“Who is this?” he asked, then cracked his head on the edge of the table climbing back out and added, “Dammit!”
“Monica,” the voice on the other end said. “Monica Stuart? Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“Sort of busy right now, Monica,” Holden said. Chip rolled his eyes. Holden flipped him off, and the bartender started mixing him another drink. Probably as punishment for the insult.
“I understand,” Monica said. “But I have something I’d love to run past you. Is there any chance we can get together? Dinner, a drink, anything?”
“I’m afraid I’m on Tycho Station for the foreseeable future, Monica. The Roci is getting a full refit right now. So —”
“Oh, I know. I’m on Tycho too. That’s why I called.”
“Right,” Holden said. “Of course you are.”
“Is tonight good?”
Chip put the drink on a tray, and a waiter from the restaurant out front popped in to carry it away. Chip saw him looking at it and mouthed Want another? at him. The prospect of another night of what the restaurant laughably called lasagna and enough of Chip’s “margaritas” to kill the aftertaste felt like slow death.
The truth was, he was bored and lonely. Monica Stuart was a journalist and had serious problems about only showing up when she wanted something. She always had an ulterior motive. But finding out what she wanted and then saying no would kill an evening in a way that wasn’t exactly like every other evening since Naomi left. “Yeah, okay Monica, dinner sounds great. Not Italian.”
They ate salmon sushi from fish grown in tanks on the station. It was outrageously expensive, but being paid for by Monica’s expense account. Holden indulged himself until his clothes stopped fitting.
Monica ate sparingly, with small precise movements of her chopsticks, almost picking up the rice one kernel at a time. She ignored the wasabi altogether. She’d aged some too, since Holden had last seen her in person. Unlike Fred, the extra years looked good on her, adding a sense of experience and gravitas to her video-star looks.
They’d started the evening talking about little things: how the ship repairs were going, what had happened to the team she’d taken on the Rocinante back when the Ring was a new thing, where Alex and Amos and Naomi had gone. He’d found himself talking more than he meant to. He didn’t dislike Monica, but she wasn’t someone he particularly trusted either. But she knew him, and they’d traveled together, and even more than good food, he was hungry to talk to someone he actually sort of knew.
“So there’s this weird thing,” she said, then dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin.
“Weirder than eating raw fish on a space station with one of the solar system’s most famous reporters?”
“You’re flattering me.”
“It’s habit. I don’t mean anything by it.”
Monica rooted around in the satchel she’d brought and pulled out a flimsy roll-out video screen. She pushed plates out of the way and flattened the screen out on the table. When it came on, it showed the image of a heavy freighter, blocky and thick, heading toward one of the rings inside the slow zone. “Watch this.”
The picture sprang into motion, the freighter burning toward a ring gate at low thrust. He assumed it was the one that led from the solar system to the slow zone and Medina Station, but it could have been any of the others. They all looked pretty much the same. When the ship passed through the gate, the image flickered and danced as the recording equipment was bombarded with high-energy particles and magnetic flux. The image stabilized, and the ship was no longer visible. That didn’t mean much. Light passing through the gates had always behaved oddly, bending the images like refraction in water. The video ended.
“I’ve seen that one before,” Holden said. “Good special effects but the plot’s thin.”
“Actually you kind of haven’t. Guess what happened to that ship?” Monica said, face flushed with excitement.
“What?”
“No, really, guess. Speculate. Give me a hypothesis. Because it never came out the other side.”
Chapter Six: Alex
“Hey, Bobbie,” Alex said to his hand terminal’s camera. “I’m gonna be downstairs in Mariner for a week or two, stayin’ with a cousin. I was wondering if you wanted to get lunch while I’m in town.”
He ended the message and sent it, put his hand terminal back in his pocket, fidgeted, took it out again. He started paging back through his contacts, looking for another distraction. With every minute, he came closer to the thin exosphere of home. They were already inside the orbit of Phobos and the now invisibly thin scatter of gravel that people called the Deimos Ring. The drop ship didn’t have screens, but from here he’d have been able to see the massive steel of Hecate Base spilling up the side of Olympus Mons. He’d been a boot there after he joined the Navy.
Mariner Valley had been one of the first large-scale settlements on Mars. Five linked neighborhoods that burrowed into the sides of the vast canyons, huddling under the stone and regolith. The network of bridges and tubes that linked them were called Haizhe because the westernmost bridge structures and the trailing tubes made a figure like a cartoon jellyfish. The later high-speed line to Londres Nova was a spear in the jellyfish’s crown.
Three waves of Chinese and Indian colonists dug deep into the dry soil there, eking out a thin, perilous existence, pushing the limits of human habitation and ability. His family had been one of them. He’d been an only child to older parents. He had no nieces or nephews, but the variety of Kamal cousins in the Valley were enough that he could go from one guest room to another for months without wearing out his welcome at any one of them.
The drop ship shuddered, the atmosphere outside thick enough now to cause turbulence. The acceleration alarm chimed pleasantly and a recorded voice instructed him and the other passengers to check the straps on their gel couches and put any objects more than two kilos into the lockers set into the wall at their sides. The braking burn would commence in thirty seconds, and reach a maximum burn of three gs. The automated concern made that sound like a lot, but he supposed some folks would be impressed.
He put his hand terminal in the locker, cycled it closed, and waited for the braking rockets to push him back into his couch. In one of the other compartments, a baby was crying. The countdown tones began, a music of converging intervals distinguishable in any language. When the tones resolved into a gentle and reassuring chord, the burn kicked in, pressing him into the gel. He dozed as the ship rattled and shook. The atmosphere of Mars wasn’t thick enough to use it for aerobraking on their steep descent path, but it could still generate a lot of heat. Half-awake, he ran through the math of landing, the numbers growing more and more surreal as the light sleep washed over him. If something had gone wrong – a change in the burn, an impact shudder passing through the ship, a shift in the couch’s gimbals – he’d have been awake and alert in an instant. But nothing happened, so nothing happened. As homecomings went, it wasn’t bad.