The Knightseemed to drift away from him, getting smaller and smaller, while he didn’t move. The illusion vanished when he turned around to look at the asteroid and felt they were hurtling toward it. He opened a channel to Naomi, but she was humming to herself as she flew, which meant she, at least, wasn’t worried. He didn’t say anything, but he left the channel open to listen to her hum.

Up close, the Scopulididn’t look all that bad. Other than the gaping hole in its flank, it didn’t have any damage. It clearly hadn’t hit the asteroid; it had just been left close enough that the microgravity had slowly reeled it in. As they approached, he snapped pictures with his suit helmet and transmitted them to the Canterbury.

Naomi brought them to a stop, hovering three meters above the hole in the Scopuli’s side. Amos whistled across the general suit channel.

“That wasn’t a torpedo did this, XO. This was a breaching charge. See how the metal’s bent in all around the edges? That’s shaped charges stuck right on her hull,” Amos said.

In addition to being a fine mechanic, Amos was the one who used explosive surgery to crack open the icebergs floating around Saturn and turn them into more manageable chunks. Another reason to have him on the Knight.

“So,” Holden said, “our friends here on the Scopulistop, let someone climb onto their hull and plant a breaching charge, and then crack them open and let all the air out. Does that make sense to anyone?”

“Nope,” Naomi said. “It doesn’t. Still want to go inside?”

If you see anything out there that seems off, don’t play hero again. Just pack up the toys and come home.

But what could he have expected? Of course the Scopuliwasn’t up and running. Of course something had gone wrong. Offwould have been not seeing anything strange.

“Amos,” Holden said, “keep that gun out, just in case. Naomi, can you make us a bigger hole? And be careful. If anything looks wrong, back us off.”

Naomi brought the mech in closer, nitrogen blasts no more than a white breath on a cold night. The mech’s welding torch blazed to life, red hot, then white, then blue. In silence, the mech’s arms unfurled—an insectile movement—and Naomi started cutting. Holden and Amos dropped to the ship’s surface, clamping on with magnetic boots. He could feel the vibration in his feet when Naomi pulled a length of hull free. A moment later the torch turned off, and Naomi blasted the fresh edges of the hole with the mech’s fire-suppression gear to cool them. Holden gave Amos the thumbs-up and dropped himself very slowly into the Scopuli.

The breaching charge had been placed almost exactly amidships, blasting a hole into the galley. When Holden landed and his boots grabbed on to the galley wall, he could feel flash-frozen bits of food crunch under them. There were no bodies in sight.

“Come on in, Amos. No crew visible yet,” Holden called over the suit comm.

He moved off to the side and a moment later Amos dropped in, gun clutched in his right hand and a powerful light in his left. The white beam played across the walls of the destroyed galley.

“Which way first, XO?” Amos asked.

Holden tapped on his thigh with one hand and thought. “Engineering. I want to know why the reactor’s off-line.”

They took the crew ladder, climbing along it toward the aft of the ship. All the pressure doors between decks were open, which was a bad sign. They should all be closed by default, and certainly if the atmosphere-loss alarm had sounded. If they were open, that meant there were no decks with atmosphere left in the ship. Which meant no survivors. Not a surprise, but it still felt like a defeat. They passed through the small ship quickly, pausing in the machine shop. Expensive engine parts and tools were still in place.

“Guess it wasn’t robbery,” Amos said.

Holden didn’t say, Then what was it?but the question hung between them anyway.

The engine room was neat as a pin, cold, and dead. Holden waited while Amos looked it over, spending at least ten minutes just floating around the reactor.

“Someone went through the shutdown procedures,” Amos said. “The reactor wasn’t killed by the blast, it was turned off afterward. No damage that I can see. Don’t make sense. If everyone is dead from the attack, who shut it down? And if it’s pirates, why not take the ship? She’ll still fly.”

“And before they turned off the power, they went through and opened every interior pressure door on the ship. Emptied out the air. I guess they wanted to make sure no one was hiding,” Holden said. “Okay, let’s head back up to ops and see if we can crack the computer core. Maybe it can tell us what happened.”

They floated back toward the bow along the crew ladder, and up to the ops deck. It too was undamaged and empty. The lack of bodies was starting to bother Holden more than the presence of them would have. He floated over to the main computer console and hit a few keys to see if it might still be running on backup power. It wasn’t.

“Amos, start cutting the core out. We’ll take it with us. I’m going to check comms, see if I can find that beacon.”

Amos moved to the computer and started taking out tools and sticking them to the bulkhead next to it. He began a profanity-laced mumble as he worked. It wasn’t nearly as charming as Naomi’s humming, so Holden turned off his link to Amos while he moved to the communications console. It was as dead as the rest of the ship. He found the ship’s beacon.

No one had activated it. Something else had called them. Holden moved back, frowning.

He looked through the space, searching for something out of place. There, on the deck beneath the comm operator’s console. A small black box not connected to anything else.

His heart took a long pause between beats. He called out to Amos, “Does that look like a bomb to you?”

Amos ignored him. Holden turned his radio link back on.

“Amos, does that look like a bomb to you?” He pointed at the box on the deck.

Amos left his work on the computer and floated over to look, then, in a move that made Holden’s throat close, grabbed the box off the deck and held it up.

“Nope. It’s a transmitter. See?” He held it up in front of Holden’s helmet. “It’s just got a battery taped to it. What’s it doing there?”

“It’s the beacon we followed. Jesus. The ship’s beacon never even turned on. Someone made a fake one out of that transmitter and hooked it up to a battery,” Holden said quietly, still fighting his panic.

“Why would they do that, XO? That don’t make no kinda sense.”

“It would if there’s something about this transmitter that’s different from standard,” Holden said.

“Like?”

“Like if it had a second signal triggered to go when someone found it,” Holden said, then switched to the general suit channel. “Okay, boys and girls, we’ve found something weird, and we’re out of here. Everyone back to the Knight,and be very careful when you—”

His radio crackled to life on the outside channel, McDowell’s voice filling his helmet. “Jim? We may have a problem.”

Chapter Four: Miller

  Miller was halfway through his evening meal when the system in his hole chirped. He glanced at the sending code. The Blue Frog. It was a port bar catering to the constant extra million noncitizens of Ceres that advertised itself as a near-exact replica of a famous Earth bar in Mumbai, only with licensed prostitutes and legal drugs. Miller took another forkful of fungal beans and vat-grown rice and debated whether to accept connection.

Should have seen this one coming,he thought.

“What?” he asked.

A screen popped open. Hasini, the assistant manager, was a dark-skinned man with eyes the color of ice. The near smirk on his face was the result of nerve damage. Miller had done him a favor when Hasini had had the poor judgment to take pity on an unlicensed prostitute. Since then, security detective and portside barman had traded favors. The unofficial, gray economics of civilization.