“I hate the gravity here. It feels like we’re moving too slow. I keep wanting to gun the engines. But there aren’t any engines and we aren’t going anywhere. It should be a drive holdin’ me down, but it’s just a big hunk of rock.” Alex gestured toward the newsfeed playing silently on his screen. A woman in a bright red hijab was speaking earnestly into the camera. Holden recognized her as a well-respected Martian journalist, but he couldn’t remember her name. “It just keeps coming. They’re calling it a mutiny. Keep talking about dereliction of duty and abandoning their post and black market sales of equipment.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“Sounds better than what it was,” Alex said. “It was a coup. It was a civil war, only instead of fighting, a fifth of the military just packed themselves off through the ring gates with all our stuff. Well, all our stuff they didn’t trade to these Free Navy assholes.”
“Any word where they were going?”
“Nope,” Alex said. “At least none they’re reporting.”
The woman in the hijab—Fatim Wilson, that was the name—vanished, but the feed spooled on with images of empty docks on Mars and then a group of protesters milling around and shouting at the camera. Holden couldn’t tell what they were for or against. The way things were now, he wasn’t sure they’d have been able to tell him either.
“If they ever come back, they’ll all be tried for treason,” Alex said. “Makes me think they weren’t planning to get back home anytime soon.”
“So,” Holden said. “Martian coup. Free Navy killing the shit out of Earth. Pirates stripping down all the colony ships that were heading out. Medina Station’s gone dark. And we-don’t-know-what eating some of the ships that go through the gates.”
Alex opened his mouth to reply, but his screen flicked and chimed. A high-priority connection request.
“One damned thing after another,” Alex said, accepting the connection, “when it ain’t a whole bunch of damned things at once.”
Chrisjen Avasarala appeared on the screen. Her hair was perfectly in place, her sari a gemlike shimmering green. Only her eyes and the set of her mouth showed the fatigue.
“Captain Holden,” she said. “I need to meet with you and your crew. At once.”
“Naomi’s asleep,” Holden said without pausing to think. Avasarala smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant expression. “So I’ll go wake her up. And we’ll be right over.”
“Thank you, Captain,” the acting ruler of Earth said and signed off.
Silence filled the deck. “You notice how she didn’t say anything obscene or offensive?” Holden said.
“Did notice that.”
Holden took a deep breath. “That can’t be good.”
The meeting room was near the moon’s surface, and it was built like a classroom or a church: a podium at the front and rows of chairs before it, but the podium was empty and a dozen of the chairs had been pushed into a rough circle. Avasarala sat with Fred Johnson—the head of Tycho Station and once a spokesman of the OPA—and Martian Prime Minister Smith to her left and Bobbie Draper to her right. Both Smith and Johnson were in their shirtsleeves, and all of them looked tired. Holden, Naomi, Alex, and Amos sat together in a group across from them, a couple of chairs marking the border on either side. Holden didn’t realize until they’d all sat down that Clarissa hadn’t come. He hadn’t even considered bringing her. This was a meeting of the Rocinante’s crew, after all, and she was …
Avasarala tapped her hand terminal. A schematic popped into place in the space in the center of th
e circle. Earth, Luna, the Lagrange stations were all glowing gold. The naval ships that formed the blockade that intercepted and destroyed the Free Navy’s follow-up attacks were in green. A separate model showed the inner system—Sol, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and the major Belt stations like Ceres and Pallas—with a scattering of red dots like the lesions of a rash.
“The red’s Free Navy,” Avasarala said. In person, her voice sounded raspy, like she’d been coughing. Holden couldn’t tell if she’d only been talking too much or if she’d been breathing in Lunar fines: dust too small to be stopped even by the best filters and that still made the station air stink of gunpowder. “We’ve been tracking their movements. There’s an anomaly. This one.”
She prodded her hand terminal, and the two displays merged, one expanding, the other shrinking, until they showed the same stretch of space. The red dot stood off apart from the stations and planets, floating in a vast emptiness where the orbital mechanics left it mostly alone. Naomi leaned forward, fighting to keep her eyes focused. She was too tired for this.
“What’s that doing out there?” Naomi asked, and her voice was clear enough.
“Spotting,” Fred said. “Its transponder’s off, but it appears to be a prospecting ship. The Azure Dragon out of Ceres. It’s crewed by radical OPA.”
“Meaning now maybe with the Free Navy. The rocks they’ve been throwing?” Holden said.
“Coordinated by that little fucker there,” Avasarala said. And then, with an exhausted shrug, “We think. What we know is this: As long as those pigfuckers can keep throwing rocks at us, we’re pinned. Our ships don’t dare move, and Marco Inaros can claim whatever the hell he wants in the outer planets.”
Smith leaned forward, speaking with his calm, almost apologetic tone. “If Chrisjen’s intelligence service is right and this ship is guiding the attacks, this is a critical target against the Free Navy. You know that Colonel Johnson, Secretary-General Avasarala, and I have been forming a joint task force? This will be their first field operation. Capture or destroy the Azure Dragon and reduce the ability of the enemy to launch assaults against Earth. Give some damn breathing room to the combined fleet.” It was the first time Holden had heard the term combined fleet, and he liked the way it sounded.
He wasn’t the only one.
“Shit,” Amos said. “And here I was enjoying being so absolutely thumb-up-the-ass useless.”
“You want a little ass-play, that’s your business,” Avasarala said. “Only you can do it in a crash couch. The Rocinante isn’t part of the fleet, so losing it won’t leave a hole in our defenses. And I understand you’ve got a few after-market add-ons—”