“Whose?” Holden asked, dropping the exterior camera and going back to tactical. The scattering of fleet ships. The surface defenses of Ceres. The slowly approaching captured ship and its Free Navy escort.
“Oh,” Naomi said, tapping through a list of connection reports longer than her screen. “Pretty much everyone.”
“The escort ship?”
“They’re painting us too.”
On his screen, the incoming ships stuttered, the data around them updating as they killed their braking burns, appearing from behind clouds of superheated gas. The Roci’s sensor arrays checked contour and heat signatures, confirming almost instantly. The larger ship matched the Minsky—large, blocky, and awkward with communications satellites meant to bootstrap a network around an alien planet covering its sides like warts. The smaller was a Martian corvette, a generation newer than the Roci, a little lighter, streamlined for atmosphere and probably loaded with similar ordnance. Its transponder wasn’t answering.
“Hate seeing this,” Alex said. “Two good Martian-built ships squaring off? It ain’t right.”
“Well,” Holden said. “Who knows? Maybe we’re on the same side.”
“If it is a fight,” Bobbie said, “let’s win it. Permission to lock target?”
“Has it locked on us?” Holden asked.
“Not yet,” Naomi said.
“Hold off, then,” Holden said. “I don’t want to go first.”
An incoming comm request appeared on his screen from Fred Johnson, and for a confused half second, he wondered what Fred was doing on the gunship, then saw the tightbeam was coming from Ceres. When this was over, he was really going to need to sleep. He accepted the connection, and Fred appeared in a separate window on the side of his screen.
“Regretting this yet?” Fred asked.
“Only a little,” Holden said. “You?”
“I want to make something clear. If—if—you take possession of that colony ship, under no circumstances does it come within three thousand klicks of my dock. If there are people who need medical assistance on board, they stay on board and we’ll send help out to them. Nothing comes off that ship until it’s been examined, scanned, reloaded, disinfected, and sprinkled with holy water by whatever flavor of priest I can put my hands on. I’m not running Troy here.”
“Understood.”
“The only reason I’m letting you do this at all is the chance of recovering prisoners of the Free Navy alive.”
“That’s the only reason?” Holden said. “So you’ll hand all the supplies on the ship back over to the former owners instead of using them to keep Ceres alive?”
Fred’s smile was gentle and warm. “Don’t be an asshole.”
“Okay,” Bobbie said. “Now they’re painting us. Permission to return the favor?”
“Granted,” Holden said.
Bobbie said something under her breath that he couldn’t make out, but it sounded happy.
“Be careful, Holden,” Fred said again. “I don’t like anything about this.”
“Well, if it’s a trap, you can say I told you so to whatever scraps of us are left.”
“I’ve got thirty ships that’ll make sure you have a nuclear funeral pyre big enough they’d see it on Proxima Centauri in four years. You know. If anyone’s there.”
“That’s not comforting,” Holden said.
“We should open comms,” Naomi said.
“Fred? I’ve gotta go do this thing. I’ll let you know how it went when it’s done.”
Fred nodded. The connection dropped. Holden swallowed past the tightness in his throat. “How are we for range?”
“Inside effective torpedo range,” Bobbie said. “And we’ll be good for PDCs in eight minutes and ten seconds.”