you... I need you to... "
"Throw you to the wolves," she said. "Blame everything on you and get the others back to Saturn Station safely."
"Yeah," Holden said. "Don't play the hero."
She let the words hang in the air until the last of the irony leeched out of them.
"Hadn't crossed my mind, sir," she said.
"Knight, this is Captain Theresa Yao of the MCRN Donnager," said the severe-looking woman on the comm screen. "Message received. Please refrain from further general broadcasts. My navigator will be sending course information shortly. Follow that course exactly. Yao out."
Alex laughed.
"I think you pissed her off," he said. "Got the course info. They'll be picking us up in thirteen days. Give her time to really stew on it."
"Thirteen days before I'm clapped in irons and have needles shoved under my fingernails," Holden sighed, leaning back in his couch. "Well, best begin our flight toward imprisonment and torture. You may lock in the transmitted course, Mr. Kamal."
"Roger that, Cap - Huh," said Alex.
"A problem?"
"Well, the Knight just did her pre-burn sweep for collision objects," Alex said. "And we have six Belt objects on an intercept course."
"Belt objects?"
"Fast contacts with no transponder signal," Alex replied. "Ships, but flyin' dark. They'll catch us just about two days before the Donnager does."
Holden pulled up the display. Six small signatures, yellow-orange shifting toward red. Heavy burn.
"Well," Holden said to the screen. "And who the hell are you?"
Chapter Eight: Miller
Aggression against the Belt is what Earth and Mars survive on. Our weakness is their strength," the masked woman said from Miller's terminal screen. The split circle of the OPA draped behind her, like something painted on a sheet. "Don't be afraid of them. Their only power is your fear."
"Well, that and a hundred or so gunships," Havelock said.
"From what I hear," Miller said, "if you clap your hands and say you believe, they can't shoot you."
"Have to try that sometime."
"We must rise up!" the woman said, her voice growing shrill. "We have to take our destiny before it is taken from us! Remember the Canterbury!"
Miller shut the viewer down and leaned back in his chair. The station was at its change-of-shift surge, voices raised one over the other as the previous round of cops brought the incoming ones up to speed. The smell of fresh coffee competed with cigarette smoke.
"There's maybe a dozen like her," Havelock said, nodding toward the dead terminal screen. "She's my favorite, though. There're times I swear she's actually foaming at the mouth."
"How many more files?" Miller asked, and his partner shrugged.
"Two, three hundred," Havelock said, and took a drag on his cigarette. He'd started smoking again. "Every few hours, there's a new one. They aren't coming from one place. Sometimes they're broadcast on the radio. Sometimes the files show up on public partitions. Orlan found some guys at a portside bar passing out those little VR squids like they were pamphlets."
"She bust them?"
"No," Havelock said as if it was no big deal.
A week had passed since James Holden, self-appointed martyr, had proudly announced that he and his crew were going to go talk to someone from the Martian navy instead of just slinging shit and implications. The footage of the Canterbury's death was everywhere, debates raging over every frame. The log files that documented the incident were perfectly legitimate, or they were obviously doctored. The torpedoes that had slaughtered the hauler were nukes or standard pirate fare that breached the drive by mistake, or it was all artifice lifted from old stock footage to cover up what had really killed the Cant.
The riots had lasted for three days on and off, like a fire hot enough to reignite every time the air pumped back in. The administrative offices reopened under heavy security, but they reopened. The ports fell behind, but they were catching up. The shirtless bastard who Miller had ordered shot was in the Star Helix detainment infirmary, getting new knees, filling out protests against Miller, and preparing for his murder trial.
Six hundred cubic meters of nitrogen had gone missing from a warehouse in sector fifteen. An unlicensed whore had been beaten up and locked in a storage unit; as soon as she was done giving evidence about her attackers, she'd be arrested. They'd caught the kids who'd been breaking the surveillance cameras on level sixteen. Superficially, everything was business as usual.
Only superficially.
When Miller had started working homicide, one of the things that had struck him was the surreal calm of the victims' families. People who had