“I have to think about it,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”
“I respect that,” Monica said. “But please don’t take long. If we’re not going with you, we’ve still got to go with someone.”
He dropped the connection. In the silence, the deck seemed larger than it was.
“This isn’t coincidence,” Holden said. “We just happen to get locked down by Mars, and the only thing that can get us out of the docking clamps just happens to be heading for the Ring? No way. We’re being manipulated. Someone’s planning this. It’s him.”
“Jim—”
“It’s him. It’s Miller.”
“It’s not Miller. He can barely string together a coherent sentence,” Naomi said. “How is he going to engineer something like this?”
Holden leaned forward and the seat under him shifted. His head felt like it was stuffed with wool.
“If we leave, they can still take her away from us,” he said. “Once this story is done, we won’t be in any better position than we are right now.”
“Except that we wouldn’t be locked on Ceres,” Naomi said. “And it’s a long way out there. A long way back. A lot could change.”
“That wasn’t as comforting as you meant it to be.”
Naomi’s smile was thin but not bitter.
“Fair point,” she said.
The Rocinante hummed around them, the systems running through their automatic maintenance checks, the air cycling gently through the ducts. The ship breathing and dreaming. Their home, at rest. Holden reached out a hand, lacing his fingers with Naomi’s.
“We still have some money. We can take out a loan,” she said. “We could buy a different ship. Not a good one, but… It wouldn’t have to be the end of it all.”
“It would be, though.”
“Probably.”
“No choice, then,” Holden said. “Let’s go to Nineveh.”
Monica and her team arrived in the early hours of the morning, loading a few small crates of equipment that they carried themselves. In person, Monica was thinner than she seemed on screen. Her camera crew were a sturdy Earth woman named Okju and a brown-skinned Martian man who went by Clip. The cameras they carried looked like shoulder-mounted weapons, alloy casings that could telescope out to almost two meters or retract to fit around the tightest corner in the ship.
The soundman was blind. He had a dusting of short white hair and opaque black glasses. His teeth were yellowed like old ivory, and his smile was gentle and humane. According to the paperwork, his name was Elio Casti, but for some reason the documentary team all called him Cohen.
They assembled in the galley, Holden’s four people and Monica’s. He could see each group quietly considering the other. They’d be living in one another’s laps for months. Strangers trapped in a metal-and-ceramic box in the vast ocean of the vacuum. Holden cleared his throat.
“Welcome aboard,” he said.
Chapter Seven: Melba
I
f the Earth-Mars alliance hadn’t collapsed, if there hadn’t been a war—or two wars depending on how the line between battles was marked—civilian ships like the Cerisier would have had no place in the great convoy. The ships lost at Ganymede and in the Belt, the skirmishes to control those asteroids best placed to push down a gravity well. Hundreds of ships had been lost, from massive engines of war like the Donnager, the Agatha King, and the Hyperion to countless small three- and four-person support ships.
Nor, Melba knew, were those the only scars. Phobos with its listening station had become a thin, nearly invisible ring around Mars. Eros was gone. Phoebe had been subjected to a sustained nuclear hell and pushed into Saturn. The farms at Ganymede had collapsed. Venus had been used and abandoned by the alien protomolecule. Protogen and the Mao-Kwikowski empire, once one of the great shipping and transport companies in the system, had been gutted, stolen, and sold.
The Cerisier began her life as an exploration vessel. Now she was a flying toolshed. The bays of scientific equipment were machine shops now. What had once been sealed labs were stacked from deck to deck with the mundane necessities of environmental control networks—scrubbers, ducting, sealants, and alarm arrays. She lumbered through the uncaring vacuum on the fusion plume of her Epstein drive. The crew of a hundred and six souls was made of a small elite of ship command—no more than a dozen, all told—and a vast body of technicians, machinists, and industrial chemists.
Once, Melba thought, this ship had been on the bleeding edge of human exploration. Once it had burned through the skies of Jovian moons, seeing things humanity had never seen before. Now it was the handservant of the government, discovering nothing more exotic than what had been flushed into the water reclamation tanks. The degradation gave Melba a sense of kinship with the ship’s narrow halls and gray plastic ladders. Once, Clarissa Melpomene Mao had been the light of her school. Popular and beautiful, and suffused with the power and influence of her father’s name. Now her father was a numbered prisoner in a nameless prison, allowed only a few minutes of external connection every day, and those to his lawyer, not his wife or children.
And she was Melba Koh, sleeping on a gel couch that smelled of someone else’s body in a cabin smaller than a closet. She commanded a team of four electrochemical technicians: Stanni, Ren, Bob, and Soledad. Stanni and Bob were decades older than her. Soledad, three years younger, had been on two sixteen-month tours. Ren, her official second, was a Belter and, like all Belters, passionate about environmental control systems the way normal people were with sex or religion. She didn’t ask how he’d ended up on an Earth ship, and he didn’t volunteer the information.
She had known the months going out to the Ring would be hard, but she’d misunderstood what the worst parts would be.
“She’s a f**king bitch, right?” Stanni said. It was a private channel between him and Ren. If she’d been who she pretended to be, she wouldn’t have been able to hear it. “She doesn’t know dick.”
Ren grunted, neither defending her nor joining the attack.
“If you hadn’t caught that brownout buffer wrong way on the Macedon last week, it would have been another cascade failure, si no? Would have had to throw off the whole schedule to go back and fix it.”
“Might’ve,” Ren said.
She was a level above them. The destroyer Seung Un muttered around her. The crew was on a maintenance run. Scheduled, routine, predictable. They’d left the Cerisier ten hours earlier in one of the dozen transports that clung to the maintenance ship’s skin. They would be here for another fifteen hours, changing out the high-yield scrubbers and checking the air supply continuity. The greatest danger, she’d learned, was condensation degrading the seals.