“You sure we got this job?” Amos asked.
“These guys seemed really sketchy to me,” Naomi said over the comm from her station in ops. “I’d think we’ve been scammed, except we haven’t given anyone our account numbers.”
“We’re on the clock here, boss,” Alex said from the cockpit. “These loading docks charge by the minute.”
Holden bit back his irritation and said, “I’ll call again.”
He pulled out his terminal and connected to the export company’s office. Their messaging system responded, as it had the last three times he’d requested a connection. He waited for the beep that would let him leave another message. Before he could, his display lit up with an incoming connection request from the same office. He switched to it.
“Holden here.”
“This is a courtesy call, Captain Holden,” the voice on the other end said. The video feed was the Outer Fringe Exports logo on a gray background. “We’re withdrawing the contract, and you might want to consider leaving that dock very, very soon.”
“You can’t back out now,” Holden said, trying to keep his voice calm and professional against the rising panic he felt. “We’ve signed the deal. We’ve got your deposit. It’s non-refundable.”
“Keep it,” his caller said. “But we consider your failure to inform us of your current situation as a prior breach.”
Situation? Holden thought. They couldn’t know about Miller. He didn’t think they could. “I don’t—”
“The party that’s tracking you left our offices about five minutes ago, so you should probably get off Ceres in a hurry. Goodbye, Mr. Holden—”
“Wait!” Holden said. “Who was there? What’s going on?”
The call ended.
Amos was rubbing his pale, stubble-covered scalp with both hands. He sighed and said, “We got a problem, right?”
“Yep.”
“Be right back,” Amos replied, and climbed off the forklift.
“Alex? How long till we can clear this dock?” Holden asked. He loped across the bay to the entry hatch. There didn’t seem to be any way to lock it from his side. Why would there be? The bays were temporary rental space for loading and unloading cargo. No need for security.
“She’s warmed up,” Alex replied, not asking the obvious question. Holden was grateful for that. “Gimme ten to run the decouplin’ sequence, that should do it.”
“Start now,” Holden said, hurrying back toward the airlock. “Leave the ’lock open till the last minute. Amos and I will be out here making sure no one interferes.”
“Roger that, Cap,” Alex replied, and dropped the connection.
“Interferes?” Naomi said. “What’s going on… Okay, why is Amos going out there with a shotgun?”
“Those sketchy, scary gangster types we just signed on with?”
“Yes?”
“They just dropped us. And whatever scared them into doing it is coming here right now. I don’t think guns are an overreaction.”
Amos ran down the ramp, holding his auto-shotgun in his right hand and an assault rifle in his left. He tossed the rifle to Holden, then took up a cover position behind the forklift and aimed at the bay’s entry hatch. Like Alex, he didn’t ask why.
“Want me to come out?” Naomi asked.
“No, but prepare to defend the ship if they get past me and Amos,” Holden replied, then moved over to the forklift’s recharging station. It was the only other cover in the otherwise empty bay.
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 fuck?” 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.