Sam, on the other hand, he liked.
“Hey, Bull,” she said as he dropped onto the foam-core couch. “Did you get a chance to talk to the XO?”
“We talked,” Bull said.
“What’s the plan?” Sam said, folding her arms in a way that meant she already knew.
Bull ran a hand through his hair. When he’d been younger, his hair had been soft. Now it was like he could feel each strand individually against his fingertips. He pulled out his hand terminal and scrolled through. There were five reports waiting, three routine security reports and two occasionals—an injury report and a larceny complaint. Nothing that couldn’t wait.
“Hey, Serge,” Bull said. “You hold the fort here for an hour?”
“Anything you want, chief,” Serge said with a grin. It was probably just paranoia that left Bull hearing contempt in the words.
“All right, then. Come on, Sam. I’ll buy you a drink.”
In a Coalition ship, back when there’d been an Earth-Mars Coalition, there would have been a commissary. In the OPA, there was a bar and a couple mom-and-pop restaurants along with a bare-bones keep-you-alive supply of prepack meals that anyone could get for the asking. The bar was in a wide space that might have been meant for a gymnasium or a ball court, big enough for a hundred people but Bull hadn’t seen it with more than a couple dozen. The lighting had been swapped out for blue-and-white LEDs set behind sand-textured plastic. The tables were flat black and magnetized to hold the bulbs of beer and liquor to them. Nothing was served in glasses.
“Che-che!” the bartender called as Bull and Sam stepped through the door. “Moergen! Alles-mesa, you.”
“Meh-ya,” Sam replied, as comfortable with the mishmash Belter patois as Bull was with Spanish or English. It was her native tongue.
“What’re you having?” Bull asked as he slid into one of the booths. He liked the ones where he could see the door. It was an old habit.
“I’m on duty,” she said, sitting across from him.
Bull leaned forward, catching the barkeep’s eye, and held up two fingers.
“Lemonades,” he said.
“Sa sa!” the barkeep replied, lifting a fist in the equivalent of a nod. Bull sat back and looked at Sam. She was a pretty enough woman. Cute, with pixie-cut hair and a quick smile. There had been about a minute when they’d first met that Bull had seriously considered whether he found her attractive. But if he’d seen the same calculus in her, they’d gotten past it.
“Didn’t go so good?” Sam asked.
“No.”
Sam lifted her eyebrows and leaned her elbows against the tabletop. He sketched out Pa’s objections and rationale, and Sam’s expression shifted slowly into a fatalistic amusement.
“Waiting for the refit’s all well and good,” she said when he was done, “but if we try and test-fire that bad boy, it’s going to make an awfully big owie.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Not a hundred percent,” she said. “High eighties, though.”
Bull sighed out a tired obscenity as the barkeep brought the bulbs of lemonade. They were about the size of Bull’s balled fists, citrus yellow with ∏ποдоовощ малыша потехи printed on the side in bright red script.
“Maybe I should talk to her,” Sam said. “If it came straight from me…”
“It came straight from you, probably it would work,” he said, “and they get to tell me no on everything from now on. ‘Bull asked for it? Well, if it was important, he’d have sent the Belter.’ Right?”
“You really think it’s about you not getting born up here?”
“Yeah.”
“Well… you’re probably right,” Sam said. “Sorry about that.”
“Comes with the territory,” Bull said, pretending that it didn’t bother him.
Sam plucked her lemonade off the table and took a long, thoughtful drink. The bulb clicked when the magnet readhered to the tabletop. “I’ve got nothing against inners. Worked with a lot of you guys, and didn’t run into a higher percentage of assholes than when I’m dealing with Belters. But I have to get that rail gun’s mounts reinforced. If there’s a way to do that without undercutting you, I’m all for it.”
“But if it’s that or mess up the ship,” Bull said, nodding. “Gimme a little time. I’ll think of something.”
“Start when you want to shoot someone and count back eighteen days,” Sam said. “That’s my deadline. Even if everyone’s sober and working balls-out, my crew can’t get it done faster than that.”
“I’ll think of something,” Bull said.
The larceny complaint turned out to be from a repair and maintenance crew who couldn’t agree how to store their tools. The injury report was a kid who got caught between a stretch of deck plating and someone driving a salvage mech. The cartilage in the kid’s knee had gotten ground into about a dozen different bits of custard; the medic said a good clean bone break would have been better. The injured man would be fine, but he was off active duty for at least a month while all his pieces got glued back together.
The security reports were boilerplate, which either meant that things were going well or that the problems were getting glossed over, but probably they were going well. The trip out to the Ring was a shakedown cruise, and that always meant there’d be a little honeymoon period when the crew were all figuratively standing shoulder to shoulder and taking on the work. Everyone expected there’d be problems, so there was a grace period when morale didn’t start heading down.
Chief security officer on an OPA ship was a half-assed kind of position, one part cop, one part efficiency expert, and pretty much all den mother to a crew of a thousand people with their own agendas and petty power struggles and opinions on how he should be doing his job better. A good security chief kept bullshit off the captain’s plate as a full-time job.
The worst part, though, was that all Bull’s formal duties were focused inward, on the ship. Right now, a flotilla of Earth ships was burning out into the deep night. A matching force of Martian war vessels—the remnants of the navy that had survived two let’s-not-call-them-wars—was burning out on a converging path. The Behemoth was lumbering along too with a head start that came from being farther from the sun and the hobble of low-g acceleration to keep her slow. And all of it was focused on the Ring.
Reports would be filling Captain Ashford’s queue, and as his XO, Pa would be reading them too. Bull had whatever scraps they let him have or else the same mix of pabulum and panic that filled the newsfeeds. Ashford and Pa would be in conference for most of their shifts, working over strategies and options and playing through scenarios for how things might go down when they reached the Ring. Bull was going to worry about all the trivial stuff so that they didn’t have to.
And somehow, he was going to make the mission work. Because Fred had asked him to.
“Hey, chief,” Serge said. Bull looked up from the terminal feed in his desk. Serge stood in the office doorway. “Shift’s up, and I’m out.”
“All right,” Bull said. “I still got some stuff. I can lock up when I’m done.”
“Bien alles,” Serge said with a nod. His light, shuffling footsteps hissed through the front room. In the corridor, Gutmansdottir stroked his white beard and Casimir said something that made them both chuckle. Corin lifted her chin to Serge as he stepped out. The door closed behind him. When he was sure he was alone, Bull pulled up the operational plan and started hunting. He didn’t have authority to change it, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t change anything.
Two hours later, when he was done, he turned off the screen and stood. The office was dark and colder than he liked it. The hum of the ventilation system comforted him. If it were ever completely silent, that would be the time to worry. He stretched, the vertebrae between his shoulder blades crunching like gravel.
They would still be in the bar, most likely. Serge and Corin and Casimir. Macondo and Garza, so similar they could have been brothers. Jojo
. His people, to the degree that they were his. He should go. Be with them. Make friends.
He should go to his bunk.
“Come on, old man,” he said. “Time to get some rest.”
He had closed and locked the office door before Sam’s voice came to him in his memory. Even if everyone’s sober and working balls-out, my crew can’t get it done faster than that. He hesitated, his wide fingers over the keypad. It was late. He needed food and sleep and an hour or so checking in with the family aggregator his cousin had set up three years before to help everyone keep track of who was living where. He had a container of flash-frozen green chile from Hatch, back on Earth, waiting for him. It was all going to be there in the morning, and more besides. He didn’t need to make more work for himself. No one was going to thank him for it.
He went back in, turned his desk back on, and reread the injury report.
Sam had a good laugh. One that came from the gut. It filled the machining bay, echoing off ceiling and walls until it sounded like there was a crowd of her. Two of the techs on the far side turned to look toward her, smiling without knowing what they were smiling about.
“Technical support?” she said. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Rail gun’s a pretty technical piece of equipment,” Bull said. “It needs support.”
“So you redefined what I do as technical support.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s never going to fly,” she said.
“Then get the job done quick,” Bull said.
“Ashford will pull you up for disciplinary action,” she said, the amusement fading but not quite gone yet.
“He has that right. But there’s this other thing I wanted to talk about. You said something yesterday about how long it would take to do the job if everyone on your crew was sober?”
It was like turning off a light. The smile left Sam’s face as if it had never been there. She crossed her arms. Tiny half-moon shapes dented in at the corners of her mouth, making her look older than she was. Bull nodded to her like she’d said something.
“You’ve got techs coming to work high,” he said.
“Sometimes,” she said. And then, reluctantly, “Some of it’s alcohol, but mostly it’s pixie dust to make up for lack of sleep.”
“I got a report about a kid got his knee blown out. His blood was clean, but it doesn’t look like anyone tested the guy who was driving the mech. Driver isn’t even named in the report. Weird, eh?”
“If you say so,” she said.
Bull looked down at his feet. The gray-and-black service utility boots. The spotless floor.
“I need a name, Sam.”
“You know I can’t do that,” she said. “These assholes are my crew. If I lose their respect, we’re done here.”
“I won’t bust your guys unless they’re dealing.”
“You can’t ask me to pick sides. And sorry for saying this, but you already don’t have a lot of friends around here. You should be careful how you alienate people.”
Across the bay, the two technicians lifted a broken mech onto a steel repair hoist. The murmur of their conversation was just the sound of words without the words themselves. If he couldn’t hear them, Bull figured they couldn’t hear him.
“Yeah. So Sam?”
“Bull.”
“I’m gonna need you to pick sides.”
He watched her vacillate. It only took a few seconds. Then he looked across the bay. The technicians had the mech open, pulling an electric motor out of its spine. It was smaller than a six-pack of beer and built to put out enough torque to rip steel. Not the sort of thing to play with drunk. Sam followed his gaze and his train of thought.
“For a guy who bends so many rules, you can be pretty fucking uncompromising.”
“Strong believer in doing what needs to get done.”
It took her another minute, but she gave him a name.
Chapter Six: Holden
“Uranus is really far away,” Naomi said as they walked along the corridor to the docking bay. It was the third objection to the contract that she’d listed so far, and something in her voice told Holden there were a lot more points on her list. Under other circumstances, he would have thought she was just angry that he’d accepted the job. She was angry. But not just.
“Yes,” he said. “It is.”
“And Titania is a shitty little moon with one tiny little science base on it,” Naomi continued.
“Yes.”
“We could buy Titania for what it cost these people to hire us to fly out there,” Naomi said.
Holden shrugged. This part of Ceres was a maze of cheap warehouse tunnels and even cheaper office space. The walls were the grungy off-white of spray-on insulation foam. Someone with a pocketknife and a few minutes to kill could reach the bedrock of Ceres without much effort. From the ratty look of the corridor, there were a lot of people with knives and idle time.
A small forklift came down the corridor toward them with an electric whine and a constant high-pitched beep. Holden backed up against the wall and pulled Naomi to him to get her out of its way. The driver gave Holden a tiny nod of thanks as she drove by.
“So why are they hiring us?” she asked. Demanded.
“Because we’re awesome?”
“Titania has, what, a couple hundred people living at the science base?” Naomi said. “You know how they usually send supplies out there? They load them into a single-use braking rocket, and fling them at Uranus’ orbit with a rail gun.”
“Usually,” Holden agreed.
“And the company? Outer Fringe Exports? If I was making a cheap, disposable shell corporation, you know what I’d call it?”
“Outer Fringe Exports?”
“Outer Fringe Exports,” she said.
Naomi stopped at the entry hatch that opened to the rental docking bay and the Rocinante. The sign overhead listed the present user: Outer Fringe Exports. Holden started to reach for the controls to cycle the pressure doors open, but Naomi put a hand on his arm.
“These people are hiring a warship to transport something to Titania,” she said, lowering her voice as though afraid someone might be listening. “How can they possibly afford to do that? Our cargo hold is the size of a hatbox.”
“We gave them a good rate?” Holden said, trying for funny and failing.
“What would someone be sending to Titania that requires a fast, stealthy, and heavily armed ship? Have you asked what’s in those crates we signed up to carry?”
“No,” Holden said. “No, I haven’t. And I normally would, but I’m trying really hard not to find out.”
Naomi frowned at him, her face shifting between angry and concerned. “Why?”
Holden pulled out his hand terminal and called up an orbital map of the solar system. “See this, all the way on this edge? This is the Ring.” He scrolled the display to the other edge of the solar system. “And this is Uranus. They are literally the two spots furthest from each other in the universe that have humans near them.”
“And?” Naomi said.
Holden took a deep breath. He could feel a surge of the anxiety he always tried to deny leaping up in him, and he pushed it back down.
“And I know I don’t talk about it much, but something really unpleasant and really big with a really high body count knows my name, and it’s connected to the Ring.”
“Miller,” Naomi said.
“The Ring opened, and he knew when it happened. It was the closest thing to making sense he’s done since…”
Since he rose from the dead. The words didn’t fit in his throat, and Naomi didn’t make him say them. Her nod was enough. She understood. In an act of legendary cowardice, he was running away to the other side of the solar system to avoid Miller and the Ring and everything that had to do with them. If they had to transport black market human organs or drugs or sexbots or whatever was in those crates, he’d do it. Because he was scared.
Her eyes were unreadable. After all this time
, she could still keep her thoughts out of her expression when she wanted to.
“Okay,” Naomi said, and pushed the entry door open for him.
At the outer edge of Ceres where the spin gravity was greatest, Holden almost felt like he could have been on Luna or Mars. Loading gantries fed into the skin of the station like thick veins, waiting for the mechs to load in the cargo. Poorly patched scars marked the walls where accidents had marred them. The air smelled of coolant and the kind of cheap air filters that reminded Holden of urinal cakes. Amos lounged on a small electric power lift, his eyes closed.
“We get the job?”
“We did,” Naomi said.
Amos cracked an eye open as they came near. A single frown line drew itself on his broad forehead.
“We happy about that?” he asked.
“We’re fine with it,” Naomi said. “Let’s get the lift warmed up. Cargo’s due in ten minutes and we probably want to get it off station as quickly as we can without raising suspicion.”
There was a beauty in the efficiency that came from a crew that had flown together as long as they had. A fluidity and intimacy and grace that grew from long experience. Eight minutes after Holden and Naomi had come in, the Roci was ready to take on cargo. Ten minutes later, nothing happened. Then twenty. Then an hour. Holden paced the gantry nearest the entry hatch with an uncomfortable tingling crawling up the back of his neck.
“You sure we got this job?” Amos asked.
“These guys seemed really sketchy to me,” Naomi said over the comm from her station in ops. “I’d think we’ve been scammed, except we haven’t given anyone our account numbers.”
“We’re on the clock here, boss,” Alex said from the cockpit. “These loading docks charge by the minute.”
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