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“Look, Shed,” Holden said, trying to break in.
“Oh, and look at this. No coagulant booster. What the hell? Hey, no chance anyone on a rescue mission could, you know, start bleeding. Catch a case of red bumps on your crank, sure, but bleeding? No way! I mean, we’ve got four cases of syphilis on the Cant right now. One of the oldest diseases in the book, and we still can’t get rid of it. I tell those guys, ‘The hookers on Saturn Station are banging every ice bucker on the circuit, so put the glove on,’ but do they listen? No. So here we are with syphilis and not enough ciprofloxacin.”
Holden felt his jaw slide forward. He gripped the side of the hatch and leaned into the room.
“Everyone on the Cant is dead,” Holden said, making each word clear and strong and brutal. “Everyone is dead. No one needs the antibiotics. No one needs wart cream.”
Shed stopped talking, and all the air went out of him like he’d been gut punched. He closed the drawers in the supply cabinet and turned off the inventory screen with small precise movements.
“I know,” he said in a quiet voice. “I’m not stupid. I just need some time.”
“We all do. But we’re stuck in this tiny can together. I’ll be honest, I came down here because Naomi is worried about you, but now that I’m here, you’re freaking me the hell out. That’s okay, because I’m the captain now and it’s my job. But I can’t have you freaking Alex or Amos out. We’re ten days from being grabbed by a Martian battleship, and that’s scary enough without the doctor falling apart.”
“I’m not a doctor, I’m just a tech,” Shed said, his voice very small.
“You’re our doctor, okay? To the four of us here with you on this ship, you’re our doctor. If Alex starts having post-traumatic stress episodes and needs meds to keep it together, he’ll come to you. If you’re down here jabbering about warts, he’ll turn around and go back up to the cockpit and just do a really bad job of flying. You want to cry? Do it with all of us. We’ll sit together in the galley and get drunk and cry like babies, but we’ll do it together where it’s safe. No more hiding down here.”
Shed nodded.
“Can we do that?” he said.
“Do what?” Holden asked.
“Get drunk and cry like babies?”
“Hell yes. That is officially on the schedule for tonight. Report to the galley at twenty hundred hours, Mr. Garvey. Bring a cup.”
Shed started to reply when the general comm clicked on and Naomi said, “Jim, come back up to ops.”
Holden gripped Shed’s shoulder for a moment, then left.
In ops, Naomi had the comm screen up again and was speaking to Alex in low tones. The pilot was shaking his head and frowning. A map glowed on her screen.
“What’s up?” Holden asked.
“We’re getting a tightbeam, Jim. It locked on and started transmitting just a couple minutes ago,” Naomi replied.
“From the Donnager?” The Martian battleship was the only thing he could think of that might be inside laser communications range.
“No. From the Belt,” Naomi said. “And not from Ceres, or Eros, or Pallas either. None of the big stations.”
She pointed at a small dot on her display.
“It’s coming from here.”
“That’s empty space,” Holden said.
“Nope. Alex checked. It’s the site of a big construction project Tycho is working on. Not a lot of detail on it, but radar returns are pretty strong.”
“Something out there has a comm array that’ll put a dot the size of your anus on us from over three AU away,” Alex said.
“Okay, wow, that’s impressive. What is our anus-sized dot saying?” Holden asked.
“You’ll never believe this,” Naomi said, and turned on the playback.
A dark-skinned man with the heavy facial bones of an Earther appeared on the screen. His hair was graying, and his neck was ropy with old muscle. He smiled and said, “Hello, James Holden. My name is Fred Johnson.”
Holden hit the pause button.
“This guy looks familiar. Search the ship’s database for that name,” he said.
Naomi didn’t move; she just stared at him with a puzzled look on her face.
“What?” he said.
“That’s Frederick Johnson,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Colonel Frederick Lucius Johnson.”
The pause might have been a second; it might have been an hour.
“Jesus,” was all Holden could think to say.
The man on the screen had once been among the most decorated officers in the UN military, and ended up one of its most embarrassing failures. To Belters, he was the Earther Sheriff of Nottingham who’d turned into Robin Hood. To Earth, he was the hero who’d fallen from grace.
Fred Johnson started his rise to fame with a series of high-profile captures of Belt pirates during one of the periods of tension between Earth and Mars that seemed to ramp up every few decades and then fade away again. Whenever the system’s two superpowers rattled their sabers at each other, crime in the Belt rose. Colonel Johnson—Captain Johnson at the time—and his small wing of three missile frigates destroyed a dozen pirate ships and two major bases in a two-year span. By the time the Coalition had stopped bickering, piracy was actually down in the Belt, and Fred Johnson was the name on everyone’s lips. He was promoted and given command over the Coalition marine division tasked with policing the Belt, where he continued to serve with distinction.
Until Anderson Station.
A tiny shipping depot almost on the opposite side of the Belt from the major port Ceres, most people, including most Belters, would not have been able to find Anderson Station on a map. Its only importance was as a minor distribution station for water and air in one of the sparsest stretches of the Belt. Fewer than a million Belters got their air from Anderson.
Gustav Marconi, a career Coalition bureaucrat on the station, decided to implement a 3-percent handling surcharge on shipments passing through the station in hopes of raising the bottom line. Less than 5 percent of the Belters buying their air from Anderson were living bottle to mouth, so just under fifty thousand Belters might have to spend one day of each month not breathing. Only a small percentage of those fifty thousand lacked the leeway in their recycling systems to cover this minor shortfall. Of those, only a small portion felt that armed revolt was the correct course.
Which was why of the million affected, only 170 armed Belters came to the station, took over, and threw Marconi out an airlock. They demanded a government guarantee that no further handling surcharges would be added to the price of air and water coming through the station.
