“Six,” Bobbie said.
“Six guards at the doors,” Holden said, not missing a beat. “If you just look at the hundred or so meters around this building, we’re totally outnumbered and outgunned. But if you expand that to half a klick out, I have a gunship. My gunship has PDCs. It has a rail gun. It has twenty torpedoes. Hell, it’s got an Epstein drive that can put out a plume that would glass this whole settlement if we pointed it at the right angle.”
“So force,” Houston said, shaking his head. “Taxation always comes at the end of a gun.”
“I thought of it more as an argument against shooting ambassadors,” Holden said. “We’re leaving now and going back to our ship. Twelve hours after we get there, we’re taking off. If we have Governor Houston here on board, you can start scheduling ships with the union again. If not, we’ll send someone back in three years to check in.”
Holden stood up, Bobbie following his lead so closely that she was on her feet before him. Houston leaned forward, his left hand on the table and his right at his side like it was resting on the butt of a gun. Before the governor could say anything, Holden started for the door. The guards watched him step forward, their eyes cutting from him to Bobbie, then up to Houston. In Holden’s peripheral vision, Bobbie settled a little deeper into her legs, her center of gravity solidifying. She was humming softly, but he couldn’t quite pick out the melody.
As they reached the door, the guards stood aside, and Holden started breathing again. A short corridor to the anteroom, then out to the dirty street. He eased his hand terminal out of his pocket as they walked. Alex picked up the connection as soon as he put in the request.
“How’s it going out there?” Alex asked.
“We’re on our way back now,” Holden said. “Make sure the airlock’s open when we get there.”
“You coming in hot?” Alex asked.
“Maybe,” Holden said.
“Copy that. I’ll have the welcome mat out and the PDCs warmed up.”
“Thank you for that,” Holden said and dropped the connection.
“You really think they’ll be dumb enough to make a play?” Bobbie asked.
“I don’t want to bet my life on other people being smart,” Holden said.
“Voice of experience?”
“I’ve been hurt before.”
Freehold was the name of the town and the planet and the solar system. Holden couldn’t say which had come first. The town nestled in a valley between two ridge mountains. A soft breeze smelled faintly of acetate and mint, by-products of whatever chemistry the local biosphere had figured out for its life cycles.
The sunlight was subtly redder than Holden expected, making the shadows seem blue and giving the sense of permanent twilight. Or maybe dawn. A flock of local bird-analogs flew overhead in a V, their wide, transparent wings buzzing in an eerie harmony. It was a beautiful planet in its way. The gravity was a little less than half a g—more than Mars, less than Earth—and the planetary tilt and spin made the daylight just eight hours and change, the night a little over nine. Two minor moons were tide-locked to a big one almost a third the mass of the planet. The large moon even had a thin atmosphere, but nothing lived there. Not yet, anyway. If Freehold made it another few generations, someone would probably put another little town up there too, if only to get away from the locals. That seemed to be the human pattern—reach out to the unknown and then make it into the sort of thing you left in the first place. In Holden’s experience, humanity’s drive out into the universe was maybe one part hunger for adventure and exploration to two parts just wanting to get the hell away from each other.
It was always strange seeing the Rocinante on her belly. The ship had been designed to rest that way when it came down the gravity well. It didn’t do any damage. It just seemed wrong. The PDCs that studded her side shifted as they got closer, restless and active. The crew airlock stood open, a length of ladder leading down to the ground. Amos sat with his legs dangling over the lip of the open airlock door, a rifle resting across his thighs. Holden was a little surprised that Clarissa wasn’t there with him. Bobbie waved as they drew close, and Amos lifted his hand in response without taking his eyes off the trail behind them.
Holden went up first, then turned, standing between the ladder and Amos while Bobbie clambered up to them. Back toward the town, four people stood in a clump, not coming close, but clearly watching. At this distance, Holden wasn’t sure if they’d been at the meeting or if they were new. Bobbie hit the panel, and the ladder retracted into the ship.
“How’d it go?” Amos asked, levering himself to his feet and stepping back from the outer door.
Bobbie cycled the door closed, raising her voice over the sound of the servos. “Back with no shots fired. I count that as a win.”
The inner door opened, and Amos stowed the rifle in a locker that their weird orientation made look like a drawer. Holden walked along the wall, heading toward the ops deck. Which should have been up, but was, for the moment, to the left.
“I’m going to be glad when we’re out of here,” he said.
Amos smiled, the expression amiable and empty as ever, and followed after. Naomi and Alex were sitting in their crash couches, playing a complex combat-simulation game that they’d picked up in the last couple of years. Holden was
reassured to see an exterior feed of the path to the town on both of their screens. Whatever else they were doing to pass the time, everyone was keeping their eyes on the town. Just in case.
“Hey, there, Captain,” Alex said, his drawl a little thicker than usual. “We ready to pull up stakes and mosey on out of here?”
“We’re waiting twelve hours,” Holden said, sitting in his couch. The gimbals didn’t shift. The fixed gravity of the planet meant all the couches were locked in place, their workstations rotated to the correct orientation. Naomi twisted to look at him.
“Twelve hours? For what?”
“I may have renegotiated the deal a little,” he said. “I said if they turned over the governor to us for trial, there wouldn’t be a quarantine.”