Alex nodded. I was thinking about how hard it is to break up family and about the family I broke up before, and that I need to see my ex-wife again and try to find some sort of resolution to who we were to each other and all the things we did. Seemed kind of anticlimactic now.
“Well, seeing how we’re going to be in dock for a good long time, I was thinking I might take a trip to Mars. Check in on the old digs.”
“Okay,” Holden said. “But you’ll come back before the repairs are done, right?”
Alex smiled. “Plan to.”
Chapter Three: Naomi
The Golgo table was set for opening throws, the first and second goals untouched and the field still empty. The throbbing bass line from the Blauwe Blome’s main room was a vibration in the deck and a murmur that wasn’t too loud to talk over. Naomi hefted the steel ball in her hand, feeling the subtle play between mass and weight, different at every gravity. Across from her, Malikah and her teammates from the repair crew waited. One of them was drinking a Blue Meanie, the bright azure fluid staining his mouth like lipstick. It was three years – no, four? – since Naomi had played a game of Golgo, and these people played every Thursday. Naomi hefted the ball again, sighed, and spun it. Instantly, the opposition balls sprang out to hold her short, matching her spin and trying to co-opt her throw.
It was the sort of response you played against a beginner. Naomi was rusty, but she wasn’t a beginner. The table registered, ending the throw, and Naomi’s marker appeared, well past the field’s half mark. Her team cheered, Malikah’s groaned. Everyone smiled. It was a friendly game. Not all of them were.
“Next up, next up!” one of Naomi’s new teammates shouted, waving his wide, pale hand. His name was Pere or Paar. Something like that. She retrieved the steel ball and tossed it to him. He grinned at her, his eyes only flickering down her body and back. Poor little shit. Naomi stood back, and Malikah moved to stand with her.
“You still got it,” Malikah said. She had a beautiful voice, the accents of Ceres Station mellowing the harsher tones of the deep Belt.
“Spent a lot of time playing it when I was here last,” Naomi said. “You never forget what you did when you were young, right?”
“Even if you want to.” Malikah laughed, and Naomi laughed with her.
Malikah lived in a set of rooms three levels down and thirty degrees spinward from the club. The last time Naomi had been in it, the walls had been draped with silk patterned in brown and gold and the air had been rich with the artificial sandalwood incense that wouldn’t clog the air recyclers. Naomi had slept in a bag on the deck for two nights, falling asleep to recorded harp music and the murmuring voices of Malikah and Sam. Only Sam was dead now, and Naomi was back together with Jim, and humanity was heir to a thousand suns within a two-year burn. Being there, laughing with Malikah and the repair crews, Naomi couldn’t tell if she was more astounded by how much things had changed or how little.
Malikah touched Naomi’s shoulder, her brow furrowed. “Bist ajá?”
“Was thinking,” Naomi said, falling into the rhythm of Belter slang only roughly. Golgo wasn’t the only thing she was rusty with.
Malikah’s mouth turned down at the corners even as the Golgo table erupted in shouts of glee and dismay. For a moment, Sam was there too. Not the actual woman with her red hair and cheerful obscenity and habit of using childish terms – boo-boo, owie – to describe things like meteoroid-breached hulls. Only the space where she had been, and the two women sharing the knowledge that someone was missing.
Paar-or-Pere passed the ball on to the next player – Sakai, the new chief engineer – while the opposing team clapped him mockingly on the back. Naomi moved forward to assess the damage. Being around Belters – just Belters – was weirdly comforting. She loved her crew, but they were two Earthers and a Martian. There were some conversations that she could never have with them.
She could tell when Jim arrived without turning around. The players across the table from her all looked past her as one. Their eyes went wide, and an air of excitement washed over them. No one said it, but they might as well have – Hey! Look! It’s James Holden!
It was easy to forget that Jim was who he was. He’d started two wars, and played some role in ending them both. He’d captained the first human ship through the Ring, or the first one that survived anyway. He’d been on the alien base in the center of the slow zone and come back. He’d survived Eros Station and the death of the Agatha King. He’d been to New Terra, the first human colony on a nonhuman planet, and forged a weird, awkward peace there. It was almost embarrassing, seeing everyone react to that Holden: the one on the screens and in the newsfeeds. She knew Jim was nothing like that James Holden, but there was no point saying it. Some things stayed secrets even when you told them.
“Hello my love,” Jim said, putting his arm around her. In his other hand, he had a grapefruit martini.
“For me?” she said, taking the cocktail.
“Hope so. I wouldn’t drink it on a dare.”
“Hoy, coyo!” Paar-or-Pere said, holding up the steel ball. “Want a throw?”
The laughter around the table was buoyant. Some of it was delight – James Holden playing Golgo with us! – and some was cruel – Watch the big shot suck. None of it had anything to do with the actual man. She wondered if he knew how much he changed the nature of a room just by walking into it. At a guess, he probably didn’t.
“No,” Jim said with a grin. “I’m terrible at this. Wouldn’t know where to start.”
Naomi leaned in toward Malikah. “I should go. Thank you so much for having me.” It meant I am grateful to you for letting me be here with other Belters like I belong.
“You are todamas welcome, coya-mi
s,” Malikah said. It meant, Sam’s death wasn’t your fault, and if it was I forgive you.
Naomi took Jim’s elbow and let him steer her out to the main bar. The music rose as they passed through the doorway, light and sound joining in a sensory assault. On the dance floor, people moved together in pairs or in groups. There had been a time, long before she’d met Jim, when the idea of getting very, very drunk and throwing herself into the press of bodies would have been an attractive one. She could remember the girl she used to be with fondness, but it wasn’t a youth she cared to recapture. She stood at the bar and finished her martini. It was too loud to talk, so she amused herself watching people notice Jim, the game of is-it-or-isn’t-it in their expressions. Jim, for his part, was amiably bored. The idea that he was the center of attention was foreign to him. It was part of what she loved about him.
When her glass was empty, she put her hand on his, and they pressed out to the public corridor outside the club. Men and women waiting to get in – Belters, almost to a person – watched them leave. It was night on Tycho Station, which didn’t mean much. The station was built on three rotating eight-hour shifts: leisure, work, sleep. Who you knew depended on what shift you worked, like three different cities that all occupied the same space. A world that would always be two-thirds strangers. She put her arm around Jim’s waist and pulled him in against her until she could feel his thigh moving against hers.
“We need to talk,” she said.