He stopped at the med bay on the way to his quarters. Sober, the symbolic implications of a new temporary crew for the trip to Luna didn’t seem quite as ominous, but the thought stayed at the back of his mind: without Naomi – without all his crew – the Rocinante wasn’t going to be what she had been. When he checked his hand terminal, the only messages were from Fred. Alex’s silence didn’t help.
The transport tube’s connection to the airlock was a gentle thump, like Tycho Station clearing its throat. Holden was at the airlock to let them in. Eight people – six Belters, and two who looked like they’d come from Earth, all wearing Tycho Station flight suits and hauling small personal kits – floated into the space among the lockers. Drummer was with them, wearing her security uniform.
“Captain Holden?” Drummer said. “I’d like to introduce Captain Foster Sales and his crew.”
The man who floated up, arms braced, looked too young to be a captain. Close-cropped black hair transitioned into a glossy beard that tried and failed to lend the boyish features some gravitas. He was introduced to the others – pilots Arnold Mfume and Chava Lombaugh, engineers Sandra Ip and Zach Kazantzakis, weapons technicians Gor Droga and Sun-yi Steinberg, communications specialist Maura Patel. By the end of the little ceremony, Holden was pretty sure he’d already forgotten all of their names.
Drummer seemed to read his unease, because when the crew broke to their stations, she lingered and drew him aside. “They’re good people, Captain. I vetted all of them myself. None of them are the bad guys.”
“Yeah,” Holden said. “That’s good.”
Her smile was weirdly gentle. “It’s weird for me too.”
“Yeah?” he said.
“On my watch, they broke into the station, stole the fucking protomolecule. They tried to kill the boss. I’m spending all day projecting an attitude of calm and control, and come sleep shift, I’m grinding my teeth and staring at the wall. Now the old man’s leaving? Honest to God, I’m shitting bricks here.”
Holden blew out a long breath. “Thanks for that.”
“Anytime, sir. Everyone you meet’s fighting a hard battle.”
“Should I know anything about…” He nodded toward the door. Drummer briefed him in quick, simple sentences. Ip’s roommate had been one of the turncoats, and she still felt betrayed. Steinberg and Mfume both had a hard time losing face, and while it wasn’t usually a problem, if they got into a spat, someone would have to step in and deescalate. Droga had family on Earth, and he was worried and angry and grieving. Holden made a note to speak to the man if he had a chance. With every small detail, every fault and vulnerability, every strength and peculiar virtue, Holden felt something in his chest grow calmer.
Okay, these men and women weren’t his family, but they were his crew. They wouldn’t ever mean what Alex and Amos and Naomi meant, but for the next weeks, he was their captain. And that was enough.
For now, that was enough.
When Fred came through the airlock, Drummer was just finishing her rundown of Maura Patel’s insomnia problem. Fred landed feetfirst on the wall, ankles hooked into the handholds like he’d been born in the Belt. He stood at ninety degrees to them, a rough smile on his face and a small personal kit strapped to his back.
“Well, what are you two doing?”
“Drummer is very gently telling me how to put on my big-boy pants,” Holden said.
“Really?” Fred asked.
“It’s possible I was getting a little maudlin.”
Fred nodded. “Happens to the best of us from time to time. Where do we stand?”
Drummer answered. “The crew’s initiating the warm-up. We haven’t had anyone reporting trouble, so you should be good to go on schedule.”
“Excellent,” Fred said. “Of course, they’ve probably taken all the good bunks by now.”
“All the bunks are the same,” Holden said. “Except mine. You can’t have mine.”
“Wouldn’t think of it, Captain,” Fred said. “The Martian convoy’s put out a distress call. The original escort’s trying to burn back toward them, but the mystery ships are engaging in force now. As ambushes go, this one’s looking pretty effective.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Holden said. “Still nothing from Alex.”
“Well. We can hope for the best,” Fred said. “Latest intel shows the attackers have stopped firing. So that makes it look like a boarding action.”
Holden’s blood went cold. “Protocol is they blow the ship if boarders get close to taking engineering or the CIC.”
“That’s so that the enemy doesn’t compromise your codes,” Drummer said. “They rode in on Martian naval ships. That damage is already done.”
The three were silent for a moment. When Fred spoke, his voice was low and mordant. “Well, that’s cheerful. You coming to help this along, Captain?”
Holden looked at Drummer. She held herself professionally at attention, but he thought he saw a glimmer of unease in her eyes. Fred Johnson had run Tycho Station for almost two decades, and now he was leaving. He might not come back. And Holden might not either.
Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
“Let’s give this part to Foster,” Holden said. “Let him get a feel for the ship. There’s something I need to take care of on the station before we go.”
Monica was in new rooms. To look at her, sitting on the couch, it was like she was meeting him for the first time. The months they’d spent – her crew and his – shipping out to the Ring, the desperate work she’d done on the Behemoth back before it became Medina Station, her abduction and his rescue of her. All of it was gone. Her expression was polite, and it was closed.
“So,” Holden said. “I’m about to take off. I’m not sure when or even if I’ll see you again. And I feel like we’re not good.”
“Why do you feel like that?”
“Off the record?”
The silence cooled the room, then Monica took her new hand terminal out of her pocket and tapped it twice. It chimed and she rested it on her thigh. “Fine. Off the record.”
“Because I lied to you, and you know it. And you’re angry about it. And because you tried to get me to talk about things I didn’t want to talk about by springing questions on me in the middle of an interview, and I’m angry with you about that.”
Monica sighed, but her face softened. She looked older now than when they’d first met. Still camera-ready and perfect at all times, but worn by the universe. “What happened to you, Holden? You used to be the man who didn’t hide anything. You were the one voice everyone could trust, because even if you didn’t know all of it, you’d at least tell the truth you did know. This reading the press release thing? It’s not you.”
“Fred asked me not to say that he’d been targeted.”
“Or that they got away with the protomolecule sample,” Monica said, then held up her hand terminal. “We’re off the record. Do me the courtesy of not lying to me now too.”
“And that they got away with the protomolecule,” Holden said.
Monica’s face softened. She scratched her arm, fingernails hissing against the cloth. “That’s critical. That’s the scariest thing that’s happened since this all started. Don’t you think that people have a right to know the danger they’re in?”
“Fred knows. He’s told Avasarala and Smith. Earth and Mars know. The OPA knows. Panicking people for no reason —”
“Panicking at this point isn’t unreasonable,” Monica said. “And deciding for people what they should get to know so they do what you think they should do? That isn’t how the good guys act, and you know it. It’s paternalistic, it’s condescending, and it’s beneath you. Maybe not them. The political movers and shakers. But it’s beneath you.”
Holden felt a warmth rising in his chest. Shame or anger or something more complicated, he couldn’t say. He remembered Mother Tamara saying It hurts most if there’s something true in it. He wanted to say something mean. To hit back. He laced his fin
gers together. “Does what you do matter?”
“What?”
“Reporting? Telling things to people. Does it have any power?”
“Of course it does.”
“Then how you use that power matters too. I’m not saying that we were right to put the protomolecule thing under the rug. I’m saying that telling everyone about it – especially right now while whatever the hell this is is still going on – is worse. When we were in the slow zone, you were the voice that pulled us all together. You gave a shape to that moment of chaos. And it made people safer and calmer and more rational. More civilized. We need that again. I need that again.”
“How can you say —” Monica began, and her hand terminal buzzed. She looked down at it in annoyance, then did a double take. She lifted a finger to him. Just a second.
“What is it?” Holden said, but she was reading her terminal, her eyes getting wider. “Monica? If this is some kind of object lesson about how shitty it is to withhold information, I admit it’s weirdly elegant. But if you could stop it now —”
“The attack ships. The ones going after the Martian prime minister. The command ship put out a message.” She looked up at him. “It’s for you.”
Naomi’s voice on the hand terminal was thin and tinny and like waking up from a nightmare into something worse. “If you receive this, please retransmit. This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. Message is for James Holden. The software controlling the magnetic bottle has been sabotaged. Do not start the reactor —”
She kept talking, but Holden already had his hand terminal up. His knuckles ached, and he had to force himself to stop squeezing the device. He put out a connection request to Drummer. His heart beat against his ribs and he felt like he was falling, like he’d stepped off a tower and hadn’t quite caught the ledge on the way down. Monica was cursing quietly under her breath. It sounded like prayer.
It the reactor came up and the bottle failed, the Rocinante would die in a fraction of a second. Tycho Station might survive. Some of it, anyway.
“Drummer here,” his hand terminal said. “How can I help you, Captain?”
“Have you started the reactor?” Holden said.
Drummer went silent for maybe half a second. It felt like years. “Yes, sir. We’re at sixty percent, and looking great.”
“Shut it down,” Holden said. “Shut it down right now.”
There was a moment of silence. Don’t ask me why, Holden thought. Don’t argue or ask me to explain. Please don’t.
“Done. The core is down,” Drummer said. “So can I ask what this is about?”
Chapter Thirty-four: Alex
… Do not start the reactor without reloading the hardware drivers from a known good source. If you hear this message, please retr—”
The message cut off.
“We have to get this out,” Alex said. “We have to get that to Holden.”
“I’ll take care of it,” the captain said. “You and the prime minister need to evacuate. Right now.”
Alex looked at her, confused. Naomi was on the attack ships. The Roci had been sabotaged. He felt like the moment of stillness between being hit in the head and the bloom of pain. His first semi-coherent, irrational thought was If Naomi’s with them, maybe they’re not so bad.
“Mister Kamal?”
“No, I’m fine. It’s just —”
Prime Minister Smith looked at him, the man’s gentle, innocuous eyes seeming utterly out of place. “Does this change anything for us?”
“No,” Alex said. “I just… No. No, we should go. Wait. Bobbie…”
“Gunny Draper knows where you’re going,” Captain Choudhary said. “I’ll see she doesn’t get lost.”
They moved to the lift, the two marines before and behind them. The lift car gave Alex a moment of orientation as it pushed them down into the heart of the ship. It only took a few seconds to match velocity and go back to floating, but it was enough of a cue that his mind made one direction into down, the other into up. The lift car was wide enough for three times the load. The marines took stations at the door, ready to face danger if there was any. The prime minister took a place at the side near the front, where there was a little cover. No one commented on it. It was just a thing that happened. The dynamics of political power as positions in an elevator.
Naomi was here. Right here. Maybe less than ten thousand kilometers away. It was like he’d turned a corner and she was there. Except, of course, that she wasn’t. Even close-quarters battle meant distances that were vast in any other context. If the ship had been transparent, the enemy vessels would only have been visible by their drive plumes – dots of light in a sky filled with them. The Pella could be as far from him right now as Boston was from Sri Lanka, and it would still be almost intimate in the vast scale of the solar system.
“You’re thinking of your friend,” Smith said.
“Yes, sir,” Alex said.
“Do you know why she would be on the Pella?”
“I don’t know why she wouldn’t be on the Rocinante. And no offense, but I’m wondering why I ever got off my ship too. Longer I’m away, the worse an idea leaving it turns out to have been.”
“I was thinking the same about my house,” Smith said.
One of the Marines – taller, and with a slushy accent that Alex couldn’t place – nodded. “You should take cover, sir. We’re going to have to pass through some territory we might not control.”
He meant that the enemy had already cut off the path between them and the hangar. Alex pressed himself against the wall that the prime minister hadn’t claimed and braced. The lift slowed, what had been down became up, then even that gentle gravity went away again. The marines stepped back, raised their weapons, and the doors opened. An eternal half second later, they moved out into the corridor, Alex and the prime minister following.
The corridors of the ship were empty, the crew strapped in their couches for the battle or else on the move elsewhere, keeping these halls safe while the four of them moved down them. The marines took turns moving forward from doorway to intersection to doorway. The distance behind them grew greater with every little jump, and Alex was deeply aware of the doors they’d passed that could open without any guards between him and whoever came out. The marines didn’t seem worried, so he tried to take comfort in that.
The halls had the same anti-spalling covering that the bridge and the mess had had, but marked with location codes and colored strips that would help navigate the ship. One line was deep red with HANGAR BAY written in yellow Hindi, English, Bengali, Farsi, and Chinese. Where the red line went, they followed.
They went quickly and quietly and Alex was almost thinking they’d make it to the bay without trouble when the enemy found them.
The ambush was professional. The slushy-voiced marine had just launched forward when the firing started. Alex couldn’t see where it was coming from at first, but he braced automatically and risked looking forward. At the intersection ahead of them, he caught the flare of muzzle flashes and the small circle of helmets. The attackers were standing on a bulkhead looking up the corridor, like they were shooting into a well. Even if he’d had a gun, there was a very small area to target.
“We’re taking fire,” the other marine said, and it took Alex a quarter second to understand he wasn’t talking to them. “Tollivsen’s shot.”
“Still in the fight,” the slushy accent shouted.
Across the corridor from Alex, Prime Minister Smith was huddled behind the lip of a doorway. Most civilians tried to press against the wall and ended up launching themselves into the middle of the firing lines. Smith hadn’t done that. So score one for training.
Another burst of fire sang past, tearing long black strips from the walls and deck and filling the air with the smell of cordite.
“Oyé,” one of the attackers called. “Hand up Smith y we let you go, sa sa?”
The first marine fired three rounds in fast succession, and the attackers’ laughter follo
wed it. Alex couldn’t be sure, but he thought the people firing at him were wearing Martian military uniforms and light armor.
“Hey!” Alex called. “We’re not going to be any good to you dead, right?”
There was a lull, like a moment of surprise. “Hoy, bist tu Kamal?”
“Um,” Alex said. “My name’s Kamal.”
“Knuckles’ pilot, yeah?”
“Who’s Knuckles?”
“Pinché traitor’s who,” the voice said. “You get to hell, tell her Salo sent you.”
“Grenade incoming,” the slushy-voiced marine said, his voice weirdly calm. “Employing countermeasures.”
Alex turned his face to the wall and pressed his hands to his ears. The shock of the explosion was like being slapped all across his side. He fought to breathe. Flecks of something like snow swirled through the air, and the stink of plastic and spent explosive was thick enough to choke. The stutter of gunfire seemed to come from far away.
“Grenade mitigated,” the marine shouted. “But we could use some backup here.”
The prime minister had a bright line of red across the backs of his hands, blood soaking into the white of his cuffs and floating in tiny dots through the air of the hallway. Alex felt the wall shudder under his hand as something on the ship detonated too far away to hear. Someone at the head of the corridor was laughing and whooping something in Belter chatter too fast to follow. Alex ducked his head out and back again, trying to get a glimpse of the corridor ahead. A crackle of gunfire drove him back into his shallow cover.
The laughter ahead of them turned to screams, the sharp, flat reports of gunfire into something deeper and more threatening. The marines opened fire, and the corridor rose to pandemonium. A body cartwheeled by, limp and dead, its uniform sopping up blood from a dozen wounds. Alex couldn’t tell which side the fighter had belonged to.
The gunfire stopped. Alex waited a long moment, ducked his head out and back again. Then leaned out for a longer look. The intersection where the enemy had been was misty with smoke and blood and the anti-grenade countermeasure. Two bodies floated in the middle space, one dead in light combat armor, the other in full marine recon gear. The power-armored figure lifted its hand in the sign for all clear.