“No, sir. Not yet, sir.”
“I’m getting errors in the electrical grid, sir. I think something’s shorted out. We might—”
The bridge went dark.
“—lose power. Sir.”
The monitors were black. The lights were off. The only sound was the hum of the air recyclers, running, Bull imagined, off the battery backups. Ashford’s voice came out of the darkness.
“Mister Pa, did we ever test-fire the missile systems?”
“I believe it’s on the schedule for next week, sir,” the XO said. Bull tuned his hand terminal screen to its brightest, lifting it like a torch. He glanced up at the emergency lighting set into the walls all around the room, sitting there as dark as everything else. Another system that hadn’t been tested yet.
A few seconds later, half of the bridge crew pulled flashlights out of recessed emergency lockers. The light level came up as beams played across the room. No one spoke. No one needed to. If the Rocinante fired back, they were a dead target, but the chances were that they wouldn’t lose the whole ship. If they’d waited until they were in pitched battle against Earth or Mars or both, the Behemoth would have died. Instead, they’d just shown the whole system how unprepared they were. It was the first time Bull was really glad to be just the security officer.
“XO?” Bull said.
“Yes.”
“Permission to release the chief engineer from house arrest?”
Pa’s face was monochrome gray in the dim light, and solemn as the grave. Still, he thought he saw a glint of bleak amusement in her eyes.
“Permission granted,” she said.
Chapter Sixteen: Holden
“Well,” Amos said. “That’s just fucking peculiar.”
The message began to repeat.
“This is Captain James Holden. What you’ve just seen is a demonstration of the danger you are in…”
The ops deck was in a stunned silence, then Naomi began working the ship ops panel with a quiet fury. In Holden’s peripheral vision, Monica motioned to her crew and Okju lifted a camera. The tacit decision to let the “no civilians on the ops deck” rule slide suddenly seemed like it might have been a mistake.
“It’s a fake,” Holden said. “I never recorded that. That’s not me.”
“Sort of sounds like you, though,” Amos said.
“Jim,” Naomi said, panic beginning to distort her voice. “That broadcast is coming from us. It’s coming from the Roci right now.”
Holden shook his head, denying the assertion outright. The only thing more ridiculous than the message itself was the idea that it was coming from his ship.
“That broadcast is coming from us,” Naomi said, slamming her hand against her screen. “And I can’t stop it!”
Everything seemed to recede from Holden, the noises in the room coming from far away. He recognized it as a panic reaction, but he gave in to it, accepted the short moment of peace it brought. Monica was shouting questions at him he could barely hear. Naomi was furiously pounding on her workstation, flipping through menu screens faster than he could follow. Over the ship’s comm, Alex was shouting demands for orders. From across the room, Amos was staring at him with a look of almost comical puzzlement. The two camera operators, equipment still clutched in one hand, were trying to belt themselves into crash couches with the other. Cohen floated in the middle of the room, lips pursed in a faint frown.
“This was the setup,” Holden said. “This is what it was for.”
Everything: the Martian lawsuit, the loss of his Titania job, the camera crew going to the Ring, all leading to this. The only thing he couldn’t imagine was why.
“What do you mean?” Monica asked, pushing close to get into the shot with him. “What setup?”
Amos put a hand on her shoulder and shook his head once.
“Naomi,” Holden said, “is the only system you’ve lost control of comms?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
“Then kill it. If you can’t, help Amos isolate the entire comm system from the power grid. Cut it out of the damn ship if you have to.”
She nodded again and then turned to Amos.
“Alex,” Holden said. Monica started to say something to him, but he held up one finger to silence her, and she closed her mouth with a snap. “Get us burning toward the Behemoth. We’re not really claiming the Ring for the OPA, but as long as everyone thinks we are, they’re the team least likely to shoot us.”
“What can you tell me about what’s going on?” Monica said. “Are we in danger here? Is this dangerous?” Her usual smirk was gone. Open fear had replaced it.
“Strap in,” Holden said. “All of you. Do it now.”
Okju and Clip were already belted into crash couches, and Monica and Cohen quickly followed suit. The entire documentary crew had the good sense to stay quiet.
“Cap,” Alex said. His voice had taken on the almost sleepy tone he got when in a high-stress situation. “The Behemoth just lit us up with their targeting laser.”
Holden belted himself into the combat ops station and warmed it up. The Roci began counting ships within their threat radius. It turned out to be all of them. The ship asked him if any should be marked as hostiles.
“Your guess is as good as mine, honey.”
“Huh?” Naomi asked.
“Um,” Alex said. “Are you guys warming up the weapons?”
“No,” Holden said.
“Oh, I’m really sorry to hear that,” Alex said. “Weapons systems are coming online.”
“Are we shooting at anyone?”
“Not yet?”
Holden told the Roci to mark anything that hit them with a targeting system as hostile and was relieved when the system actually responded. The Behemoth shifted to red on the display. Then, after a moment’s thought, he told the ship to lump all the Martians and Earth ships into two groups. If they wound up fighting with one ship in a group, they’d be fighting them all.
There were too many. The Roci was caught between Fred Johnson’s two-kilometer-long OPA overcompensation and most of the remaining Martian navy. And beyond the Martians, the Ring.
“Okay,” he said, desperately trying to think of what to do now. They were as far from a hiding spot as it was possible to be in the solar system. It was a two-month trip just to the nearest rock bigger than their ship. He doubted he could outrun three fleets and all their torpedoes for two months. Or two minutes, really, if it came to that. “How’s that radio coming?”
“Down,” Amos said. “Easy enough to just pull the plug.”
“Do we have any way to tell everyone that the broadcast wasn’t us? I will happily signal full and complete surrender at this point,” Holden said.
“Not without turning it back on,” Amos replied.
“Everyone out there is probably trying to contact us,” Holden said. “The longer we don’t answer, the worse this will look. What about the weapons?”
“Warmed up, not shooting,” Amos said. “And not responding to us.”
“Can we pull power on those too?”
“We can,” Amos said, looking pained. “But damn, I sure don’t want to.”
“Fast mover!” Naomi yelled.
“Holy shit,” Alex said. “The OPA just fired a torpedo at us.”
On Holden’s panel, a yellow dot separated from the Behemoth and shifted to orange as it took off at high g.
“Go evasive!” Holden said. “Naomi, can you blind it?”
“No. No laser,” she replied, her voice surprisingly calm now. “And no radio. Countermeasures aren’t responding.”