Holden said, “We don’t usually eat this well while flying, but we try to do something nice for our weekly dinner together.”
Okju smiled and said, “Smells lovely.” She was wearing half a dozen rings, a blouse with buttons on it, a silver pendant, and an ivory-colored comb holding back her frizzy brown hair. The soundman gazed serenely at nothing, his black glasses hiding the top of his face, his expression calm and open. Monica watched him look over her crew, saying nothing, a faint smile on her lips.
“Chow,” Amos said, then began putting bowls of food on the table. While the meal was handed around in a slow circuit, Okju bowed her head and mumbled something. It took Holden a moment to realize she was praying. He hadn’t seen anyone do it for years, not since he’d left home. One of his fathers, Caesar, had sometimes prayed before meals. Holden waited for her to finish before he started eating.
“This is very nice,” Monica said. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” said Holden.
“We’re a week out of Ceres,” she said, “and I think we’re all settled in. Was wondering if we could start scheduling some preliminary interviews? It’s mostly so we can test out the equipment.”
“You can interview me,” Amos said, not quite hiding his leer.
Monica smiled at him and speared a mushroom with her fork, then stared at him while she popped it into her mouth and chewed slowly.
“Okay,” she said. “We can start with background work. Baltimore?”
The silence was suddenly brittle. Amos started to stand, but a gentle hand on his arm from Naomi stopped him. He opened his mouth, closed it, then looked down at his plate while the pale skin on his scalp and neck turned bright red. Monica looked down at her plate, her expression at the friction point between embarrassed and annoyed.
“That’s not a good idea,” Holden said.
“Captain, I’m sensitive to privacy issues for you and your crew, but we have an agreement. And with all respect, you’ve been treating me and mine like we’re unwelcome.”
Around the table, the food was starting to cool off. It had hardly been touched. “I get it. You held up your end of the deal,” Holden said. “You got me out of Ceres, and you put money in our pockets. We haven’t been holding up our end. I get it. I’ll set aside an hour tomorrow for starters, does that work?”
“Sure,” she said. “Let’s eat.”
“Baltimore, huh?” Clip said to Amos. “Football fan?”
Amos said nothing, and Clip didn’t press it.
After the uncomfortable dinner, Holden wanted nothing more than to climb into bed. But while he was in the head brushing his teeth, Alex pretended to casually wander in and said, “Come on up to ops, Cap. Got something to talk about.”
When Holden followed him up, he found Amos and Naomi already waiting. Naomi was leaning back with her hands behind her head, but Amos sat on the edge of a crash couch, both feet on the floor and his hands clenched into a doubled fist in front of him. His expression was still dark with anger.
“So, Jim,” Alex said, walking over to another crash couch and dropping into it, “this ain’t a good start.”
“She’s looking stuff up about us,” Amos said to no one in particular, his gaze still on the floor. “Stuff she shouldn’t know.”
Holden knew what Amos meant. Monica’s reference to Baltimore was an allusion to Amos’ childhood as the product of a particularly nasty brand of unlicensed prostitution. But Holden couldn’t admit he knew it. He himself only knew because of an overheard conversation. He had no interest in humiliating Amos further.
“She’s a journalist, they do background research,” he said.
“She’s more than that,” Naomi said. “She’s a nice person. She’s charming and she’s friendly, and every one of us on this ship wants to like her.”
“That’s a problem?” Holden said.
“That’s a big fucking problem,” Amos said.
“I was on the Canterbury for a reason, Jim,” Alex said. His Mariner Valley drawl had stopped sounding silly, and just seemed sad instead. “I don’t need someone diggin’ up my skeletons to air them out.”
The Canterbury, the ice hauler they’d all worked on together before the Eros incident, was a bottom-of-the-barrel job for those who flew for a living. It attracted people who’d failed down to the level of their incompetence, or those who couldn’t pass the background checks a better job might require. Or, in his own case, those who had a dishonorable military discharge staining their record. After having served with his small crew for years, Holden knew it wasn’t incompetence that had put any of them on that ship.
“I know,” he started.
“Same here, Cap’n,” Amos said. “I got a lot of past in my past.”
“So do I,” Naomi said.
Holden started to reply, then stopped when the import of her words hit him. Naomi was hiding something that had driven her to take a glorified mechanic’s job on the Canterbury. Well, of course she was. Holden hadn’t wanted to think about it, but it was obvious. She was about the most talented engineer he’d ever met. He knew she had degrees from two universities, and had completed her three-year flight officer training in two. She’d started her career on an obvious command track. Something had happened, but she’d never talked about what it had been. He frowned a question at her, but she stopped him with a tiny shake of her head.
The fragility of their little family struck him full force. The paths that had pulled them all together had been so diverse, as improbable and unlikely as those kinds of things ever were. And the universe could just as easily take them apart. It left him feeling small and vulnerable and a little defensive.
“Everyone remembers why we did this, right?” Holden asked. “The lockdown? Mars coming after the Rocinante?”
“We didn’t have a choice,” Naomi replied. “We know. We all agreed to take this job.”
Amos nodded in agreement. Alex said, “No one’s sayin’ we shouldn’t have taken the job. What we’re sayin’ is that you’re the frontman for this band.”
“Yes,” Naomi said. “You need to be so interesting that this documentary crew forgets all about the rest of us. That’s your job for the rest of this flight. That’s the only way this works.”
“No,” Amos said, still not looking up. “There is another way, but I’ve never tossed a blind man out an airlock. Don’t know how I’d feel about that. Might not be fun.”
“Okay,” Holden said, patting the air with his hands in a calming motion. “I get it. I’ll keep the cameras out of your faces as much as I can, but this is a long trip. Be patient. When we get to the Ring, maybe they’ll be tired of us and we can pawn them off on some other ship.”
They were silent for a moment, then Alex shook his head.
“Well,” he said, “I think we just found the only thing that’ll make me look forward to getting there.”
Holden woke with a start, rubbing furiously at an itch on his nose. He had a half-remembered feeling of something trying to climb inside it. No bugs on the ship, so it had to have been a dream. The itch was real, though.
As he scratched, he said, “Sorry, bad dream or something,” and patted the bed next to him. It was empty. Naomi must have gone to the bathroom. He inhaled and exhaled loudly through his nose several times, trying to get rid of the itchy sensation inside. On the third exhale, a blue firefly popped out and flew away. Holden became aware of a faint scent of acetate in the air.
“We need to talk,” said a familiar voice in the darkness.
Holden’s throat went tight. His heart began to pound. He pulled a pillow over his face and suppressed an urge to scream as much from frustration and rage as the old familiar fear that tightened his chest.
“So. There was this rookie,” Miller started. “Good kid, you’d have hated him.”
“I can’t take this shit,” Holden said, yanking the pillow away from his face and throwing it in the direction of Miller’s voice. He slapped the panel by the bed and the
room’s lights came on. Miller was standing by the door, the pillow behind him, wearing the same rumpled gray suit and porkpie hat, fidgeting like he had a rash.
“He never really learned to clear a room, you know?” Miller continued. His lips were black. “Corners and doorways. I tried to tell him. It’s always corners and doorways.”
Holden reached for the comm panel to call Naomi, then stopped. He wanted her to be there, to make the ghost vanish the way it always had before. And he was also afraid that this time, it wouldn’t.
“Listen, you’ve gotta clear the room,” Miller said, his face twisted with confusion and intensity, like a drugged man trying to remember something important. “If you don’t clear the room, the room eats you.”
“What do you want from me?” Holden said. “Why are you making me go out there?”
A thick exasperation twisted Miller’s expression.
“What the hell are you hearing me say? You see a room full of bones, only thing you know is something got killed. You’re the predator right up until you’re prey.” He stopped, staring at Holden. Waiting for an answer. When Holden didn’t respond, Miller moved a step closer to the bed. Something on his face made Holden think of the times he’d watched the cop shoot people. He opened a cabinet by the bed and took out his sidearm.
“Don’t get any closer,” Holden said, not pointing the gun at Miller yet. “But be honest, if I shot you, would you even die?”
Miller laughed. His expression became almost human. “Depends.”
The door opened and Miller blinked out. Naomi came in wearing a robe and carrying a bulb of water.
“You awake?”
Holden nodded, then opened the cabinet and put the gun away. His expression must have told Naomi everything.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. He vanished when you opened the door.”
“You look terrified,” Naomi said, putting her water down and sliding under the covers next to him.
“He’s scarier now. Before, I thought… I don’t know what I thought. But ever since he knew about the gate, I keep trying to figure out what he really means. It was easier when I could think it was some kind of static. That it didn’t… that it didn’t mean anything.”
Naomi curled up against his side, putting her arms around him. He felt his muscles relaxing.
“We can’t let Monica and her crew ever know about this,” he said. Naomi’s smile was half sorrow. “What?”
“James Holden not telling everyone everything,” she said.
“This is different.”
“I know.”
“What did he say?” Naomi asked. “Did it make sense?”
“No. But it was all about death. Everything he says is about death.”
Over the course of the following weeks, the ship fell into a routine that, while not comfortable, was at least collegial. Holden spent time with the documentary crew, being filmed, showing them the ship, answering questions. What was his childhood like? Loving and complex and bittersweet. Had he really saved Earth by talking the half-aware girl who’d been the protomolecule’s seed crystal into rerouting to Venus? No, mostly that had just worked out well. Did he have any regrets?
He smiled and took it and pretended he wasn’t holding anything back. That the only thing leading him out to the Ring was his contract with them. That he hadn’t been chosen by the protomolecule for something else that he hadn’t yet begun to understand.
Sometimes, Monica turned to the others, but Alex and Naomi kept their answers friendly, polite, and shallow. Amos laced his responses with cheerful and explicit profanity until it was almost impossible to edit into something for a civilized audience.
Cohen turned out to be more than a sound engineer. The dark glasses he wore were a sonar feedback system that allowed him to create a three-dimensional model of any space he occupied. When Amos asked why he didn’t have prosthetics instead, Cohen had told them that the accident that claimed his eyes also burned the optic nerves away. The attempted nerve regrowth therapy had failed and almost killed him with an out-of-control brain tumor. But the interface that allowed his brain to translate sonar data into a working 3D landscape also made him an extraordinary visual effects modeler. While Monica spun a narrative of Holden’s life following the destruction of his ship the Canterbury, Cohen created beautiful visual renderings of the scenes. At one point, he showed the crew a short clip of Holden speaking, describing the escape from Eros after the initial protomolecule infection, all while he appeared to be moving down perfectly rendered Erosian corridors filled with bodies.
Part of Holden had almost come to enjoy the interviews, but he could only watch the Eros graphics for a few seconds before he asked Cohen to turn it off. He’d been sure that seeing it would somehow invoke Miller, but it hadn’t. Holden didn’t like the memories that came with their story. The documentary crew made accommodations, not forcing him further than he was willing to go. Their being nice about it somehow only made him feel worse.
A week out from the Ring, they caught up to the Behemoth. Monica was sitting on the ops deck with the crew when the massive OPA ship finally got close enough for the Roci’s telescopes to get a good view of her. Holden had allowed the restrictions on where the documentary crew were permitted to just sort of fade away.
They were doing a slow pan of the Behemoth’s hull when Alex whistled and pointed at a protrusion on the side. “Damn, boss, the Mormons are better armed than I remember. That’s a rail gun turret right there. And I’d bet a week’s desserts those things are torpedo tubes.”
“I liked her better when she was a generation ship,” Holden replied. He called up combat ops and told the Rocinante to classify the new hull as the Behemoth-class dreadnought and add all the hardpoints and weapons to her threat profile.
“That’s the kind of stealing only governments can get away with,” Amos said. “I guess the OPA is a real thing now.”
“Yeah,” Alex replied with a laugh.
“Mars is making a similar claim against us,” Holden said.
“And if we’d been the ones to blow up their battleship before we flew off in this boat, they’d have an argument to make,” Amos said. “Last I checked, that was the bad guys, though.”
Naomi didn’t chime in. She was working at something on the comm panel. Holden could tell it was a complex problem because she was quietly humming to herself.
“You’ve been on the Nauvoo before, right?” Monica asked.
“No,” Holden said. The Rocinante began rapidly throwing data onto his screen. The ship’s calculations of the Behemoth’s actual combat strength. “They were still working on it the first time I was on Tycho Station. By the time I started working for Fred Johnson, they’d already shot the Nauvoo at Eros, and she was on her way out of the solar system. I did get to walk through the ship they sent to catch her, once.”
The Rocinante was displaying puzzling projections at him. The ship seemed to think that the Behemoth didn’t have the structural strength to support the number and size of weapon hardpoints she currently sported. In fact, she seemed to think that if the OPA battleship ever actually fired two of its six capital-ship-class rail guns at the same time, there was a 34 percent chance the hull would rip apart. Just to have something to do, Holden told the Roci to create a tactical package for fighting the Behemoth and send it to Alex and Naomi. Probably, they’d never need it.
“You didn’t like working for the OPA?” Monica asked. She had the little smile she got when she asked a question she already knew the answer to. Holden suspected the documentarian was also a terrible poker player, but so far he hadn’t been able to get her into a game.
“It was a mixed bag,” he said, forcing himself to smile. To be the James Holden that Monica wanted and expected. To sacrifice himself to her attention so she’d leave the others be.
“Jim?” Naomi said, finally looking up from her panel. “You know that memory leak in comms that I’ve been hunting for a month? It’s getting worse.
It’s driving me nuts.”
“How bad?” Alex asked.
“Fluctuating between .0021 and .033 percent,” she said. “I’m having to flush and reboot every couple of days now.”
Amos laughed. “Do we care about that? Because I’ll raise you a power leak in the head that’s almost a whole percent.”
Naomi turned to look at him with a frown. “You didn’t tell me?”
“I’ll bet you a month’s pay it’s a worn lead to the lights. I’ll yank the fucker out when I get a chance.”
“Do those things happen a lot?” Monica asked.
“Hell no,” Alex replied before Holden could. “The Roci is solid.”
“Yeah,” Amos chimed in. “She’s so well put together, we gotta obsess over bullshit like crusty memory bubbles and shitty light bulbs just to have something to do.” The smile he aimed at Monica was indistinguishable from the real thing.
“So you didn’t really answer my question about the OPA,” Monica said, swiveling her chair to face Holden. She pointed at the threat map the Roci had created of the Behemoth, the weapon hardpoints like angry red blisters dotting her skin. “Everything okay between you?”
“Yeah, everyone’s still friends,” Holden said. “Nothing to worry about.”
A proximity light flashed as the Behemoth bounced a ranging laser off the Roci’s hull. She returned the favor. Not targeting lasers. Just two ships making sure they weren’t in any danger of getting too close.
Nothing to worry about.
Yeah, right.
Chapter Eleven: Melba
Stanni stood just behind Melba’s left shoulder, looking at the display. His palm rubbed against the slick fabric of his work trousers like he was trying to sooth a cramped quadriceps. Melba had learned to read it as a sign the man was nervous. The narrow architecture of the Cerisier put him so close to her, she could feel the subtle warmth of his body against the back of her neck. In any other context, being this close to a man would have meant they were sharing an intimate moment. Here, it meant nothing. She didn’t even find it annoying.
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