, the increasingly confused mech driver hauled out crates from the pallet and Fred and Holden opened them. When the motes of protein dust in the air set off the particulate warning alarm twice, Fred called a stop. “She’s not here,” he said. “I saw that. So that’s kind of weird, right?” “It is.” Fred rubbed his eyes with his finger and thumb. He looked old. Tired. When he gathered himself, the sense of power and authority was still there. “Either they switched the crates somewhere between her quarters and here or they doctored the feed.” “Both of those would be bad.” Fred looked over at the mech driver as she piled the opened crates into a stack to ship back for reprocessing. When he spoke, his voice was low enough it would only carry to Holden. “Both of which would mean they had a high-level working knowledge of the security system, but not enough access to wipe the records completely.” “That narrows it down?” “A little, maybe. Could be a UN black ops team. They could have done something like this. Or Mars.” “But you don’t think that’s it, do you?” Fred chewed his lip. He pulled up his hand terminal, typed in a series of codes, every tap sharp and percussive. An alert Klaxon sounded and gold-and-green alert icons appeared on every display from Holden’s hand terminal to the door controls to the mech status panel. Fred pushed his fists into his pockets with a satisfied grunt. “Did you just lock down the station ?” Holden said. “I did,” Fred said. “And I’m keeping it locked down until I’ve got some answers. And Monica Stuart back.” “Good,” Holden said. “Extreme, but good.” “I may be a little pissed off.” The contents of Monica’s quarters were laid out on the gray-green ceramic counters of the security lab. No blood, no images, and the background soup of DNA from thousands of people who’d been in contact with the objects in the last week, usually with too small a sample to identify an individual. This was what was left. A clothing bag, its zipper ripped and hanging open in a mindless smile. A shirt Holden remembered her wearing when he’d seen her a few days before. Her crippled hand terminal with its shattered display. All the things that hadn’t belonged to the station when it rented her the space. It seemed small, like there wasn’t enough there. He realized it was just that he was thinking of it as the collection of a lifetime. Probably she had other possessions somewhere else, but maybe she didn’t. If they didn’t find her alive, maybe this was all she’d have to leave behind. “You cannot be fucking serious,” Sakai said for what seemed like the third or fourth time. The chief engineer’s face was red, his jaw set. He’d arrived at the security station a few minutes after Fred and Holden, and Holden was a little surprised Fred hadn’t had him thrown out yet. “I have eight ships inbound within the next week. What am I supposed to do? Tell them to match orbit and float until we decide whether we’ll let them in?” “Seems like a good start,” Fred said. “We have supplies due to ship on half a dozen contracts.” “I’m aware of that, Mister Sakai.” Fred’s voice was no louder; there was no anger in it. The cool politeness made the hair on the back of Holden’s neck rise. Sakai seemed to feel it too. It didn’t stop him, but his voice went from accusatory to almost wheedling. “I’ve got shipments on two dozen jobs due to go out . There are a lot of people counting on us.” For a moment, Fred’s shoulders seemed to sag, but his voice was just as strong. “I’m aware of that. We’ll open up for business again as soon as we can.” Sakai wavered, on the edge of saying something more. Instead, he made a short, impatient sigh and walked back out as the head of security came in. She was a thin-faced woman Fred called Drummer, but Holden didn’t know if that was her first name, her last, or just something she went by. “How’s it going?” Fred asked. “Nothing we can’t handle,” she said. Her voice had a crisp accent that Holden couldn’t place. She glanced at him, nodded curtly, and turned back to Fred. “Do we have any information we can give on how long we expect the lockdown to be in effect?” “Tell them the interruption of service will be as brief as possible.” “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Drummer said, then turned away. “Drummer. Close the door when you go, eh?” Her eyes flickered, cut back to Holden, then away again. She didn’t say anything, but she pulled the door closed behind her when she left. Fred gave Holden a mirthless, tired smile. “Sakai’s right. I just shut down the equivalent of a major port city because of one missing woman. Every hour I keep it like this, Tycho’s losing thousands of credits in a dozen different scrips.” “So we’ll have to find her quickly.” “If they haven’t already fed her into the recyclers and broken her down to water and a few active molecules,” Fred said. And then a moment later, “I have the sensor arrays sweeping the local area. If she’s been spaced, we’ll know it soon.” “Thank you,” Holden said, leaning against the counter. “I know I don’t say it often, but I do appreciate this.” Fred nodded to the door. “You see her? Drummer?” “Sure.” “I’ve been working with her directly for three years. Knew who she was for ten before that.” “All right,” Holden said. “If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have told you I trusted her with my life.” “Now?” “Now there is exactly one person on this station who I’m certain isn’t going to shoot me in the back of the head if I keep pressing on this, and that’s you,” Fred said. “That’s got to be uncomfortable.” “It really is. So what I mean to say, James, is that while I am glad that you appreciate all I’m doing for you, I’m also taking you on right now as my personal bodyguard. In return, I’ll try to keep anyone from shooting you.” Holden nodded slowly. Something in the back of his brain was shifting, like a thought that wasn’t quite formed. A wave of vertigo washed over him like he was looking over a cliff. “Two of us against a deep OPA conspiracy.” “Until I have evidence to the contrary, yes.” “That really is an uncomfortable position to be in, isn’t it?” “Not what I would have picked, no,” Fred said. “But someone knows how to circumvent my security systems, and whatever your reporter friend was doing was enough to spook them into action direct enough to tip their hand.” “The missing ships,” Holden said. “There were a couple of people I mentioned it to.” “That’s not something you do.” “In retrospect, I wish I’d played it a little closer to the vest, but —” “Not that,” Fred said. “When you’ve infiltrated the enemy security structures, you don’t do anything that shows that you’ve managed it. It’s basic information warfare. As long as the enemy doesn’t know they’re compromised, you can keep gathering intelligence. That’s not something you give up unless the stakes are unimaginably high or…” “Or?” “Or the enemy you’ve compromised isn’t going to be around very long anyway. I don’t know if those missing ships spooked someone into making a stupid mistake, or if my position on Tycho is so precarious that it doesn’t matter anymore whether I know.” “You seem to be taking it all in stride.” Fred hoisted an eyebrow. “I’m panicking on the inside,” he said in a deadpan. Holden looked over the pile of Monica’s belongings as if they might have something to add to the conversation. The hand terminal blinked forlornly. The blouse hung loose and sad. “Did you pull anything from her terminal?” he asked. “We can’t connect to it,” Fred said. “All the diagnostics are disabled or sunk in third-party encryption. Journalists.” Holden picked up the hand terminal. The shattered display was a mess of light scatter. The only sections that still had anything close to recognizable were a blinking red button in one corner and a few letters in a particularly large shard: NG SIG. Holden tapped the red button and the hand terminal flashed once. The button was gone, the letters replaced by something pale brown with a line across it, a single jigsaw puzzle piece floating in a sea of noise-light. “What did you do?” Fred asked. “There was a button,” Holden said. “I pushed it.” “Jesus Christ. That really is how you go through life, isn’t it?” “But look. It… I think I may have accepted an incoming signal.” “From what?” Holden shook his head. Then turned back to the pile of Monica’s belongings, the tiny half-thought that had been bothering him slipping into his consciousness with something like relief. “Her video capture,” he said. “She has a little wearable interview rig. It’s intentionally unobtrusive so that the person she’s talking to sort of forgets they’re on camera.” “And?” Holden spread his hands. “It’s not here.” Fred moved forward, his lips thin, his eyes shifting over the mess of light from the broken screen. Holden had a sense of movement, as if the image was shifting slightly. Voices came from the far side of Fred’s office door. A man’s voice raised in anger; Drummer’s calm, clipped reply. “Are you sure we can’t get into this hand terminal?” Holden said. “Positive,” Fred said, “but there may be another way. Come on. If we’re going to solve this, we’re going to need an imaging astronomer.” Once Fred explained the problem, it took three hours to set up a rig that would capture the glow coming from the scattered screen and an hour more to get the computer to understand its new task. The properties of light coming off extrasolar dust clouds were apparently very different from a busted terminal display. Once the expert systems were convinced that the problem fit inside their job description, the lab went to work matching polarizations and angles, mapping the fissures in the surface of the display, and building a computational lens that couldn’t exist in the physical world. Fred had emptied the lab and sealed it. Holden sat on a chair, listening to the tick-tick-tick of the scanners recording photons and watching the image on the display slowly cohere. Fred hummed to himself, a low, slow tune that seemed melancholy and threatening at the same time. The empty stations and desks highlighted how alone the two of them were in a station filled with people. A computational run ended. The image updated. It was still rough. Rainbow-colored deformations crossed it and sections were simply missing; it looked like the beginning of a migraine. But it was enough. Several empty meters, ending in a square metal door complicated by an industrial bolt mechanism. Walls, ceiling, and floor marked with scuffed yellow paint and stippled by guide holes where pallets and crates would stack. “That’s a storage container,” Fred said. “She’s in a shipping container.” “The way the image moves. Is that her? Is she moving?” Fred shrugged. “Because if she’s moving, then she’s probably alive, right?” “Could be. If she’s alive, it’s because they want her alive. And off Tycho. Look at that.” Holden followed Fred’s finger. “It’s the edge of the doorway?” “The door’s sealed. You don’t do that until it’s ready to ship. There are probably a quarter million containers like that on the station, but I’d bet we don’t have more than a few thousand sealed and ready to go out. Whoever wants her, they want her someplace we can’t get her back from.” Holden felt something in his gut relax. She was out there, and she was okay. Not safe, not yet. But not dead. He hadn’t realized how much the guilt and fear had settled down on his shoulders until the moment of hope lifted it. “What?” Fred said. “I didn’t say anything.” “But you made that noise.” “Oh,” Holden said. “Yeah, I was just noticing how having everyone I care about gone makes it really important that I not screw up the things I can control.” “Good insight. Well done.” “Are you making fun of me?” “Little bit. But I’m also running a targeted security scan of the shipping containers on the float. And guess what?” Fred gestured to the display on the desk before him. The great emptiness of the Tycho work sphere was drawn in thin, clean schematic lines. From habit, Holden’s gaze went to the Rocinante . Fred pointed beyond it to a floating cluster of metal containers. “One of them’s warm.” Chapter Seventeen: Alex Alex had spent a fair amount of his training time at Hecate Base, and going back now was strange in a couple ways. There were the sorts of changes that he’d become accustomed to on Mars – old bars gone, new restaurants in place, the crappy handball courts converted to an administrative center, things like that. But driving his cart through the wide corridors, the thing that struck him most was how young everyone was. Cadets strutted in front of the bar that had once been the Steel Cactus Mexican Grill and sold to-go cups of Thai food now, their chins up and their chests out looking like they were playing dress-up. The ads on the screens were all for weapons and churches, singles services designed for people on tours of duty, and life insurance tailored for the families they left behind. They were the sorts of things that promised control or comfort in an uncertain universe. Alex remembered ads like that from decades before. The styles had changed, but the needs and subterranean fears that fueled them were the same. Alex had worn the uniform, told the jokes. Or at least the same kind. He’d wondered whether there would be violence when he got out with a mixture of hope and dread. He’d pretended to be tougher than he was in hope of becoming tougher. He remembered how serious it had all been. The time Preston had gotten drunk and started a fight with Gregory. Alex had been pulled into it, and they’d all ended up before the MPs, certain their careers were over. The time Andrea Howard got busted cheating and had been dishonorably discharged. It had felt like someone died. Now, looking at these kids, of course there was brawling and stupid decisions. They were children. And so he’d been a child when he was there too, and his choices had been made by a guy who didn’t know any better. He’d married Talissa when he was about that old. They’d made their blueprints for how he’d serve his tours and then come home. All their plans had been made by kids this young. Looked at that way, it made sense how nothing had worked out. The other thing that surprised him was that everyone seemed to know who he was. He parked his cart outside a teahouse called Poush that had survived the years since he’d served. The blue-and-gold awning put a gentle shadow over the glassed doorway. Faux-aged paint on the window curved in art nouveau framing with phrases in French. Alex figured the intention was to evoke the idea of some Parisian caf? of centuries before for people who’d never so much as stepped on the same planet as France. It was strange that the quaint feeling translated so well. Inside, a dozen small tables with real linen cloth crowded together. The air was thick with the scent of the local qahwa – almonds and cinnamon and sugar. Captain Holden had a thing for coffee, and Alex felt a moment’s regret that he was off on Tycho Station where he couldn’t smell this. Before he could finish the thought, Ferm?n boiled up out of his chair and wrapped his arms around him. “Alex!” Ferm?n shouted. “Good God, man. You got fat.” “No,” Alex said, returning the hug and then breaking it. “That was you.” “Ah,” his old friend said, nodding. “Yes, that was me. I forgot. Sit down.” The waiter, a young man of maybe eighteen, looked out from behind the kitchen door and his eyes widened. The smile pretended to be the customary politeness, but when he ducked back Alex could hear him talking to someone. He sounded excited. Alex tried not to feel awkward about that. “Thanks for this,” Alex said. “I don’t like to be the guy who doesn’t keep in touch until he needs a favor.” “And yet,” Ferm?n said. The years had turned his stubble gray and thickened his jowls. Alex felt like if he squinted, he could still see the sharp-faced man he’d served with hidden somewhere in him. It was easier to see him in his gestures when he waved Alex’s concern away. “It’s nothing. Happy to do a favor for a friend.” The waiter came out of the kitchen, nodding. The wide-mouthed cup in his hand steamed. He put it in front of Alex almost shyly. “Specialty of the house,” the boy said. “For you, Mr. Kamal.” “Ah,” Alex said. “Thank you.” The boy nodded again and retreated. Alex chuckled uncomfortably at the cup, and Ferm?n grinned. “Come on now. You’ve got to be used to this kind of thing, right? You’re Alex Kamal. First pilot through the Ring.” “Naw, just the first one that lived.” “Same thing.” “And I surely didn’t want to be,” Alex said. “They were shooting at me.” “And that makes it less romantic?” Alex blew across the surface of the cup and sipped at it. Chai with honey and cardamom and something else he couldn’t quite place. “That trip was a lot of things,” he drawled. “Romantic wasn’t one of ’em. And usually since then I’ve had the captain around to soak up the attention.” “Probably different elsewhere. But you’re a local boy. One of us who got out and made good.” “Is that what happened?” Ferm?n spread his hands, the gesture taking in the teahouse, the corridor outside, Hecate Base, and Mars. “I’ve been here the whole damned time. Made it as far as chief petty officer. Two divorces and a kid in upper university calls me twice a year to borrow money.” “Bet you had fewer people shooting at you, though. It’s not as much fun as you make it sound.” “Suppose not,” Ferm?n said. “Grass is always greener.” For an hour, more or less, they sat drinking chai and eating almond cookies – though fewer of those than they had when they’d been younger. Ferm?n brought him up to speed on half a dozen of the others that they’d known in common back in the day. The chai was good and Ferm?n jovial. It was hard to say what it was exactly that left Alex melancholy. When the time came to leave, the boy wouldn’t take their money. He just said “On the house” when they tried. The checkpoint into the base proper was manned by a security team that had Ferm?n glance into a facial recognition setup. Once he cleared, they checked Alex for weapons and contraband and issued him a visitor pass. The process was less than five minutes, and leisurely at that. Alex followed Ferm?n to a moving walkway and leaned against the rail with him as it drew them forward, deeper into Olympus Mons. “So this guy,” Alex said. “Commander Duarte? You’ll like him. Everyone likes him. Admiral Long’s aide. Has been for the last ten years.” “Long hasn’t retired?” “She’ll die at her desk,” Ferm?n said. He sounded just on the edge of resentful, but his smile covered whatever it was over. “I appreciate you setting this up.” “Not a problem. Duarte was excited to meet you.” “Really?” “Why the surprise? You’re pilot of the Rocinante . You’re famous.” Winston Duarte’s office was plain and comfortable. The desk was simple pressed polycarbonate, a little larger maybe than the receptionist’s in the lobby. The screen on the wall was set to a calm semi-abstract piece that flowed in sepia and brown, evoking fallen leaves and mathematical proofs in roughly equal proportions. The only touch of luxury was a shelf of what appeared to be actual printed books on military strategy. The man himself fit in the space like he’d been designed for it. Half a head shorter than Alex with acne-pocked cheeks and warm brown eyes, Duarte radiated politeness and competence. After they shook hands, he took the seat beside Alex rather than cross back behind his desk. “I have to say I’m a little surprised at the visit,” Duarte said. “Most of my dealings with the OPA are formal.” “The Roci ’s not OPA.” Duarte’s eyebrows ticked up a millimeter. “Really?” “We’re more of an independent contractor. We’ve taken jobs from the OPA, but Earth’s paid some of our bills. Private companies too, if the job’s a good fit.” “I stand corrected. All the same, I’m honored. What can I do for you, Mr. Kamal?” “Call me Alex for one thing. I’m not here officially. I mean, I’m on leave from the ship. Came back to the old stompin’ grounds for a visit, came across an old friend who needed a hand with something, and one thing led to another.” “Which led you to me,” Duarte said. His smile was sudden and warm. “I’ll count myself lucky for that. What’s on your friend’s mind?” “Missing ships.” Duarte went still, his smile still perfectly in place. For a moment, it was like the man had become a statue. When he moved again, he sat back, leaning into the chair with a barely exaggerated casualness that plucked at Alex’s ears. “I’m not aware of any ships that have gone missing. Is there something I should know about?” Alex folded his hands on his knee. “My friend. She’s a marine. Well, ex now. She’s been doing a little digging into the black market.” “A journalist, then?” “A patriotic Martian,” Alex said. “She’s not looking to stir up anything, and neither am I. But she’s found some things that got her back up.” “Things like what?” Alex lifted a finger. “I’ll get there in a minute. Thing is, she’s not Navy. Doesn’t have friends and contacts on our side. So she asked if I’d ask, and when I did —” “Chief Petty Officer Beltran sent you to me,” Duarte said. “I see.” “Did he make a mistake?” Duarte was quiet for a long moment, his eyes soft and fixed on nothing. Alex shifted in his seat. These sorts of conversations weren’t part of his usual duties, and he couldn’t tell if it was going well or poorly. Duarte sighed. “No. He didn’t.” “You’re… you’re seeing things too. Aren’t you?” Duarte stood and moved to the door, not touching it, but looking. His head bent a degree. “This isn’t the sort of thing we talk about. I don’t break the chain of command.” “I respect that,” Alex said. “I’m not asking you to be disloyal to anyone. Only I have some information, you maybe have some too. I’ll tell you what I’m comfortable sharing, you do the same. Maybe we can do each other some good.” “I have an investigation in progress.” “Anything I give you, I don’t mind your passing on,” Alex said. “And maybe it’d be best if it was like that for you too.” Duarte considered, his lips pressing together. “All right. What have you got?” “Blips in the inventories. Things that got lost or destroyed that showed up again later. Weapons. Medical supplies.” “Ships?” “Yeah,” Alex said. “Ships.” “Give me a name.” “Apalala .” Duarte seemed to deflate. He went to his desk and sank into the chair behind it, but when he spoke, his voice had a relaxed tone that made Alex feel like he’d passed a test. Like the false and cordial ease that had begun the meeting had fallen away like a mask. “That’s one I’ve been looking at too,” Duarte said. “What are you seeing?” “I don’t know. Not exactly. We’re stretched thin. You know that?” “People heading out for the new planets.” “Inventories are running slow. I think more of them are being dry-labbed than anyone wants to admit. I’ve been trying to convince the admiral that it’s a problem, but either she doesn’t understand or…” “Or?” Duarte didn’t finish his thought. “There has been a pattern of attacks too. They may be political or it may just be theft and piracy. You heard about the attack on Callisto?” “Heard about it.” “Have you come across anything about it particularly?” “No.” Duarte clenched his jaw in disappointment. “There was something about that one that bothers me, but I can’t put my finger on it. The timing was precise. The attack was well coordinated. And for what? To loot a shipyard?” “What did they take?” Duarte’s gaze clicked onto Alex. His smile was sorrowful. “I don’t know. Nobody knows. I think nobody will ever know, because I can’t even figure out what was there. That’s how bad it is.” Alex scowled. “You’re telling me that the Martian Navy doesn’t know where its own ships are?” “I’m telling you that the tracking of supplies, ships, and material has all but collapsed. We don’t know what’s missing because we don’t know . And I’m telling you that the leadership is so focused on trying not to lose face in front of Earth and the OPA that they’re downplaying it.” “Covering it up.” “Downplaying it,” Duarte said. “Prime Minister Smith is making a big show right now of taking a convoy to Luna to meet with the UN secretary-general and swearing that everything’s fine, and he’s doing that because it isn’t true. If I were a criminal and a black marketer, all this would look like a permanent Christmas.” Alex said something obscene. Duarte opened his desk and took out a pad of paper and a silver pen. He wrote for a moment, then tore off the sheet and handed it across the desk. In precise, legible handwriting he’d written KAARLO HENDERSON-CHARLES and an address in base housing. The act of physically writing something down, not trusting the information to electronic transfer, felt like either sensible precaution or paranoia. Alex wasn’t sure which. “While you’re here, I’d recommend talking to Kaarlo. He’s a senior programmer that’s been working on a project that was supposed to coordinate the databases. He was the one who came to me first to say he was seeing problems. If you have specific questions, he may be able to give you answers. Or he may be able to point you to where they are.” “Will he help me?” “He may,” Duarte said. “I did.” “Could you… give him cover?” “No,” Duarte said, with his sad smile. “I’m not ordering anyone to do anything with you. No offense. You’re not Navy anymore. Whatever we do, you and I, we do as part of my investigation. And I report all of it, down to the letter, to the admiral.” “Covering your ass.” “Hell yes,” Duarte said. “You should do the same.” “Yes, sir,” Alex said. Ferm?n wasn’t in the waiting area when he left, so Alex went out and caught one of the moving walkways heading east, toward base housing. His head felt a little light, like he’d been running the oxygen too lean for too long. The Navy had always been the thing in his life that didn’t change. The permanent factor. His relationship to it might shift. He did his tours, he mustered out, but those changes were all about him. His life, his fragility and mortality and impermanence. The idea that the Navy itself could be fragile, that the government of Mars might stumble or collapse, was like saying the sun might go out. If that wasn’t solid, then nothing was. So maybe nothing was. Kaarlo Henderson-Charles’ hole was in a stretch of a hundred just like it, spare and spartan. There was nothing on the gray-green door to identify it beyond numbers. No flowers in the planter, only dry soil. Alex rang the bell. When he knocked, the door opened under his knuckles. He heard someone grumbling angrily under their breath. No. Not a person. The recyclers on high, scrubbing the air. He caught a whiff of cordite and something like rotten meat. The body was on the kitchen table in its uniform jumper. The blood had pooled under the chair and spattered along the wall and ceiling. A pistol still hung in the limp right hand. Alex coughed out a laugh of mixed disbelief and despair, then he pulled out his hand terminal and called the MPs. “Then what happened?” Bobbie asked. “What do you think? The MPs came.” The hotel lobby was decorated in crimson and gold. A wall fountain burbled and chuckled beside the couches, giving the two of them something like privacy. Alex sipped at his gin and tonic. The alcohol bit a little. Bobbie pressed her knuckles against her lips and scowled. She was looking solid for any other person who’d been tortured and shot, but still a little fragile for Bobbie. The bandages that covered bullet wounds on her left side made an awkward bump under her blouse, but nothing more. “They questioned you?” she said, barely even making it a question. “For about eight hours. Duarte was able to give me a solid alibi, though, so I’m not in prison.” “Small favors. And your friend? Ferm?n?” “Apparently his terminal’s not on the network. I don’t know if he killed the guy or if whoever killed the guy killed him or… anything. I don’t know anything.” He drank again, more deeply this time. “I may not be good at this whole investigation thing.” “I’m not much better,” Bobbie said. “Mostly I’ve just been shaking the trees and seeing what falls out. So far the only thing I’m really sure about is that something’s going on.” “And that people are willing to kill each other over it,” Alex said. “And now that the MPs are involved, they’re going to lock down the investigation like it was fissionable. I’m not going to be able to do a damned thing.” “Amateur detective hour does seem to be pretty much over,” Alex agreed. “I mean, I can still ask around.” “You did more than enough,” Bobbie said. “I shouldn’t have gotten you into this in the first place. I just don’t like disappointing the old lady.” “I can respect that. But I do kind of wish I knew what was going on.” “Me too.” Alex finished his drink, the ice clicking against his teeth. He had a pleasant warmth in his belly. He looked at Bobbie, saw her looking back at him. “You know,” he said slowly, “just because everything’s shut down here, it doesn’t mean everything’s shut down everywhere.” Bobbie blinked. Her shrug was noncommittal, but there was a gleam in her eyes. “You’re thinking about that backwater asteroid Holden was asking about?” “You’ve got a ship. There’s nothing we can do here,” Alex said. “Seems like something we could do.” “Anyone shot at us, at least we’d see it coming,” Bobbie said, her nonchalance radiating a kind of excitement. Or perhaps it was the alcohol and the prospect of being in a pilot’s chair again making Alex see what he wanted to see. “We could go,” he said. “Take a look. Probably it’s nothing.” Chapter Eighteen: Holden The construction sphere of Tycho Station glittered around Holden, brighter than stars. Ships hung in their berths in all states of undress, the Rocinante just one among many. Other ships hung in the center, awaiting clearance to leave. The sparks of welding rigs and the white plumes of maneuvering thrusters blinked into and out of existence like fireflies. The only sound he heard was his own breath, the only smell the too-clean scent of bottled air. The dirty green-gray EVA suit had TYCHO SECURITY stenciled on the arm in orange, and the rifle in his hand had come from Fred’s weapons locker. Station security was on high alert, Drummer and her teams all set to watch each other on the assumption – and Holden was too painfully aware that it wasn’t anything more – that if there was a dissident faction within them, they’d be outnumbered by the ones loyal to Fred. When they’d started out from the airlock, Holden had turned on the security system. It highlighted slightly over a thousand possible sniper’s nests. He’d turned it off again. Fred floated ahead of him strapped into a bright yellow salvage mech. The rescue-and-recovery kit looked like a massive backpack slung across the mech’s shoulders. A burst of white gas came from the mech’s left side, and Fred drifted elegantly to the right. For a moment, Holden’s brain interpreted the dozens of shipping containers clustered in the empty space outside the massive warehouse bays as being below them, as if he and Fed were divers in a vast airless sea; then they flipped and he was rising up toward them feetfirst. He turned the HUD back on, resetting its display priorities, and one container took on a green overlay. The target. Monica Stuart’s prison, or else her tomb. “How’re you doing back there?” Fred asked in his ear. “I’m solid,” Holden said, then curled his lip in annoyance and turned his mic on. “I’m solid except that this isn’t my usual suit of armor. The controls on this thing are all just a little bit wrong.” “Keep you from dying if they start shooting at us.” “Sure, unless they’re good at it.” “We can hope they’re bad,” Fred said. “Get ready. I’m heading in.” As soon as they’d identified the container, Holden had thought they’d send out a mech, haul it into a bay, and open it. He hadn’t thought about the possibility of booby traps until Fred pointed it out. The container’s data showed awaiting pickup, but the frame that should have said what ship it was slated for was garbled. The image from Monica’s feed didn’t show anything beyond the access door. For all they knew, she could be sitting on tanks of acetylene and oxygen wired to the same circuit as the docking clamps. What they knew for certain was that the main doors were bolted and sealed. But even those could be wired to a trigger. The lowest-risk option, according to Fred, was to cut a hole into the visible doorframe and send someone in to take a look. And the only someone he was sure he could trust was Holden. Fred positioned himself in front of the container’s doors, and the mech’s massive arm reached back and plucked the r-and-r pack loose. Fred unpacked it with a speed and efficiency of movement that made it seem like something he did all the time. The thin plastic emergency airlock, a single-use cutting torch, two emergency pressure suits, a distress beacon, and a small, sealed crate of medical supplies all took their places in the vacuum around him like they’d been hooked in place. Holden had spent enough years bucking ice to admire how little drift each piece of equipment had. “Wish me luck,” Fred said. “Don’t blow up,” Holden replied. Fred’s mic cut out on his chuckle, and the mech’s arms swung into motion with a surgical speed and precision. The welding torch bloomed, slicing through the metal while a sealant foam injector followed to keep the air in the box from venting. Holden opened a connection to the lab and the captured image from Monica’s feed. A brightness like a star shone there. “We’ve got confirmation,” Holden said. “This is the right one.” “I saw,” Fred replied, finishing the cut. He smoothed the airlock over the scar, pressing the adhesive against the surface, and then opened the outer zipper. “You’re up.” Holden moved forward. Fred held out a bulky three-fingered mech claw, and Holden gave it the rifle, scooping up the medical bag and emergency suit. “If anything looks suspicious, just get back out,” Fred said. “We’ll take our chances with a real demolitions tech.” “I’ll just pop my head in,” Holden said. “Sure you will,” Fred said. The angle of the faceplate made Fred’s smile impossible to see, but he could hear it. Holden pulled the outer sheet of the lock over him, sealed it, inflated the blister, and opened the interior sheet. The cut was a square, a meter to each side, black scorch marks with a pale beige foam between them. Holden put a foot on the uncut container door, locking the mag boot in place, and kicked in. The foam splintered and broke inward; the cut panel floated into the container. Dull buttery light spilled out. Monica Stuart lay strapped in a crash couch. Her eyes were open but glazed, her mouth slack. A cut across her cheek had a ridge of black scab. A cheap autodoc was clamped to the wall, a tube reaching out to her neck like a leash. There didn’t seem to be anything else there. Nothing with a big CAUTION EXPLOSIVES sign anyway. When Holden grabbed the edge of the crash couch, it shifted on its gimbals. Her eyes looked into his, and he thought he saw a flicker of emotion there – confusion and maybe relief. He took the needle out of her neck gently. A tiny spurt of clear liquid bubbling and dancing in the air. He cracked the emergency medical kit open and strapped it over her arm. Forty long seconds later, it reported that she appeared sedated but stable and asked if Holden wanted to intervene. “How’s it going in there?” Fred asked, and this time Holden remembered to turn on the mic. “I’ve got her.” Three hours later, they were in the medical bay on Tycho Station proper. The room was sealed off, four guards posted outside and all network connections to the suite physically disabled. Three other beds sat empty, the patients, if there were any, rerouted to other places. It was half recovery room, half protective custody, and Holden could only wonder if Monica understood how much of that security was just theater. “That wasn’t fun,” Monica said. “I know,” Holden said. “You’ve been through a lot.” “I have.” The words were slushy, like she was drunk, but her eyes had the sharpness and focus Holden was used to seeing in them. Fred, standing at the foot of the bed, crossed his arms. “I’m sorry, Monica, but I’m going to have to ask you some questions.” Her smile reached her eyes. “Usually goes the other way.” “Yes, but I usually don’t answer. I’m hoping you will.” She took a deep breath. “Okay. What do you have?” “Why don’t we start with how you wound up in that container,” Fred said. Her shrug looked sore and painful. “Not much to tell there. I was in my quarters and the door opened. Two guys came in. I sent an emergency alert to security, screamed a lot, and tried to get away from them. But then they sprayed something in my face and I blacked out.” “The door opened,” Fred said. “You didn’t answer it?” “No.” Fred’s expression didn’t change, but Holden had the sense of growing weight in the angle of his shoulders. “Go on.” “I came to when they were loading me into the crash couch. I couldn’t move much,” Monica went on, “but I managed to turn my camera rig on.” “Did you hear anyone speaking?” “Did,” she said. “They were Belters. That’s what you’re getting at, isn’t it?” “It’s one thing. Can you tell me what they said?” “They called me some unpleasant names,” Monica said. “There was something about a trigger. I couldn’t follow all of it.” “Belter creole can be hard to follow.” “And I’d been drugged and assaulted,” Monica said, her voice growing hard. Fred lifted his hands, placating. “No offense meant,” he said. “Do you remember anything specific that —” “This is about the missing colony ships, isn’t it?” “It’s early to say what this is ‘about,’ ” Fred said, and then, grudgingly, “but that’s certainly one possibility.” “The OPA’s doing it, then. Only you didn’t know about it.” “I’m not confirming or denying anything, just at the moment.” “Then neither am I,” Monica said, crossing her arms. “Hey, hey, hey,” Holden said. “Come on, you two. We’re all on the same side here, right?” “Not without terms,” Monica said. Fred’s jaw went tight. “We just saved your life.” “Thanks for that,” Monica said. “I’m included in the investigation. All of it. Exclusive interviews with both of you. I’ll give you everything I have about the colony ships and my abduction. Even the parts I didn’t tell Holden. And fair warning before I go public with any of this.” “Wait a minute,” Holden said. “There were parts you didn’t tell me?” “Final approval before anything sees air,” Fred said. “Not a chance,” Monica said. “And you need me.” “Final approval exclusively for issues of security and safety,” Fred said. “And two weeks lead time.” Monica’s eyes were bright and hungry. Holden had traveled with her for weeks going out to the Ring the first time, and he felt like he knew her. The ruthlessness in her expression was surprising. Fred only seemed amused by it. “One week lead time, and nothing unreasonably withheld,” she said and pointed an accusing finger at Fred. “I’m trusting you on that.” Fred looked to Holden, his smile thin and unamused. “Well, now I’ve got two people I know aren’t working for the other side.” The thing Holden hadn’t known— No, that wasn’t true. The thing Holden had known, but hadn’t appreciated, was the number of ships moving through the rings and out to the vast spread of new planets. Monica’s full logs tracked the almost five hundred ships that had made the transit. Many were smaller even than the Rocinante , traveling together in groups to make a claim on a new and unknown world or else to join newly founded steadings on places with names like Paris and New Mars and Firdaws. Other ships were larger – true colony ships loaded with the same kinds of supplies that, generations before, humanity had taken out to Luna, Mars, and the Jovian moons. The first one to vanish had been the Sigyn . She’d been a converted water hauler a little newer than the Canterbury . Then the Highland Swing , a tiny rock hopper that had been nearly gutted to put in an Epstein drive with three times the power a ship like that could ever have used. The Rabia Balkhi that she’d shown him had the best footage of its transit, but it wasn’t the first or the last to disappear. As he went through, he made note of the types and profiles of all the missing ships to forward on to Alex. The Pau Kant could be any of them. There was another pattern to the vanishing too. The ships that went missing did so during times of high traffic when Medina Station’s attention was stretched between five or six different ships. And afterward – this was interesting – the ring through which the missing ship had passed showed not a spike in radiation but a discontinuity – a moment when the background levels changed suddenly. It wasn’t something that other transits seemed to have. Monica had interpreted it as evidence of alien technology doing something inscrutable and eerie. Knowing what they did now, it looked to Holden more like a glitch left over where the data had been doctored. Like switching the crate that Monica had been taken away in or vanishing into a men’s room and never coming out, someone would have had to hide the “missing” ships coming back through the ring. If there was a similar glitch in the sensor data of the ring that led back to humanity’s home system — “Holden?” The security office around him was empty. Fred had cleared it for his “personal use” – meaning as the center for his private investigation of how deeply he had been compromised. The security personnel Holden had walked past coming in seemed nonplussed to be turned out of their own offices, but no one had raised any objection. Or at least none that he’d heard. Fred stood in the archway of the short hall that led to the interrogation rooms. He was in civilian clothes, well tailored. A scattering of white stubble dusted his chin and cheeks, and his eyes were bloodshot and the yellow of old ivory. His spine was stiff though, and his demeanor sharp enough to cut. “Did you hear something?” Holden asked. “I’ve had a conversation with an associate of mine who I’ve known for a long time. Light delay always makes these things painfully slow, but… I have a better idea what I’m looking at. A start, anyway.” “Can you trust them?” Fred’s smile was weary. “If Anderson Dawes is against me, I’m screwed whatever I do.” “All right,” Holden said. “So where do we start?” “If I could borrow you for a few minutes,” Fred said, nodding back toward the interrogation rooms. “You want to question me?” “More use you as a prop in a little play I’m putting on.” “Seriously?” “If it works, it’ll save us time.” Holden stood. “And if it doesn’t?” “Then it won’t.” “Good enough.” The interrogation room was bare, cold, and unfriendly. A steel table bolted to the floor separated the single backless stool from three gel-cushioned chairs. Monica was already sitting in one. The cut on her face was looking much better – little more than a long red welt. Without makeup, she looked harder. Older. It suited her. Fred gestured to the seat at the other side for Holden, then sat in the middle. “Just look serious and let me do the talking,” he said. Holden caught Monica’s gaze and lifted his eyebrows. What is this? She cracked a thin smile. Guess we’ll find out. The door opened, and Drummer walked in. Sakai followed her. The chief engineer’s gaze flickered from Holden to Monica and back. Drummer guided him to a stool. “Thank you,” Fred said. Drummer nodded and walked tightly out of the room. She might have been pissed at being kept out of the proceedings. Or maybe it was something else. Holden could see how something like this could lead to crippling paranoia pretty quickly. Fred sighed. When he spoke, his voice was soft and warm as flannel. “So. I think you know what this is about.” Sakai opened his mouth, shut it. And then it was like watching a mask fall away. His features settled into an image of perfect, burning hatred. “You know what?” Sakai said. “Fuck you.” Fred sat still, his expression set. It was like he hadn’t heard the words at all. Sakai clenched his jaw and scowled at the silence until the pressure built up and it became too much to bear. “You arrogant fucking Earthers. All of you. Out here in the Belt leading the poor skinnies to salvation? Is that who you think you are? Do you have any idea how fucking patronizing you are? All of you. All of you. The Belt doesn’t need Earther bitches like you to save us. We save ourselves, and you assholes can pay for it, yeah?” Holden felt a flush of anger rising in his chest, but Fred’s voice was calm and soft. “I’m hearing you say you resent me for being from Earth. Am I getting that right?” Sakai leaned back on the stool, caught his balance, then turned and spat on the decking. Fred waited again, but this time Sakai let the silence stretch. After a few moments Fred shrugged, then sighed and stood up. When he leaned forward and hit Sakai it was such a simple, pedestrian movement, Holden wasn’t even shocked until Sakai fell over. Blood poured down the engineer’s lip. “I have given up my life and the lives of people I care for a hell of a lot more than you to protect and defend the Belt,” Fred growled. “And I am not in the mood to have some jumped-up terrorist piece of shit tell me different.” “I’m not scared of you,” Sakai said in a voice that made it very clear to Holden he was desperately scared. Holden was a little unnerved himself. He’d seen Fred Johnson angry before, but the white-hot rage radiating from the man now was another thing entirely. Fred’s eyes didn’t flicker. This was the man who had led armies and massacred thousands. The killer. Sakai shrank from his pitiless regard like it was a physical blow. “Drummer!” The head of security opened the door and stepped in. If she was surprised, it didn’t show in her face. Fred didn’t look at her. “Mister Drummer, take this piece of shit to the brig. Put him in an isolation cell, and be sure he gets enough kibble and water that he doesn’t die. No one in, no one out. And I want a complete audit of his station presence. Who he’s talked to. Who he’s traded messages with. How often he’s taken a shit. Everything goes through code analysis.” “Yes, sir,” Drummer said, paused. And then, “Should I take the station off lockdown?” “No,” Fred said. “Yes, sir,” Drummer repeated, and then helped Sakai to his feet and ushered him out the door. Holden cleared his throat. “We need to double-check the work on the Rocinante ,” he said, “because there’s no way I’m flying something that guy did the safety inspections for.” Monica whistled low. “Schismatic OPA faction?” she said. “Well. It wouldn’t be the first time a revolutionary leader was targeted by the extreme wing of his own side.” “It wouldn’t,” Fred agreed. “What bothers me is that they’re feeling secure enough to tip their hand.” Chapter Nineteen: Naomi The beer was vat-brewed: rich and yeasty with a little fungal aftertaste where the hops had been cut with engineered mushrooms. Karal was making hot-plate cousa: thin, unleavened cracker bread heavy with gum roux and hot onion. With Cyn and Naomi and a new man named Miral sharing air with Karal and the hot plate both, the recyclers were working near their top rate for the space. The heat and the spiced air, the closeness of bodies and the just-buzzed relaxation of the alcohol felt like falling backward through time. Like if she opened the door, it wouldn’t be the dockside grunge of Ceres Station but Rokku’s ship burning for the next claim or the next port. “So Josie,” Cyn said, waving one vast palm. He paused and turned a scowl to Naomi. “Kennst Josie?” “I remember which one he is,” Naomi said. “Yeah, so Josie sets up shop there, sa sa? Start charging the Earthers to go down the corridor. Calls it…” – Cyn snapped three times, trying to call up the story’s punch line – “calls it a municipal tollway. Tollway!” “And how long did that last?” Naomi asked. “Long enough we had to get off station before security grabbed us,” Cyn said around a grin. Then he grew sober. “That was before, though.” “Before,” Naomi agreed, lifting her glass. “Everything changed after Eros.” “Everything changed after the fuckers killed the Cant ,” Miral said, eyes narrowed at Naomi as if to say That was your ship, wasn’t it? Another invitation for her to tell her stories. She leaned forward a degree, hiding behind the veil of her hair. “Everything changed after Metis Base. Everything changed after Anderson Station. Everything changed after Terryon Lock. Everything changed after everything.” “Ez maldecido igaz,” Cyn said, nodding. “Everything changed after everything.” Karal looked up. His expression was a mix of camaraderie and regret that meant Everything changed after the Gamarra. Naomi smiled back. It had, and she was sorry too. Being here, with these men, brought up a kind of nostalgia that seeped into everything. All of them would have liked her to tell her stories – being on Eros, riding the first ship through the gate, trekking out to the first colony on the new worlds. Cyn and Karal wouldn’t ask, and so the new one followed their lead. And she kept her own counsel. Filip was asleep in the next room, his body curled into a comma, his eyes merely closed. They weren’t the profoundly shut eyes of a sleeping baby. The rest of the cell were in other safe houses. Smaller groups drew less attention, and even if they lost one group, the rest could go on. It wasn’t something anyone had said. The strategy was familiar and strange at the same time, like a once-favorite song heard again after years of being forgotten. Karal scooped up the cousa, lifting it off the heating element and spinning it on his fingertips in the same motion. Naomi held out her hand, and he set the cracker down on her palm, their fingers brushing against each other. The simple physical intimacy of close companionship. Of family. It had been true once, and that it was less true now was forgiven by the fact that they all knew it wasn’t what it had been. Since she’d arrived, they’d all been careful not to let conversation stray into anything that put too fine a point on the gap of years she’d been absent. And so when she broke the unspoken covenant, they would know she’d meant to. And as much as she didn’t want to undo the fragile moment, the only thing worse than talking about it was leaving it all unsaid. “Filip is looking well,” she said, as if the words carried no extra significance. She bit the cracker, roux and onion flooding her tongue and the back of her nose with salt and sweet and bitter. She talked around it. “He’s grown.” “Has,” Cyn said, his voice cautious. Naomi felt years of grief and anger, loss and betrayal at the back of her throat. She smiled. Her voice didn’t waver. “How’s he been?” Cyn’s glance at Karal was nothing, a flicker almost too fast to notice. They were in dangerous territory now. She didn’t know if they were looking to protect her from the truth or Filip and Marco from her. Or if they only didn’t want a part of the drama that had been and still was her old lover and their son. “Filipito’s been good,” Karal said. “Smart boy, and focused. Ser focused. Marco seen after him. Kept him safe.” “Safe as any of us ever are,” Miral said, trying to make the words light. The hunger of curiosity was in the man’s expression. He hadn’t been there when Naomi and Marco had been together. It was like the rest of them were having a conversation, and half the words Miral couldn’t hear. “Que a m??” Naomi asked. “We all told him the truth,” Karal said, a hardness coming into his voice. “Not going to lie to our own.” Cyn coughed once. He looked at her sideways, like a guilty dog. “When he got old enough to ask, him, Marco tells him how things got harsh. Too harsh. His mother, she needed to step away from it. Put ellas kappa together.” “Ah,” Naomi said. So that was the story of who she was. The one who’d been too sensitive. Too weak. From where Marco sat, it might even look like the truth. But then what must it have been to see who she’d become? XO of the Rocinante , survivor of Eros Station, traveler to new worlds. Looked at that way, “too harsh” was a strange thing. Unless it meant she just didn’t love her son enough to stay. Unless what she’d run from was him. “Filipito, he’s solid,” Cyn said. “Be proud of him.” “Nothing but,” Naomi said. “So,” Miral said, his voice fighting and failing for casual. “You ship sui James Holden, yeah? What’s that like?” “Steady work. No room for promotion,” Naomi said, and Cyn laughed. After a moment, Miral joined in ruefully. Only Karal kept quiet, and that might only have been from concentrating on the hot plate. Naomi’s hand terminal chimed. She picked it up. Two more messages from Jim. Her fingertip was a centimeter from the button to accept them. His voice was a few small movements away, and the thought pulled at her like a magnet. Hearing him now, even just his recorded voice, would be like taking a long shower in clean water. She pushed the messages into her hold queue. Soon, and then all of them. But if she started now, she wouldn’t stop, and she wasn’t done yet. Instead, she put in a connection request to the address the Outer Fringe Exports representative had given her. A few seconds later, the connection hiccupped to life, a red border marking that the channel was secure. “Ms. Nagata,” the young man said. “How can I help you today?” “Waiting on the ship,” she said. “Need to know where we stand.” The man’s eyes unfocused for a moment, then his smile sharpened. “We’re waiting for the title transfer to update in the base registry, ma’am.” “So the payment’s gone through?” “Yes. If you’d like, you can take possession now, but please be aware you can’t be cleared to leave port until the registry updates.” “That’s fine,” she said, getting to her feet. “Where’s she berthed?” “Dock six, berth nineteen, ma’am. Would you like a representative present for the handover?” “No,” she said. “Just leave the keys in the ignition, and we can take it from here.” “Of course. It’s been a pleasure.” “Likewise,” Naomi said. “Have a better one.” She dropped the connection. Cyn and Miral were already gathering their few things. Karal scooped up the last cousa from the hot plate with one hand and unplugged it with the other. She didn’t need to tell them to alert the others. Cyn was already doing it. Without changing, the air in the room felt suddenly too thick, the heat from the hot plate and their bodies too oppressive. Naomi stepped through the doorway. “It’s time,” she said, her voice gentle. She remembered all the drama feeds and films with a mother waking her child up for school. This was the closest thing she would ever have to that, and against her best judgment, she savored it. “Filip. We can go now.” His eyes opened, and for a moment, he wasn’t wholly awake. He looked confused. Vulnerable. Young. And then his focus sharpened, and he was himself again. His new self. The one she didn’t know. They cycled the front door and stepped out into the corridor. The cool rotation breeze smelled of damp and ozone. She was still holding Karal’s cousa half-eaten in her off hand. She took another bite, but it had gone cold and the roux was clotting. She dropped what was left in the recycler and tried not to see it as a metaphor for anything else. Cyn loomed up from the door, his face in its resting scowl. He looked older. Harder. She missed who he’d been when they were young. She missed who she’d been. “Ready to go, Knuckles?” Cyn asked. “Hell, yes,” she said, and he looked at her more closely. Hearing, maybe, something more in the words than only the affirmation. The ship was a simple transport skiff so small that the docking clamps holding it seemed about to crush its tarnished sides in. It didn’t have an Epstein drive, so most of the hold would be taken up by the propellant mass. It would have to fly teakettle, and even then, a fair stretch of the way they’d be on the float. It was one step better than getting EVA suits and a bunch of extra air bottles, but it would do what they needed. Naomi had bought it at salvage rates, routing money from her share in the Rocinante through two anonymized accounts, one on Luna, the other on Ganymede. The final owner of record was Edward Slight Risk Abatement Cooperative, a company that had not existed before it appeared on the registration forms and that would vanish again when the ship was disposed of. The transponders would announce it as the Chetzemoka . In all, it represented about half of everything Naomi could call her own, and her name wasn’t on any of the paperwork. It didn’t seem like enough. It seemed like too much. She didn’t know what it seemed like. Filip waited in the bay outside the boarding gantry, and so she did too. Cyn and Karal and Miral stood far enough away to give them something like privacy. The berth was a rental space with a red-numbered counter on the wall measuring the minutes left under agreement before its ownership changed. The metal and ceramic walls had the foggy look of sealant breaking down from the constant radiation of space. The air stank of lubricant. Someone had left an old poster on the wall, the split circle of the OPA with a hemisphere of Mars and one of Earth as the circle. Not just OPA, but militant OPA. They’d been her people, once. The others arrived. Josie and Old Sandy. Wings, whatever his real name was. A thick-faced, sorrow-eyed woman with one missing tooth that Naomi hadn’t seen before. A shaven-headed man with livid scars webbing the dark flesh of his scalp and the limp of an unhealed foot wound. More. Each of them nodded to Filip as they passed, their expressions a mix of respect and indulgence. All of them knew him better than she did. All of them would ship with him when he left. The ache behind her breastbone would have concerned her any other time. Just now, she knew what it was. Soft tears threatened, but she blinked them back. Bit her tongue to stop them. “All well?” Filip asked. She laughed, and the tightness around her heart grew harder. “Well enough. As soon as the registry updates, we can file a plan and go.” “Good.” “Do you have a moment?” His gaze flickered up to hers, something like anxiety in his eyes. A heartbeat later, he nodded once and pointed to the corner with his chin. They walked together, and the others gave them space. Naomi’s heart beat like she was in danger. She could feel her pulse in her throat. At the wall of the berth, she stopped. Filip turned to face her. The memory of him as an infant, toothless and grabbing onto her finger with a grin of unmistakable pride intruded powerfully into her mind and she took a moment to shove it away. “It’s been good seeing you,” she said. For a moment, she thought he wouldn’t answer, then, “You too.” “The ship,” she said. “When it’s done, it’s yours, all right?” Filip looked over her shoulder toward the gantry. “Mine?” “I want you to have it. Resell it, keep the money for yourself. Or hold it, if you want. Yours, though. No one else.” He tilted his head. “You’re not coming with?” “I didn’t come here to join back in,” she said, then sighed. “I came because he said you were in trouble. I came because of you. Whatever he’s doing, whatever he’s having you do, I can’t be part of it. Not before. Not now either.” For a long moment, Filip didn’t move. Her throat felt too narrow, like she couldn’t get air through it. “I understand,” her son said. Her son who was leaving again. Who was going back to Marco and everything he was. “Your father isn’t a good man,” Naomi said, the words spilling out. “I know you love him. I loved him too once, but he isn’t…” “You don’t have to justify it,” Filip said. “You did this for us, and I appreciate it. This is all you’re willing to do, and that’s disappointing, but he told me it might happen this way.” “You could come with me.” She hadn’t meant to say it, but as soon as she did, she meant it to her marrow. “The ship I’m on needs crew. We’re independent and we’re well stocked. Come do a tour with me, yeah? Get to… get to know each other?” For the first time, a real expression cracked her son’s reserve. Three thin lines drew themselves between his brows and he smiled with what could have been confusion or pity. “Kind of in the middle of something,” he said. She wanted to beg. She wanted to pick him up and carry him away. She wanted him back. It hurt worse than sickness that she couldn’t have him. “Maybe after, then,” she said. “When you want it, you say it. There’s room for you on the Rocinante .” If Marco lets you , she thought, but didn’t say. If he doesn’t hurt you as a way to punish me. And then, a moment later, God this will be weird to explain to Jim. “Maybe after,” Filip said, nodding. He put his hand out, and they held each other by the wrist for a moment. He turned first, walking away with his hands in his pockets. The sense of loss was vast and oceanic. And it was worse because the loss wasn’t happening now. It had happened every day since she’d left. Every day that she’d lived the life she chose instead of the one Marco had prescribed for her. It only hurt so badly now because she was seeing what all those days summed to and feeling the tragedy of it. She didn’t see Cyn and Karal coming up until they were there. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her palm, angry and embarrassed and afraid that a kind word would shatter the composure she still had. A kind word or a cruel one. “Hoy, Knuckles,” Cyn said, his landslide-deep voice low and soft. “So. No chance kommt mit? Filipito’s something. Know he’s tight and thin right now, but he’s still on mission. When he’s not running herd, he can be funny. Sweet too.” “I left for reasons,” Naomi said, the words feeling thick and muddy and true. “They haven’t changed.” “Your son, him,” Karal said, and the accusation in his voice was calming because she knew how to answer it. “You know those stories about a trapped wolf chewing itself free?” she said. “That boy’s my paw. I’ll never be whole without him, but I’m fucked if I’ll give up getting free.” Cyn smiled, and she saw the sorrow in his eyes. Something released in her. It was done. She was done. All she wanted now was to go listen to every message Jim had left her and find the fastest transport back to Tycho that there was. She was ready to go home. Cyn spread his arms, and she walked into them one last time. The big man folded around her, and she rested her head on his shoulder. She said something obscene and Cyn chuckled. He smelled of sweat and incense. “Ah, Knuckles,” Cyn rumbled. “Didn’t have to fall this way. Suis d?sol?, yeah?” His arms tightened around her, pinning her arms to her sides. He reared back, lifting her feet off the deck. Something bit at the flesh of her thigh and Karal limped back, needle still in his hand. Naomi thrashed, slamming her knee into Cyn’s body. The vicious embrace pressed the air out of her. She bit Cyn’s shoulder where she could reach it and tasted blood. The big man’s voice was soft and lulling in her ears, but she couldn’t tell what the words were anymore. A numbness spread along her leg and up into her belly. Cyn seemed to fall with her locked in his arms, but he never landed. Only spun backward into space without his legs ever leaving the deck. “Don’t do this,” she gasped, but her voice seemed to come from far away. “Please don’t do this.” “Had to, Knuckles,” Cyn said. “Was the plan immer and always, sa sa? What it’s all about.” A thought came to her and then slid away. She tried to land her knee in his crotch, but she wasn’t sure where her legs were anymore. Her breath was loud and close. Over Cyn’s shoulder, she saw the others standing beside the gantry to the ship. Her ship. Filip’s ship. They were all turned to watch her. Filip was among them, his face empty, his eyes on her. She thought she might have cried out, but it could only have been something she imagined. And then, like a light going out, her mind stopped. Chapter Twenty: Alex When piloting a ship – any ship – there was a point where Alex’s sense of his body reached out to subtly include the whole vessel. Coming to know how that individual ship felt as she maneuvered – how the thrust gravity cut out as that particular drive shut down, how long the flip took at the midpoint of a run – all of it made a deep kind of intimacy. It wasn’t rational, but it changed how Alex felt about himself. His sense of who he was. When he’d gone from the massive, stately heft of the colony-ship-turned-ice-hauler Canterbury to the fast-attack frigate that had become the Rocinante , it had been like turning twenty years younger. But even the Roci had tons of metal and ceramic. She could spin fast and hard, but there was an authority behind the movement. Muscle. Piloting the racing pinnace Razorback was like strapping onto a feather in a thunderstorm. There was nothing to the ship but a blister the size of the Roci ’s ops deck strapped to a fusion drive. Even the engineering deck was a sealed compartment, accessible to technicians at the dock. It wasn’t the sort of ship the crew was going to maintain; they had hired help for that. The two crash couches huddled close together, and the compartments behind them were just a head, a food dispenser, and a bunk too small for Bobbie to fit in. There wasn’t even a system to recycle food, only water and air. A maneuvering thruster could spin the ship around twice in ten seconds with power output that would have shifted the Roci five degrees in twice the time. If piloting the Rocinante required Alex to think of the ship like a knight’s horse, the Razorback begged for attention like a puppy. The screens wrapped around the couches and covered the walls, filling his whole visual field with the stars, the distant sun, the vector and relative speed of every ship within a quarter AU. It threw the ship’s performance data at him like it was boasting. Even with interior anti-spalling fabric a decade out of fashion and the grime and signs of wear on the edge of the couches, the ship felt young. Idealistic, feckless, and a little bit out of control. He knew if he spent enough time to get used to her, the Roci would feel sluggish and dull when he got back. But, he told himself, only for a little while. Until he got used to it again. The thought kept him from feeling disloyal. For sheer power and exuberance, the Razorback would have been an easy ship to fall in love with. But she wasn’t built for privacy. “… as a community, Mars has got its collective asshole puckered up so tight it’s bending light,” Chrisjen Avasarala continued behind him. “But the prime minister’s convoy has finally launched. When he gets to Luna, I’m hoping we can get him to say something that hasn’t already been chewed by half a dozen diplomats playing cover-your-ass. At least he knows there’s a problem. Realizing you’ve got shit on your fingers is the first step toward washing your hands.” He hadn’t seen the old woman since Luna, but he could picture her. Her grandmotherly face and contempt-filled eyes. She projected a weariness and amusement as part of being ruthless, and he could tell Bobbie liked her. More, that she trusted her. “In the meantime, you stay out of trouble. You’re no good to anybody dead. And if that idiot Holden’s plucking another thread in the same knot, God alone knows how he’ll fuck it up. So. Report in when you can.” The recording ticked and went silent. “Well,” Alex said. “She sounds the same as ever.” “Give her that,” Bobbie agreed. “She’s consistent.” Alex turned his couch to look back at her. Bobbie made hers look small, even though it was the same size as his own. The pinnace was doing a fairly gentle three-quarter-g burn. Over twice the pull of Mars, but Bobbie still trained for full g just the way she had when she was an active duty marine. He’d offered less in deference to her wounds, but she’d just laughed. Still, he didn’t need to burn hard. “So when you said you were working with her?” Alex said, trying not to make it sound like an accusation. “How different is that from working for her?” Bobbie’s laugh was a cough. “I don’t get paid, I guess.” “Except for the ship.” “And other things,” Bobbie said. Her voice was carefully upbeat in a way that meant she’d practiced hiding her discomfort. “She’s got a lot of ways to sneak carrots to me when she wants to. My job is with veterans’ outreach. This other stuff…” “Sounds complicated.” “It is,” Bobbie said. “But it all needs doing, and I’m in a position to do it. Makes me feel like I matter, so that’s something. Still miss being who I was, though. Before.” “A-fucking-men,” Alex said. The lift of her eyebrows told him he’d said more than he’d meant to. “It’s not that I don’t love the Roci . She’s a great ship, and the others are family. It’s just… I don’t know. I came to it out of watching a lot of people I knew and kind of liked get blown up. Could have lived without that.” Bobbie’s expression went calm, focused, distant. “You still dream about it sometimes?” “Yeah,” Alex drawled. It felt like confession. “You?” “Less than I used to. But sometimes. I’ve sort of come to peace with it.” “Really?” “Well, at least I’m more comfortable with the idea that I won’t come to peace with it. That’s kind of the same thing.” “You miss being a marine?” “I do. I was good at it.” “You couldn’t go back?” “Nope.” “Yeah,” Alex said. “Me neither.” “The Navy, you mean?” “Any of it. Things change, and they don’t change back.” Bobbie’s sigh was like agreement. The vast emptiness between Mars and the Belt, between the two of them and the distant stars, was an illusion made by curved screens and good exterior cameras. The way the space contained their voices was more real. The two of them were a tiny bubble in a sea immeasurably greater than mere oceans. It gave them permission to casually discuss things that Alex normally found hard to talk about. Bobbie herself was in that halfway space between a stranger and a shipmate that let him trust her but not feel a responsibility to protect her from what he thought and felt. The days out from Mars to Hungaria were like sitting at a bar, talking to someone over beer. He told her his fears about Holden and Naomi’s romance and the panic attacks he’d had on the way back to Earth from New Terra. The times he’d killed someone, and the nightmares that eventually replaced the guilt. The stories about when his father died, and his mother. The brief affair he’d had while he was flying for the Navy and the regret he still felt about it. For her part, Bobbie told him about her family. The brothers who loved her but didn’t seem to have any idea who or what she was. The attempts she’d made at dating since she’d become a civilian, and how poorly they’d gone. The time she’d stepped in to keep her nephew from getting involved with the drug trade. Rather than trying to fold into the bunk, Bobbie slept in her couch. Out of unspoken solidarity, Alex did the same. It meant they wound up on the same sleep cycle. Bad for rotating watches, good for long meandering conversations. They talked about the rings and the protomolecule, the rumors Bobbie had heard about the new kinds of metamaterials the labs on Ganymede were discovering based on observation of the Ring and the Martian probes reverse engineering what had happened on Venus. In the long hours of comfortable silence, they ate the rations that they’d packed and watched the scopes as the other ships went on their own ways: a pair of prospectors making for an unclaimed asteroid, the little flotilla escorting the Martian prime minister to Luna, a water hauler burning back out toward Saturn to gather ice for Ceres Station, making up for all the oxygen and hydrogen humanity had used spinning the rock into the greatest port city in the Belt. The tracking system generated tiny dots from the transponder data; the actual ships themselves were too small and far away to see without magnification. Even the high albedo of the Hungaria cluster only meant the sensor arrays picked them up a little easier. Alex wouldn’t have identified that particular centimeter of star-sown sky as being different from any other if the ship hadn’t told him. The intimacy of the Razorback and shortness of the trip was like a weekend love affair without the sex. Alex wished they’d thought to bring a few bottles of wine. The first sign that they weren’t alone came when they were still a couple hundred thousand klicks out from Hungaria. The Razorback ’s external sensors blinked and flashed, the proximity reading dancing in and out. Alex closed down the false stars and pulled up tactical and sensor data in their place. “What’s the matter?” Bobbie asked. “Unless I’m reading this wrong, this is the time when a military ship would be telling us that someone out there’s painting us.” “Targeting lasers?” “Yup,” Alex said, and a creeping sensation went up his spine. “Which is a mite more provocative than I’d have expected.” “So there is a ship out here that’s gone dark.” Alex flipped through the databases and matching routines, but it was just standard procedure. He hadn’t expected to find anything and he didn’t. “No transponder signal. I think we’ve found the Pau Kant . I mean, assuming we can find her. Let’s just see what we see.” He started a sensor sweep going in a ten-degree arc and popped open the comms for an open broadcast. “Hey out there. We’re the private ship Razorback out of Mars. Couldn’t help noticing you’re pointing a finger at us. We’re not looking for any trouble. If you could see your way to answering back, it’d ease my mind.” The Razorback was a racing ship. A rich kid’s toy. In the time it took her system to identify the ship that was targeting them, the Roci would have had the dark ship’s profile and specs and a target lock of her own just to make the point. The Razorback chimed that the profile data had been collected and matches were being sought. For the first time since they’d left Mars, Alex felt a profound desire for the pilot’s chair in the Rocinante . “They’re not answering,” Bobbie said. “They’re not shooting either,” Alex said. “As long as they think we’re just some yahoo out joyriding, we’ll be fine. Probably.” Bobbie’s couch hissed on its gimbals as she shifted her weight. She didn’t believe it either. The moments stretched. Alex opened the channel again. “Hey out there, unidentified ship. I’m going to cut thrust here until I hear from you. I’m just letting you know so I don’t startle anyone. I’d really appreciate a ping back, just so we all know we’re good here. No offense meant.” He cut the drive; the grip of acceleration gravity loosened its hold on him. The gel of the couch launched him gently against his restraints. He could feel his heartbeat in his neck. It was going fast. “They’re deciding what to do about us,” Bobbie said. “That’s my guess too.” “Taking them a while.” The Razorback announced a visual match, but it wasn’t with the data Holden had sent them. The ship with its sights on them wasn’t any of the colony ships that had gone missing out in the gates. With an eighty-nine percent certainty, it was a Martian naval corvette, floating dark. Behind him, Bobbie saw the same thing and drew the same conclusions. “Well,” she said. “Fuck.” Profile match completed, the Razorback returned to its scanning arc. Another passive contact. If the corvette was the Pau Kant , it wasn’t out here alone. And then two more. And then six. The Razorback picked the nearest one and cheerfully started matching its profile. By reflex, Alex went to activate his point defense cannons. Only, of course, he didn’t have any. “Maybe they’ll talk,” Bobbie said. He could hear it in her voice that she didn’t expect them to. He didn’t either. Half a second later, the Razorback announced two fast-movers coming from the corvette. He spun the pinnace away from the missiles and punched the drive. The couch slammed into his back like a blow. Behind him, Bobbie grunted. With a mental apology to her, he pushed them to ten g, and the pinnace leaped forward eagerly. It wasn’t going to be enough. As light as the Razorback was, the missiles were an order of magnitude less mass to accelerate. And they didn’t carry anything as fragile as a human body. They could pull a much heavier burn and close the gap to target in a matter of hours. He didn’t have countermeasures to shoot them down, and there was nothing to hide behind. He didn’t even have a load of cargo to drop out the back in hopes the missiles might blunder into it. His vision started to narrow, darkening at the edges and dancing gold and fractured in the center. He felt the couch’s needles slide into his thighs and neck, the juice like pouring ice water into his veins. His heart labored and he was fighting to breathe, but his vision was clear. And his mind. He had to think. His ship was fast, as ships went, but nothing compared to a missile. There was no cover he could reach in time, and if the missiles were half as good as the ship that fired them, they’d be able to guide themselves right up his drive cone, no matter what he tried to huddle behind. He could run away, draw the attackers into a line behind him, and then drop core. The vented fusion reaction would probably take out at least the first one. Maybe more. But then they’d be on the float, and at the mercy of a second volley. Well. A bad plan was better than no plan at all. His finger twitched on the controls. The layout was unfamiliar and the fear that he was coding in the wrong information just because he wasn’t on his own damned boat was like a stake in his heart. Bobbie grunted. He wasn’t strong enough to look back at her. He hoped it wasn’t pain. High g wasn’t a good thing for someone who’d had a bunch of holes pushed through her recently. He told himself it was just the needles feeding her the juice. An alert popped onto his screen from Bobbie’s console. PRIME MINISTER. GUARD SHIPS. Between the drugs and the panic and the compromised blood flow in his brain, it took Alex a few seconds to understand what she meant. The Razorback didn’t have point defense cannons or interceptor missiles, but the flotilla heading for Luna did. Alex pulled the data into the plotting system. There was no way they could reach the Martian ships before the missiles caught up with them, but it was just possible – barely – to get inside the range of their antimissile defenses. If he turned course now. If the Martians figured out what was going on and launched almost immediately. And the burn was going to be at the outer limit of what he or Bobbie could handle. Almost without thinking, he engaged the maneuvering thrusters and the crash couches clicked to match the new vector. The missiles seemed to leap closer, correcting for the new course and anticipating where the pinnace would be. He sent an emergency signal, broadcast on all standard frequencies, and hoped whoever saw it on the flotilla was a quick thinker. The two spheres – time-to-collision and Martian antimissile range – didn’t overlap, but there were only a few hundred klicks between them. Barely an eyeblink at their relative speeds. He shifted to medical control and switched Bobbie from juice to life support protocol. Sorry, Bobbie , he thought. I’d warn you if I had time, but you’re gonna need to take a little nap if we don’t want you bleeding out. He watched her vital signs spike and then drop, her blood pressure and core temperature falling like a stone in the ocean. He pushed the ship to fifteen g. His head hurt. He hoped he wasn’t having a stroke, but it’d be fair if he did. Sustained fifteen g was a stupid, suicidal thing to do. He felt the air pressed out of his chest under the weight of his ribs, his skin. The sound of his gasping was like gagging. But the spheres touched now. Minutes stretched. Then fast-movers from the Martian flotilla. It had taken damned long enough, but the defenses were on the way. He tried to type in a message, warning the Martians that there were more ships out there, a dark fleet. He couldn’t keep hold of the thought long enough to send it. His consciousness kept blinking, like the universe stuttering. The medical system flashed up a warning, and he thought it was Bobbie, her old wounds reopening after all. But it was tagged for him. Something in his gut had ripped free. He canceled the alert and went back to watching death get closer. They weren’t going to make it. The lead missile was too close. It was going to take out the Razorback before the rescuers could come. Hadn’t he had an idea about that? Something… He wasn’t aware of changing course. His fingers just did it. The spheres didn’t touch anymore, until he switched to collision to track the second missile. Then, maybe. Maybe. He waited. The lead missile closed. Five thousand kilometers. Four thousand. He vented the core. Two hundred kilometers — The crush of gravity vanished. The Razorback , still hurtling through space, stopped accelerating. Behind him, the lead missile died in the nuclear furnace of the rapidly diffusing core. The second missile jittered and turned to avoid the expanding cloud of superhot gas, and four lights burned before him, streaking across his screens so quickly he only knew them by their afterimages. A fraction of a second later the Martian antimissile defenses destroyed the pursuing torpedo, but he had already lost consciousness. Chapter Twenty-one: Naomi “Bist bien, Knuckles?” Karal asked. The thin, slapped-together galley was too big for so small a crew. Bad design, waste of space. It wasn’t worn; it was cheap. She looked at him from behind the veil of her hair and smiled. “Fine, things being,” she said, making a joke. “Como sa?” Karal shrugged with his hands. His hair had gotten gray over the years. And the stubble of his beard. It had been as black as the space between the stars once. He looked at her eyes and she didn’t flinch. “Something to say, me.” “No secrets between us now,” she replied, and he laughed. She smiled back. The prisoner flirting with the turnkey, hoping a kind thought in his head would help her later. Maybe it would. The thing that frightened her most was how well she knew how to play it. From the moment she’d come back to consciousness, she talked when people talked to her, laughed when someone told a joke. She acted like her abduction was just one of those things that happens, like using someone’s tools without asking first. She pretended to sleep. Ate as much as she could past the tightness in her gut. And they all treated her like she was the girl she’d been, like they could all ignore the years and the differences, fold her back in as though she’d never gone away. As if she’d never been anyone else. Hiding her fear and her outrage slipped back on so easily, it was as if she’d never stopped. It made her wonder whether perhaps she hadn’t. “So I was one,” he said. “Helped with Filipito. Took care.” “Good.” “No,” Karal said. “Before that. Sometimes, he was with me.” Naomi smiled. She’d been trying not to remember those desperate days after she’d told Marco she was leaving. The days after he’d taken Filip. To keep the boy safe, he’d said. Until she got her emotions under control, he’d said. A knot filled her throat, but she smiled past it. “Those days. You had him?” “Immer, no. But sometimes. Hijo moved, yeah? Night here, two nights there.” Her baby passed around among the people she knew. The manipulation of it was brilliant. Marco using his child as a marker of how much trust he placed in them and at the same time painting her as the crazed one. The dangerous one. Making sure the story in their community was about how solid he was and how close to cracked she’d come. She had the sudden powerful memory of Karal looking in from the kitchen while she broke down in his wife’s arms. Souja, her name had been. What must her tears and profanity have looked like to him then? “Kept it quiet,” Naomi said, “and I wouldn’t have known. So why say it here?” Karal’s hands shrugged again. “New day. New start. Looking to scrape off some old rust.” She tried to read from his face whether that was true, or if this was just another little cruelty in a form she couldn’t call out without looking like the crazy one. If it had been back on the Roci , she would have known. But here, now, the balance between fear and anger and trying to control herself swamped little things like truth. It was the beauty of the way Marco had set her against herself. Tell her she was broken as a way to break her, and here they were a decade and a half past, and it still worked. Then, for a moment, Amos was there, stronger in her memory than the surrounding ship. It don’t matter what’s inside, boss. They only care what you do. She didn’t know if it was a memory or just her mind reaching for a place of certainty in an environment where nothing could be relied upon. If Amos has become my personal touchstone for wisdom, I’m fucked , she thought, and laughed. Karal ventured a smile. “Thank you for telling it straight,” Naomi said. “New start. Scrape off the rust.” And if I ever get the chance to leave you behind in a fire, Karal, then good God you will burn. A chime sounded, then the acceleration warning came on. She hadn’t noticed when the ship had made its flip. Might have been when she was asleep, or slowly over the course of hours so that the rotation was subliminal. It didn’t matter. She was cargo here. It didn’t matter what she knew. “Strap in, yeah?” Karal said. “On my way,” she said, launching herself gently to the ceiling, and then back to the deck at the crash couch between Cyn and Wings. It had turned out Wings’ real name was Alex, but that space was taken in her mind, so he was Wings forever to her. He smiled to her and she smiled back as she strapped herself in against the gel. The warning went from an amber glow to a ten-count in soft amber numbers, and at zero the couch lurched up against her, folding her a few centimeters in. The deceleration burn had started. When it stopped, they’d be where Marco was. After the passageway linked the airlocks, she’d thought there would be some kind of farewell. Hugs and lies and all the things people did at the parting after a long journey. When it didn’t happen, she understood that it had only been a long journey for her. The flight from Ceres to the empty space sunward of Mars and the Hungaria asteroids was like going from the couch to the head for them. Filip emerged from the ops deck looking sharp and hard. No, that wasn’t true. Looking like a boy trying to look sharp and hard. “Check her for weapons,” Filip said, biting at the words. Cyn looked from Filip to Naomi and back. “Verdad? Knuckles been packing, she’s been for a long time. Doesn’t seem —” “No prisoners on the Pella without a check,” Filip said, pulling a fl?chette gun from his pocket and not pointing it at her in particular. “Way it is, yeah?” Cyn shrugged and turned to her. “Way it is.” Filip looked at her, his lips pressed thin. His fingers too aware of the trigger on his gun. He should have looked threatening, but he mostly looked scared. And angry. Sending a son on a kidnap job was the sort of thing Marco would do. It wasn’t that it was cruel, though it was cruel. It wasn’t that it would corrode any relationship that they might have had, though it did that too. It was only that it would work. Even putting Filip on Ceres looked like a manipulation now. Here is your son, where you left him. Come into the mousetrap and take him back. And she’d done it. She didn’t know if she was more disappointed in Filip or herself. They were two very different kinds of disappointment, and the one pointed at her had more poison in it. She could forgive Filip anything. He was a boy, and living with Marco in his head. Forgiving herself was going to be harder, and she didn’t have much practice. When the outer airlock cycled, she suffered a wave of disorientation. The passage was the usual design of inflated Mylar and titanium ribs. There was nothing about it that looked strange. It wasn’t until they’d nearly reached the other side that she recognized the smell of it: tangy and deep and probably carcinogenic. The outgassing of volatile organics from the cloth. “This is new?” she said. “We don’t talk about it,” Filip said. “We don’t talk about much, do we?” she snapped, and he looked back at her, surprised by the bite in her voice. You think you know what I am , she thought, but all you’ve got is stories. The airlock of the other ship was weirdly familiar. The curve was like the airlock on the Roci , and the design of the latch. Martian design. And more than that, Martian Navy. Marco had come into a military ship. Inside, soldiers waited. Unlike the ragged group on Ceres, they wore a rough kind of uniform: gray jumpsuits with the split circle on their arms and breasts. Against the clean design of the ship’s corridor, they looked like bad costumes in a play with good set design. The guns were real though, and she didn’t doubt they’d use them. The bridge looked like the Rocinante ’s younger brother. After the cheap, barely-enough aesthetic of the Chetzemoka , military-grade crash couches and terminal displays looked solid and reassuring. And there, in the center of it all like he’d posed himself, floated Marco. He wore something like a military uniform, but without any insignia. He was beautiful as a statue. Even now, she had to give him that. She could still remember when those lips and the softness in those eyes had made her feel safe. Lifetimes ago, that was. Now he smiled, and a strange relief spread through her. She was with him again, and unquestionably in his power. Her nightmare had come true, so at least she didn’t have to dread it anymore. “I’ve brought her, sir,” Filip said, all his consonants sharp enough to cut with. “Mission accomplished.” “I never had a doubt,” Marco said. In person, his voice had a richness that recorded messages lost. “Good work, mijo.” Filip gave a little salute, and spun to leave. “Ah!” Marco said, pulling the boy up short. “Don’t be rude, Filip. Kiss your mother before you go.” “You don’t have to do that,” Naomi said, but – eyes blank and empty – Filip floated over and pecked her cheek with dry lips before returning to the lift. The guards went with him, except for two that took up stations behind her. “It’s been a long time,” Marco said. “You look good. The years have been kind to you.” “You too,” she said. “Sound different too. When did you stop talking like a Belter?” Marco spread his hands. “In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. The accusation of tyranny, however well-founded in fact, is dismissed unless it is delivered in the manner that power recognizes as powerful. That’s why Fred Johnson was useful. He was already iconic of an authority that the authorities understood.” “So you’ve been practicing, then,” she said, folding her arms. “It’s my job.” Marco reached up, pushed his fingertips against the upper deck, and floated down toward the control couches. “Thank you for coming.” Naomi didn’t answer that. She could feel him already rewriting the past. Treating her like she’d chosen to join him. Like she was responsible for being here. Instead, she nodded toward the ops deck. “Nice ride. Where’d you get it?” “Friends in high places,” Marco said, and then chuckled. “And strange, strange alliances. There are always people who understand that when the world changes, the rules change with it.” Naomi tugged at her hair, pulling it down over her eyes, and then, angry with herself, pushed it back. “So then. To what do I owe this setup bullshit?” Marco’s hurt expression could have passed for genuine. “No setup. Filip was in trouble, you were in a position to get our son out of a bad place that had the potential to get a whole lot worse.” “And paid for it by being pulled on your ship against my will? I can’t really thank you for that.” “You should,” Marco said. “We brought you because you’re one of ours. To keep you safe. If we could have explained it all, we would have, but things are delicate, and you don’t stop to explain why you’re protecting someone when the danger’s close. The stakes are the lives of millions of Belters, and —” “Oh please,” Naomi said. “You don’t think so?” Marco said, a harshness coming into his voice. “You’re the one who killed us. You and your new captain. The minute those gates opened, all the rest of us were dead.” “You’re still breathing,” Naomi said, but her anger sounded like petulance even to herself. He heard it that way too. “You didn’t grow up down a well. You know how little the inners cared about us. The Chesed . Anderson Station. The Cielo mine fire. Belter lives don’t mean shit to inners. Never have. You know that.” “They’re not all like that.” “Some that pretend they aren’t, yeah?” The accents of the Belt slipped into his voice. And a rattling anger with them. “But they can still go down the wells. There’re a thousand new worlds, and billions of inners who can just step onto them. No training, no rehab, no drugs. You know how many Belters can tolerate a full g? Give them everything, all the medical care, the exoskeleton support mechs, nursing homes? Two-thirds. Two-thirds of us could go be cripples on these brave n?o worlds, if the inners pulled together and threw all their money at it. You think that’s going to happen? Never has before. Last year, three pharmaceutical plants stopped even making their low-end bone density cocktails. Didn’t open the patents. Didn’t apologize to any ships don’t have budget for the high-end stuff. Just stopped. Needed the capacity for colony ships and all the new ganga they’re making with the data coming back from the rings. “We’re leftovers, Naomi. You and me and Karal and Cyn. Tia Margolis. Filip. They’re moving on, and they’re forgetting us because they can. They write the histories, you know what we’ll be? A paragraph about how much it sucks when a race of people go obsolete, and how it would have been more humane to put us down. “Come. Tell me I’m wrong.” It was the same ranting he’d done before, but perfected by years. A new variation of the same arguments he’d made on Ceres. She half expected him to say The Gamarra had it coming. This is war, and anyone who helps choke out the enemy is a soldier whether they know it or not. Her gut felt like it was made from water. It was a feeling she remembered from the dark times. Something in the back of her head shifted. The serpent of learned helplessness long asleep starting to wake. She pretended it wasn’t there, in hopes that if she denied it enough, it wouldn’t exist. “What’s it got to do with me?” Naomi asked, less forcefully than she intended. Marco smiled. When he spoke, it was back in the voice of the cultured leader. The rough-cut Belter thug vanished behind his mask. “You’re one of us. Estranged, yes, but one of us all the same. You’re the mother of my son. I didn’t want you in harm’s way.” She was supposed to ask what that meant. The path was laid out before her in lights. What do you mean, harm’s way? she’d say, and he’d tell her. Watch her eyes go wide. See the fear in her. Fuck that. “Didn’t want me,” she said. “Wanted the Rocinante , only that didn’t work out. Was it the ship? Or was it Holden? You can tell me. Did you want to show off in front of my new boyfriend? Because that would be kind of sad.” She felt her breath coming fast, adrenaline pumping through her. Marco’s expression hardened, but before he could speak, the comms chimed and a voice she didn’t recognize echoed on the deck. “Hast contact,” the woman said. “Que?” “Little one. Pinnace out from Mars. Talking to the Andreas Hofer .” “Scout ship?” Marco snapped. The pause stretched for seconds. Then, “Looks like just some pinch? asshole wrong-placing it. Seen one, seen the whole strike force, though, yeah?” “How long before the trigger impact?” “Twenty-seven minutes.” There had been no hesitation. Whoever was on the other end of the comms had known the question was coming. Marco scowled at the control panel. “Couldn’t have waited a little longer. Would have been prettier without. But fine. Take out the pinnace.” “Toda?” Marco looked over at Naomi, his dark eyes on her. A smile touched his lips. Theatrical asshole that he was. “No. No es toda. Launch the assault on the Martian prime minister’s ship too. And tell the hunt group to get ready, so that when the duster runs, we can take him down.” “Sabez,” the woman said. “Orders out.” Marco waited, hand out like a challenge. “This is the way,” he said. “Make it so they can’t forget us. Take chains they fashioned to bind us and use them as whips. We won’t go down to darkness. They’ll respect us now.” “And do what? Shut down the Ring?” Naomi said. “Start making your cheap bone drugs again? What do you think shooting a Martian politician’s going to do for ‘our people’? How does that help anybody?” Marco didn’t laugh, but he softened. She had the sense that she’d said something stupid, and it had pleased him. Despite it all, she felt a twinge of embarrassment. “I’m sorry, Naomi. We’re going to have to take this up later. But I really am glad you’ve come back. I know there’s a lot of harsh between us, and that we don’t see the world the same way. But you’ll always be the mother of my son, and I will always love you for that.” He lifted a fist to the guards. “Make sure she’s secure, then get ready for hard burn. We’re heading to the fight.” “Sir,” one guard said as the other took Naomi by the elbow. Her first instinct was to resist, pull back, but what would the point have been? She pushed off for the lift, her jaw tight, her teeth aching. “One thing,” Marco said, and she turned, thinking he was speaking to her. He wasn’t. “When you lock her down, make sure it’s someplace she can watch a newsfeed. Today everything changes. Wouldn’t want her to miss it, yeah?” Chapter Twenty-two: Amos Reports at this hour are that a massive asteroid has impacted northern Africa. The Oxford Center in Rabat, five hundred kilometers west of the event, is estimating eight point seven five on the Richter scale at the epicenter.” Amos tried again to lean back in his chair. It was an uncomfortable little piece of furniture. Just crappy lightweight plastic to start with, then molded in a factory by a machine that didn’t have to sit in it. His first guess was that it had been designed specifically to be awkward and ineffective if you tried to hit someone with it. And then they’d bolted it to the floor. So every five minutes or so, he placed his heels on the textured concrete and pushed back without even knowing he was doing it. The chair bent a little under the pressure, but didn’t get more comfortable, and when he gave up, it bounced right back into its old shape. “— unseen since Krakatoa. Air traffic is being severely affected as the debris plume threatens both civilian and commercial craft. For further analysis of the situation on the ground, we are going now to Kivrin Althusser in Dakar. Kivrin?” The screen jumped to an olive-skinned woman in a sand-colored hijab. She licked her lips, nodded, and started talking. “The shock wave hit Dakar just under an hour ago, and authorities are still taking stock of the damage. My experience is that the city is devastated. We have reports that many, many of the local structures have not survived the initial shock. The power grid has also collapsed. The hospitals and emergency medical centers are overwhelmed. The Elkhashab Towers are being evacuated as I speak, and there are fears that the north tower may have become unstable. The sky… the sky here —” Amos tried to lean back in his chair, sighed, and stood up. The waiting room was empty apart from him and an old woman in the far corner who kept coughing into the crook of her elbow. It wasn’t what you’d call a big place. The windows looked out on an uninspiring two hundred meters of North Carolina, bare from the entrance facility to the perimeter gate. Two rows of monofilament hurricane fencing blocked the path to a two-story concrete wall. Sniper nests stood at each corner, the automatic defense and control weapons stiller than tree trunks. The building was low – a single story peeking up out of the ground with administrative offices and a massive service entrance. Most of what happened here happened underground. It was exactly the kind of place Amos had never hoped to be. Good thing was, when he was done, he could leave again. “In other news, a distress call from the convoy carrying the Martian prime minister appears to be genuine. A group of unidentified ships —” Behind him, the admin door swung open. The man inside looked like he was one hundred kilos of sculpted muscle and also tremendously bored. “Clarke!” “Here!” the coughing old woman said, rising to her feet. “I’m Clarke!” “This way, ma’am.” Amos scratched his neck and went back to looking at the prison yard. The newsfeed kept on being excited about shitty things going on. He’d have paid more attention to it if the back of his head hadn’t been planning the ways he’d have pushed to get out of here if they’d sent him, and where he’d have died trying. From the parts he caught, though, it sounded like a good day for reporters. “Burton!” He walked over slowly. The big guy checked his hand terminal. “You Burton?” “Today I am.” “This way, sir.” He led him to a small room with more chairs bolted to the floor and a table too. The table was solidly made, anyway. “So. Visitation?” “Yup,” Amos said. “Looking for Clarissa Mao.” The big guy looked up under his eyebrows. “We don’t have names here.” Amos opened his hand terminal. “I’m looking for 42-82-4131.” “Thank you. You’ll need to surrender all personal effects including any food or beverages, your hand terminal, and any clothing with more than seven grams of metal. No zippers, arch supports, anything like that. While you are inside the prison grounds, you are subject to reduced civil rights, as outlined in the Gorman code. A copy of the code will be made available to you at your request. Do you request a copy of the code?” “That’s all right.” “I’m sorry, sir. I need a yes or no.” “No.” “Thank you, sir. While in the prison, you are required to follow the directives of any guard or prison employee without hesitation or question. This is for your own safety. If you fail to comply, the guards and prison employees are authorized to use any means they deem necessary to ensure your safety and the safety of others. Do you understand and consent?” “Sure,” Amos said. “Why not?” The big guy pushed a hand terminal across the table, and Amos mashed his thumb onto it until the print read. A little indicator on the side of the form went green. The big guy took it back along with Amos’ hand terminal and shoes. The slippers were made out of paper and glue. “Welcome to the Pit,” the big guy said, smiling for the first time. The elevator was steel and titanium with a harsh set of overhead lights that flickered just a little too quickly to be sure it was really flickering. Two guards apparently lived in it, going up and down whenever it did. So that seemed like a shitty job. At the tenth level down, they let him out, and an escort was waiting for him: a gray-haired woman with a wide face, light armor, and a gun in her holster that he didn’t recognize. Something beeped twice as he stepped into the hall, but none of the guards tried to shoot anyone, so he figured it was supposed to do that. “This way, sir,” the escort said. “Yeah. Okay,” Amos said. Their footsteps echoed off the hard floor and ceiling. The lights were recessed into metal cages, making a mesh of shadows over everything. Amos found himself flexing his hands and balling them into fists, thinking about how exactly he’d have to bounce the guard’s head against the wall in order to get the gun off her. Nothing more than habit, really, but the place brought it out in him. “First time down?” the escort asked. “It show?” “Little.” From down the hall, a man’s voice lifted in a roar. A familiar calmness came over him. The escort’s eyebrows went up, and he smiled at her. Her lips turned up in answer, but there was a different assessment behind it. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “Right through here.” The hallway was brutal concrete; green-gray metal doors in a line with identical windows of thick green-tinted glass that made the rooms beyond look like they were underwater. In the first, four guards in the same armor Amos’ escort wore were forcing a man to the ground. The woman from the waiting room huddled in the corner, her eyes closed. She seemed to be praying. The prisoner – a tall, thin man with long hair and a flowing beard the color of iron – roared again. His arm flashed out, quicker than Amos’ eye could follow, grabbing one of the guards by the ankle and pulling. The guard toppled, but two of the others had what looked like cattle prods out. One of them landed on the prisoner’s back, the other at the base of his skull. With one last obscenity, the iron-bearded man collapsed. The fallen guard rose back to her feet, blood pouring from her nose as the others teased her. The old woman sank to her knees, her lips moving. She took a long, shuddering breath, and when she spoke, she wailed, her voice sounding like it came from kilometers away. Amos’ escort ignored it, so he did too. “Yours is there. No exchange of goods of any sort. If at any point you feel threatened, raise your hand. We’ll be watching.” “Thanks for that,” Amos said. Until he saw her, Amos hadn’t realized how much the place reminded him of a medical clinic for people on basic. A cheap plastic hospital bed, a steel toilet on the wall without so much as a screen around it, a battered medical expert system, a wall-mounted screen set to an empty glowing gray, and Clarissa with three long plastic tubes snaking into her veins. She was thinner than she’d been on the ride back from Medina Station before it had been Medina Station. Her elbows were thicker than her arms. Her eyes looked huge in her face. “Hey there, Peaches,” Amos said, sitting in the chair at her bedside. “You look like shit on a stick.” She smiled. “Welcome to Bedlam.” “I thought it was called Bethlehem.” “Bedlam was called Bethlehem too. So what brings you to my little state-sponsored apartment?” On the other side of the window, two guards hauled the iron man past. Clarissa followed Amos’ gaze and smirked. “That’s Konecheck,” she said. “He’s a volunteer.” “How’d you figure?” “He can leave if he wants to,” she said, lifting her arm to display the tubes. “We’re all modified down here. If he let them take out his mods, he could transfer up to Angola or Newport. Not freedom, but there’d be a sky.” “They couldn’t just take ’em?” “Body privacy’s written into the constitution. Konecheck’s a bad, bad monkey, but he’d still win the lawsuit.” “What about you? Your… y’know. Stuff?” Clarissa bowed her head. Her laugh shook the tubes. “Apart from the fact that every time I used them, I wound up puking and mewling for a couple minutes afterward, they’ve got some other drawbacks. If we pull them out, I’d survive, but it would be even less pleasant than this. Turns out there’s a reason the stuff I got isn’t in general use.” “Shit. That’s got to suck for you.” “Among other things, it means I’m here until… well. Until I’m not anywhere. I get my blockers every morning, lunch in the cafeteria, half an hour of exercise, and then I can sit in my cell or in a holding tank with nine other inmates for three hours. Rinse, repeat. It’s fair. I did bad things.” “All that shit the preacher pitched about redemption, getting reformed —” “Sometimes you don’t get redeemed,” she said, and her voice made it clear she’d thought about the question. Tired and strong at the same time. “Not every stain comes out. Sometimes you do something bad enough that you carry the consequences for the rest of your life and take the regrets to the grave. That’s your happy ending.” “Huh,” he said. “Actually, I think I know what you mean.” “I really hope you don’t,” she said. “Sorry I didn’t put a bullet in your head when I had the chance.” “Sorry I didn’t know to ask. What brings you down here, anyway?” “Was in the neighborhood saying goodbye to a bunch of my past, mostly. Don’t see how I’m coming back this way, so thought I’d better say hi now if I was going to at all.” Tears welled up in her eyes, and she took his hand. The contact was weird. Her fingers felt too thin, waxy. Seemed rude to push her away though, so he tried to remember what people were like when they had an intimate moment like this. He pretended he was Naomi and squeezed Clarissa’s hand. “Thank you. For remembering me,” she said. “Tell me about the others. What’s Holden doing?” “Well, shit,” Amos said. “How much they tell you about what happened on Ilus?” “The censors don’t let me see anything that involves him. Or you. Or anything involving Mao-Kwikowski or the protomolecule or the rings. It might be disruptive for me.” Amos settled in. “All right. So a while back, Cap’n gets this call…” For maybe forty-five minutes, maybe an hour, he laid out all the stuff that had happened since the Rocinante turned Clarissa Mao over to the authorities. Telling stories that didn’t have a punch line wasn’t something he had much practice with, so he was pretty sure that as story time went, it sucked. But she drank it up like he was pouring water on beach sand. The medical system beeped every now and then, responding to whatever was happening in her bloodstream. Her eyes started to close like she was going to sleep, but her fingers didn’t lose their grip on his. Her breath got deeper too. He wasn’t sure if that was part of the medical whatever it was they were doing to her or something else. He stopped talking, and she didn’t seem to notice. It felt weird to sneak out without saying anything, but he also didn’t want to wake her up just to do it. So he sat for a while, looking at her because there wasn’t anything else to look at. The weird thing was, she looked younger. No wrinkles at the sides of her mouth or eyes. No sagging in her cheeks. Like the time she’d spent down in the prison didn’t count. As if she’d never get old, never die, just be here wishing for it. It was probably some kind of side effect of the shit they’d pumped into her. There were kinds of environmental poisoning that did that too, not that he knew the details. She’d killed a lot of people, but he had too, one way and another. Seemed a little weird that she’d be staying and he’d be walking out. She felt bad about all the things she’d done. Maybe that was the difference. Regret and punishment the flip sides of the karmic coin. Or maybe the universe was just that fucking random. Konecheck didn’t look like he had a lot of regrets, and he was locked up just the same. Amos was about to start trying to get his hand free when the Klaxons went off. Clarissa’s eyes shot open and she sat up, present and alert and not even sort of groggy. So maybe she hadn’t been asleep after all. “What is that?” she said. “I was about to ask you.” She shook her head. “I haven’t heard that one before.” It seemed like the right time to get his hand back. He went to the door, but his escort was already there coming in. She had her weapon drawn, but not pointing at anything. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, and her voice was higher than it had been before. She was scared. Or maybe excited. “This facility has been put on lockdown. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to remain in here for the time being.” “How long are we talking about?” he asked. “I don’t know the answer to that, sir. Until the lockdown is lifted.” “Is there a problem?” Clarissa asked. “Is he in danger?” That was a good move. No guard ever gave a fuck whether the prisoner was in danger, so she was asking about the civilian. Even so, the escort wasn’t going to say a goddamn thing unless she wanted to. Turned out, she wanted to. “A rock came down outside Morocco about three hours ago,” she said, her sentence curling up at the end like it was a question. “I saw something about that,” Amos said. “How did it get through?” Clarissa asked. “It was going very, very fast,” the escort said. “Accelerated.” “Jesus,” Clarissa said, like someone had punched her in the chest. “Someone dropped a rock on purpose?” Amos said. “Rocks. Plural,” the escort said. “Another one came down about fifteen minutes ago in the middle of the Atlantic. There’re tsunami and flood warnings going out everywhere from Greenland to fucking Brazil.” “Baltimore?” Amos said. “Everyplace. Everywhere.” The escort’s eyes were getting watery and wild. Panic maybe. Maybe grief. She gestured with her gun, but it just looked impotent. “We’re on lockdown until we know.” “Know what?” Amos said. It was Clarissa that answered. “If that was the last one. Or if the hits are going to keep on coming.” In the silence that came afterward, they weren’t guard, prisoner, and civilian. They were just three people in a room. The moment passed. “I’ll be back with an update as soon as I have one, sir.” Amos’ brain ran through all the scenarios that came easy and didn’t see many options. “Hey, wait. I know it ain’t for pleasure viewing or nothing, but that screen over there catch newsfeeds?” “Prisoners only get access in the common area.” “Sure,” Amos said. “But I’m not a prisoner, right?” The woman looked down, then shrugged. She took out her hand terminal, tapped in a few lines of text, and the empty gray screen flickered to life. A pale man with broad, soft lips was in the middle of his report. “— undetected by the radar arrays, we are getting reports that there was a temperature anomaly that may have been related to the attack.” The guard nodded to him and closed the door. He couldn’t hear it lock, but he was pretty sure it had. He sat back in his chair and propped his heels on the side of the hospital bed. Clarissa sat forward, her bone-thin hands knotted together. The feed switched over to a white-haired man talking earnestly about the importance of not jumping to conclusions. “Do you know where the first one hit?” Clarissa asked. “Do you remember anything from the news?” “I wasn’t paying attention. I think they said Krakatoa? Is that a place?” Clarissa closed her eyes. If anything, she went a little paler. “Not exactly. It’s a volcano that blew itself up a long, long time ago. Sent ash eighty kilometers up. Shock waves went around the world seven times.” “But it’s not North Africa?” “No,” she said. “I can’t believe they really did it. They’re dropping rocks. I mean, who would even do that? You can’t… you can’t replace Earth.” “Maybe you kind of can now,” Amos said. “Lot of planets out there now weren’t around before.” “I can’t believe someone would do this.” “Yeah, but they did.” Clarissa swallowed. There had to be stairs around here. They’d be locked up so that prisoners couldn’t get to them, but Amos figured there’d have to be stairs. He went to the window to the hall and pressed his head against it. He couldn’t see anything down the hall either way. Kicking the glass out seemed unlikely too. Not that he was looking to try. Just thinking. On the screen, a mushroom cloud rose over a vast and empty sea. Then, as a woman’s voice calmly talked about megatonnage and destructive capacity, a map was displayed with one bright red dot on North Africa, another in the ocean. Clarissa hissed. “Yeah?” Amos said. “If the spacing’s even,” Clarissa said, “if there’s another one, it’s going to be close.” “Okay,” Amos said. “Can’t do anything about that, though.” The hinges were on the other side of the door too, because of course they were. It was a fucking prison. He clicked his tongue against his teeth. Maybe they’d take it off lockdown and send him on his way. Might happen. If it didn’t, though… Well, this was going to be a stupid way to die. “What’re you thinking?” she asked. “Well, Peaches. I’m thinking that I stayed on this mudball a day too long.” Chapter Twenty-three: Holden Holden sat back, light-headed, his eyes still on the screen. The immensity of the news made Fred’s office seem fresh and unfamiliar: the desk with the fine black lines of wear at the corner; the captain’s safe set into the wall like a little privacy window; the industrial carpeting. It was like he was seeing Fred, leaning forward on his elbows, grief in his eyes, for the first time. Less than an hour earlier, reports had come through with red frames around the feed windows to show how serious everything was. The previous headlines – a meteor or possibly a small comet had struck North Africa – were forgotten. The ships carrying the prime minister of the Martian Republic were being approached by an unknown and apparently hostile force, his escort moving to intercept. It was the news of the year. Then the second rock hit Earth, and what might have been a natural disaster was revealed as an attack. “They’re connected,” Holden said. Every word came out slow. Every thought. It was like the shock had dropped his mind in resistance gel. “The attack on the prime minister. This. They’re connected, aren’t they?” “I don’t know. Maybe,” Fred said. “Probably.” “This is what they were planning. Your dissident OPA faction,” Holden said. “Tell me you didn’t know about this. Tell me you’re not part of it.” Fred sighed and turned to him. The weariness in his expression was vast. “Fuck you.” “Yeah. Okay. Just had to ask.” And then a moment later, “Holy shit.” On the newsfeed, images of Earth’s upper atmosphere showed the strike like a bruise. The cloud of dust was smearing off to the west as the planet turned under it. The dust plume would keep widening until it covered the whole northern hemisphere – and maybe more – but for now it was just a blackness. His mind kept bouncing off the image, rejecting it. His family was on Earth – his mothers and his fathers and the land he’d grown up on. He hadn’t been back in too long, and now — He couldn’t finish the thought. “We have to get in front of this,” Fred said, to himself as much as Holden. “We have to —” A communication request popped onto the side of the screen, and Fred accepted it. Drummer’s face filled a small window. “Sir, we have a problem,” she said. “One of the ships we’ve got parked out there waiting to dock just put target locks on the main engines and the upper habitation ring.” “Defense grid up?” “That’s the problem, sir. We’re seeing —” The door of the office opened. The three people who came in wore Tycho Station security uniforms. One carried a large duffel bag; the other two had instruments in their hands that Holden struggled to make sense of. Strange hand terminals, or some sort of compact tool. Or, guns. Like someone speaking through the radio, a voice in the back of Holden’s mind said This is a coordinated, system-wide attack just as the first woman fired. The sound alone was like being struck, and Fred toppled back in his seat. Holden scrambled for his own sidearm, but the second woman had already turned to him. He tried to drop down, to take cover behind the desk, but the two women fired almost simultaneously. Holden caught his breath. Something kicked him just below the rib, and he didn’t know if he’d hit the edge of the desk or he’d been shot. He fired wild, and the man dropped the duffel bag. The first woman’s head snapped back and she dropped to her knees. Someone else was shooting, and it took what seemed like minutes and was probably less than a second to realize it was Fred, supine behind the desk and firing between his feet. Holden had no idea where Fred had acquired a gun in the seconds since the attack started. The second woman turned her gun toward Fred, but Holden took a breath and remembered how to aim, hitting her in the ribs. The man fled out the office door. Holden let him go and slid to the ground. There didn’t seem to be any blood on him, but he still wasn’t sure whether he’d taken a bullet. The first woman struggled to her knees, one blood-soaked hand pressing her ear. Fred shot her again. She dropped. Like it was happening in a dream, Holden noticed that the duffel bag had fallen open. It had emergency environment suits in it. When Fred shouted, his voice was strangely high and very far away. The gunfire had left them both almost deaf. “You’re a shitty bodyguard, Holden. Do you know that?” “No formal training,” Holden shouted back. The words felt louder in his throat than they sounded in his ears. He became aware of another voice shouting, but not from here. From the desk console. Drummer. He stooped over Fred, ignoring her. Blood covered the man’s side, but Holden couldn’t see where the wound was. “Are you okay?” Holden shouted. “Just ducky,” Fred growled, hauling himself up. He winced, clenched his teeth, and took his seat. On the monitor, Drummer blanched. “You’ll have to speak up,” Fred said. “Things got a little loud here. Holden! Secure the goddamn door.” “Doors and corners,” Holden said, stepping over the bodies. “Always doors and corners.” Outside, the security office was empty. A light was flashing on the wall. Emergency signal of some kind. Now that he knew to listen for it, he could hear the alarm. Evacuation warning. Someone was evacuating the station ring. That couldn’t be good. He wondered if the good guys had sounded the alert, or if it was just part of the plan. A distraction while something even worse happened. He was having a hard time catching his breath. He had to keep checking to make sure he hadn’t been shot. He looked at the gun in his fist. I think I just killed someone , he thought. And someone dropped a rock on Earth. And then they tried to kill Fred. It was bad. It was all just bad. He didn’t notice Fred coming up behind him until he took Holden’s elbow, leaning against him for support and pushing him forward at the same time. “Look alive, sailor,” Fred said. “We’ve got to go. They’ve fired a torpedo at us, and some ratfucker sabotaged my defense grid.” Fred was cursing more than usual. The stress of combat waking up the long-dormant marine inside of him. “They’re shooting the ring?” Holden said. “Yes. And in particular, they’re shooting at my office. I’m starting to get the feeling they don’t like me.” Together, they struggled forward. In the wide corridor, people were scampering to hardened shelters and evacuation stations. An older man with close-shaved hair and a mouth set in a permanent grimace saw Fred and the blood. Without a word, he took Fred’s far arm across his shoulder. “Are we heading to medical bay or evac?” Grimace asked. “Neither one,” Fred said. “The bad guys are trying to take engineering. My men got jumped. They’re pinned down, and there are two enemy torpedoes on their way to disable the engines. We’ve got to relieve our people, and get the grid back up. See if we can’t start firing back.” “Are you joking?” Holden said. “You’ve been shot. You’re bleeding.” “I’m aware of that,” Fred said. “There’s a security transfer up here to the left. We can take it. Get to the construction sphere. What’s your name, chief?” Grimace looked at Holden, asking by his expression who Fred was talking to. Holden shook his head. Fred knew his name already. “Electrician First Class Garret Ming, sir. Been working for you about ten years, one way and another.” “Sorry I haven’t met you before,” Fred said. “You know how to use a gun?” “I’m a quick study, sir.” Fred’s face was gray. Holden didn’t know if it was blood loss or shock or the first symptoms of a deeper despair. “That’s good.” Tycho Station was built like a ball half a kilometer across. The construction sphere was big enough to accommodate almost any ship smaller than a battleship in its interior space. At rest, the two rings at its equator gave spin gravity to a city’s worth of the Belt’s best engineers and technicians. The great drives at the sphere’s base could move the station anywhere in the system. Or out of it, now. Tycho had overseen the spinning up of Ceres and Pallas. It was the beating heart of the Belt and its loudest boast. The Nauvoo , the ship that would have taken humans to the stars, had been too large to fit inside the construction sphere, but it had been built in space next to the massive station. There was no better place for the construction of grand dreams than Tycho. Along with the terraforming of Mars and the farms of Ganymede, it was a living testament to humanity’s ambition and skill. Holden would never have imagined it could feel fragile. The transfer from ring to construction dome was like taking a particularly awkward lift. They began at the full one-third g of the station, lurched, and their weight began to leach away. When doors opened again, they were in free fall. The blood that had started dripping from Fred’s arm was a fluid coating now, the liquid held to his body by surface tension as it gradually thickened into a kind of jelly. Garret was covered with it. Holden was too. He kept expecting Fred to pass out, but the old man didn’t lose focus or determination. Visible from the long translucent tube of the access corridor, the construction sphere looked like a network of purified functionality. Other corridors curved between the ship berths, the walls tiled with a subtly repeating pattern of access panels, power transfers, storage and equipment lockers, and mech parking plates. The steel and ceramic bones of the station showed everywhere, and the light was as bright and harsh as sunlight in vacuum. The air in the access corridor was sweet with the scent of carbon lubricant and electrical discharge. Together, the three of them pulled themselves headfirst toward station south, the engineering decks, and the massive fusion reactors. Holden’s body couldn’t decide if he was falling down a long, bent well or swimming along an underground river of air. “Drummer!” Fred snapped. “Report.” The audio feed from his hand terminal was confused for a moment, then the woman’s voice came, her syllables clipped, calm, and measured in a way that sounded like the professional version of raw panic. “Understood. Main engineering has been shut down by the hostiles. They are holding auxiliary engineering with a force of approximately twenty well-armed enemy, sir. We’re in a mutual holding action.” “Can you disengage?” “Not safely, sir. They can’t move, but neither can we.” “Do we know —” Something loud happened on the other end of the terminal, and a second later, a bone-deep ringing shuddered through the corridor. Garret swore under his breath. “The first torpedo has made impact, sir,” Drummer said. “The ring?” “No, sir. The drive cone. The torpedo targeting the ring hit a few minutes ago, but failed to detonate.” “Small favors,” Fred said. “Do we know the armament of the insurgents?” “Small automatic weapons. Some grenades.” “Can you shut down their air?” “There’s a manual cutoff, but I haven’t had the spare manpower yet.” “I’ve got an electrician first class with me,” Fred said. “Tell me where to take him.” “Understood. We’re looking at an access on service deck four. Environment controls Delta-Foxtrot-Whiskey-slash-six-one-four-eight.” “They had vacuum suits,” Holden said. “The ones in your office. They had emergency suits. Turning off the air may not matter.” Drummer answered from Fred’s hand terminal. “We’ll keep them in place until their bottles run out if that’s what we need to do.” “Good,” Fred said. “We’re on our way.” “Don’t stop for beer, sir,” Drummer said, and the background hiss of the connection dropped. Fred made a small, satisfied grunt and pushed himself farther down the hall. “It’s not going to work,” Holden said. “They’ll figure out what we’re doing and cut through a bulkhead or something.” “You know the difference between a code and a cipher, Holden?” “What?” “A code and a cipher. Cipher, you encrypt text so that no one can tell what the words in the message are. A code, you say the words right out in the open, but you change what they mean. Anyone with a smart computer and a lot of time can break a cipher. No one can break a code.” Holden launched himself across a wide intersection where three passageways came together. For a moment, the station extended around him on all three axes. Fred and Garret floated close behind him but pushed off faster, so that they reached the far side before him. Fred turned to his left and gestured for them to follow. “Service deck four’s the other way, sir,” Garret said. “But the four people on the ambush team are this way,” Fred replied. His words were getting slushy. “Level six, section fourteen, berth eight. Once we’re in position, I’ll try to pull the bad guys out, and we’ll take them in the flank.” Holden thought for a moment. “You had a whole system set up in case this happened. But what if Drummer had been one of them?” “I had other systems set up with Oliver, Chu, and Stavros,” Fred said. “Secure, open communications with whoever I had left.” “Tricky,” Holden said. “I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while.” The ambush team was where Fred said it would be: three male Belters and a woman with the thick build of Earth, all in light armor with riot guns and suppression grenades. Fred gave Garret a short-barreled shotgun and a position at the rear where he could be both useful and safe. One tried to tend to Fred’s gunshot wound, but he waved the man away. Near the bottom of the station, the curve of the corridors was tighter, the horizon close. They were less than ten meters from the doors to auxiliary engineering, and the bent wall offered them cover. When the time came, they’d have to get even closer. Holden’s hand terminal vibrated in his pocket. Around a red frame, the newsfeed announced a third rock had struck Earth. Holden thumbed it off. If he let himself think about what was happening around the rest of the solar system now, he couldn’t think about what was about to happen in this corridor. Still, his throat felt thick and his hands had a shudder he couldn’t entirely control. His family was on Earth. Amos was on Earth. And Alex was in a tiny ship someplace not too far from the Martian prime minister’s convoy. And Naomi was… somewhere. That he didn’t know where made it worse. “Be okay,” he murmured. “Just be okay.” “What?” Fred said. “Nothing. I’m ready.” Fred opened a connection. “Drummer. Killing the air is a no-go. We’re going to have to pull in heavy artillery. I have a squad of combat marines I scraped out of a bar. They’re coming to relieve you now.” “Understood,” Drummer said. Holden thought there was a smile in her voice. “Make it fast, though. We’ve got two down. I’m not sure we can hold much longer.” “Ten minutes,” Fred said, raising his bloodied left hand in the Belter idiom for Take position . The ambush team steadied their weapons. Holden did too. It took the people holed up in auxiliary engineering almost five minutes to decide they should make a break for it. The door popped open, and the first half dozen or so of the enemy streamed out of engineering. They were dressed like normal people: security uniforms, technicians’ jumpsuits, the sort of casual clothing Holden would have seen in a bar or in the corridors. They were just people, citizens of Tycho. Of the Belt. They took positions that gave them cover from Drummer’s suppressing fire, unaware at first of the second team. At Fred’s signal, the six of them opened up, though Holden was aware that he wasn’t trying very hard to hit anyone. A second wave tried to get out of engineering as the first one tried to retreat back into it. Drummer’s force moved forward with a barrage of gel rounds and suppression grenades that burst into foam and hardened to stone almost instantly. In half a minute, the fight was over. Fifteen minutes later, the defense grid was back up, and the attacking torpedo boat was burning hard for someplace in among the Trojan asteroids. It was almost an hour before the real cost became clear. With the station in relative safety, Fred had allowed himself to be taken to the medical bay. The gentle gravity of the ring was still enough to show how weak he’d become. The expert system inserted four needles, inflating him with artificial blood, and the color began to come back to his face. Holden, sitting at the bedside, watched the readouts without really seeing them. He wanted to check the newsfeeds about Earth, and he also didn’t. The longer he could put it off, the longer he didn’t have to think about it. When Drummer came in with the damage report, it was almost a relief. Another distraction. “The torpedoes cracked the drive cone,” she said. “How badly?” Fred asked. “Do you want to fly this thing on a patched-up cone? Badly enough that we’re going to manufacture a new one.” “Fair enough,” Fred said. “At least they didn’t blow the ring,” Holden said. “If that one hadn’t been a dud —” Drummer’s face went still. “About that. We were mistaken. The enemy fired a weapon with the hull and drive of a torpedo, but they rigged it with a salvage mech on the end. Ran it into your office, sliced through the exterior decking, and pulled half the wall away with them.” Fred blinked. “That was why they needed EVA suits,” Holden said. “I was wondering. But it seems like a pretty weird way to get to you. Peeling your office open like a sardine can.” “They weren’t after me,” Fred said, then paused and said something obscene. “What?” Holden said. “What is it?” Drummer answered. Her voice had the same professional calm she’d used in the firefight. “The enemy took the wall that had Colonel Johnson’s safe. It won’t be easy getting it open, but with enough time and resources, we have to assume they will.” “But they already compromised your command structure, right? Any sensitive information they get, they probably already had?” Holden knew even before Fred said it, but he wanted to give the universe a chance to prove him wrong. Make it so that the worst possible thing hadn’t happened. “They got the sample,” Fred said, making it a reality. “Whoever did this? They now have the protomolecule.” Chapter Twenty-four: Amos “Wouldn’t the density figure in?” Clarissa asked. Whatever crap they’d been feeding into her bloodstream, it had run out. She was starting to look a little better. He could still see the veins under her parchment-thin skin, but she was getting some color back in her cheeks. “Sure, but that’s all energy you’d put in getting the rocks up to speed in the first place. You drop a slug of tungsten out of a ship or a fucking feather pillow, you’ve still got to get the ship going whatever speed you’re aiming for. All that price got paid at the front, energetically speaking.” “But a pillow would have burned up before it hit ground.” “Okay, now that’s a fair point.” On the screen, the newsfeed showed the strikes again and again, looting footage from as many different sources as they could find – terminals, security cameras, high-orbit mapping satellites. The bolt of ionized air glowed like the trail of a rail gun, and North Africa bloomed a massive rose of fire, again and again. Another beam-like trail in the air, and the Atlantic Ocean went from a vast expanse of slate-blue water to an expanding circle of eerie green and then spewed white and black to the sky. It was like the reporters thought if they all just kept looking at it, it would start making sense. Millions of people were dead, and millions more would be in the next few hours as the tsunamis and flooding hit. Billions would go in the next few weeks and months. The Earth had become a different planet since he’d gone underground. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could make sense of by staring at it, but he couldn’t look away either. All he could do was talk to Peaches about trivia and wait to see what came next. The man doing the voice-over had a gentle European accent and a sense of calm that probably meant he’d sucked down a lot of pills. Or it might have been tweaked and enhanced by the sound techs. “The weapons remained undetected by radar until they entered the Terran atmosphere, less than a second before impact.” The image shifted to an apocalyptic satellite image: five frames in a loop showing the Atlantic impact and the raw shock wave rolling out from it across the ocean. The scale was massive. “You see,” Amos said, pointing a thumb at the screen, “that’s how you know they were using radar-absorbing coating on the rocks. Burned off and stopped working after they hit atmo, right? Anyway, you figure it went from the ionosphere to sea level in about half a second, so that’s about two hundred klicks per. I’m making this up here, but the kind of bang they’re talking about, you could do it with a block of tungsten carbide maybe three and a half, four meters to a side. That ain’t big.” “You can figure all that in your head?” Amos shrugged. “My job has been playing with magnetically contained fusion reactions for a lot of years now. It’s the same kind of math, more or less. You get a feel for it.” “I can see that,” she said. And then, “You think we’re going to die?” “Yup.” “Of this?” “Maybe.” On the screen, the newsfeed replayed a five-second clip from a sailing boat. The flash of perfectly straight lightning, the weird deforming lens of the pressure wave bending the air and light, and the image shattered. Whoever had been in the ship, they’d died before they knew what they were looking at. Probably the most common last words that day were going to be Huh, that’s weird . That or Oh shit . Amos was aware in a distant way that his gut hurt, like he’d eaten a little too much food. Probably fear or shock or something. Clarissa made a small sound in the back of her throat. Amos looked over at her. “I wish I’d seen my father again.” “Yeah?” She was silent for a moment. Then, “If he’d done it? If he’d figured out how to control the protomolecule? Everything would have been different. This wouldn’t be happening.” “Something else would be,” Amos said. “And if you’d ever seen that thing up close, you wouldn’t think it was better.” “Do you think Captain Holden would ever —” The floor rose up and punched Amos in the legs. By instinct, he tried to roll, but the attack was too wide. There was no way to get around it. The screen shattered; the lights failed. Something loud happened. For a few seconds, he was rattled around the room like dice in a box, not knowing what was hitting him. Everything went black. An endless moment later, the amber emergency light flickered on. Clarissa’s bed was on its side, the girl poured out of it to the floor. A pool of clear liquid widened around the medical expert system, filling the air with a pungent smell like coolant and alcohol. The thick wire-and-bulletproof-glass window had shattered in its frame and was now opaque as snow. A network of cracks laced the wall. From the corner, Clarissa’s half-panicked laughter bubbled up, and Amos felt his own feral smile rise up to meet it. An alarm was sounding, the wail rising and stuttering and rising again. He didn’t know if it was supposed to sound like that or if the shock wave had broken it. “You all in one piece there, Peaches?” “Not sure. My hand really hurts. May have broken something.” He got to his feet. He hurt everywhere. But long familiarity with pain told him nothing was seriously damaged, so he shoved the hurt to one side and ignored it. Either the ground was still shaking a little or he was. “Well, if you did, that’ll suck.” The door to the hall was closed, but it looked wrong. Like the frame had warped. He wondered if it would ever open again. “We’re ten stories underground,” Clarissa said. “Yeah.” “If it was like this for us, how bad is it up top?” “Don’t know,” Amos said. “Let’s go see.” She sat up. Her left hand was already swollen to about twice the size of the right one, so something in it was busted. In her prison gown, she looked like a ghost. Something already dead that hadn’t stopped moving yet. Which, he figured, might be accurate. “We’re on lockdown,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere.” “Thing is, for us to be in lockdown, this has to be a prison. For this to be a prison, there has to be, you know, a civilization out there. I think this just turned into a big hole in the ground with a bunch of dangerous people in it. We should leave.” He kicked the door. It was like punching a bulkhead with a bare fist. He moved over and tried the shattered window. It was only a little bit better. He tried three more times before a voice shouting from outside interrupted him. “Stop that immediately! We’re in lockdown!” “Someone doesn’t know this isn’t a prison anymore,” Clarissa said. She sounded a little drunk. Might be a concussion to go with her broken hand. “In here!” Amos shouted. “Hey! We’re stuck in here!” “We are in lockdown, sir. You have to stay where you are until —” “The wall’s cracked,” Amos shouted back. “It’s gonna collapse.” It might even have been true. There was a long moment of quiet, and then a click from the doorway. The door scraped open a couple centimeters and jammed. The escort looked in. Dim emergency lighting from down the hall turned her into a grayscale outline. Even so, he could see the fear in her expression. There were other people behind her, but he couldn’t make them out. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, “but this facility is —” Amos put his shoulder against the door, not pushing out, but not letting her close it again either. “In lockdown. I got that,” he said. “Here’s the thing, though. We need to evacuate.” “You can’t, sir, this is —” “Not just us,” Amos said. “You too. You need to get out of here too. Unless you’re really looking to die at work, which I would find disappointing.” The escort licked her lips. Her gaze cut to the right. He tried to think what would convince her the rest of the way, but the best he came up with was punching her in the jaw and hoping he could push his way out before anyone shot him. He was cocking back his arm when Clarissa put a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got people on the top, don’t you?” she said. “Friends? Family?” The escort’s gaze lost focus, seeing something else. Someone else. Probably someone dead but not cool yet. “I can’t… I can’t think about that right now.” “Penal regulations say that you have the responsibility to maintain the safety and health of prisoners in your custody,” Clarissa said. “You won’t get in trouble for leading an evacuation. You’ll be a hero.” The escort was breathing heavily, like she was doing some kind of hard physical labor. Amos had seen people do that kind of thing when they were upset about something, but he didn’t really understand it. Clarissa moved him gently aside and leaned in toward the escort. “You can’t be part of a relief effort up there if you’re buried alive down here,” the girl said, softly. Like she was apologizing for something. “There might be aftershocks. The walls might collapse. There’s no dishonor in evacuating.” The escort swallowed. Clarissa leaned in, almost whispering. “There’s a civilian in here.” The escort said something under her breath that Amos didn’t quite catch, then turned to talk over her shoulder. “Help me get this goddamned door open, Sullivan. The structure’s compromised, and we’ve got a fucking civilian in here that we need to get to safety. Morris, if that bastard tries anything, take him down hard. You understand, asshole? One wrong move, and we’ll end you.” Someone in the corridor laughed, and it sounded like a threat. Amos and Clarissa backed up. Two new hands took hold of the door and started hauling it back open. “Keep the civilian safe? That’s what got to her?” Amos asked. Clarissa shrugged. “It was the excuse she needed. Though you are a precious flower.” “Well, sure. Just not used to anybody appreciating it.” The door opened with a shriek, swinging into the corridor only halfway before it stuck fast. Probably permanently. In the hallway, the damage was clearer. A crack ran down the center, three or four centimeters lower on one side than the other. The air was thicker than it had been coming in; Amos felt the reflexive urge to check the air recyclers. Maybe that wasn’t even wrong. Being thirty-odd meters underground was a lot like being in vacuum. If things were busted enough, atmosphere was going to be a problem. The other prisoner – Konecheck – knelt on the ground, a second guard – Morris – standing three paces behind him with a weapon pointed at the man’s back. If it was a gun, it wasn’t a design Amos recognized. The prisoner’s face was swollen all down the left side like he’d lost a boxing match with a very slow ref. The escort, two other guards, Peaches, and this fella. Konecheck looked up from behind strands of long iron-gray hair and gave a one-millimeter nod. Amos felt a wave of something a lot like comfort pass through him – a looseness across his shoulders, a warmth in his gut. This was going to get ugly before it was over, but it was a scale of violence he understood. “New plan,” the escort said. “We’re evacuating these prisoners and the civilian to the surface.” The guard who’d helped pull the door open – Suliman? Sullivan? Something like that – was a thick-necked bull of a man with a single black eyebrow running across his forehead. Morris, the one with the gun, was thinner, older, with bad teeth and missing the last knuckle on his left pinky finger. “Sure you don’t want to put the prisoners in a closet before we go?” Morris asked. “I’d feel a lot better getting out of here if we didn’t have these fucking psychos at our back.” “Peaches comes with me,” Amos said with a loose shrug. “That’s just a thing.” “Might need some help clearing debris,” Konecheck said. He’d been the one that laughed before. The words, innocuous as they were, held just as much threat but the others didn’t seem to hear it. Amos wondered why that was. “Elevators are disabled, so we’ll get to the stairs,” the escort said. “That’ll get us out of here. Once we’re up top, we can secure the prisoners.” “What about fallout?” the thick guard – Amos was almost sure the name was Sullivan – said. “That’s nukes, asshole,” Konecheck growled. “Rona? Shouldn’t you query the captain before we do this?” Morris asked. His eyes hadn’t shifted off Konecheck’s back. Competent , Amos thought, and filed the information away for later. “Captain’s not answering,” the escort, Rona, said. Her voice was tight, too controlled to let the panic out. From the way the other two went quiet, Amos guessed they hadn’t known that. “Let’s head for the stairs. Morris, you take lead, then the prisoners, then me and Sully. You’ll need to follow behind, sir.” “I’ll walk with them,” Amos said. “Don’t trust me with your girlfriend?” Konecheck growled. Amos grinned. “Nope.” “Let’s get moving,” Rona said. “Before there’s a fucking aftershock.” Fear was an interesting thing. Amos could see it in all the guards without quite being able to point to what it was. The way Morris kept looking over his shoulder, maybe. Or the way Rona and Sullivan walked exactly in step behind them, like they were trying to agree with each other just by the length of their stride. Peaches seemed focused and empty, but that was kind of just her. Konecheck, on Amos’ left, was jutting out his beard and making a big show of what a badass he was, which would have been funnier if he didn’t have a nervous system redesigned for violence. Guys like that were either scared all the time anyway or so broken they didn’t count. Amos wondered whether he was scared. He didn’t know how he’d tell. He also wondered if there were going to be more rocks falling, but it didn’t seem like the kind of thing he had any say over. All around them, the prison was in shambles. Cracks ran along the walls like the floor had been shoved out a couple centimeters and pushed back in place. There was a sound of water running through pipes from somewhere. The emergency lights were on, but here and there a few had failed, leaving pools of darkness. Even if the elevators were running, he wouldn’t have wanted to take them. One of the things living on a ship for years had done was give him a sense for how the whole vessel was running based on a few local indicators. And if the Pit had been above orbit, he’d have been sleeping in an environment suit, just so as not to be unpleasantly surprised by waking up airless. “Stop fucking whistling,” Konecheck said. “Was I whistling?” Amos asked. “You were,” Clarissa said, still cradling her swollen hand. “Huh,” Amos said, and started whistling again, consciously this time. “I said stop it,” Konecheck growled. “Yeah,” Amos agreed with a friendly nod. “You did say that.” “Prisoners will maintain silence,” Rona snapped behind them. “And the civilian will kindly shut the fuck up too.” Amos considered Konecheck out of the corner of his eyes. Still too early to be sure, but maybe sixty-forty that one of them was going to have to kill the other. Not now, but before it was over. He could hope for the forty. A shudder passed through the floor like a badly tuned thruster firing. Concrete dust sifted down from the lights like amber snow. Morris said something obscene. “Aftershock,” Rona said. “Just an aftershock.” “Might be,” Clarissa said. “Might be the shock wave from Africa. I don’t remember how fast that kind of force travels through the mantle.” “Not fucking North Africa,” Konecheck said. “No way we’d feel that.” “When the Galveston plant went up, the shock wave was still measurable on its third time around the planet,” Clarissa said. “Oh, the bitch is a history professor now?” “The prisoners will maintain silence!” Rona shouted. She was sounding a lot more agitated. Around a corner, a light glowed green, the icon of a thick-legged stick man walking up steps. He wondered how many other people were on this level, still in lockdown, waiting on rescue. How many were already trudging up the stairs on their way out. The guards were playing it pretty close to the vest, but he’d have bet good money that there were a whole lot of people making their own decisions right now. Morris stopped at the door to the stairway. The readout set into the wall beside it showed a red image of a closed lock until he swiped his hand terminal across it and keyed something into the display that opened. The lock switched to green, and the door slid open. Of course a prison would put the locks on the emergency power circuit, Amos thought. He wondered what else was locked. A landslide of mud, water, rocks, concrete, and rebar spilled into the corridor. Morris yelped and jumped back, then fell to the ground, grabbing one shin. His pants were ripped, and Amos caught a glimpse of a dark wetness between the man’s fingers. Blood. “Morris!” Rona said. “Report!” “I’m gonna need stitches.” “I’m moving ahead to look,” Amos said, leaving So don’t shoot me as a given. Beyond the door, the stairway was gone. Rubble and dirt were so thick, he couldn’t even tell if the stairs still existed under them. He couldn’t tell where the water was coming from, but it smelled clean. Which meant it was probably the drinking water. Another tremble shook a few stones and a head-sized ball of concrete loose. Sullivan was muttering a stream of obscenities under his breath that sounded less like anger and more like the first signs of panic. Amos shook his head. “No one’s getting out that way,” he said. “Not without a few months and a digging mech. We’re gonna have to find another way up.” “There isn’t a goddamn other way up,” Rona said. “That’s the evacuation route. That right there.” “Peaches?” Clarissa’s voice was calm but still a little slurred. “Hard call, Amos. It’s a prison for high-risk criminals. They don’t put a lot of easy egress routes in it.” “Fair enough,” Amos said. “But say you had to think of something clever?” “The guards have overrides. If we can get access to the elevator shaft and the car’s not blocking it, we might be able to climb up.” “Ten stories at one g on a broken hand?” He didn’t mention the possible concussion that was probably screwing with her sense of balance. “Didn’t say it’d be fun.” “The access ladders are all locked down,” the escort said. “They put doors across them so no one can get up without permission.” Konecheck gave a wide, mirthless laugh, and Sullivan trained another of the strange not-quite-guns on him. “Peaches?” “I don’t know. Maybe we could find something else.” Amos stretched his neck, the vertebrae popping like firecrackers. “This,” he said, “is getting to be a long fucking day.” Chapter Twenty-five: Naomi Hour by hour, history rolled out, every new moment making things worse. The newsfeeds from Earth and Mars, and then reports from Tycho Station and Ganymede filled with reporters and journalists blank with shock or else weeping. The hammering of Earth took most of the bandwidth: images from an apocalypse. Cities along the coasts of the Atlantic with grinding waves shattering fourth- and fifth-story windows. An army of small tornados forming behind the shock wave’s leading edge. The planet she was so used to seeing glow as the city lights made it a permanent fire, going dark. The field hospital at Dakar where ash and stones rained down upon row after row of the dead. The shaking UN spokesman confirming the death of the secretary-general. The void between the planets was alive with chatter and speculation, reports and theories and then conflicting reports and theories. With the complexity of light delay, it was almost impossible to put events in order. Everything seemed to be happening at once. Which, she supposed, was how Marco had wanted it. The events in other places – things that would have been shattering on any other day – seemed footnotes to the grand thesis of destruction playing out on Earth. Yes, there had been an attempted coup on Tycho Station, but the Earth was dying. Yes, an OPA cell had taken control of the ports on Ganymede, but the Earth was dying. Yes, a battle was going on between Martian escort ships and an unknown force near the Hungaria asteroids, but Earth was dying. The sense that something vast had descended on all humanity was inescapable. Outside, in the common room, elated voices rose with each new report, cheering with delight. In her assigned quarters, she watched with a growing numbness. And beneath it, something else. After half a shift, she turned the screen off. Her own face reflected in the emptiness that followed looked like another stunned reporter searching for words and failing. She pulled herself out of her crash couch and walked out to the common room. It was so much like the Roci ’s galley that her brain kept trying to recognize it, failing, and trying again. An utterly unfamiliar space would have been easier than this architectural uncanny valley. “Hoy, Knuckles,” Cyn said, rising from among the crowd. “A que gehst, yeah?” She made an automatic Belter’s shrug, but Cyn didn’t sit back down. Not the question of a friend wondering where she was going, but of a guard demanding information of a prisoner. She arranged her expression more carefully. “This was why, wasn’t it? This was why he wanted me?” “Marco son Marco,” Cyn said, and his voice was weirdly gentle. “He thought we should get you, so did, yeah? Why does why matter? Still the safest place to be in the system right here.” Naomi took a long breath and blew it out. “Lot to take in,” she said. “Big.” “Is that,” Cyn said. Naomi looked at her hands, her fingers laced together. Act like one of them , she thought. What would she do if she were one of them again? The answer came too naturally. As if she was one of them. As if she always had been. “Ship’s got an inventory,” she said. “I can do the checks. Be useful.” “I’ll join,” he said, falling into step with her. She knew where to go, how the lift would take her, where the machine shop was. In the years she’d been on the Roci , she hadn’t been aware that she was also internalizing the design logic of the Martian Navy, but she had been. When they reached the shop, she knew where the diagnostic arrays would be stored even though she’d never set foot in the place before. Cyn hesitated before he opened the cabinets, but only a little. Checking inventory, testing batteries and relays and storage bubbles, was something everyone did in their spare time if they grew up in the Belt. It was as natural as drinking water, and when she picked up an array, he did too. The door to the cargo bay was sealed, but it cycled open for Cyn. The bay was well-stocked. Magnetic pallets locked to the decks and walls in neat rows. She wondered idly where it had all come from, and what promises had been given in exchange. She went to the nearest, plugged the array into the pallet, and popped it open. The crates unfolded. Batteries. She took the first, snapped it into the array. The indicator went green, and she snapped the battery back out, replaced it, and took the next one. “All going to be good,” Cyn said. “Military grade, this.” “Well thank God militaries never get shit wrong.” The indicator went green. She swapped the battery in her hand for the next one. Cyn went to the next crate over, popped it, and started doing as she was doing. She recognized it as a kindness. He hadn’t come down to be her friend, but her jailer. He could as easily have put her back in her cabin and locked the door to keep her there, but he hadn’t. He could have stood guard over her while she worked through the batteries, but he didn’t. He pretended that they were together on the task, equals. Even if it meant missing beer and Armageddon with his friends. Against her will, Naomi felt a spark of gratitude for that. “Big day,” she said. “A long time coming,” Cyn said. “Long time,” she agreed automatically. “Got to be weird seeing him again.” She pulled another battery, checked it, put it back, grabbed the next one. Cyn cleared his throat. “M? falta,” he said. “Shouldn’t have said it.” “No, it’s fine,” Naomi said. “Yes, it’s weird seeing him again. Did a lot to get away from him last time. Didn’t see ever coming back.” “Bad times.” “Those or these?” Cyn coughed out a laugh and looked over at her, a question in his eyes. “These? Es? the promised land. Belt standing up. You know how it was before. You remember running thin because we couldn’t get enough oxygen. Breaking bones because the meds got taxed too much.” “I do,” she said, but Cyn was on a roll now, and he wasn’t ready to stop. He put down his array and stared at her. The sympathy had burned out of him, and there was a rage in his eyes. Not with her. With something bigger. “I got three cousins died because Earth corporations wouldn’t sell the good cancer meds to Belters. Gave us the crap left over from the farms on Ganymede. Only vat meats aren’t like people, yeah? Don’t work the same, but who cares? Tio Bennett got his ship taken away because he was behind on his permitting. He wasn’t even in a pinch? Earther dock, but he didn’t pay, so they boarded him, dropped him on Ceres, and sold his rig. And for what? They protect us from pirates? They protect us from third-rate manufacturers passing off old suits as new? They care if we got shot? If we got killed?” “I know they don’t.” “Didn’t, Knuckles. They didn’t . Because past is the past now. Today,” Cyn said, poking the air with his thumb. “You been flying on their side for a lot of years, and maybe not tu falta. Things before, keeping Filipito away, maybe we all did that wrong, yeah? But I’m starting to think you been sharing a couch with an Earth coyo so long you forgot what you are . Started thinking maybe you’re like them.” No , she wanted to say. No, I never forgot. But even as she formed the words, she wasn’t sure if they were true. Once, there had been a girl with her name who had belonged here. Who’d felt the rage she saw in Cyn and in Filip. There had been a time when she could have cheered the deaths on Earth. But Jim was from Earth. And Amos. Alex from Mars, which from a Belt perspective was more or less the same thing. And what was she? Their pet Belter? The one that didn’t belong? She didn’t think so. So then, she was something else. And still, how well had they known her, really? There was so much she hadn’t said. She didn’t know what would have changed if she had. Cyn was scowling at her, his eyes hard, his jaw set. She tried to retreat back behind the curtain of her hair, but it wasn’t enough. Not here. Not now. She had to say something; she had to react or it would be the same as confessing, and she was done taking responsibility for things she hadn’t chosen. She tried to think what Jim would have said, but imagining him was like touching an open wound. Guilt at keeping her past from him and the grief and longing of being away from him and the fear that something bad had happened to him on Tycho. Or was happening to him, right now, while she could do nothing about it. She didn’t know what Jim would do, and didn’t dare to imagine him. All right. Amos, then. What would Amos do? She took a deep breath, let it out. When she looked up, she brushed her hair away. Grinned. “Well, Cyn. That’s one way of looking at things,” she said, leaning into the words. “Ain’t it?” Cyn blinked. Whatever he’d expected, it hadn’t been that. She checked the last battery on her pallet, replaced it, and shut the box back down. Cyn was still looking at her, his head turned a degree to his left. It made him seem wary of her. Good. She nodded at the open pallet at his feet. “You going to check those?” she asked. “Or d’you need some help?” By dinner, it seemed like the attacks were done. The feeds, on the other hand, were in full swarm. She sat at a table that, like everything on the ship, seemed too familiar. Cyn sat on her right, and a young woman she didn’t know on her left. Her plate was heaped with fried mushroom in hot sauce, the way Rokku used to make it. She ate it one-handed, the way the others did, and wondered whether someone looking over the room would have been able to pick her out as the one that didn’t fit. The screen was set to a feed coming out of Tycho Station. She watched it and tried not to feel anything. When Monica Stuart appeared, she felt a shock of fear that she couldn’t quite explain. The woman made an introduction that told Naomi nothing new, then turned to Fred Johnson sitting stiffly across from her. He looked old. He looked tired. She didn’t watch him, barely listened to them speak, straining instead at the edges of the screen in case Jim was there. The others were heckling and catcalling anyway. She caught fragments. “Do you believe that you were the primary target of the attack?” “That appears to be the case.” “Fucking liar!” someone across the galley shouted, and the others roared their approval. Including Cyn. Fred moved carefully, and the camera stayed close on his face. He was hurt then, and hiding it. She’d heard once that birds back on Earth would do everything they could to hide that they were ill. Any visible weakness was an invitation to attack. The comparison made Fred Johnson seem vulnerable. Maybe everything was vulnerable now. “The attackers are in custody, and we hope very soon to have a clear idea who was behind this.” Something about that caught her. It was odd, knowing Marco, that he hadn’t made a press release of it. He’d brought her here to show off, hadn’t he? Or had he? She was supposed to bring the Rocinante with her, and they’d been disappointed when she didn’t. Was the ship what he’d really wanted? Or Jim? She wondered with a sense of dread what would have happened if she hadn’t come alone. And then, as if thinking had summoned him, Monica Stuart ended the interview with Colonel Fred Johnson, voice of the OPA and director of Tycho Station, and turned instead to Captain James Holden. Her breath stuttered. “I understand you were working as a bodyguard for Colonel Johnson,” Monica said. “Yes, that’s true,” Jim said with a little grimace. He hadn’t done a very good job of it apparently. “It wasn’t really needed. The people who infiltrated the security team turned out to be a very small minority. He wasn’t ever in real danger.” He was lying. Naomi pushed her food away. “Is it true that there was a secondary target? There are some people reporting that the attack may have been cover for some kind of theft.” Annoyance flashed in Jim’s eyes. She wondered if anyone else saw it. Monica was probably pushing into territory that they hadn’t agreed on. Or had agreed to avoid. “They’re not reporting that to me,” Jim said. “As far as I know, apart from some damage to the station, the coup was a total failure.” Another lie. “Switch the feed!” someone shouted. A chorus of agreement rose. Someone called Jim something insulting, and Cyn glanced over at her and then away. Naomi went back to her food. The hot sauce burned her lips, but she didn’t mind. The screen switched to a major newsfeed from Earth. The reporter was a young man in a black raincoat. The text said he was in someplace called Porto. The buildings behind him were a mix of ancient and new, with thick, muddy water tearing at them all. On the higher ground behind him, there were rows of sacks. No, body bags. “That was him, wasn’t it?” She didn’t know how long Filip had been standing behind her. The girl to her left nodded to Filip and fled. The boy took the empty seat. Wisps of stubble stretched along the line of his jaw, black against the golden brown of his skin. He turned to look at her, and his eyes took a moment to find her, like he was drunk. “That was the man you left us for, si no?” Cyn grunted like he’d been hit. Naomi didn’t know why. The question was so wrong it was actually funny. “Not how it played,” she said. “But yes. I ship with him.” “He’s handsome,” Filip said. She wondered whose voice he was echoing. It didn’t sound like Marco. “Wanted to say, about your being here? Wanted to say.” But then he didn’t go on to actually finish the thought. She wondered whether she saw regret in his eyes, or if she was imagining it because she wanted it to be there. She didn’t know what to say, how to answer. It felt like there were many versions of her – the captive, the collaborator, the mother reunited, the mother who went away – and all of them spoke differently. She didn’t know which was her real self. If any of them. Probably, it was all. “Not the way I’d have chosen,” she said, stepping through the words like they were sharp. “But that’s true of a lot of things, yeah?” Filip nodded, looked down. For a moment she thought he’d move away, and didn’t know whether she wanted him to stay or go. “It’s me up there now, you know,” Filip said. “On the feed? That’s me.” The reporter was older than Filip, broader across the face and shoulders. For a moment, she tried to see a resemblance between them, and then like walking into a freezer, she understood. “Your work,” she said. “Gave it to me as a present,” Filip said. “The stealth coating on the rocks? I led the team that retrieved it, me. Without me, none of this.” He was boasting. It was in the corner of his eyes and the tightness of his lips how badly he wanted her to be impressed. To approve. Something like rage shifted in her gut. On the screen, the reporter was listing relief organizations and religious groups. People who were trying to organize help for the refugees. As if anyone on the planet didn’t need refuge now. “Did that to me too,” she said. Filip’s expression asked the question. “Your father. He put blood on my hands too. Made me complicit in killing people. Thought it would make me easier to control, I guess.” It was the wrong thing to say. The boy flinched, drawing into himself like a snail’s feeler touched with salt. The feed changed. The dead and missing on Earth had topped two hundred million. A cheer went up all through the galley. “Is that why you left?” Filip asked. “Couldn’t handle doing the work?” She sat silent for a long moment. Then, “Yes.” “Better that you went, then,” Filip said. She told herself he didn’t mean it. It was just something he said to hurt her. It worked. But more than that, she felt a vast sorrow for all the things her baby boy might have been that he wasn’t. For the child she could have had in him, if there had been a way. But she’d left her child in the hands of a monster, and the infection had spread. A family of monsters, father and mother and child. It made it easier. “Weighed on me,” she said. “All those dead people because of what I’d done. I tried to leave. Told him I wouldn’t turn him in if he just let me take you and go. So instead he took you away. Said I was acting crazy, and he didn’t trust me around you. That if anyone was getting turned in, it would be me.” “I know,” Filip said. Spat. “He told me.” “And I was going to have to do it again. And again. And again. Kill more people for him. I tried to do it too. Tried to push through. Let them die. He tell you I tried to kill myself?” “Yeah,” Filip said. She should stop. She didn’t need to put this on him. Her little boy. Her little boy who’d just helped kill a world. God, she still wanted to protect him. How stupid was that? He was a murderer now. He needed to know. “I was at an airlock on Ceres Station. Rigged it to open. All I needed to do was step out. It was an old-style one. Blue and gray. And it smelled like fake apple. Something about the recycler there. And, anyway, I did it. I triggered it. Only the station had put in a fail-safe I didn’t know about. So.” She shrugged. “That was when I knew.” “Knew what?” “That I couldn’t save you. You could have a gone mother or a dead one. Those were all the options.” “Some people aren’t meant to be soldiers,” Filip said. It was meant to cut, but she was past feeling now. “The only right you have with anyone in life is the right to walk away. I would have taken you with me if I could. But I couldn’t. I would have stayed if I could. But I couldn’t. I would have saved you if I could.” “I didn’t need saving.” “You just killed a quarter of a billion people,” she said. “Someone should have kept that from happening.” Filip stood, his motions wooden. For a moment, she saw what he would look like as a man. And what he had been as a boy. There was a deep pain in his eyes. Not like her own. His pain was his, and she could only hope he would feel it. That he would at least learn to regret. “Before you kill yourself,” she said, “come find me.” He pulled back a centimeter, as if she’d shouted. “Con que I do something stupid like that? Soy no coward, me.” “When it comes,” she said, “find me. Nothing can ever take it back, but I’ll help you if I can.” “You’re merde to me, puta,” Filip snapped and stalked away. Around the galley, the others stared or pretended not to. Naomi shook her head. Let them look. She was past caring. She didn’t even hurt. Her heart was vast and dry and empty as a desert. For the first time since she’d taken Marco’s call on Tycho, her mind was clear. She’d almost forgotten Cyn was there until he spoke. “Harsh words for his big day.” “Life’s like that,” she said. But she thought, This isn’t the big day. In her memory, Marco spoke. In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. But he hadn’t made his pronouncement yet. Not in any diction. She didn’t know his plans. Likely no one but Marco knew all of them. But whatever his grand design was, it wasn’t over yet. Chapter Twenty-six: Amos Sullivan died when they were about fifteen meters up the shaft. The plan, if you wanted to call it that, was open the elevator shaft doors, then boost up a level and pry those open. Each level could be a staging area for getting to the next, and by the time they got to where the car was stuck at the very top level, they’d have enough experience with the layout they’d maybe be able to find a way to get past it or get the guards posted in it to let them through. Anyway, it was a problem they could solve once they got there. It took about an hour to get the first set of doors opened. They defaulted to locked, for one thing. For another, the mass of the doors was a lot more than the usual lift gates. In the end, it had taken Amos, Sullivan, and Morris on one door and Konecheck with his modifications on the other to pry them open enough to slip through. Twice, the ground had shaken, and the second time harder than the first; the whole damned planetary mantle was ringing like a struck bell. By the end, Amos was starting to get thirsty, but he didn’t see the point in mentioning it. The shaft was in darkness, which Amos had expected. It was also wet, which he hadn’t. Black drops like filthy rain pattered down from above, smearing the walls and making them slick. He couldn’t tell if it was leaking through from one of the floors above them or if the building at the ground level had been sheared off. The guards had flashlights, but all the beams showed were dirty steel walls and a recessed track that the car ran on. A set of repeating steel access panels ran along beside the track looking like cabinets stacked one on top of the other, going up forever into the gloom. “That’s the maintenance ladder,” Rona said, playing a circle of white light over the cabinet doors. “The doors retract, and there’s handholds.” “That’s great,” Amos replied, leaning out into the empty air. The shaft went down another three meters or so. The black soup at the bottom might have gone deeper than that, but he was hoping not to find out. The air smelled like ashes and paint. He didn’t want to think too much about what was leaking into the shaft or where it was coming from. If the whole place was ass-deep in toxic crap, it didn’t change what they had to do. The gap between floors was maybe half a meter. Craning his neck, he could see the lines of the elevator doors set flush into the wall. Not so much as a fingerhold. He thought maybe there was something way at the top of the shaft – a spot of brightness that came and went in an eyeblink. “Can we get to the next doors?” Clarissa asked from behind him. “What’s it look like?” “It looks like we need a plan C,” Amos said, coming back into the prison hallway. Konecheck chuckled, and Sullivan turned on the man, lifting the gun-like thing to the prisoner’s head. “You think that’s funny, asshole? You think it’s all so fucking amusing?” Amos ignored the homicidal tension in the air and looked at the gun. It wasn’t like anything he’d put his hands on before. The grip was hard ceramic with a contact interface running along the seam. The barrel was short and square and as wide across as his thumb. Konecheck loomed up over Sullivan, his swollen face a mask of rage and defiance, which was fine as long as it stopped there. “You going to use that, little man?” “What’s it shoot?” Amos asked. “Tell me it ain’t one of those riot gear things. They give you real bullets down here, don’t they?” Sullivan turned to him, the gun still trained on Konecheck. Amos smiled and very slowly, gently put his hand on the guard’s arm and drew it down. “What the hell are you talking about?” Sullivan asked. “Plan C,” Amos said. “That thing. Shoots real bullets, right? Not gel rounds or some wimpy shit like that?” “They’re live rounds,” Morris said. “Why?” “I was just thinking about how a gun makes a shitty metal punch.” “Where are you going with it?” Clarissa asked. “Thinking we’ve got three shitty metal punches,” Amos said. “Maybe we can punch some metal.” The guns were biometrically linked to the guards in case someone like Peaches or Konecheck got hold of them, so Amos and Rona lowered themselves down into the muck instead of Amos going alone. The black sludge came up to Amos’ ankle, cold and slick. The lowest of the cabinet-like doors had its edge under the dark surface. Amos rapped on the metal with his knuckles, listening to the sound. The beam from the flashlight bounced, filling the shaft with twilight. “Put a round here,” Amos said, putting a daub of muck on the steel. “And here. See if you can get us some fingerholds.” “What if it ricochets?” “That’ll suck.” The first round left a hole in the steel covering maybe a centimeter wide. The second round, a little less. Amos tested the edges with his fingertips. They were sharp, but not knife-sharp. The black rain had soaked the shoulders of his shirt, and the back of it was clinging to his spine. “Hey, Tiny,” he called. “You come down here a minute?” After a short silence, Konecheck’s growl came down. “What’d you call me?” “Tiny. Just come take a look at this. See if we’ve got something.” Konecheck landed with a splash, spattering muck on Amos and Rona. That was fine. The prisoner made a big show of flexing his back muscles and stretching out his hands, then stuffed his first two fingers into the bullet holes, braced his other arm against the wall, and pulled. A normal person, it wouldn’t have done a damned thing, but the Pit wasn’t a place for normal people. The metal flexed, bent, peeled back to show a line of rungs. Curved metal with a little sandpaper texturing for grip. Konecheck grinned, the swelling of his injured face and the jutting beard making him look like something out of a sideshow. His fingertips were red and raw-looking, but as far as Amos could tell, there wasn’t any blood. “All right,” Amos said. “It’s ugly as hell, but we got a plan. Let’s get out of here.” The ladder was narrow and rough, and spending hours hanging off it didn’t make sense if they didn’t have to do it. Sullivan and Konecheck went up ahead, the guard with his gun to make the fingerholds and the monster to pry away the steel. Amos sat on the concrete floor of the hallway, his legs hanging out into the shaft. Morris and Rona stood behind him with Clarissa between them. Amos’ stomach growled. Ten meters up the ladder, the sharp attack of the gun came once, then again. “I’m surprised it wasn’t harder to find a way out,” Clarissa said. “Thing about prison,” Amos said. “It’s not like it’s supposed to keep you in all on its own, y’know? As long as it slows you down long enough for someone to shoot you, it pretty much did its job.” “You’ve spent time inside?” Rona asked. “Nope,” Amos said. “I just know people.” Another two aftershocks came and went without knocking anyone off the ladder or collapsing the shaft. An hour later, the Klaxon stopped, the silence as sudden and unnerving as the sounding of the alarm had been. With it gone, there were noises in the distance. Voices raised in anger. Twice, gunshots that weren’t from the elevator shaft. Amos didn’t know how many people were in the Pit, prisoners and guards and whoever else. Maybe a hundred. Maybe more. The prisoners were in cells, he figured. Locked down. If there were other guards, they were making their own decisions, and no one suggested they go find any of them. Two more gunshots from the shaft, a murmur of voices, and then a scream. Amos was on his feet almost before Sullivan’s body fell past. He landed in the muck at the bottom of the shaft. Rona cried out wordlessly, dropping down to him while Morris turned his flashlight up the ladder. Konecheck’s feet were two pale dots, his face a shadow above them. “He slipped,” Konecheck called. “The hell he did!” Rona shouted. Her gun was in her hand, and she was going for the ladder. Amos jumped down and got in her way, his hands spread wide. “Hey, hey, hey. Don’t get crazy here. We need that guy.” “Coming up on level four,” Konecheck said. “Starting to see light up top. Hear the wind. Almost there.” Sullivan lay in the muck, his leg folded unnaturally under him, and limp as a rag. He still had the gun in his fist. A yellow indicator on the side said he was out of ammunition. Sullivan had lived just long enough to stop being useful, then Konecheck had murdered him. Asshole couldn’t have waited until they were all the way up. “He slipped,” Amos said. “Shit like that happens. Don’t do anything stupid.” Rona’s teeth were chattering with rage and fear. Amos smiled and nodded at her because it seemed like the kind of thing people did to reassure folks. He couldn’t tell if it was doing any good. “Someone going to come help?” Konecheck called. “Or am I doing all this on my own?” “Take Morris,” Clarissa said. “Two guns. One for the metal, one to guard him. It was a mistake. It won’t happen twice.” “And leave you unguarded?” Morris said behind her. “Not a chance. No one goes without a guard.” “I’ll keep her out of trouble,” Amos said, but the guards didn’t seem to hear him. “Everyone up,” Rona said. “Everyone. And if anybody does something even a little bit threatening, I swear to God I’ll kill all of you.” “I’m a civilian,” Amos said. Rona pointed toward the rungs with her chin. “Get climbing.” So they climbed up into the darkness, hand over hand. Ten meters up, maybe twelve. Morris first, then Clarissa, then Amos, with Rona coming up last, her flashlight stuck in her belt and her gun in her hand. Konecheck wrestled the next length of ladder open, clanging and cursing and roaring in the effort. The black muck kept dripping down from above, making everything slick. Amos wondered if maybe Sullivan really had slipped, and chuckled to himself quietly enough that no one heard him. Konecheck, at the upper end of the ladder, swung to one side, letting Morris pass next to him. Then two more shots and the two men switched places again. Amos wondered if the rungs had been designed to carry the weight of two men at once. But they didn’t bend, so that was one good thing. He spent a lot of time looking at Clarissa’s ankles, since that was pretty much what there was to look at. They were thin from atrophy, the skin pale and dusty. He noticed when they started to tremble. If her busted hand bothered her, she didn’t say so. “You all right, Peaches?” “Fine,” she said. “Just getting tired is all.” “Hang on, little tomato,” he said. “We’re almost there.” Above her, the shaft grew shorter. There was no sign of the car or the guards who’d been in it. Just a pale gray square and a growing howl of wind. Once, when they only had four or five meters still to go, Rona below him made a sound like a sob, but only once. He didn’t ask her about it. And then Konecheck was at the edge, hauling himself up with Morris scrambling after. The black rain was still falling, and it had gotten colder. Clarissa was shaking now, her whole body fluttering like she was too light, and the wind might pick her up and carry her away. “You can do it, Peaches.” “I know,” she said. “I know I can.” She boosted herself up, and then it was Amos’ turn. The elevator shaft ended in a clean break, like the hand of God had come and swept everything away. The intake building was gone apart from shattered concrete and splintered wood strewn across the bare field. The fence was gone. The trees on the horizon had been shaved down to stubble. For as far as he could see, there was just earth and scrub. The sky was dark and low, huge clouds scalloped from one side of the world to the other like inverted waves. The wind barreling down out of the east stank of something he couldn’t quite identify. It was what he imagined the aftermath of a battle looked like. Only worse. “Come on,” Rona said, pushing at his leg. Then, without warning, Konecheck roared and Morris shrieked. A gun went off as Amos made it up onto the ledge and got his feet under him. Konecheck was holding Morris up off the ground. The guard’s head hung slack and boneless in a way that clarified the situation. Clarissa had collapsed at the gray-haired prisoner’s feet. For a fraction of a second, Konecheck’s gaze locked with his. Amos saw a base, animal pleasure in the man. The joy of a schoolboy burning ants with his magnifying glass. Faster than anything human, Konecheck dropped the dead guard and surged forward, his feet digging into the slick mud as he ran. Amos stepped into the attack, which wasn’t what the guy had expected, and got a solid punch in under his rib cage. But then Konecheck’s elbow came out of nowhere and hit Amos’ ear hard enough that the world started spinning. Amos stumbled, and the other guy’s grip was on his belt and arm. Amos felt himself lifted up over Konecheck’s head. He looked down the shaft and saw Rona looking up at him wide-eyed and openmouthed. The black was a long way down. Amos wondered if he’d see Lydia again when he got to the bottom. Probably not, but it was pretty as a last thought. The gunshot made Konecheck stumble and Amos twisted into the slackness of his grip, falling backward and landing hard. Clarissa was lying over Morris’ body, her two hands around the dead man’s fist, taking aim again. Blood poured down Konecheck’s chest, but before he could launch himself at the girl, Rona’s hand came up over the edge of the shaft and grabbed his ankle. Konecheck kicked back, his muscles flickering too fast to see, and Rona yelped. But by then Amos was on his feet again, knees bent deep to keep his center of gravity low. The world was still spinning. He couldn’t trust his inner ear to tell him which way was up. But he’d spent a lot of years in free fall. Ignoring vertigo just meant it was a day that ended in y . He landed a straight kick in Konecheck’s crotch that probably castrated him, and the man stepped back, eyes wide. He had maybe a tenth of a second to look surprised as he fell back down into the Pit. Then that part was done. Amos sat down, rubbing his injured ear as Rona crawled up into the bleak half-light. She was crying and turning slowly, taking in the devastation all around them with disbelief and horror. The woman’s hands flapped at her sides like she was pretending to be a penguin. Her distress would have been funny if it hadn’t been so sincere. Losing everything should at least be dignified. “Where’d it go?” she shouted over the rushing of the wind, like anyone could answer. And then, “Oh my God. Esme .” Clarissa had rolled onto her back, her arms spread to the filthy rain, her head resting on the dead man like he was a pillow. Her eyes were closed, but he could see her rib cage moving. Amos squinted up at Rona. “Esme? That one of your people?” She nodded without looking at him. “Yeah,” Amos said. “Look, if you need to go look for her, that’s all right with me.” “The prisoner… I have to…” “It’s all right. I’ll keep Peaches out of trouble. You know. Until you get back.” The absurdity of it seemed lost on the woman. She stumbled forward, heading for a low hill on the horizon. She wasn’t coming back. No one was coming back. There wasn’t anything to come back to. Clarissa’s eyes were open now. As he watched, her mouth widened into a smile and she reached up, running damp hands through her hair. When she laughed, it sounded like pleasure. “Wind,” she said. “Oh my God, I never thought I’d feel wind again. I never thought I’d be outside. It’s so beautiful.” Amos glanced around the ruins and shrugged. “That’s got a lot to do with context, I guess.” He was hungry and thirsty. Wet. They didn’t have shelter or clothes, and the only gun they had, they’d need to haul around a dead man to shoot. Until his body got cold, anyway. “Well, fuck,” he said. “Where do we go from here, right?” Clarissa extended a thin arm, pointing her pale finger to the sky. There, struggling behind the clouds and stratospheric debris, a perfect, pale disk. “Luna,” she said. “Staying on the planet’s going to mean dying when the food runs out. And the water.” “I was thinking that too.” “There are yachts. I know where the family kept them. But it’s a spaceport for rich people. Tons of security. We might need help breaking in.” “I know some people,” Amos said. “I mean, y’know. If they’re still alive.” “That’s a plan, then,” she said, but didn’t move. Her slur was going away, which meant she probably wasn’t bleeding into her brain. So that was one problem he didn’t have. Amos shifted, lying back on the dead man’s rib cage, the crown of his head touching hers. A little rest seemed like a fine thing, but they’d have to get moving soon. It was a long walk back to Baltimore. He wondered if they could find a car. Or, failing that, a couple of bicycles. His ear was starting to lose its angry throb. He’d probably be able to walk soon. In the black sky, the pale circle dimmed behind a thicker roil of cloud and ash, then vanished for a moment before struggling back. “It’s funny,” Clarissa said. “Most of human history, going to the moon was impossible. A dream beyond anyone’s imagination. And then, for a while, it was an adventure. And then it was trivial. Yesterday , it was trivial. And now, it’s almost impossible again.” “Yeah,” Amos said, “well…” He felt her shift, tuning her head as if to see him better. “What?” He gestured up toward the sky. “Pretty sure that’s the sun. I get what you’re saying though.” Chapter Twenty-seven: Alex His head hurt. His back hurt. He couldn’t feel his legs. It was all distressing until his mind came back enough for him to realize it meant he hadn’t died. The medical bay chimed, something cool pumped into his arm, and his consciousness faded away again. When he woke this time, he felt almost human. The medical bay was huge. Easily five times what they had on the Rocinante , but smaller than the full, multiunit hospital of the Behemoth . The anti-spalling coating on the walls was the soft brown of bread crusts. He tried to sit up, then reconsidered. “Ah, Mister Kamal. Are you feeling better?” The doctor was a thin-faced, pale-skinned woman with eyes the color of ice. Her uniform was MCRN. He nodded to her more out of social habit than because he was feeling better. “Am I going to be okay?” Alex said. “Depends,” she said. “Keep eating like you’re twenty, and it’ll haunt you.” Alex laughed and a spike of pain cut through his belly. The doctor grimaced and put a hand on his shoulder. “You did get a little surgery while you were out. That burn you were on made your ulcer way worse.” “I have an ulcer?” “You used to. Now you have a reconstructed stem graft, but it’s still settling into place. Give it a few days, and it’ll be much better.” “Yeah,” Alex said, resting his head back on the pillow. “I’ve been under a little stress lately. Is Bobbie okay?” “She’s fine. They’ve been debriefing her. I imagine they’ll want to chat with you too, now that you’re back around.” “What about my ship?” “We pulled her into the hangar. She’s being refueled. You can get her back when we’re clear.” That brought him back. “Clear?” “Those gentlemen who were taking potshots at you? Our escort’s back making sure they don’t get too happy about following us. Once the relief ships actually get here, I expect you’ll be on your way.” “You got some coming, then?” “Oh my, yes,” the doctor said, with a sigh. “Half a dozen of our finest. Probably more than we need, but we’re not in a place where anyone wants to take risks.” “I’m right there with ’em on that,” Alex said, closing his eyes. The silence felt weird. He opened them again. The doctor stood where she had been before, her smile as it had been, her hands clasped lightly in front of her. There were tears in her eyes. “Some things happened while you were out,” she said. “You should probably know about them.” Bobbie stood up and hugged him hard as soon as he walked into the debriefing room. She wore a flight jumpsuit just like the one they’d provided him. They didn’t say anything at first. It felt strange, being enveloped in her arms. She was much larger than him and stronger besides. He would have imagined that being held like that by an attractive woman would have had some erotic element, but all he felt was a deep sense of their shared vulnerability. He’d never been on Earth. He didn’t know it there. Until now, he wouldn’t have said he had any particular connection to the place. That he was wrong about that was a revelation. A quarter billion dead between the strikes and the tsunamis. And many more soon. Already the newsfeeds were reporting failures of infrastructure, and surface temperatures were dropping toward freezing in the springtime northern hemisphere under the vast clouds of dust and water and debris. The major cities had fusion reactors for power, but everywhere that still relied on distributed solar was running out of battery reserves. Billions more lights going dark. The secretary-general was dead, as were an unknown number of assembly representatives. The military was calling back ships from all parts of the solar system, making a cordon around the planet in fear of further strikes. The failed coup on Tycho and the dark fleet that they’d stumbled into, it all felt like a footnote to what had happened to humanity’s home world. And the worst thing was no one knew who’d done it all. Or why. Bobbie let him go and stepped back. He saw the same hollowness he felt reflected in her eyes. “Holy shit,” he said. “Yeah.” Everything about the debriefing room expressed safety, comfort. The lights were indirect and shadowless. The walls had the same warm brown as the medical bay. Crash couches surrounded a small, built-in table instead of a desk. It was the kind of space Alex associated with psychiatrists’ offices in films. Bobbie looked around too, seeming to see the place anew now that Alex was there. She nodded to a small alcove opposite the door. “You want some tea? They have tea.” “Sure,” Alex said. “Okay. Are you all right?” “I’m fine. I mean, I’m a little shook, but they didn’t put me in the med bay,” she said. “What kind do you want? They’ve got orange pekoe, oolong, chamomile —” “I don’t know what any of those are.” “Me either. So. Okay, you get oolong.” The machine hissed. She handed him a bulb. It felt warm in his hand and had a subtle smell of smoke and water. Alex sat at the table and tried a sip, but it was too hot. Bobbie sat beside him. “That was some pretty amazing flying,” she said. “I’m almost sorry I wasn’t there to see it.” “I would have warned you, but, you know. Heat of the moment.” She shook her head. “No objections. If I’d been tensed up, I’d have probably popped open an old wound or stroked out or something. I watched the flight data. Seriously, I was in this room wearing a fresh suit and looking at recordings, and there were still a few seconds there I didn’t think we were going to make it.” The admiration in her voice felt warmer than the tea. He was pretty sure he was blushing, and hoped it didn’t show. “Yeah, it was a squeaker. Good damned thing you remembered the convoy here too. I wasn’t coming up with anything. Do we know who the hell those ships are?” “No. Most of the escort’s pulled off to cover us, and so far it looks like it’s working. But no transponder signals from the bad guys. No demands or threats or anything.” “Creepy.” The tea had cooled enough now. “Any chance they’ll let me send a message back to the captain?” Bobbie sighed and spread her hands. “Eventually, yeah. They’ve been treating us like friendlies, but it may be a while before they hand us access to the comm arrays. We’re still in a fight, even if we’re not at the middle of it.” “What did you tell them?” Bobbie’s brow furrowed. “The truth, only it doesn’t come out real well.” “Meaning?” “I said we were out there looking for missing ships hiding under new transponder signals because of a tip from James Holden.” “Huh. Yeah, that does sound a little ominous when you say it out loud, doesn’t it?” “They wanted to know how he knew to look there, and what my relationship was to Holden. I mean, they kind of knew about you, so it was more about why I was shipping with you.” “What was the answer for that?” “Old friends, and the fact that you were Navy. You know ships. I’m just a ground-pounder. But that got me into talking about looking at black market issues back at home, and you asking around on Hecate for me and the dead guy and the guys who attacked me.” “So the other dead guys.” “Well, yeah. And after that, it seemed like they were a little suspicious when I said I didn’t know anything.” Alex leaned forward. His body still felt weak and shaky. “At least they don’t think we’re part of… you know. That.” The door opened softly, almost apologetically. The man who came in was older, his hair a well-crafted white. He wore a suit instead of a uniform or jumpsuit. He looked like a particularly avuncular lawyer. Two marines came in behind him in full armor. They didn’t acknowledge Alex or Bobbie, just took positions at either side of the door. The white-haired man beamed at Alex and then Bobbie and then back at Alex again. “Mr. Kamal!” he said. His voice matched his appearance. “I’m so glad to see that you’re up and around. I was hoping to have a word with you about this present unpleasantness, yes?” Alex shot a glance at Bobbie. Her shrug was almost invisible. This wasn’t someone she knew. “Of course,” Alex said. “Anything I can do to help.” “Good, good, good,” the man said, then lifted a finger. “But first.” He sat down at the table, and an oddly mild scowl came over his face. Alex felt like they were about to be gently chided by the head of school. “Sergeant Draper, I was wanting to ask you why the government of Earth is demanding to speak with you. Have you been in contact with them?” Bobbie’s face went gray and pale. Her hand went to her mouth. “Oh, I am so sorry,” she said. “You look so different on video. I didn’t recognize you, sir. Alex, this is Prime Minister Smith.” Alex hopped to his feet. “Oh! I’m sorry, sir. With everything going on out on Ilus and such, I didn’t follow the elections last time.” One of the guards coughed in a way that might have hidden laughter. Prime Minister Smith’s scowl shifted to something slightly more authentic and nonplussed. He motioned Alex to sit back down. “Yes, well. No harm, of course. But, to the question. Have you been working with the government of Earth?” “No,” Bobbie said. “I’ve had some conversations and I have a personal familiarity with one person. Chrisjen Avasarala. But that’s all.” The prime minister nodded, his brows knitting. “Yes, I see. With the passing of the secretary-general and disarray of the assembly, Chrisjen Avasarala is the de facto legitimate government of Earth. And she has offered to… I believe the phrase was massage my balls with a paint scraper if anything happened to you.” “That sounds like her,” Alex said. “Yes, she is quite colorful. And she is also insisting that she be allowed to speak with you. I wonder what exactly it is you would tell her?” “Nothing I wouldn’t say in front of you, sir,” Bobbie said. “I’m not a spy. She brought up some questions and concerns that seemed legitimate and interesting, and I followed up for my own sake. If you’d like, I’d be happy to walk you through everything I did and what I found.” “You are close friends with Chrisjen Avasarala. You are flying with the crew of the Rocinante . You seem to have many contacts with Earth and the Belt, Sergeant.” “Yessir,” Bobbie said, her gaze forward and slightly down. “Good that we’re all on the same side, then.” The silence was longer than Alex liked. The prime minister laced his fingers across his knee. “I suppose it is at that,” he said. “So, why don’t we all go over what exactly you’ve found and how we can productively include our mutual friend Chrisjen in all of this.” The debriefing lasted for hours. They had taken him to a separate room, and he’d told them the story of everything that had happened since the return from Ilus. Then another woman had come, and he’d told her. Then they’d brought him back to where Bobbie was, and asked the two of them questions that, by and large, they couldn’t answer. All in all, it had been gentle as interrogations went, and even so, it left him drained. He had quarters of his own that night. A locker, a crash couch, a screen. Even his hand terminal back. The place was a little larger than his bunk on the Roci , tiny compared to the quarters on Tycho, and a little bit better than what he’d had back before he’d mustered out of the Navy. They’d even let him record messages for Holden and Amos and Naomi, though they were vetted by the ship’s system before being sent out. After that, he promised himself that he’d keep away from the newsfeeds. It had been years since he’d smelled the air of an MCRN ship. The astringent bite of the air recyclers brought back memories. His first tour, his last one. A sense of growing melancholy stole over him that he didn’t recognize at first. Grief. And fear. All his anxieties over the crew of the Roci came back a hundred times over. He imagined being back on the ship without Amos. Or without Naomi. Or never seeing his ship again, never hearing Holden’s voice. An hour after he’d resolved to go to sleep, he gave up, turned the lights back on, and opened a newsfeed. Mars was pledging drops of food and emergency supplies. Ganymede, back in control of her own docks, was diverting crops back to Earth. A group calling itself the Acadian Front had claimed responsibility for the attacks, but were discredited almost as soon as they’d made the claim. And on Earth, the riots had begun. Looting. He turned the feed back off and got dressed. He opened a connection to Bobbie, and she accepted it almost immediately. Wherever she was, it wasn’t her bunk. The walls behind her were too far away, and the sound of her voice echoed a little. Her hair was pulled back from her face, her cheeks were flushed, and she was sweating hard. “Hey,” she said, lifting her chin in a sharp nod. “Hey. Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d see what you were doing.” “Just got done sparring. The lieutenant’s going to let me drill some.” “They know you just got shot a little while ago, right?” “You think a few bullet holes gets you out of training?” she said with a ferocity that left him wondering whether she was joking. “They’re even loaning me a suit.” “You been in powered armor since Io?” “Nope. So that’ll be… I don’t know. Either really cool or nightmare inducing.” Alex chuckled, and she grinned. Her smile was like pouring water on a burn. “You heading straight for your bunk, or are you stopping by the mess first?” “I could stand something to eat probably. Meet you there?” It was an off-time for the mess. The alpha shift’s dinner was done, the beta shift’s lunch still an hour away. Bobbie was sitting alone at a table by the far wall, her hand terminal open before her. A group of three men and a woman sat not far from her, casting glances at her back and talking among themselves. Alex felt an instant protective surge, like he was back in lower university and one of his friends was being laughed at by another clique. He grabbed a cheese sandwich and bulb of water, then came and sat across from her. The remains of meatloaf and gravy she’d wolfed down were on her plate and a familiar voice was coming from her terminal. “— going to be monitoring anything we fucking say. If you wanted to discuss menstruation at great length and detail, this is probably our best chance. He’s always been squeamish about women, and no one likes a Peeping Tom, even if he is prime minister.” “How is she?” Alex asked, nodding toward the hand terminal. Bobbie turned the recording off and frowned at the newly blank screen. “Heartsick, I think. Devastated. But she’ll never let it show. This is what she always feared the most. And now it’s happened, and she can’t even look away, because she’s the one who has to… fix it. Only it can’t be fixed, can it?” “Naw, I guess not.” “They’re taking us to Luna.” “I figured as much,” Alex said. Something in his voice caught Bobbie’s attention. “You don’t want to?” “Honestly? I want to go home. Get back on the Roci with my crew, and after that, I care a whole lot less where we go. Be nice if it was somewhere they weren’t shooting at us.” “That would be a plus,” Bobbie said. “Don’t know where that is.” “Lot of planets out there. My experience with colonies is, ah, a little checkered, but I can see the appeal of a new start.” “There aren’t any new starts,” Bobbie said. “All the new ones pack the old ones along with them. If we ever really started fresh, it’d mean not having a history anymore. I don’t know how to do that.” “Still, I can dream.” “Right there with you.” At the other table, two of the men rose, carrying their trays to the recycler. The man and woman who stayed glanced over at Alex and Bobbie, and then pretended they hadn’t. Alex took a bite of his sandwich. The greasy cheese and fake butter were like being young again. Or else like remembering how long it had been since he was young. “Any word on the assholes who shot at us?” “They’re still fighting with the escort ships. Withdrawing, but not retreating. The escort isn’t looking to engage as long as they can keep the bastards from getting close to us.” “Yeah, all right.” “Seem weird to you too?” “Little bit,” Alex said. “Seems like a pretty piss-poor ambush if you don’t actually ambush anyone.” “It’s because of us,” Bobbie said. “You and me. We were in the right place at the right time. We forced the bad guys to make their play too soon. If we hadn’t, it wouldn’t be just the secretary-general that died. Honestly, I think that’s why we’re getting treated this well. Smith knows it could have gone a lot worse without us.” “You’re probably right. It’s just…” “You’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.” “Yeah.” “Me too. We’re jumpy. Why wouldn’t we be? Someone just broke pretty much all of human civilization overnight.” The words hit Alex like a blow. He put down his sandwich. “They did, didn’t they? I don’t know who we are now. I don’t know what this does.” “Me neither. Or anyone else. But we’ll figure it out. And whoever did this, we’ll find them. We’re not going to let them win.” “No matter what game they’re playing.” “No matter what,” Bobbie agreed. Billions were dying right now, and no way to save them. Earth was broken, and even if it survived, it would never go back to what it had been. Mars was a ghost town, the terraforming project at its heart falling to pieces. The aliens that sent the protomolecule hadn’t needed to destroy humanity. They’d given humans the opportunity to destroy themselves, and as a species, they’d leaped on it. Alex pushed away an angry tear, and Bobbie pretended she hadn’t seen it. “Yeah,” he said. “Still. I’m going to feel a lot better when the relief ships get here.” “Amen,” Bobbie said. “Still, I wish it was more than just six ships coming. Well, seven. Six and a half.” “Six and a half?” “Relief ships picked up a commercial hauler somewhere. Nonmilitary. It’s called the Chetzemoka ?” Chapter Twenty-eight: Holden “Cover for some kind of theft,’ ” Holden said again. “I mean what the hell was that?” Fred Johnson kept walking. The gently curving corridor with its view of the construction sphere was like Tycho Station’s boast that it had not been destroyed. The people they passed nodded to Fred and Holden. Some wore green armbands in solidarity, and more than a few of those had the OPA split circle with an additional split at ninety degrees to the first. Others had a stylized globe and the words ONE PEOPLE OPA