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“No,” Fred said. “I need you.”
“You don’t,” Holden replied. “You need our depositions. And we’re not going to sit here waiting a year or two for sanity to reign. We’ll all do video depositions, sign whatever affidavits you want us to as to their authenticity, but we’re leaving to find work one way or the other. You might as well make use of it.”
“No,” Fred said. “You’re too valuable to take risks with your lives.”
“What if I throw in the data cube the captain of the Donnager was trying to liberate?”
The silence was back, but it had a different feel to it.
“Look,” Holden said, pressing on. “You need a ship like the Roci. I’ve got one. You need a crew for her. I’ve got that too. And you’re as hungry to know what’s on that cube as I am.”
“I don’t like the risk.”
“Your other option is to throw us in the brig and commandeer the ship. There’s some risks in that too.”
Fred laughed. Holden felt himself relax.
“You’ll still have the same problem that brought you here,” Fred said. “Your ship looks like a gunship, no matter what its transponder is saying.”
Holden jumped up and grabbed a piece of paper from Fred’s desk. He started writing on it with a pen snatched from a decorative pen set.
“I’ve been thinking about that. You’ve got full manufacturing facilities here. And we’re supposed to be a light gas freighter. So,” he said as he sketched a rough outline of the ship, “we weld on a bunch of empty compressed-gas storage tanks in two bands around the hull. Use them to hide the tubes. Repaint the whole thing. Weld on a few projections to break up the hull profile and hide us from ship-recognition software. It’ll look like shit and screw up the aerodynamics, but we won’t be near atmo anytime soon. It’ll look exactly like what it is: something a bunch of Belters slapped together in a hurry.”
He handed the paper to Fred. Fred began laughing in earnest, either at the terrible drawing or at the absurdity of the whole thing.
“You could give a pirate a hell of a surprise,” he said. “If I do this, you and your crew will record my depositions and hire on as an independent contractor for errands like the Eros run and appear on my behalf when the peace negotiations start.”
“Yes.”
“I want the right to outbid anyone else who tries to hire you. No contracts without my counteroffer.”
Holden held out his hand, and Fred shook it.
“Nice doing business with you, Fred.”
As Holden left the office, Fred was already on the comm with his machine-shop people. Holden pulled out his portable terminal and called up Naomi.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Pack up the kids, we’re going to Eros.”
Chapter Twenty-Two: Miller
The people-mover to Eros was small, cheap, and overcrowded. The air recyclers had the plastic-and-resin smell of long-life industrial models that Miller associated with warehouses and fuel depots. The lights were cheap LEDs tinted a false pink that was supposed to flatter the complexion but instead made everyone look like undercooked beef. There were no cabins, only row after row of formed laminate seating and two long walls with five-stacks of bunks that the passengers could hot-swap. Miller had never been on a cheapjack transport before, but he knew how they worked. If there was a fight, the ship’s crew would pump riot gas into the cabin, knock everyone out, and put anyone who’d been in the scuffle under restraint. It was a draconian system, but it did tend to keep passengers polite. The bar was always open and the drinks were cheap. Not long ago Miller would have found that enticing.
Instead, he sat on one of the long seats, his hand terminal open. Julie’s case file—what he had reconstructed of it—glowed before him. The picture of her, proud and smiling, in front of the Razorback, the dates and records, her jiu jitsu training. It seemed like very little, considering how large the woman had grown in his life.
A small newsfeed crawled down the terminal’s left side. The war between Mars and the Belt escalated, incident after incident, but the secession of Ceres Station was the top news. Earth was taken to task by Martian commentators for failing to stand united with its fellow inner planet, or at least for not handing over the Ceres security contract to Mars. The scattershot reaction of the Belt ran the gamut from pleasure at seeing Earth’s influence fall back down the gravity well, to strident near-panic at the loss of Ceres’ neutrality, to conspiracy theories that Earth was fomenting the war for its own ends.
Miller reserved judgment.
“I always think of pews.”
Miller looked over. The man sitting next to him was about Miller’s age; the fringe of gray hair, the soft belly. The man’s smile told Miller the guy was a missionary, out in the vacuum saving souls. Or maybe it was the name tag and Bible.
“The seats, I mean,” the missionary said. “They always make me think of going to church, the way they’re all lined up, row after row. Only instead of a pulpit, we have bunk beds.”
“Our Lady of Sleeping Through It,” Miller said, knowing he was getting drawn into conversation but unable to stop himself. The missionary laughed.
“Something like that,” he said. “Do you attend church?”
“Haven’t in years,” Miller said. “I was a Methodist when I was anything. What flavor are you selling?”
The missionary lifted his hands in a gesture of harmlessness that went back to the African plains of the Pleistocene. I have no weapon; I seek no fight.
“I’m just going back to Eros from a conference on Luna,” he said. “My proselytizing days are long behind me.”
“I didn’t think those ever ended,” Miller said.
“They don’t. Not officially. But after a few decades, you come to a place where you realize that there’s really no difference between trying and not trying. I still travel. I still talk to people. Sometimes we talk about Jesus Christ. Sometimes we talk about cooking. If someone is ready to accept Christ, it doesn’t take much effort on my part to help them. If they aren’t, no amount of hectoring them does any good. So why try?”
“Do people talk about the war?” Miller asked.
“Often,” the missionary said.
“Anyone make sense of it?”
“No. I don’t believe war ever does. It’s a madness that’s in our nature. Sometimes it recurs; sometimes it subsides.”
