“Hank, Anna. Please call me Hank.”
“Oh,” Tilly said, her coffee bulb floating forgotten in the air in front of her. “We are so f**ked.”
“Hi Nono,” Anna said to the video camera in her room’s communication panel. “Hi Nami! Mom loves you. She loves you so much.” She hugged her pillow to her chest, squeezing it tight. “This is you. This is both of you.”
She put the pillow down, taking a moment to compose herself.
“Nono, I’m calling to apologize again.”
Chapter Nineteen: Melba
T
he injustice of it shrieked in the back of her skull; it wouldn’t let her sleep. It had come so close to working. So much of it had worked. But then Holden dove into the Ring, and something had saved him, and Melba felt a huge invisible fist drive itself into her gut. And it was still there.
She’d watched the whole thing unfold in her quarters, sitting cross-legged on her crash couch, her hand terminal seeking information from any feed. The network had been so swamped with other people doing the same thing, her own signal wouldn’t stand out. No one would wonder why she was watching when everyone else was doing the same. When the OPA had opened fire, she’d heard the Earth forces bracing for a wave of sabotage explosions that never came. The anger at Holden, the condemnations and recriminations had been like pouring cool water on a burn. Her team had been called up on an emergency run to the Seung Un, repairing the damage she’d done, but she’d checked in whenever there was a free moment. When Mars had turned its targeting lasers on the Rocinante, guiding the missile to him, she’d laughed out loud. Holden had stopped her outgoing message, but at the expense of killing his whole communications array. There was no way he could send out a retraction in time.
When he’d passed through the Ring, she’d been in three conversations simultaneously and watching an electrical meter for dangerous fluctuations. She didn’t find out until they were being rotated back to the Cerisier that Holden hadn’t died. That he wasn’t going to. The missile had been stopped and the enemy had been spared.
Back on her ship, she’d gone straight to her bunk, curled up on the crash couch, and tried not to panic. Her brain felt like it had come untied; her thoughts ran in random directions. If the Martians had just launched a few missiles of their own instead of waiting for the OPA’s to do the job, Holden would be dead. If the Rocinante had been a few thousand kilometers closer to the Behemoth when it fired, Holden would be dead. The gimbaling under her couch hushed back and forth in the last of the deceleration burn, and she realized she was shaking her body, banging her back against the gel. If the thing that made the protomolecule—the nameless, evil thing that was hunched in the abyssal black on the other side of the Ring—hadn’t changed the laws of physics, Holden would be dead.
Holden was alive.
She’d always known that the destruction of James Holden was a fragile thing. Discrepancies would be there if anyone looked closely. She couldn’t match her announcement to the exact burn that the Rocinante would be on when she sprang her trap. There would be artifacts in the video that a sufficiently close analysis would detect. By the time that happened, though, it would have been too late. The story of James Holden would have been set. New evidence could be dismissed as crackpots and conspiracy theorists. But it required that Holden and his crew be dead. It was something she’d always heard her father say. If the other man’s dead, the judge only has one story to follow. When he put his communication array back together, the investigation would begin. She’d be caught. They’d find out it was her.
And—the thought had the copper taste of fear—they’d find Ren. They’d know she killed him. Her father would know. Word would reach him in his cell that she had beaten Ren to death, and that would be worse than anything. Not that she’d done it, Melba thought. That she’d been caught doing it.
The sound came from her door, three hard thumps, and she screamed despite herself. Her heart was racing, the blood tapping at the inside of her throat, banging at her ribs.
“Miss Koh?” Soledad’s voice came. “You in there? Can I… I need to talk if you’ve…”
Hearing fear in someone else’s voice felt like vertigo. Melba got to her feet. Either the pilot was repositioning the ship or she was just unsteady. She couldn’t tell which. She looked in her mirror, and the woman looking out could almost have been a normal person woken from a deep sleep.
“Just a minute,” she said, running her fingers through her hair, pressing the dark locks against her scalp. Her face felt clammy. Nothing to be done. She opened the door.
Soledad stood in the thin, cramped corridor. The muscles in her jaw worked like she was chewing something. Her wide eyes skittered over Melba, away and back, away and back.
“I’m sorry, Miss Koh, but I can’t… I can’t do it. I can’t go there. They can fire me, but I can’t go.” Melba reached out and put her hand on the woman’s arm. The touch seemed to startle them both.
“All right,” she said. “It’ll be all right. Where can’t you go?”
The ship shifted. That one wasn’t her imagination, because Sole moved too.
“The Prince,” she said. “I don’t want… I don’t want to volunteer.”
“Volunteer for what?” Melba asked. She felt like she was coaxing the girl back from some sort of mental break. There was enough self-awareness left in her to appreciate the irony.
“Didn’t you get the message? It’s from the contracts supervisor.”
Melba looked back over her shoulder. Her hand terminal was on the crash couch, a green-and-red band on the screen showing that there was a priority message waiting. She raised a finger, keeping Soledad out of the room and away from the locker, and grabbed the terminal. The message had come through ten hours before, marked urgent and must reply. Melba wondered how long she’d been lying in her couch, lost in her panic fugue. She thumbed the message accept. A stream of tight legal script poured onto the screen, brash as a shout.
Danis General Contracting, owners and operators of half the civilian support craft in the fleet, including the Cerisier, was invoking the exceptional actions clause of the standard contract. Each functional team would choose a designated volunteer for temporary duty on the UNN Thomas Prince. The remuneration would remain at the standard level until completion of the contract, when any hazard bonuses or exemptions would be assessed.