“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 f**ker 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
S
tanni 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.
“Mira,” Stanni said, flapping his hand. “La. Right there.”
The monitor was old, a constant green pixel burning in the lower left corner where some steady glitch had been irreparable and not worth replacing. The definition was still better than a hand terminal. To the untrained eye, the power demand profile for the UNN Thomas Prince could have been the readout of an EEG or a seismological reading or the visual representation of a bhangra recording. But over the course of weeks—months now—Melba’s eye wasn’t untrained.
“I see it,” she said, putting her finger on the spike. “And we can’t tell where it came from?”
“Fucks me,” Stanni said, rubbing his thigh. “I’m seeing it, but I don’t know what I’m looking at.”
Melba ran her tongue against the back of her teeth, concentrating, trying to remember what the tutorials had shown about tracking power spikes. In an odd way, her inexperience had shifted into an asset for the team. Stanni and Ren, Bob and Soledad all had more hands-on experience than she did, but she’d only just learned the basics. Sometimes she would know some simple thing that all of them had known once, and only she hadn’t forgotten. Her analysis was slower, but it didn’t skip steps, because she didn’t know which steps could be skipped.
“Did it start at the deceleration flip?” she asked.
Stanni grunted like a man struck by a sudden pain.
“They hit null g and one of the regulators reset,” he said. “Least it’s nothing serious. Embarrassing to blow up all they preachers y sa. We’ll need to get back over there and check them, though.”
Melba nodded and made a mental note to read through what that process required. All she’d known was the truism repeated in three of her tutorials that when a ship cut thrust halfway through a journey, flipped, and began accelerating in the opposite direction it was a time for especial care.
“I’ll put it on the rotation,” she said, and pulled up her team’s schedule. There was a slot in ten days when there would be enough time to revisit the big ship. She blocked out the time, marked it, and posted it to the full group. All of it felt easy and natural, like the sort of thing she had been doing her whole life. Which in a sense, she had.
The flotilla was coming to the last leg of its journey. They had passed the orbit of Uranus weeks ago, and the sun was a bright star in an overwhelming abyss of night sky. All the plumes of fire were pointed toward the Ring now, bleeding off their velocity with every passing minute. Even though it was the standard pattern for Epstein drive ships, Melba couldn’t quite shake the feeling that they were all trying to flee from their destination and being pulled in against their will.
Unless they were discussing work, the only conversation—in the mess hall, on the exercise machines, on the shuttles to and from the ships they maintained—was about the Ring. The Martian science ships and their escort were already there, peering through the void. There had been no official reports given, so instead rumors sprang up like weeds. Every beam of light that passed through the Ring and hit something bounced back, just like in normal space. But a few troubling constants varied as you got close to it. The microwave background from inside the Ring was older than the big bang. People said if you listened carefully to the static from the other side of the Ring, you could hear the voices of the dead of Eros, or of the damned. Melba heard the dread in other people’s voices, saw Soledad crossing herself when she thought no one was looking, felt the oppressive weight of the object. She understood their growing fear not because she felt it herself but because her own private crisis point was coming.
The OPA’s monstrous battleship was on course to arrive soon, almost at the same time as the Earth flotilla. It wasn’t a matter of days yet, but it would be soon. The Rocinante had already passed the slower Behemoth. She and Holden were rising up out of the sun’s domain, and soon their paths would converge. Then there would be the attack, and the public humiliation of James Holden, and with it, his death. And after that…