for any visible warts. Burns 'em off. Hurts like hell, but it does the job. No reason to keep it on the shuttle. Medical inventory is always so messed up."
Holden opened his mouth to speak, found nothing to say, and closed it again.
"We've got acetic acid cream," Shed said, his voice increasingly shrill, "but no elemcet for pain. Which do you think you'd need more on a rescue shuttle? If we'd found anyone on that wreck with a bad case of GW, we'd have been set. A broken bone? You're out of luck. Just suck it up."
"Look, Shed," Holden said, trying to break in.
"Oh, and look at this. No coagulant booster. What the hell? Hey, no chance anyone on a rescue mission could, you know, start bleeding. Catch a case of red bumps on your crank, sure, but bleeding? No way! I mean, we've got four cases of syphilis on the Cant right now. One of the oldest diseases in the book, and we still can't get rid of it. I tell those guys, 'The hookers on Saturn Station are banging every ice bucker on the circuit, so put the glove on,' but do they listen? No. So here we are with syphilis and not enough ciprofloxacin."
Holden felt his jaw slide forward. He gripped the side of the hatch and leaned into the room.
"Everyone on the Cant is dead," Holden said, making each word clear and strong and brutal. "Everyone is dead. No one needs the antibiotics. No one needs wart cream."
Shed stopped talking, and all the air went out of him like he'd been gut punched. He closed the drawers in the supply cabinet and turned off the inventory screen with small precise movements.
"I know," he said in a quiet voice. "I'm not stupid. I just need some time."
"We all do. But we're stuck in this tiny can together. I'll be honest, I came down here because Naomi is worried about you, but now that I'm here, you're freaking me the hell out. That's okay, because I'm the captain now and it's my job. But I can't have you freaking Alex or Amos out. We're ten days from being grabbed by a Martian battleship, and that's scary enough without the doctor falling apart."
"I'm not a doctor, I'm just a tech," Shed said, his voice very small.
"You're our doctor, okay? To the four of us here with you on this ship, you're our doctor. If Alex starts having post-traumatic stress episodes and needs meds to keep it together, he'll come to you. If you're down here jabbering about warts, he'll turn around and go back up to the cockpit and just do a really bad job of flying. You want to cry? Do it with all of us. We'll sit together in the galley and get drunk and cry like babies, but we'll do it together where it's safe. No more hiding down here."
Shed nodded.
"Can we do that?" he said.
"Do what?" Holden asked.
"Get drunk and cry like babies?"
"Hell yes. That is officially on the schedule for tonight. Report to the galley at twenty hundred hours, Mr. Garvey. Bring a cup."
Shed started to reply when the general comm clicked on and Naomi said, "Jim, come back up to ops."
Holden gripped Shed's shoulder for a moment, then left.
In ops, Naomi had the comm screen up again and was speaking to Alex in low tones. The pilot was shaking his head and frowning. A map glowed on her screen.
"What's up?" Holden asked.
"We're getting a tightbeam, Jim. It locked on and started transmitting just a couple minutes ago," Naomi replied.
"From the Donnager?" The Martian battleship was the only thing he could think of that might be inside laser communications range.
"No. From the Belt," Naomi said. "And not from Ceres, or Eros, or Pallas either. None of the big stations."
She pointed at a small dot on her display.
"It's coming from here."
"That's empty space," Holden said.
"Nope. Alex checked. It's the site of a big construction project Tycho is working on. Not a lot of detail on it, but radar returns are pretty strong."
"Something out there has a comm array that'll put a dot the size of your anus on us from over three AU away," Alex said.
"Okay, wow, that's impressive. What is our anus-sized dot saying?" Holden asked.
"You'll never believe this," Naomi said, and turned on the playback.
A dark-skinned man with the heavy facial bones of an Earther appeared on the screen. His hair was graying, and his neck was ropy with old muscle. He smiled