But then he’d return to his apartment eight hours later and no one would be there. He was truly alone for the first time in years. Amos wouldn’t come by asking him to hit a bar. Alex wouldn’t watch the video streams sitting on his couch and making sarcastic comments to the screen. Naomi wouldn’t be there to ask about his day and compare notes on how the repairs were coming. The rooms even smelled empty.
It wasn’t something about himself he’d ever had to face before, but Holden was coming to realize how much he needed family. He’d grown up with eight parents, and a seemingly endless supply of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. When he’d left Earth for the Navy, he’d spent four years at the academy with roommates and classmates and girlfriends. Even after his dishonorable discharge, he’d gone straight to work for Pur’N’Kleen on the Canterbury and a whole new loose-knit family of coworkers and friends. Or if not family, at least people.
The only two people he’d been close with on Tycho were Fred, so busy with his political machinations he barely had time to breathe, and Sam, who’d died in the slow zone years ago. The new Sam – Sakai – was a competent engineer and seemed to take fixing his ship seriously, but had expressed no interest in any association outside of that.
So Holden spent a lot of time in bars.
The Blauwe Blome was too noisy and too filled with people who knew Naomi but not him. The places close to the docks were full of boisterous workers coming off shift and picking a fight with a famous guy seemed like a great way to blow off steam. Anyplace else with more than four people in it at a time turned into line up to have your picture taken with James Holden then ask him personal questions for an hour. So, he found a small restaurant nestled in a side corridor between a residential section and a strip of commercial shopping outlets. It specialized in what the Belters were calling Italian food and had a small bar in a back room that everyone seemed to ignore.
Holden could sit at a tiny table skimming the latest news on his hand terminal, reading messages, and finally check out all the books he’d downloaded over the last six years. The bar served the same food as the restaurant out front, and while it was not something anyone from Earth would have mistaken for Italian, it was edible. The cocktails were mediocre and cheap.
It might almost have been tolerable if Naomi hadn’t seemingly fallen out of the universe. Alex sent regular updates about where he was and what he was up to. Amos had his terminal automatically send a message letting Holden know his flight had landed on Luna, and then New York. From Naomi, nothing. She still existed, or at least her hand terminal did. The messages he sent arrived somewhere. He never got a failed connection from the network. But the successfully received message was his only reply.
After a couple weeks of his new bad Italian food and cheap cocktails routine, his terminal finally rang with an incoming voice request. He knew it couldn’t be from Naomi. The light lag made a live connection unworkable for any two people not living on the same station. But he still pulled the terminal out of his pocket so fast that he fumbled it across the room.
The bartender – Chip – said, “Had a few too many of my margaritas?”
“The first one was too many,” Holden replied, then climbed under the booth looking for the terminal. “And calling that a margarita should be illegal.”
“It’s as margarita as it gets with rice wine and lime flavor concentrate,” Chip said, sounding vaguely hurt.
“Hello?” Holden yelled at the terminal, mashing the touch screen to open the connection. “Hello?”
“Hi, Jim?” a female voice said. It didn’t sound anything like Naomi.
“Who is this?” he asked, then cracked his head on the edge of the table climbing back out and added, “Dammit!”
“Monica,” the voice on the other end said. “Monica Stuart? Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“Sort of busy right now, Monica,” Holden said. Chip rolled his eyes. Holden flipped him off, and the bartender started mixing him another drink. Probably as punishment for the insult.
“I understand,” Monica said. “But I have something I’d love to run past you. Is there any chance we can get together? Dinner, a drink, anything?”
“I’m afraid I’m on Tycho Station for the foreseeable future, Monica. The Roci is getting a full refit right now. So —”
“Oh, I know. I’m on Tycho too. That’s why I called.”
“Right,” Holden said. “Of course you are.”
“Is tonight good?”
Chip put the drink on a tray, and a waiter from the restaurant out front popped in to carry it away. Chip saw him looking at it and mouthed Want another? at him. The prospect of another night of what the restaurant laughably called lasagna and enough of Chip’s “margaritas” to kill the aftertaste felt like slow death.