shyness they'd avoided the night before coming now in the artificial morning of the room's LEDs.
Naomi put her empty coffee cup down and touched the badly healed lump in his recently broken nose.
"Is it hideous?" Holden asked.
"No," she said. "You were too perfect before. It makes you seem more substantial."
Holden laughed. "That sounds like a word you use to describe a fat man or a history professor."
Naomi smiled and touched his chest lightly with her fingertips. It wasn't an attempt to arouse, just the exploration that came when satiation had removed sex from the equation. Holden tried to remember the last time the cold sanity following sex had been this comfortable, but maybe that had been never. He was making plans to spend the remainder of the day in Naomi's bed, running through a mental list of restaurants on the station that delivered, when his terminal began buzzing on the nightstand.
"God dammit," he said.
"You don't have to answer," Naomi replied, and moved her explorations to his belly.
"You've been paying attention the last couple months, right?" Holden said. "Unless it's a wrong number, then it's probably some end-of-the-solar-system-type shit and we have five minutes to evacuate the station."
Naomi kissed his ribs, which simultaneously tickled him and caused him to question his assumptions about his own refractory period.
"That's not funny," she said.
Holden sighed and picked up the terminal off the table. Fred's name flashed as it buzzed again.
"It's Fred," he said.
Naomi stopped kissing him and sat up.
"Yeah, then it's probably not good news."
Holden tapped on the screen to accept the call and said, "Fred."
"Jim. Come see me as soon as you get a chance. It's important."
"Okay," Holden replied. "Be there in half an hour."
He ended the call and tossed his hand terminal across the room onto the pile of clothes he'd left at the foot of the bed.
"Going to shower, then go see what Fred wants," he said, pulling off the sheet and getting up.
"Should I come, too?" Naomi asked.
"Are you kidding? I'm never letting you out of my sight again."
"Don't get creepy on me," Naomi replied, but she was smiling when she said it.
The first unpleasant surprise was Miller sitting in Fred's office when they arrived. Holden nodded at the man once, then said to Fred, "We're here. What's up?"
Fred gestured for them to sit, and when they had, he said, "We've been discussing what to do about Eros."
Holden shrugged. "Okay. What about it?"
"Miller thinks that someone will try to land there and recover some samples of the protomolecule."
"I have no trouble believing that someone will be that stupid," Holden said with a nod.
Fred stood up and tapped something on his desk. The screens that normally showed a view of the Nauvoo construction outside suddenly switched to a 2-D map of the solar system, tiny lights of different colors marking fleet positions. An angry swarm of green dots surrounded Mars. Holden assumed that meant the greens were Earth ships. There were a lot of red and yellow dots in the Belt and outer planets. Red was probably Mars, then.
"Nice map," Holden said. "Accurate?"
"Reasonably," Fred said. With a few quick taps on his desk, he zoomed in on one portion of the Belt. A potato-shaped lump labeled EROS filled the middle of the screen. Two tiny green dots inched toward it from several meters away.
"That is the Earth science vessel Charles Lyell moving toward Eros at full burn. She's accompanied by what we think is a Phantom-class escort ship."
"The Roci's Earth navy cousin," Holden said.
"Well, the Phantom class is an older model, and largely relegated to rear-echelon assignments, but still more than a match for anything the OPA can quickly field," Fred replied.
"Exactly the sort of ship that would be escorting science ships around, though," Holden said. "How'd they get out there so quick? And why just the two of them?"
Fred backed the map up until it was a distant view of the entire solar system again.
"Dumb luck. The Lyell was returning to Earth from doing non-Belt asteroid mapping when it diverted course toward Eros. It was close; no one else was. Earth must have seen a chance to grab a sample while everyone else was figuring out what to do."
Holden looked over at Naomi, but her face was unreadable. Miller was staring at him like an entomologist trying to figure out exactly where the pin went.
"So they know, then?" Holden said. "About Protogen and Eros?"
"We assume so," Fred said.
"You want us to chase them away? I mean, I think we can,