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“So why aren’t we doing that?”
Miller nodded slowly. “How do you throw away the holy grail?”
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Holden
Alex had the Rocinante running at three-quarters of a g for two hours while the crew prepared and ate dinner. He would run it back up to three when the break was over, but in the meantime, Holden enjoyed standing on his own two legs at something not too far off from Earth gravity. It was a little heavy for Naomi and Miller, but neither of them complained. They both understood the need for haste.
Once the gravity had dropped from the crush of high acceleration, the whole crew quietly gathered in the galley and started making dinner. Naomi blended together fake eggs and fake cheese. Amos cooked tomato paste and the last of their fresh mushrooms into a red sauce that actually smelled like the real thing. Alex, who had the duty watch, had forwarded ship ops down to a panel in the galley and sat at a table next to it, spreading the fake cheese paste and red sauce onto flat noodles in hopes that the end result would approximate lasagna. Holden had oven duty and had spent the lasagna prep time baking frozen lumps of dough into bread. The smell in the galley was not entirely unlike actual food.
Miller had followed the crew into the galley but seemed uncomfortable asking for something to do. Instead, he set the table and then sat down at it and watched. He wasn’t exactly avoiding Holden’s eyes, but he wasn’t going out of his way to catch his attention. By unspoken mutual agreement, no one had any of the news channels on. Holden was sure everyone would rush back to check the current state of the war as soon as dinner was over, but for now they all worked in companionable silence.
When the prep was done, Holden switched off bread duty and on to moving lasagna-filled cookware into and out of the oven. Naomi sat down next to Alex and began a quiet conversation with him about something she’d seen on the ops screen. Holden split his time between watching her and watching the lasagna. She laughed at something Alex said and unconsciously twisted one finger into her hair. Holden felt his belly tighten a notch.
Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Miller staring at him. When he looked, the detective had turned away, a hint of a smile on his face. Naomi laughed again. She had one hand on Alex’s arm, and the pilot was blushing and talking as fast as his silly Martian drawl would let him. They looked like friends. That both made Holden happy and filled him with jealousy. He wondered if Naomi would ever be his friend again.
She caught him looking and gave him a conspiratorial wink that probably would have made a lot of sense if he’d been able to hear what Alex was saying. He smiled and winked back, grateful just to be included in the moment. A sizzling sound from inside the oven called his attention back. The lasagna was beginning to bubble and run over the sides of the dishes.
He pulled on his oven mitts and opened the door.
“Soup’s on,” he said, pulling the first of the dishes and putting it on the table.
“That’s mighty ugly-looking soup,” Amos said.
“Uh, yeah,” Holden said. “It’s just something Mother Tamara used to say when she’d finished cooking. Not sure where it comes from.”
“One of your three mothers did the cooking? How traditional,” Naomi said with a smirk.
“Well, she split it pretty evenly with Caesar, one of my fathers.”
Naomi smiled at him, a genuine smile now.
“It sounds really nice,” she said. “Big family like that.”
“Yeah, it really was,” he replied, a vision in his head of nuclear fire tearing apart the Montana farmhouse he’d grown up in, his family blowing into ash. If it happened, he was sure Miller would be there to let him know it was his fault. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to argue anymore.
As they ate, Holden felt a slow release of tension in the room. Amos belched loudly, then reacted to the chorus of protests by doing it again even more loudly. Alex retold the joke that had made Naomi laugh. Even Miller got into the mood and told a long and increasingly improbable story about hunting down a black market cheese operation that ended in a gunfight with nine naked Australians in an illegal brothel. By the finish of the story, Naomi was laughing so hard she’d drooled on her shirt, and Amos kept repeating “No f**king way!” like a mantra.
The story was amusing enough, and the detective’s dry delivery suited it well, but Holden only half listened. He watched his crew, saw the tension falling from their faces and shoulders. He and Amos were both from Earth, though if he had to guess, he’d say Amos had forgotten about his home world the first time he’d shipped out. Alex was from Mars and clearly still loved it. One bad mistake on either side and both planets might be radioactive rubble by the end of dinner. But right now they were just friends having a meal together. It was right. It was what Holden had to keep fighting for.
“I actually remember that cheese shortage,” Naomi said once Miller had stopped talking. “Belt-wide. That was your fault?”
“Yeah, well, if they’d only been sneaking cheese past the government auditors, we wouldn’t have had a problem,” Miller said. “But they had this habit of shooting the other cheese smugglers. Makes the cops notice. Bad business.”
“Over f**king cheese?” Amos said, tossing his fork onto his plate with a clack. “Are you serious? I mean, drugs or gambling or something. But cheese?”
“Gambling’s legal, most places,” Miller said. “And a chemistry class dropout can cook up just about any drug you like in his bathroom. No way to control supply.”
“Real cheese comes from Earth, or Mars,” Naomi added. “And after they tack on shipping costs and the Coalition’s fifty percent in taxes, it costs more than fuel pellets.”
“We wound up with one hundred and thirty kilos of Vermont Cheddar in the evidence lockup,” Miller said. “Street value that would have probably bought someone their own ship. It had disappeared by the end of the day. We wrote it up as lost to spoilage. No one said a word, as long as everyone went home with a brick.”
The detective leaned back in his chair with a distant look on his face.
“My God, that was good cheese,” he said with a smile.
“Yeah, well, this fake stuff does taste like shit,” Amos said, then added in a hurry, “No offense, Boss, you did a real good job whipping it up. But that’s still weird to me, fighting over cheese.”
“It’s why they killed Eros,” Naomi said.
