“Don’t worry, Boss, you can bunk with me,” Amos said with a wink at Naomi.

Naomi just smiled faintly.

“Okay, Fred, we’re off the street,” she said. “Now answer the captain’s questions.”

Fred nodded, then stood up and cleared his throat. He seemed to review something. When he spoke, the conversational facade was gone. His voice carried a grim authority.

“War between the Belt and Mars is suicide. Even if every rock hopper in the Belt were armed, we still couldn’t compete with the Martian navy. We might kill a few with tricks and suicide runs. Mars might feel forced to nuke one of our stations to prove a point. But we can strap chemical rockets onto a couple hundred rocks the size of bunk beds and rain Armageddon down on Martian dome cities.”

Fred paused, as if looking for words, then sat back down on his chair.

“All of the war drums ignore that. It’s the elephant in the room. Anyone who doesn’t live on a spaceship is structurally vulnerable. Tycho, Eros, Pallas, Ceres. Stations can’t evade incoming missiles. And with all of the enemy’s citizens living at the bottom of huge gravity wells, we don’t even have to aim particularly well. Einstein was right. We will be fighting the next war with rocks. But the Belt has rocks that will turn the surface of Mars into a molten sea.

“Right now everyone is still playing nice, and only shooting at ships. Very gentlemanly. But sooner or later, one side or the other will be pressed to do something desperate.”

Holden leaned forward, the slick surface of his environment suit making an embarrassing squeak on the leather textured chair. No one laughed.

“I agree. What does that have to do with us?” he asked.

“Too much blood has already been shed,” Fred said.

Shed.

Holden winced at the bleak, unintentional pun but said nothing.

“The Canterbury,” Fred continued. “The Donnager.People aren’t just going to forget about those ships, and those thousands of innocent people.”

“Seems like you just crossed off the only two options, Chief,” Alex said. “No war, no peace.”

“There’s a third alternative. Civilized society has another way of dealing with things like this,” Fred said. “A criminal trial.”

Amos’ snort shook the air. Holden had to fight not to smile himself.

“Are you fucking serious?” Amos asked. “And how do you put a goddamn Martian stealth ship on trial? Do we go question all the stealth ships about their whereabouts, double-check their alibis?”

Fred held up a hand.

“Stop thinking of the Canterbury’s destruction as an act of war,” he said. “It was a crime. Right now, people are overreacting, but once the situation sinks in, heads will cool. People on both sides will see where this road goes and look for another way out. There is a window where the saner elements can investigate events, negotiate jurisdiction, and assign blame to some party or parties that both sides can agree to. A trial. It’s the only outcome that doesn’t involve millions of deaths and the collapse of human infrastucture.”

Holden shrugged, a gesture barely visible in his heavy environment suit.

“So it goes to a trial. You still aren’t answering my question.”

Fred pointed at Holden, then at each of the crew in turn.

“You’re the ace in the hole. You four people are the only eyewitnesses to the destruction of bothships. When the trial comes, I need you and your depositions. I have influence already through our political contacts, but you can buy me a seat at the table. It will be a whole new set of treaties between the Belt and the inner planets. We can do in months what I’d dreamed of doing in decades.”

“And you want to use our value as witnesses to force your way into the process so you can make those treaties look the way you want them to,” Holden said.

“Yes. And I’m willing to give you protection, shelter, and run of my station for as long as it takes to get there.”

Holden took a long, deep breath, got up, and started unzipping his suit.

“Yeah, okay. That’s just self-serving enough I believe it,” he said. “Let’s get settled in.”

  Naomi was singing karaoke. Just thinking about it made Holden’s head spin. Naomi. Karaoke. Even considering everything that had happened to them over the past month, Naomi up onstage with a mic in one hand and some sort of fuchsia martini in the other, screaming out an angry Belt-punk anthem by the Moldy Filters, was the strangest thing he’d ever seen. She finished to scattered applause and a few catcalls, then staggered off the stage and collapsed across from him in the booth.

She held up her drink, sloshing a good half of it onto the table, then threw the other half back all at once.

“Whadja think?” Naomi asked, waving at the bartender for another.

“It was terrible,” Holden replied.

“No, really.”

“It was truly one of the most awful renditions of one of the most awful songs I’ve ever heard.”

Naomi shook her head, blowing an exasperated raspberry at him. Her dark hair fell across her face and, when the bartender brought her a second brightly colored martini, foiled all her attempts at drinking. She finally grabbed her hair and held it above her head in a clump while she drank.

“You don’t get it,” she said. “It’s supposedto be awful. That’s the point.”

“Then it was the best version of that song I’ve ever heard,” Holden said.

“Damn straight.” Naomi looked around the bar. “Where’re Amos and Alex?”

“Amos found what I’m pretty sure was the most expensive hooker I’ve ever seen. Alex is in the back playing darts. He made some claims about the superiority of Martian darts players. I assume they’re going to kill him and throw him out an airlock.”

A second singer was onstage, crooning out some sort of Vietnamese power ballad. Naomi watched the singer for a while, sipping her drink, then said, “Maybe we should go save him.”

“Which one?”

“Alex. Why would Amos need saving?”

“Because I’m pretty sure he told the expensive hooker he was on Fred’s expense account.”

“Let’s mount a rescue mission; we can save them both,” Naomi said, then drank the rest of her cocktail. “I need more rescue fuel, though.”

She started waving at the bartender again, but Holden reached out and grabbed her hand and held it on the table.

“Maybe we should take a breather instead,” he said.

A flush of anger as intense as it was brief lit her face. She pulled back her hand.

“You take a breather. I’ve just had two ships and a bunch of friends shot out from underneath me, and spent three weeks of dead time flying to get here. So, no. I’m getting another drink, and then doing another set. The crowd loves me,” Naomi said.

“What about our rescue mission?”

“Lost cause. Amos will be murdered by space hookers, but at least he’ll die the way he lived.”

Naomi pushed her way up from the table, grabbed her martini off the bar, and headed toward the karaoke stage. Holden watched her go, then finished off the scotch he’d been nursing for the past two hours and got up.

For a moment there, he’d had a vision of the two of them staggering back to the room together, then falling into bed. He’d have hated himself in the morning for taking advantage, but he’d still have done it. Naomi was looking at him from the stage, and he realized he’d been staring. He gave a little wave, then headed out the door with only ghosts—Ade, Captain McDowell, Gomez and Kelly and Shed—to keep him company.

  The suite was comfortable and huge and depressing. He’d lain on the bed less than five minutes before he was up and out the door again. He walked the corridor for half an hour, finding the big intersections that led to other parts of the ring. He found an electronics store and a teahouse and what on closer inspection turned out to be a very expensive brothel. He declined the video menu of services the desk clerk offered and wandered out again, wondering if Amos was somewhere inside.