In a conversational tone, Amos said, “Any idea what we’re expecting here?”
“Nope,” Holden said. He clicked the rifle to autofire and felt a faint nausea rising in his throat.
“All right, then,” Amos said cheerfully.
“Eight minutes,” Naomi said from his hand terminal. Not a long time, but if they were trying to hold the bay under hostile fire, it would seem like an eternity.
The entry warning light at the cargo bay entrance flashed yellow three times, and the hatch slid open.
“Don’t shoot unless I do,” Holden said quietly. Amos grunted back at him.
A tall blond woman walked into the bay. She had an Earther’s build, a video star’s face, and couldn’t have been more than twenty. When she saw the two guns pointed at her, she raised her hands and wiggled her fingers. “Not armed,” she said. Her cheeks dimpled into a grin. Holden tried to imagine why a supermodel would be looking for him.
“Hi,” Amos said. He was grinning back at her.
“Who are you?” Holden said, keeping his gun trained on her.
“My name’s Adri. Are you James Holden?”
“I can be,” Amos said, “if you want.” She smiled. Amos smiled back, but his weapon was still in a carefully neutral position.
“What’ve we got down there?” Naomi asked, her voice tense in his ear. “Do we have a threat?”
“I don’t know yet,” Holden said.
“You are, though, right? You’re James Holden,” Adri said, walking toward him. The assault rifle in his hands didn’t seem to bother her at all. Up close, she smelled like strawberries and vanilla. “Captain James Holden, of the Rocinante?”
“Yes,” he said.
She held out a slim, throwaway hand terminal. He took it automatically. The terminal displayed a picture of him, along with his name and his UN citizen and UN naval ID numbers.
“You’ve been served,” she said. “Sorry. It was nice meeting you, though.”
She turned back to the door and walked away.
“What the f**k?” Amos said to no one, dropping the muzzle of his gun to the floor and rubbing his scalp again.
“Jim?” Naomi said.
“Give me a minute.”
He paged through the summons, jumping past seven pages of legalese to get to the point: The Martians wanted their ship back. Official proceedings had been started against him in both Earth and Martian courts challenging the salvage claim to the Rocinante. Only they were calling it the Tachi. The ship was under an order of impound pending adjudication, effective immediately.
His short conversation with Outer Fringe Exports suddenly made a lot more sense.
“Cap?” Alex said through the connection. “I’m getting a red light on the docking clamp release. I’m puttin’ a query in. Once I get that cleared, we can pop the cork.”
“What’s going on out there?” Naomi asked. “Are we still leaving?”
Holden took a long, deep breath, sighed, and said something obscene.
The longest layover the Rocinante had taken since Holden and the others had gone independent had been five and a half weeks. The twelve days that the Roci spent in lockup seemed longer. Naomi and Alex were on the ship most of the time, putting inquiries through to lawyers and legal aid societies around the system. With every letter and conversation, the consensus grew. Mars had been smart to begin legal proceedings in Earth courts as well as their own. Even if Holden and the Roci slipped the leash at Ceres, all major ports would be denied them. They’d have to skulk from one gray-market Belter port to the next. Even if there was enough work, they might not be able to find supplies to keep them flying.
If they took the case before a magistrate, they might or might not lose the ship, but it would be expensive to find out. Accounts that Holden had thought of as comfortably full suddenly looked an order of magnitude too small. Staying on Ceres Station made him antsy; being on the Roci left him sad.
There had been any number of times in his travels on the Roci that he’d imagined—even expected—it all to come to a tragic end. But those scenarios had involved firefights or alien monstrosities or desperate dives into some planetary atmosphere. He’d imagined with a sick thrill of dread what it would be like if Alex died, or Amos. Or Naomi. He’d wondered whether the three of them would go on without him. He hadn’t considered that the end might find all of them perfectly fine. That the Rocinante might be the one to go.
Hope, when it came, was a documentary streamcast team from UN Public Broadcasting. Monica Stuart, the team lead, was an auburn-haired freckled woman with a professionally sculpted beauty that made her seem vaguely familiar when he saw her on the screen of the pilot’s deck. She hadn’t come in person.
“How many people are we talking about?” Holden asked.
“Four,” she said. “Two camera jockeys, my sound guy, and me.”
Holden ran a hand across eight days’ worth of patchy beard. The sense of inevitability sat in his gut like a stone.
“To the Ring,” he said.
“To the Ring,” she agreed. “We need to make it a hard burn to get there before the Martians, the Earth flotilla, and the Behemoth. And we’d like some measure of safety once we’re out there, which the Rocinante would be able to give us.”
Naomi cleared her throat, and the documentarian shifted her attention to her.
“You’re sure you can get the hold taken off the Roci?” Naomi asked.
“I am protected by the Freedom of Journalism Act. I have the right to the reasonable use of hired materials and personnel in the pursuit of a story. Otherwise, anyone could stop any story they didn’t like by malicious use of injunctions like the one on the Roci. I have a backdated contract that says I hired you a month ago, before I arrived at Ceres. I have a team of lawyers ten benches deep who can drown anyone that objects in enough paperwork to last a lifetime.”
“So we’ve been working for you all along,” Holden said.
“Only if you want to get that docking lock rescinded. But it’s more than just a ride I’m looking for. That’s what makes it reasonable that I can’t just hire a different ship.”
“I knew there was a but,” Holden said.
“I want to interview the crew too. While there are a half dozen ships I could get for the trip out, yours is the one that comes with the survivors of Eros.”
Naomi looked across at him. Her eyes were carefully neutral. Was it better to be here, trapped on Ceres while the Roci was pulled away from him by centimeters, or flying straight into the abyss with his crew? And the Ring.