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Holden let that sink in. “The ones from the coup? Duarte’s people?”

“They’re not saying anything, but that’s my assumption. This could be important.”

“See they’re kept safe and treated well,” Holden said.

“Already on it,” Bobbie said and dropped the connection.

Holden shifted his monitor to the

exterior cameras and shifted the view until he could see the Giambattista, the alien station, and—far enough away that it hardly seemed like more than a shaving of metal, invisible without the Roci enhancing it—Medina Station. He folded a hand over his mouth, turned on identification markers for all the landing skiffs and jerry-rigged boats, watched the display vanish under the cloud of pale green text, turned them off again and stared into the blackness. His eyes felt gritty. It was like all the anxiety and tension that he’d built up during the burn out to the ring had collapsed. Turned into something else.

“You all right?” Naomi asked.

“I was thinking about Fred,” he said. “This? It’s what he did. Lead armies. Take stations. This is what his life was like.”

“This is what he retired from,” Naomi said. “When he decided to start trying to get people to talk things out instead of shooting people, this is what he left behind.”

“Well, let’s see how that works,” he said. He set up the camera, considered himself on his screen, and ran his fingers through his hair until he looked a little better. Still worn-out. Still tired. But better. He set the system to broadcast.

“Medina Station. This is James Holden of the Rocinante. We’re here to take administration of the station and the slow zone and the gates back from the Free Navy. If you really want, we can spend a while shooting your PDCs and torpedo arrays until they don’t work and then land all these boats. We’ve got a lot of people with guns. I figure you do too. We could all kill a bunch more of each other, but I’d really prefer that we do this without losing anyone else. Surrender, lay down arms, and I promise humane treatment for the Free Navy’s command structure and any other prisoners.”

He tried to think of something else. Something more. A sweeping speech about how they were all one species after all, and that they could shrug off the weight of history if they chose to. They could all come together and make something new, and all it would really take was doing it. But all the words he could think of sounded false and unconvincing in his mind, so he cut the feed instead and waited to see what happened.

Naomi slipped out of her crash couch, floated to the lift and down. She came back a few minutes later with a bulb of tea. Slipped back into her couch. Waited. If it went on much longer, Holden knew he’d have to launch the attack. The boats weren’t built for much more than scooting from one ship to another. They’d start running out of air and fuel before long. But maybe a few minutes more …

The response came. Clear, unencrypted radio signal, as open as his demand for surrender had been. The woman in the Free Navy uniform was on the float in a very familiar room. The religious images on the wall behind her were like symbols from a recurring dream about violence and blood and loss.

Only maybe this time would be different.

“Captain Holden. I am Captain Christina Huang Samuels of the Free Navy. I will accept the terms of your surrender on the condition that you guarantee the safety and humane treatment of my people. We reserve the right to record and broadcast your boarding action to assure that all of humanity will bear witness to your behavior. I do this out of necessity and loyalty to my people. The Free Navy is the military arm of the people of the Belt, and I will not sacrifice the lives of my people or the unaffiliated civilians of Medina Station when there is no profit to be had from it. But I myself will stand now and forever against the tyranny of the inner planets and their exploitation and slow genocide of my people.”

She saluted the camera and the message ended. Holden sighed, started up his broadcast again.

“Sounds good,” he said. “We’ll be right over.” He killed the broadcast.

“Seriously?” Alex called from above. “‘Sounds good, we’ll be right over’?”

“I may kind of suck at this job,” Holden called back.

The voice over the ship’s comm was Clarissa’s: “I thought it was sweet.”

The fall of Medina Station took twenty hours from the first OPA ships docking to the last Free Navy operative being locked in a cell. Medina’s brig wasn’t anywhere near big enough, so it was reserved for the higher officials—the command staff, the department heads, the security officers and agents. The others—mostly technicians and maintenance—were confined to their quarters with the doors locked by the station system. Which meant, in the end, by Holden. He couldn’t help feeling like he’d just sent a thousand people to their rooms to really think about what they’d done.

He set up his command post in the central security office in the drum. The spin gravity wasn’t so high it would bother Naomi, and there was something restful about being able to collapse into his chair while they watched the newsfeeds from Earth. Bobbie Draper, now the acting head of security for Medina, sprawled at her desk, legs up, hands behind her head, looking as relaxed as he’d seen her since she and Amos had come on board the Roci again. One sleeve was rolled up, and a bright, blistered burn ringed her elbow in the shape of a vac suit’s seal. She rubbed it gently. Caressed it. There was something unnervingly postcoital about her response to violence. Alex and Amos were in the next room where Naomi was combing through the station logs with an OPA engineer named Costas, arguing about something that involved yogurt and black beans. Only Clarissa hadn’t come on the station, and Holden hadn’t asked why. His memories of the Behemoth were bad enough. He couldn’t imagine hers.

On the newsfeed, The Hague looked like a battered, sepia-soaked version of itself. The sky above the UN building was white with haze, but it wasn’t dark. And Avasarala stood without a podium. Her bright-orange sari looked like a victory banner.

“The liberation of Medina means more than freeing one station from violent tyranny,” she said, reaching the crescendo of the half-hour-long speech. “It means the reopening of the path to all the colonies and all the worlds that the Free Navy tried to lock away. It means the reconnection to the motive force of history, and proof that the spirit of humanity will never bow to fear and cruelty. And yes, since you’ve all behaved so nicely, I’ll take some questions. Takeshi?”

A thin reporter in a gray suit stood up, a reed among the ranks of his professional fraternity.

“Shit,” Alex said from the doorway. “Are there reporters anywhere else, or does she have all of them?”

“Shh,” Bobbie said.

“Madam Secretary-General, you said that the attack on Earth was not an act of war but the lashing out of a criminal conspiracy. Now that you have captured prisoners, how will they be handled?”

“The conspirators will be brought to Luna and introduced to their lawyers,” Avasarala said. “Next quest—”


Tags: James S.A. Corey Expanse Horror