“You couldn’t go back?”
“Nope.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Me neither.”
“The Navy, you mean?”
“Any of it. Things change, and they don’t change back.”
Bobbie’s sigh was like agreement. The vast emptiness between Mars and the Belt, between the two of them and the distant stars, was an illusion made by curved screens and good exterior cameras. The way the space contained their voices was more real. The two of them were a tiny bubble in a sea immeasurably greater than mere oceans. It gave them permission to casually discuss things that Alex normally found hard to talk about. Bobbie herself was in that halfway space between a stranger and a shipmate that let him trust her but not feel a responsibility to protect her from what he thought and felt. The days out from Mars to Hungaria were like sitting at a bar, talking to someone over beer.
He told her his fears about Holden and Naomi’s romance and the panic attacks he’d had on the way back to Earth from New Terra. The times he’d killed someone, and the nightmares that eventually replaced the guilt. The stories about when his father died, and his mother. The brief affair he’d had while he was flying for the Navy and the regret he still felt about it.
For her part, Bobbie told him about her family. The brothers who loved her but didn’t seem to have any idea who or what she was. The attempts she’d made at dating since she’d become a civilian, and how poorly they’d gone. The time she’d stepped in to keep her nephew from getting involved with the drug trade.
Rather than trying to fold into the bunk, Bobbie slept in her couch. Out of unspoken solidarity, Alex did the same. It meant they wound up on the same sleep cycle. Bad for rotating watches, good for long meandering conversations.
They talked about the rings and the protomolecule, the rumors Bobbie had heard about the new kinds of metamaterials the labs on Ganymede were discovering based on observation of the Ring and the Martian probes reverse engineering what had happened on Venus. In the long hours of comfortable silence, they ate the rations that they’d packed and watched the scopes as the other ships went on their own ways: a pair of prospectors making for an unclaimed asteroid, the little flotilla escorting the Martian prime minister to Luna, a water hauler burning back out toward Saturn to gather ice for Ceres Station, making up for all the oxygen and hydrogen humanity had used spinning the rock into the greatest port city in the Belt. The tracking system generated tiny dots from the transponder data; the actual ships themselves were too small and far away to see without magnification. Even the high albedo of the Hungaria cluster only meant the sensor arrays picked them up a little easier. Alex wouldn’t have identified that particular centimeter of star-sown sky as being different from any other if the ship hadn’t told him.
The intimacy of the Razorback and shortness of the trip was like a weekend love affair without the sex. Alex wished they’d thought to bring a few bottles of wine.
The first sign that they weren’t alone came when they were still a couple hundred thousand klicks out from Hungaria. The Razorback’s external sensors blinked and flashed, the proximity reading dancing in and out. Alex closed down the false stars and pulled up tactical and sensor data in their place.
“What’s the matter?” Bobbie asked.
“Unless I’m reading this wrong, this is the time when a military ship would be telling us that someone out there’s painting us.”
“Targeting lasers?”
“Yup,” Alex said, and a creeping sensation went up his spine. “Which is a mite more provocative than I’d have expected.”
“So there is a ship out here that’s gone dark.”
Alex flipped through the databases and matching routines, but it was just standard procedure. He hadn’t expected to find anything and he didn’t.
“No transponder signal. I think we’ve found the Pau Kant. I mean, assuming we can find her. Let’s just see what we see.”
He started a sensor sweep going in a ten-degree arc and popped open the comms for an open broadcast. “Hey out there. We’re the private ship Razorback out of Mars. Couldn’t help noticing you’re pointing a finger at us. We’re not looking for any trouble. If you could see your way to answering back, it’d ease my mind.”
The Razorback was a racing ship. A rich kid’s toy. In the time it took her system to identify the ship that was targeting them, the Roci would have had the dark ship’s profile and specs and a target lock of her own just to make the point. The Razorback chimed that the profile data had been collected and matches were being sought. For the first time since they’d left Mars, Alex felt a profound desire for the pilot’s chair in the Rocinante.
“They’re not answering,” Bobbie said.
“They’re not shooting either,” Alex said. “As long as they think we’re just some yahoo out joyriding, we’ll be fine. Probably.”
Bobbie’s couch hissed on its gimbals as she shifted her weight. She didn’t believe it either. The moments stretched. Alex opened the channel again. “Hey out there, unidentified ship. I’m going to cut thrust here until I hear from you. I’m just letting you know so I don’t startle anyone. I’d really appreciate a ping back, just so we all know we’re good here. No offense meant.”
He cut the drive; the grip of acceleration gravity loosened its hold on him. The gel of the couch launched him gently against his restraints. He could feel his heartbeat in h
is neck. It was going fast.
“They’re deciding what to do about us,” Bobbie said.
“That’s my guess too.”
“Taking them a while.”
The Razorback announced a visual match, but it wasn’t with the data Holden had sent them. The ship with its sights on them wasn’t any of the colony ships that had gone missing out in the gates. With an eighty-nine percent certainty, it was a Martian naval corvette, floating dark. Behind him, Bobbie saw the same thing and drew the same conclusions.