“Rocinante, this is Michio Pa of the Connaught. Weird to see you again, Captain Holden.”
His lips widened into a boyish grin, and to her surprise, she found herself smiling back. It wasn’t pleasure, but the giddiness of fear. Her heart tapped at her ribs like it was impatient. Trying to get her attention. I could kill him. He could kill me. Either decision would be justified. The Rocinante had a rail gun. By the time she knew he’d fired, she’d already be dead. But he probably wouldn’t. And she probably wouldn’t either.
“Weird to see you too, Captain Pa. Strange times.”
She laughed, and it sounded like someone else. Evans looked at her, concern in his eyes. She ignored him.
“Couldn’t help noticing that you’ve got some ships pointing their guns at me,” she said lightly.
“People are nervous,” Holden said.
“Was sending you supposed to be symbolic of something?”
“Nope. We just drew the short straw.”
It was eerie, speaking to someone on the other side of the fight without so much as a stutter of light delay. She wanted to flip and burn hard, get out. Every second on the float brought her closer to Ceres and the consolidated fleet and Fred fucking Johnson. Every dot on the tactical display made her itch. They were the enemy as much as Marco. But the enemy of her enemy was at least playing nice right now.
No sudden moves. Nothing without warning. They could do this.
“We’re ready to transfer control of the Minsky to you,” she said. “Her passengers are all on board confined to their quarters. I’ll send along a manifest with what supplies she’s carrying.”
Holden nodded. “So. Nothing’s going to blow up when we do this, is it? No booby traps? Because there are some smart people who think I’m pretty stupid for trusting you.”
“Plenty on my side saying the same of me. Nothing either of us can say right now’s going to change their minds. We’ll just have to try this. See what happens.”
Oksana’s voice cut through the air like a wire. “I’ve got fast-movers coming in from Ceres! Six torpedoes. Fifty seconds to impact.”
The breath left Michio’s lungs, pushed out by fear so profound it felt like calm. Open fire, all guns. Get us out of here. Whatever they were going to do, she had to order it now.
Except she was looking at Holden, and he was surprised too. Shocked, even.
Angry.
She had to give the order. She had to fire. Her family was going to die. If she fired, they’d all fire back. She had to run. Burn hard. Melt everything behind her to slag.
Stop, she thought. If we die, we die, but right now, stop.
Why was Holden angry?
“Holden?” she said, her voice trembling. “Do we have a problem?”
“Fuck yes, you have my permission,” Holden snapped, and it took her a fraction of a second to realize he wasn’t speaking to her.
“The Rocinante’s firing its PDCs,” Oksana said, her voice high and sharp. Fear was a resonance tone, and the deck rang with it.
“Lighting up our PDCs,” Evans said.
“Don’t,” Michio shouted before she knew she was going to say it. Then, in the stunned silence, “Touch those fire controls, and you will kill us all. Do you understand, Mr. Evans? Everyone you love will die, and it will be your fault.” Her husband looked at her, confusion in his eyes. His fingers hovered over the controls, twitching toward them. If she’d shot him, he couldn’t have looked more betrayed. “Oksana, what is the Rocinante firing on?”
“No no no,” Holden said. “We’re getting them. Not you. You don’t think we’re—”
“They’re targeting the missiles from Ceres. Impact in … They’re done, sir. The Rocinante shot down the attack.”
Michio nodded. Her blood rattled in her veins. Her hands shook. She was aware of the panic in her mind like listening to voices in a nearby room, but she didn’t feel it. She didn’t feel anything.
“Evans,” she said. “Put your hands down.”
Evans looked at his own fingers like he was surprised to see them there, then slowly lowered them to his sides. She watched the realization bloom in his eyes: If he’d started firing, the enemy fleet would have started firing. Maybe not the Rocinante, but everyone else. His instincts had come within a finger-tap of killing them all. He moaned the way he did when he was sick or drunk, unstrapped, and pushed off. His crash couch spun gently on its gimbals as he abandoned his post. She didn’t stop him.
On her screen, Holden was bending in toward the camera. Not much, just the little unconscious curve of someone protecting their gut. She forced her own spine to relax. Long seconds passed as she waited for another attack. Heartbeat after heartbeat, nothing came.
“Well,” she said.
“Yeah,” Holden replied.
Another moment passed. Michio heard another voice behind Holden. Naomi Nagata. The words themselves weren’t clear, but the tone of the woman’s voice could have stripped paint. So he hadn’t left her someplace safe. Fair enough. Safety might not exist now anywhere. The first hints of adrenaline crash haunted the edges of Michio’s consciousness: a faint nausea, a deepening weariness, sorrow. She ignored those too.
“Was saying,” Michio said, her voice calmer than she’d expected. “We have the Minsky and what she’s carrying. Ready to pass control over to you. Then we’re backing away before anyone else starts shooting at us.”
“That wasn’t Fred,” Holden said. “I don’t know who fired those torpedoes, but we’re going to find out.”
Michio’s lips felt heavy, solid, like she’d been carved from stone. It didn’t matter who’d pulled the trigger on the attack from Ceres. Look far enough back, and Marco Inaros would be behind it.
“I appreciate that,” she said. “You let us know when you’re ready for the remote command protocols.”
Marco’s response didn’t take an hour. He shook his head sorrowfully, looked into the camera with wide, dark eyes. The raw charisma of his presence was banked by being on a screen, but it wasn’t extinguished. Proof that the traitor Michio Pa was working with Earth. Undermining the efforts of the Free Navy to protect and rebuild the Belt. Brazenly giving aid and comfort to the enemy. His voice vibrated with indignation on behalf of his people and disgust for her collaboration with the enemy. It didn’t matter that the “enemy” included millions of Belters he’d left behind. She wondered whether that would matter to the people who watched him.
He included images of the Rocinante defending the Connaught. The final proof, if anyone needed it, that she was in bed with the people who most wanted the Free Navy and the Belt to fail.
She watched it on the command deck, a dozen responses competing in her head. She even went as far as recording one, but the words got away from her, tugged along by her anger until the woman looking back at her from the screen seemed almost as crazed as the one Marco described.
They burned away from Ceres, but not hard. The point of the exercise was to put themselves in range of the inners and not be killed. To show the other ships still loyal to her and the handful of independent ships that saw more hope in her path than Marco’s that zones of protection were possible. Fleeing her new little zone of safety as quickly as she could was what she wanted down to her marrow, but it wasn’t what she’d come here for. Wasn’t what she’d risked her ship and her family and her life to get. And so a third of a g, and then the float, reorienting, then another burn. The farther she got from Fred Johnson’s guns, the more she tried to make the Connaught hard for Marco to track.