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“Only if you want to get that docking lock rescinded.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.
“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
If 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.