Aggression against the Belt is what Earth and Mars survive on. Our weakness is their strength,” the masked woman said from Miller’s terminal screen. The split circle of the OPA draped behind her, like something painted on a sheet. “Don’t be afraid of them. Their only power is your fear.”
“Well, that and a hundred or so gunships,” Havelock said.
“From what I hear,” Miller said, “if you clap your hands and say you believe, they can’t shoot you.”
“Have to try that sometime.”
“We must rise up!” the woman said, her voice growing shrill. “We have to take our destiny before it is taken from us! Remember the Canterbury!”
Miller shut the viewer down and leaned back in his chair. The station was at its change-of-shift surge, voices raised one over the other as the previous round of cops brought the incoming ones up to speed. The smell of fresh coffee competed with cigarette smoke.
“There’s maybe a dozen like her,” Havelock said, nodding toward the dead terminal screen. “She’s my favorite, though. There’re times I swear she’s actually foaming at the mouth.”
“How many more files?” Miller asked, and his partner shrugged.
“Two, three hundred,” Havelock said, and took a drag on his cigarette. He’d started smoking again. “Every few hours, there’s a new one. They aren’t coming from one place. Sometimes they’re broadcast on the radio. Sometimes the files show up on public partitions. Orlan found some guys at a portside bar passing out those little VR squids like they were pamphlets.”
“She bust them?”
“No,” Havelock said as if it was no big deal.
A week had passed since James Holden, self-appointed martyr, had proudly announced that he and his crew were going to go talk to someone from the Martian navy instead of just slinging shit and implications. The footage of the Canterbury’s death was everywhere, debates raging over every frame. The log files that documented the incident were perfectly legitimate, or they were obviously doctored. The torpedoes that had slaughtered the hauler were nukes or standard pirate fare that breached the drive by mistake, or it was all artifice lifted from old stock footage to cover up what had really killed the Cant.
The riots had lasted for three days on and off, like a fire hot enough to reignite every time the air pumped back in. The administrative offices reopened under heavy security, but they reopened. The ports fell behind, but they were catching up. The shirtless bastard who Miller had ordered shot was in the Star Helix detainment infirmary, getting new knees, filling out protests against Miller, and preparing for his murder trial.
Six hundred cubic meters of nitrogen had gone missing from a warehouse in sector fifteen. An unlicensed whore had been beaten up and locked in a storage unit; as soon as she was done giving evidence about her attackers, she’d be arrested. They’d caught the kids who’d been breaking the surveillance cameras on level sixteen. Superficially, everything was business as usual.
Only superficially.
When Miller had started working homicide, one of the things that had struck him was the surreal calm of the victims’ families. People who had just lost wives, husbands, children, and lovers. People whose lives had just been branded by violence. More often than not, they were calmly offering drinks and answering questions, making the detectives feel welcome. A civilian coming in unaware might have mistaken them for whole. It was only in the careful way they held themselves and the extra quarter second it took their eyes to focus that Miller could see how deep the damage was.
Ceres Station was holding itself carefully. Its eyes were taking a quarter second longer to focus. Middle-class people-storekeepers, maintenance workers, computer techs-were avoiding him on the tube the way petty criminals did. Conversations died when Miller came near. In the station, the sense of being under siege was growing. A month earlier, Miller and Havelock, Cobb and Richter, and the rest had been the steadying hand of the law. Now they were employees of an Earth-based security contractor.
The difference was subtle, but it was deep. It made him want to stand taller, to show with his body that he was a Belter. That he belonged there. It made him want to win people’s good opinion back. Let by a bunch of guys passing out virtual reality propaganda with a warning, maybe.
It wasn’t a smart impulse.
“What’ve we got on the board?” Miller asked.
“Two burglaries that look like that same ring,” Havelock said. “That domestic dispute from last week still needs the report closed up. There was a pretty good assault over by Nakanesh Import Consortium, but Shaddid was talking to Dyson and Patel about that, so it’s probably spoken for already.”
“So you want… ”
Havelock looked up and out to cover the fact that he was looking away. It was something he’d been doing more often since things had gone to shit.
“We’ve really got to get the reports done,” Havelock said. “Not just the domestic. There’re four or five folders that are only still open because they need to be crossed and dotted.”
“Yeah,” Miller said.
Since the riots, he’d watched everyone in a bar get served before Havelock. He’d seen how the other cops from Shaddid down went out of their way to reassure Miller that he was one of the good guys, a tacit apology for saddling him with an Earther. And he’d seen Havelock see it too.
It made Miller want to protect the man, to let Havelock spend his days in the safety of paperwork and station house coffee. Help the man pretend that he wasn’t hated for the gravity he’d grown up in.
That wasn’t a smart impulse either.
“What about your bullshit case?” Havelock asked.
“What?”
Havelock held up a folder. The Julie Mao case. The kidnap job. The sideshow. Miller nodded and rubbed his eyes. Someone at the front of the station house yelped. Someone else laughed.
“Yeah, no,” Miller said. “Haven’t touched it.”
Havelock grinned and held it out to him. Miller accepted the file, flipped it open. The eighteen-year-old grinned out at him with perfect teeth.
“I don’t want to saddle you with all the desk driving,” Miller said.
“Hey, you’re not the one that kept me off that one. That was Shaddid’s call. And anyway… it’s just paperwork. Never killed anyone. You feel guilty about it, you can buy me a beer after work.”
Miller tapped the case against the corner of his desk, the small impacts settling the contents against the folder’s spine.
“Right,” he said. “I’ll go do some follow-up on the bullshit. I’ll be back by lunch, write something up to keep the boss happy.”
“I’ll be here,” Havelock said. Then, as Miller rose: “Hey. Look. I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure, but I also don’t want you to hear it someplace else… ”
“Put in for a transfer?” Miller said.
“Yeah. Talked to some of those Protogen contractors that passed through. They say their Ganymede office is looking for a new lead investigator. And I thought… ” Havelock shrugged.
“It’s a good move,” Miller said.
“Just want to go someplace with a sky, even if you look at it through domes,” Havelock said, and all the bluff masculinity of police work couldn’t keep the wistfulness out of his voice.
“It’s a good move,” Miller said again.
Juliette Andromeda Mao’s hole was in the ninth level of a fourteen-tiered tunnel near the port. The great inverted V was almost half a kilometer wide at the top, and no more than a standard tube width at the bottom, the retrofit of one of a dozen reaction mass chambers from the years before the asteroid had been given its false gravity. Now thousands of cheap holes burrowed into the walls, hundreds on each level, heading straight back like shotgun shacks. Kids played on the terraced streets, shrieking and laughing at nothing. Someone at the bottom was flying a kite in the constant gentle spin breeze, the bright Mylar diamond swerving and bucking in the microturbulence. Miller checked his terminal against the numbers painted on the wall. 5151-I. Home sweet home to the poor little rich girl.
He keyed his override, and the dirty green door popped its seals and let him pass.
The hole canted up into the body of the station. Three small rooms: general living space at the front, then a bedroom hardly larger than the cot it contained, then a stall with shower, toilet, and half sink all within elbow distance. It was a standard design. He’d seen it a thousand times.
Miller stood for a minute, not looking at anything in particular, listening to the reassuring hiss of air cycling through ductwork. He reserved judgment, waiting as the back of his head built an impression of the place and, through it, of the girl who’d lived there.
Spartan was the wrong word. The place was simple, yes. The only decorations were a small framed watercolor of a slightly abstracted woman’s face over the table in the front room and a cluster of playing-card-sized plaques over the cot in the bedroom. He leaned close to read the small script. A formal award granting Julie Mao-not Juliette-purple belt status by the Ceres Center for Jiu Jitsu. Another stepping her up to brown belt. They were two years apart. Tough school, then. He put his fingers on the empty space on the wall where one for black could go. There was none of the affectation-no stylized throwing stars or imitation swords. Just a small acknowledgment that Julie Mao had done what she had done. He gave her points for that.
The drawers had two changes of clothes, one of heavy canvas and denim and one of blue linen with a silk scarf. One for work, one for play. It was less than Miller owned, and he was hardly a clotheshorse.
With her socks and underwear was a wide armband with the split circle of the OPA. Not a surprise, for a girl who’d turned her back on wealth and privilege to live in a dump like this. The refrigerator had two takeaway boxes filled with spoiled food and a bottle of local beer.
Miller hesitated, then took the beer. He sat at the table and pulled up the hole’s built-in terminal. True to Shaddid’s word, Julie’s partition opened to Miller’s password.
The custom background was a racing pinnace. The interface was customized in small, legible iconography. Communication, entertainment, work, personal. Elegant. That was the word. Not Spartan, but elegant.
He paged quickly through her professional files, letting his mind take in an overview, just as he had with the whole living space. There would be time for rigor, and a first impression was usually more useful than an encyclopedia. She had training videos on several different light transport craft. Some political archives, but nothing that raised a flag. A scanned volume of poetry by some of the first settlers in the Belt.
He shifted to her personal correspondence. It was all kept as neat and controlled as a Belter’s. All incoming messages were filtered to subfolders. Work, Personal, Broadcast, Shopping. He popped open Broadcast. Two or three hundred political newsfeeds, discussion group digests, bulletins and announcements. A few had been viewed here and there, but nothing with any sort of religious observation. Julie was the kind of woman who would sacrifice for a cause, but not the kind who’d take joy in reading the propaganda. Miller filed that away.
Shopping was a long tracking of simple merchant messages. Some receipts, some announcements, some requests for goods and services. A cancellation for a Belt-based singles circle caught his eye. Miller re-sorted for related correspondence. Julie had signed up for the “low g, low pressure” dating service in February of the previous year and canceled in June without having used it.
The Personal folder was more diverse. At a rough guess there were sixty or seventy subfolders broken down by name. Some were people-Sascha Lloyd-Navarro, Ehren Michaels. Others were private notations-Sparring Circle, OPA.
Bullshit Guilt Trips.
“Well, this could be interesting,” he said to the empty hole.
Fifty messages dating back five years, all marked as originating at the Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile stations in the Belt and on Luna. Unlike the political tracts, all but one had been opened.
Miller took a pull from the beer and considered the most recent two messages. The most recent, still unread, was from JPM. Jules-Pierre Mao, at a guess. The one immediately before it showed three drafted replies, none of them sent. It was from Ariadne. The mother.
There was always an element of voyeurism in being a detective. It was legal for him to be here, poking through the private life of a woman he’d never met. It was part of his legitimate investigation to know that she was lonely, that the only toiletries in her bathroom were her own. That she was proud. No one would have any complaints to make, or at least any that carried repercussions for his job, if he read every private message on her partition. Drinking her beer was the most ethically suspect thing he’d done since he’d come in.
And still he hesitated for a few seconds before opening the second-to-last message.
The screen shifted. On better equipment, it would have been indistinguishable from ink on paper, but Julie’s cheap system shuddered at the thinnest lines and leaked a soft glow at the left edge. The handwriting was delicate and legible, either done with a calligraphic software good enough to vary letter shape and line width, or else handwritten.
Sweetheart:
I hope everything’s going well for you. I wish you would write to me on your own sometimes. I feel like I have to put in a request in triplicate just to hear how my own daughter is doing. I know this adventure of yours is all about freedom and self-reliance, but surely there’s still room in there to be considerate.
I wanted to get in touch with you especially because your father is going through one of his consolidation phases again, and we’re thinking of selling the Razorback. I know it was important to you once, but I suppose we’ve all given up on your racing again. It’s just racking up storage fees now, and there’s no call to be sentimental.
It was signed with the flowing initials AM.
Miller considered the words. Somehow he’d expected the parental extortions of the very rich to be more subtle. If you don’t do as we say, we’ll get rid of your toys. If you don’t write. If you don’t come home. If you don’t love us.
Miller opened the first incomplete draft.
Mother, if that’s what you call yourself:
Thank you so much for dropping yet another turd onto my day. I can’t believe how selfish and petty and crude you are. I can’t believe you sleep at night or that you ever thought I could
Miller skimmed the rest. The tone seemed consistent. The second draft reply was dated two days later. He skipped to it.
Mom:
I’m sorry we’ve been so estranged these last few years. I know it’s been hard for you and for Daddy. I hope you can see that the decisions I’ve made were never meant to hurt either of you.
About the Razorback, I wish you’d reconsider. She’s my first boat, and I
It stopped there. Miller leaned back.
“Steady on, kid,” he said to the imaginary Julie, then opened the last draft.
Ariadne:
Do what you have to.
Julie
Miller laughed and raised his bottle to the screen in toast. They’d known how to hit her where it hurt, and Julie had taken the blow. If he ever caught her and shipped her back, it was going to be a bad day for both of them. All of them.
He finished the beer, dropped the bottle into the recycling chute, and opened the last message. He more than half dreaded learning the final fate of the Razorback, but it was his job to know as much as he could.
Julie:
This is not a joke. This is not one of your mother’s drama fits. I have solid information that the Belt is about to be a very unsafe place. Whatever differences we have we can work out later.
FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY COME HOME NOW.
Miller frowned. The air recycler hummed. Outside, the local kids whistled high and loud. He tapped the screen, closing the last Bullshit Guilt Trip message, then opened it again.
It had been sent from Luna, two weeks before James Holden and the Canterbury raised the specter of war between Mars and the Belt.
This sideshow was getting interesting.
The ships are still not responding,” Naomi said, punching a key sequence on the comm panel.
“I didn’t think they would. But I want to show the Donnager that we’re worried about being followed. It’s all covering our asses at this point,” Holden said.
Naomi’s spine popped as she stretched. Holden pulled a protein bar out of the box in his lap and threw it at her.
“Eat.”
She peeled the wrapping off while Amos clambered up the ladder and threw himself into the couch next to her. His coverall was so filthy it shined. Just as with the others, three days on the cramped shuttle hadn’t helped his personal hygiene. Holden reached up and scratched his own greasy hair with distaste. The Knight was too small for showers, and the zero-g sinks were too small to stick your head in. Amos had solved the hair-washing problem by shaving all of his off. Now he just had a ring of stubble around his bald spot. Somehow, Naomi’s hair stayed shiny and mostly oil free. Holden wondered how she did that.
“Toss me some chow, XO,” Amos said.
“Captain,” Naomi corrected.
Holden threw a protein bar at him too. Amos snatched it from the air, then considered the long, thin package with distaste.
“Goddamn, Boss, I’d give my left nut for food that didn’t look like a dildo,” Amos said, then tapped his food against Naomi’s in mock toast.
“Tell me about our water,” Holden said.
“Well, I’ve been crawling around between hulls all day. I’ve tightened everything that can be tightened, and slapped epoxy on anything that can’t, so we aren’t dripping anywhere.”
“It’ll still be right down to the wire, Jim,” Naomi said. “The Knight’s recycling systems are crap. She was never intended to process five people’s worth of waste back into potables for two weeks.”
“Down to the wire, I can handle. We’ll just learn to live with each other’s stink. I was worried about ‘nowhere near enough.’ ”
“Speaking of which, I’m gonna head to my rack and spray on some more deodorant,” Amos said. “After all day crawling in the ship’s guts, my stink’s even keeping me awake tonight.”
Amos swallowed the last of his food and smacked his lips with mock relish, then climbed out of his couch and headed down the crew ladder. Holden took a bite of his own bar. It tasted like greased cardboard.
“What’s Shed up to?” he asked. “He’s been pretty quiet.”
Naomi, frowning, put her half-eaten bar down on the comm panel.
“I wanted to talk to you about that. He’s not doing well, Jim. Out of all of us, he’s having the hardest time with… what’s happened. You and Alex were both navy men. They train you to deal with losing shipmates. Amos has been flying so long this is actually the third ship that’s gone down under him, if you can believe that.”
“And you are made entirely of cast iron and titanium,” Holden said, only pretending to joke.
“Not entirely. Eighty, ninety percent. Tops,” Naomi said with a half smile. “Seriously, though. I think you should talk to him.”
“And say what? I’m no psychiatrist. The navy version of this speech involves duty and honorable sacrifice and avenging fallen comrades. Doesn’t work as well when your friends have been murdered for no apparent reason and there’s essentially no chance you can do anything about it.”
“I didn’t say you had to fix him. I said you needed to talk to him.”
Holden got up from his couch with a salute.
“Yes, sir,” he said. At the ladder he paused. “Again, thank you, Naomi. I’d really-”
“I know. Go be the captain,” she said, turning back to her panel and calling up the ship ops screen. “I’ll keep waving at the neighbors.”
Holden found Shed in the Knight’s tiny sick bay. Really more a sick closet. Other than a reinforced cot, the cabinets of supplies, and a half dozen pieces of wall-mounted equipment, there was just enough room for one stool stuck to the floor on magnetic feet. Shed was sitting on it.
“Hey, buddy, mind if I come in?” Holden asked. Did I actually say ‘Hey, buddy’?
Shed shrugged and pulled up an inventory screen on the wall panel, opening various drawers and staring at the contents. Pretending he’d been in the middle of something.
“Look, Shed. This thing with the Canterbury has really hit everyone hard, and you’ve-” Holden said. Shed turned, holding up a white squeeze tube.
“Three percent acetic acid solution. Didn’t realize we had this out here. The Cant’s run out, and I’ve got three people with GW who could really use it. Why’d they put it on the Knight, I wonder,” Shed said.
“GW?” was all Holden could think to reply.
“Genital warts. Acetic acid solution is the treatment for any visible warts. Burns ’em off. Hurts like hell, but it does the job. No reason to keep it on the shuttle. Medical inventory is always so messed up.”
Holden opened his mouth to speak, found nothing to say, and closed it again.
“We’ve got acetic acid cream,” Shed said, his voice increasingly shrill, “but no elemcet for pain. Which do you think you’d need more on a rescue shuttle? If we’d found anyone on that wreck with a bad case of GW, we’d have been set. A broken bone? You’re out of luck. Just suck it up.”
“Look, Shed,” Holden said, trying to break in.
“Oh, and look at this. No coagulant booster. What the hell? Hey, no chance anyone on a rescue mission could, you know, start bleeding. Catch a case of red bumps on your crank, sure, but bleeding? No way! I mean, we’ve got four cases of syphilis on the Cant right now. One of the oldest diseases in the book, and we still can’t get rid of it. I tell those guys, ‘The hookers on Saturn Station are banging every ice bucker on the circuit, so put the glove on,’ but do they listen? No. So here we are with syphilis and not enough ciprofloxacin.”
Holden felt his jaw slide forward. He gripped the side of the hatch and leaned into the room.
“Everyone on the Cant is dead,” Holden said, making each word clear and strong and brutal. “Everyone is dead. No one needs the antibiotics. No one needs wart cream.”
Shed stopped talking, and all the air went out of him like he’d been gut punched. He closed the drawers in the supply cabinet and turned off the inventory screen with small precise movements.
“I know,” he said in a quiet voice. “I’m not stupid. I just need some time.”
“We all do. But we’re stuck in this tiny can together. I’ll be honest, I came down here because Naomi is worried about you, but now that I’m here, you’re freaking me the hell out. That’s okay, because I’m the captain now and it’s my job. But I can’t have you freaking Alex or Amos out. We’re ten days from being grabbed by a Martian battleship, and that’s scary enough without the doctor falling apart.”
“I’m not a doctor, I’m just a tech,” Shed said, his voice very small.
“You’re our doctor, okay? To the four of us here with you on this ship, you’re our doctor. If Alex starts having post-traumatic stress episodes and needs meds to keep it together, he’ll come to you. If you’re down here jabbering about warts, he’ll turn around and go back up to the cockpit and just do a really bad job of flying. You want to cry? Do it with all of us. We’ll sit together in the galley and get drunk and cry like babies, but we’ll do it together where it’s safe. No more hiding down here.”
Shed nodded.
“Can we do that?” he said.
“Do what?” Holden asked.
“Get drunk and cry like babies?”
“Hell yes. That is officially on the schedule for tonight. Report to the galley at twenty hundred hours, Mr. Garvey. Bring a cup.”
Shed started to reply when the general comm clicked on and Naomi said, “Jim, come back up to ops.”
Holden gripped Shed’s shoulder for a moment, then left.
In ops, Naomi had the comm screen up again and was speaking to Alex in low tones. The pilot was shaking his head and frowning. A map glowed on her screen.
“What’s up?” Holden asked.
“We’re getting a tightbeam, Jim. It locked on and started transmitting just a couple minutes ago,” Naomi replied.
“From the Donnager?” The Martian battleship was the only thing he could think of that might be inside laser communications range.
“No. From the Belt,” Naomi said. “And not from Ceres, or Eros, or Pallas either. None of the big stations.”
She pointed at a small dot on her display.
“It’s coming from here.”
“That’s empty space,” Holden said.
“Nope. Alex checked. It’s the site of a big construction project Tycho is working on. Not a lot of detail on it, but radar returns are pretty strong.”
“Something out there has a comm array that’ll put a dot the size of your anus on us from over three AU away,” Alex said.
“Okay, wow, that’s impressive. What is our anus-sized dot saying?” Holden asked.
“You’ll never believe this,” Naomi said, and turned on the playback.
A dark-skinned man with the heavy facial bones of an Earther appeared on the screen. His hair was graying, and his neck was ropy with old muscle. He smiled and said, “Hello, James Holden. My name is Fred Johnson.”
Holden hit the pause button.
“This guy looks familiar. Search the ship’s database for that name,” he said.
Naomi didn’t move; she just stared at him with a puzzled look on her face.
“What?” he said.
“That’s Frederick Johnson,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Colonel Frederick Lucius Johnson.”
The pause might have been a second; it might have been an hour.
“Jesus,” was all Holden could think to say.
The man on the screen had once been among the most decorated officers in the UN military, and ended up one of its most embarrassing failures. To Belters, he was the Earther Sheriff of Nottingham who’d turned into Robin Hood. To Earth, he was the hero who’d fallen from grace.
Fred Johnson started his rise to fame with a series of high-profile captures of Belt pirates during one of the periods of tension between Earth and Mars that seemed to ramp up every few decades and then fade away again. Whenever the system’s two superpowers rattled their sabers at each other, crime in the Belt rose. Colonel Johnson-Captain Johnson at the time-and his small wing of three missile frigates destroyed a dozen pirate ships and two major bases in a two-year span. By the time the Coalition had stopped bickering, piracy was actually down in the Belt, and Fred Johnson was the name on everyone’s lips. He was promoted and given command over the Coalition marine division tasked with policing the Belt, where he continued to serve with distinction.
Until Anderson Station.
A tiny shipping depot almost on the opposite side of the Belt from the major port Ceres, most people, including most Belters, would not have been able to find Anderson Station on a map. Its only importance was as a minor distribution station for water and air in one of the sparsest stretches of the Belt. Fewer than a million Belters got their air from Anderson.
Gustav Marconi, a career Coalition bureaucrat on the station, decided to implement a 3-percent handling surcharge on shipments passing through the station in hopes of raising the bottom line. Less than 5 percent of the Belters buying their air from Anderson were living bottle to mouth, so just under fifty thousand Belters might have to spend one day of each month not breathing. Only a small percentage of those fifty thousand lacked the leeway in their recycling systems to cover this minor shortfall. Of those, only a small portion felt that armed revolt was the correct course.
Which was why of the million affected, only 170 armed Belters came to the station, took over, and threw Marconi out an airlock. They demanded a government guarantee that no further handling surcharges would be added to the price of air and water coming through the station.
The Coalition sent Colonel Johnson.
During the Massacre of Anderson Station, the Belters kept the station cameras rolling, broadcasting to the solar system the entire time. Everyone watched as Coalition marines fought a long, gruesome corridor-to-corridor battle against men with nothing to lose and no reason to surrender. The Coalition won-it was a foregone conclusion-but it took three days of broadcast slaughter. The iconic image of the video was not one of the fighting, but the last image the station cameras caught before they were cut off: Colonel Johnson in station ops, surrounded by the corpses of the Belters who’d made their last stand there, surveying the carnage with a flat stare and hands limp at his sides.
The UN tried to keep Colonel Johnson’s resignation quiet, but he was too much a public figure. The video of the battle dominated the nets for weeks, only displaced when the former Colonel Johnson made a public statement apologizing for the massacre and announcing that the relationship between the Belt and the inner planets was untenable and heading toward ever greater tragedy.
Then he vanished. He was almost forgotten, a footnote in the history of human carnage, until the Pallas colony revolt four years later. This time refinery metalworkers kicked the Coalition governor off station. Instead of a tiny way station with 170 rebels, it was a major Belt rock with more than 150,000 people on it. When the Coalition ordered in the marines, everyone expected a bloodbath.
Colonel Johnson came out of nowhere and talked the metalworkers down; he talked the Coalition commanders into holding back the marines until the station could be handed over peacefully. He spent more than a year negotiating with the Coalition governor to improve working conditions in the refineries. And suddenly, the Butcher of Anderson Station was a Belt hero and an icon.
An icon who was beaming private messages to the Knight.
Holden hit the play button, and that Fred Johnson said, “Mr. Holden, I think you’re being played. Let me say straight out that I am speaking to you as an official representative of the Outer Planets Alliance. I don’t know what you’ve heard, but we aren’t all a bunch of cowboys itching for a chance to shoot our way to freedom. I’ve spent the last ten years working to make life for the Belters better without anyone getting shot. I believe in this idea so deeply that I gave up my Earth citizenship when I came out here.
“I tell you that so you’ll know how invested I am. I may be the one person in the solar system who wants war the least, and my voice is loud in OPA councils.
“You may have heard some of the broadcasts beating on the war drums and calling for revenge against Mars for what happened to your ship. I’ve talked to every OPA cell leader I know, and no one’s claiming responsibility.
“Someone is working very hard to start a war. If it’s Mars, then when you get on that ship, you’ll never say another word in public that isn’t fed to you by Martian handlers. I don’t want to think it is Mars. I can’t see how they would get anything out of a war. So my hope is that even after the Donnager picks you up, you can still be a player in what follows.
“I am sending you a keyword. Next time you broadcast publicly, use the word ubiquitous within the first sentence of the broadcast to signal that you’re not being coerced. Don’t use it, and I’ll assume you are. Either way, I want you to know you have allies in the Belt.
“I don’t know who or what you were before, but your voice matters now. If you want to use that voice to make things better, I will do anything I can to help you do it. If you get free, contact me at the address that follows. I think maybe you and I have a lot to talk about.
“Johnson out.”
The crew sat in the galley drinking a bottle of ersatz tequila Amos had scrounged from somewhere. Shed was politely sipping from a small cup of it and trying to hide his grimace each time. Alex and Amos drank like sailors: a finger full in the bottom of the cup, tossed back all at once. Alex had a habit of saying “Hooboy!” after each shot. Amos just used a different profanity each time. He was up to his eleventh shot and so far had not repeated himself.
Holden stared at Naomi. She swirled the tequila in her cup and stared back. He found himself wondering what sort of genetic mashup had produced her features. Definitely some African and South American in there. Her last name hinted at Japanese ancestry, which was only barely visible, as a slight epicanthic fold. She’d never be conventionally pretty, but from the right angle she was actually fairly striking.
Shit, I’m drunker than I thought.
To cover, he said, “So… ”
“So Colonel Johnson is calling you now. Quite the important man you’ve become, sir,” Naomi replied.
Amos put down his cup with exaggerated care.
“Been meaning to ask about that, sir. Any chance we might take up his offer of help and just head back to the Belt?” he said. “Don’t know about you, but with the Martian battleship in front, and the half dozen mystery ships behind, it’s starting to feel pretty fuckin’ crowded out here.”
Alex snorted. “Are you kidding? If we flipped now, we’d be just about stopped by the time the Donnager caught up to us. She’s burnin’ the furniture to catch us before the Belter ships do. If we start headin’ their direction, the Donnie might take that as a sign we’ve switched teams, frag the whole lot of us.”
“I agree with Mr. Kamal,” Holden said. “We’ve picked our course and we’re going to see it through. I won’t be losing Fred’s contact information anytime soon. Speaking of which, have you deleted his message yet, Naomi?”
“Yes, sir. Scrubbed it from the ship’s memory with steel wool. The Martians will never know he talked to us.”
Holden nodded and unzipped his jumpsuit a little further. The galley was starting to feel very hot with five drunk people in it. Naomi raised an eyebrow at his days-old T-shirt. Embarrassed, he zipped back up.
“Those ships don’t make any sense to me, Boss,” Alex said. “A half dozen ships flyin’ kamikaze missions with nukes strapped to their hulls might make a dent in a battlewagon like the Donnie, but not much else would. She opens up with her point defense network and rail guns, she can create a no-fly zone a thousand klicks across. They could be killin’ those six ships with torpedoes already, ’cept I think they’re as confused about who they are as we are.”
“They’ll know they can’t catch us before the Donnager picks us up,” Holden said. “And they can’t take her in a fight. So I don’t know what they’re up to.”
Amos poured the last of the tequila into everyone’s cups and held his up in a toast.
“I guess we’ll fucking find out.”