Naomi curled up against his side, putting her arms around him. He felt his muscles relaxing.

“We can’t let Monica and her crew ever know about this,” he said. Naomi’s smile was half sorrow. “What?”

“James Holden not telling everyone everything,” she said.

“This is different.”

“I know.”

“What did he say?” Naomi asked. “Did it make sense?”

“No. But it was all about death. Everything he says is about death.”

Over the course of the following weeks, the ship fell into a routine that, while not comfortable, was at least collegial. Holden spent time with the documentary crew, being filmed, showing them the ship, answering questions. What was his childhood like? Loving and complex and bittersweet. Had he really saved Earth by talking the half-aware girl who’d been the protomolecule’s seed crystal into rerouting to Venus? No, mostly that had just worked out well. Did he have any regrets?

He smiled and took it and pretended he wasn’t holding anything back. That the only thing leading him out to the Ring was his contract with them. That he hadn’t been chosen by the protomolecule for something else that he hadn’t yet begun to understand.

Sometimes, Monica turned to the others, but Alex and Naomi kept their answers friendly, polite, and shallow. Amos laced his responses with cheerful and explicit profanity until it was almost impossible to edit into something for a civilized audience.

Cohen turned out to be more than a sound engineer. The dark glasses he wore were a sonar feedback system that allowed him to create a three-dimensional model of any space he occupied. When Amos asked why he didn’t have prosthetics instead, Cohen had told them that the accident that claimed his eyes also burned the optic nerves away. The attempted nerve regrowth therapy had failed and almost killed him with an out-of-control brain tumor. But the interface that allowed his brain to translate sonar data into a working 3D landscape also made him an extraordinary visual effects modeler. While Monica spun a narrative of Holden’s life following the destruction of his ship the Canterbury, Cohen created beautiful visual renderings of the scenes. At one point, he showed the crew a short clip of Holden speaking, describing the escape from Eros after the initial protomolecule infection, all while he appeared to be moving down perfectly rendered Erosian corridors filled with bodies.

Part of Holden had almost come to enjoy the interviews, but he could only watch the Eros graphics for a few seconds before he asked Cohen to turn it off. He’d been sure that seeing it would somehow invoke Miller, but it hadn’t. Holden didn’t like the memories that came with their story. The documentary crew made accommodations, not forcing him further than he was willing to go. Their being nice about it somehow only made him feel worse.

A week out from the Ring, they caught up to the Behemoth. Monica was sitting on the ops deck with the crew when the massive OPA ship finally got close enough for the Roci’s telescopes to get a good view of her. Holden had allowed the restrictions on where the documentary crew were permitted to just sort of fade away.

They were doing a slow pan of the Behemoth’s hull when Alex whistled and pointed at a protrusion on the side. “Damn, boss, the Mormons are better armed than I remember. That’s a rail gun turret right there. And I’d bet a week’s desserts those things are torpedo tubes.”

“I liked her better when she was a generation ship,” Holden replied. He called up combat ops and told the Rocinanteto classify the new hull as the Behemoth-class dreadnought and add all the hardpoints and weapons to her threat profile.

“That’s the kind of stealing only governments can get away with,” Amos said. “I guess the OPA is a real thing now.”

“Yeah,” Alex replied with a laugh.

“Mars is making a similar claim against us,” Holden said.

“And if we’dbeen the ones to blow up their battleship before we flew off in this boat, they’d have an argument to make,” Amos said. “Last I checked, that was the bad guys, though.”

Naomi didn’t chime in. She was working at something on the comm panel. Holden could tell it was a complex problem because she was quietly humming to herself.

“You’ve been on the Nauvoobefore, right?” Monica asked.

“No,” Holden said. The Rocinantebegan rapidly throwing data onto his screen. The ship’s calculations of the Behemoth’s actual combat strength. “They were still working on it the first time I was on Tycho Station. By the time I started working for Fred Johnson, they’d already shot the Nauvooat Eros, and she was on her way out of the solar system. I did get to walk through the ship they sent to catch her, once.”

The Rocinantewas displaying puzzling projections at him. The ship seemed to think that the Behemothdidn’t have the structural strength to support the number and size of weapon hardpoints she currently sported. In fact, she seemed to think that if the OPA battleship ever actually fired two of its six capital-ship-class rail guns at the same time, there was a 34 percent chance the hull would rip apart. Just to have something to do, Holden told the Rocito create a tactical package for fighting the Behemothand send it to Alex and Naomi. Probably, they’d never need it.

“You didn’t like working for the OPA?” Monica asked. She had the little smile she got when she asked a question she already knew the answer to. Holden suspected the documentarian was also a terrible poker player, but so far he hadn’t been able to get her into a game.

“It was a mixed bag,” he said, forcing himself to smile. To be the James Holden that Monica wanted and expected. To sacrifice himself to her attention so she’d leave the others be.

“Jim?” Naomi said, finally looking up from her panel. “You know that memory leak in comms that I’ve been hunting for a month? It’s getting worse. It’s driving me nuts.”

“How bad?” Alex asked.

“Fluctuating between .0021 and .033 percent,” she said. “I’m having to flush and reboot every couple of days now.”

Amos laughed. “Do we care about that? Because I’ll raise you a power leak in the head that’s almost a whole percent.”

Naomi turned to look at him with a frown. “You didn’t tell me?”

“I’ll bet you a month’s pay it’s a worn lead to the lights. I’ll yank the fucker out when I get a chance.”

“Do those things happen a lot?” Monica asked.

“Hell no,” Alex replied before Holden could. “The Rociis solid.”

“Yeah,” Amos chimed in. “She’s so well put together, we gotta obsess over bullshit like crusty memory bubbles and shitty light bulbs just to have something to do.” The smile he aimed at Monica was indistinguishable from the real thing.

“So you didn’t really answer my question about the OPA,” Monica said, swiveling her chair to face Holden. She pointed at the threat map the Rocihad created of the Behemoth, the weapon hardpoints like angry red blisters dotting her skin. “Everything okay between you?”

“Yeah, everyone’s still friends,” Holden said. “Nothing to worry about.”

A proximity light flashed as the Behemothbounced a ranging laser off the Roci’s hull. She returned the favor. Not targeting lasers. Just two ships making sure they weren’t in any danger of getting too close.

Nothing to worry about.

Yeah, right.

Chapter Eleven: Melba

Stanni stood just behind Melba’s left shoulder, looking at the display. His palm rubbed against the slick fabric of his work trousers like he was trying to sooth a cramped quadriceps. Melba had learned to read it as a sign the man was nervous. The narrow architecture of the Cerisierput him so close to her, she could feel the subtle warmth of his body against the back of her neck. In any other context, being this close to a man would have meant they were sharing an intimate moment. Here, it meant nothing. She didn’t even find it annoying.