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He flicked off his mic, switching to the shipwide comm.
“Alex, get us moving. One g for now. If I can’t bluff this guy, it’ll be a shooting match. Be ready to open her up.”
“Roger,” drawled Alex. “Goin’ on the juice, just in case.”
Holden glanced over at Naomi’s station, but she’d already switched to her tactical screen and had the Roci plotting firing solutions and jamming tactics on the two approaching ships. Naomi had been in only one battle, but she was reacting now like a seasoned veteran. He smiled at her back, then turned around before she had time to realize he was staring.
“Amos?” he said.
“Locked down and shipshape down here, Cap. The Roci’s pawing at the turf. Let’s go kick some ass.”
Let’s hope we don’t have to, Holden thought.
He turned his mic back on.
“This is Captain James Holden of the Rocinante, calling the captain of the approaching United Nations Navy corvette, call sign unknown. Please respond.”
There was a static-filled pause, followed by “Rocinante. Leave our flight path immediately. If you do not begin moving away from Eros at best possible speed, you will be fired upon.”
The voice was young. An aging corvette with the tedious task of following an asteroid-mapping ship around wouldn’t be a much sought after command. The captain was probably a lieutenant without patrons or prospects. He’d be inexperienced, but he might see a confrontation as an opportunity to prove himself to his superiors. And that made the next few moments treacherous to navigate.
“Sorry,” said Holden. “Still don’t know your call sign, or your name. But I can’t do what you want. In fact, I can’t let anyone land on Eros. I’m going to need you to stop approaching the station.”
“Rocinante, I don’t think you—”
Holden took control of the Roci’s targeting system and began painting the approaching corvette with its targeting laser.
“Let me explain what’s happening here,” he said. “Right now, you’re looking at your sensors, and you’re seeing what looks like a thrown-together gas freighter that’s giving your ship-recognition software fits. And all of a sudden, meaning right now, it’s painting you with a state-of-the-art target-acquisition system.”
“We don’t—”
“Don’t lie. I know that’s what’s happening. So here’s the deal. Despite how it looks, my ship is newer, faster, tougher, and better armed than yours. The only way for me to really prove that is to open fire, and I’m hoping not to do that.”
“Are you threatening me, Rocinante?” the young voice on Holden’s headset said, its tone hitting just the right notes of arrogance and disbelief.
“You? No,” said Holden. “I’m threatening the big, fat, slow-moving, and unarmed ship you’re supposed to be protecting. You keep flying toward Eros, and I will unload everything I’ve got at it. I guarantee we will blow that flying science lab out of the sky. Now, it’s possible you might get us while we do it, but by then your mission is screwed anyway, right?”
The line went silent again, only the hiss of background radiation letting him know his headset hadn’t died.
When his answer came, it came on the shipwide comms.
Alex said, “They’re stoppin’, Captain. They just started hard brakin’. Tracking says they’ll be relative stopped about two million klicks out. Want me to keep flyin’ toward ’em?”
“No, bring us back to our stationary position over Eros,” Holden replied.
“Roger that.”
“Naomi,” Holden said, spinning his chair around to face her. “Are they doing anything else?”
“Not that I can see through the clutter of their exhaust. But they could be tightbeaming messages the other direction and we’d never know,” she said.
Holden flipped the shipwide comm off. He scratched his head for a minute, then unbuckled his restraints.
“Well, we stopped them for now. I’m going to hit the head and then grab a drink. Want anything?”
“He’s not wrong, you know,” Naomi said later that night.
Holden was floating in zero g on the ops deck, his station a few feet away. He’d turned down the deck lights, and the cabin was as dim as a moonlit night. Alex and Amos were sleeping two decks below. They might as well have been a million light-years away. Naomi was floating near her own station, two meters away, her hair unbound and drifting around her like a black cloud. The panel behind her lit her face in profile: the long forehead, flat nose, large lips. He could tell that her eyes were closed. He felt like they were the only two people in the universe.
“Who’s not wrong?” he said, just to be saying something.
“Miller,” she replied as though it were obvious.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Naomi laughed, then swatted with one hand to rotate her body and face him in the air. Her eyes were open now, though with the panel lights behind her, they were visible only as black pools in her face.
“I’ve been thinking about Miller,” she said. “I treated him badly on Tycho. Ignored him because you were angry. I owed him better than that.”
“Why?”
“He saved your life on Eros.”
Holden snorted, but she kept going anyway.
“When you were in the navy,” she finally said, “what were you supposed to do when someone went crazy on the ship? Started doing things that endangered everyone?”
Thinking they were talking about Miller, Holden said, “You restrain him and remove him as a danger to the ship and crew. But Fred didn’t—”
Naomi cut him off.
“What if it’s wartime?” she said. “The middle of a battle?”
“If he can’t be easily restrained, the chief of the watch has an obligation to protect the ship and crew by whatever means necessary.”
“Even shooting him?”
“If that’s the only way to do it,” Holden replied. “Sure. But it would only be in the most pressing circumstances.”
Naomi nodded with her hand, sending her body slowly twisting the other way. She stopped her motion with one unconscious gesture. Holden was pretty good in zero g, but he’d never be that good.
“The Belt is a network,” Naomi said. “It’s like one big distributed ship. We have nodes that make air, or water, or power, or structural materials. Those nodes may be separated by millions of kilometers of space, but that doesn’t make them any less interconnected.”
