“Our next stop is the bank, where we’ll be finalizing the loan to sell the ship.”
“Mmhmm,” Puffer said, making it a sound of deep skepticism.
As Holden filled out the next of the endless forms, he listened to the small voices coming from Naomi’s terminal. He only caught about every third word, but the hot topic of conversation was definitely the approaching Laconian ships.
“Luna,” Naomi said.
“Something happening on Luna?”
“No, I mean, let’s try Luna first. It’ll be easy to find consulting gigs, what with all the work going on down on Earth.”
“I’m not sure I—” Holden started.
“Not you. Me. I could get consulting gigs. I like the gravity there. And you could pop down the well whenever you wanted to visit your parents.”
“True.” His parents were all pushing the centenarian mark, and while he’d been lucky and they were all in pretty good shape, he didn’t want them doing orbital launches to visit him if they could avoid it.
“And it’s all very far from this,” she said, pointing at her screen.
“Not a bad thing,” he agreed, and handed his filled-out screen back to the puffer. “But I did like the idea of living in exuberant decadence on Titan.”
“When we have enough money to do that for another three decades. Two hours,” Naomi said, and Holden didn’t need to ask what she was referring to. Two hours until the first representatives from Laconia to come through their gate in decades would arrive.
“We done here?”
The puffer agreed that they were.
“I could use a drink,” Holden said. “Let’s go get a drink and watch the big arrival on the screens in a bar or something.”
They did.
It didn’t go well.
Holden ran across the open fields of the rotating drum, heading toward the lift up to Medina’s command enter. The adrenaline pumping through his veins only seemed to
make his heart beat faster without speeding him up. It occurred to him, with a sort of surreal detachment, that this was exactly like many nightmares he’d had. He reached the lift station, pressed the call button, and willed the doors to open.
Bobbie was yelling Fire, fire, fire on the Roci’s group channel, her voice coming out of his terminal loud, but not panicky. Commanding. On the screen, Alex was sending him the Roci’s tactical display. Three of the rail guns on the hub station fired at the massive Laconian ship. The shots all hit, tearing holes in the hull, but the breaches closed almost as fast as they were created. It didn’t look like damage-control systems. It looked like it was healing.
Holden had seen that sort of nearly instantaneous repair before. But not on human technologies. It took a really bad situation and made it a nightmare.
“Bobbie,” he yelled back at the terminal. “Keep the ship—”
He didn’t get to finish, because the screen flashed white and died. Medina actually shuddered. The entire station shook and rang like a bell.
“Jim,” Naomi said, and then couldn’t finish because she was still gasping for breath from their run. She made the Belter hand signal for emergency. Should we be looking for a shelter? It was a valid question. If the Laconians started poking holes in Medina, they’d want to be in a sealed emergency compartment with its own air supply.
“Go find one,” he said. “But I need to get up to command.”
“Why?”
Another valid question. Because I’ve fought in three major wars, he thought. Because the Belters running the station are the ones that didn’t join Marco’s Free Navy, so they’ve never been in this kind of fight. They’ll need my experience. All perfectly true and probably valid reasons. But he didn’t say them out loud, because he knew Naomi would see through them instantly to the truth. Because something terrible is happening, and I don’t know how not to be in the middle of it.
The doors finally opened, and the car recognized him as a captain with union clearances and gave him access to the overrides. As they went up, the feeling of gravity slowly turned into a lurching sideways motion and then disappeared. The lift opened onto corridors that Holden remembered fighting through under heavy fire, back when humans first found their way into the ring system. That astonishing moment in human history, passing through a stable wormhole into an alien-created network of interstellar gates, had just led to a whole bunch of people deciding to shoot each other. And now, a group of people who’d been isolated from humanity for decades were rejoining society just as things seemed to be going pretty well. And what did they do? Start shooting.
Holden’s terminal gave a gentle ping and then reconnected to the network. A moment later, Alex’s face appeared.
“You still there, Cap?”