“That’s how they see it,” Fred said. He and Holden shared a quiet moment while they drank.
“Yeah,” Holden finally said. “Well, they’ve got a point. But I don’t know what they can do about it.”
“There are people trying to figure that out. But it’s ramping up.”
“Callisto and Pallas.”
“And more recently they ran an attack on Earth with an old mothballed heavy freighter.”
Holden laughed. “I haven’t read that Earth got bombed, so that must not have worked.”
“Well, it was a suicide attack, and the suicide half worked. The UN fleet in high orbit patrol reduced the freighter to gas a tenth of an AU from the planet. No damage, not much press. But it’s possible those were all preliminary. That they’re planning some big showy statement about how the Belt can’t be ignored. The thing that scares the shit out of me is that no one can figure out what it will be.”
The gently sloping main corridor of the Tycho Station habitation ring was filled with workers. Holden didn’t pay much attention to the station schedules, but he assumed the crowds passing him meant it was shift change. Either that, or an orderly evacuation with no alarms sounding.
“Yo! Holden,” someone said as they passed.
“Hey,” Holden said, not sure who he was saying it to.
Celebrity was not something he’d figured out how to handle, yet. People would point, stare, whisper to each other when he walked by. He knew it generally wasn’t intended as insult. Just the surprise people felt when someone they’d only seen on video screens before suddenly appeared in the real world. Most of the murmured conversations, when he could overhear them, consisted of Is that James Holden? I think that’s James Holden.
“Holden,” a woman walking toward him down the corridor said, “what’s up?”
There were fifteen thousand
people on Tycho, working in three different shifts. It was like a small city in space. He couldn’t remember if the woman speaking to him was someone he should know or not, so he just smiled and said, “Hey, how’s it going?”
“Same same,” she said as they passed.
When he reached the door to his apartment it was a relief that the only person inside was Naomi. She sat at the dining table, a steaming mug of tea in front of her, a distant look in her eyes. Holden couldn’t tell if she was melancholy or solving a complex engineering problem in her head. Those looks were confusingly similar.
He pulled himself a cup of water out of the kitchen tap, then sat across from her waiting for her to speak first. She looked up through her hair at him and gave him a sad smile. Melancholy, then, not engineering.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
“So I have a thing.”
“Is it a thing I can fix?” Holden asked. “Point me at the thing.”
Naomi sipped at her tea, buying time. Not a good sign, because it meant this was something she wasn’t sure how to talk about. Holden felt his stomach muscles tightening.
“That’s kind of the problem, actually,” she said. “I need to go do something, and I can’t have you involved in it. At all. Because if you are, you’ll try to fix it and you can’t do that.”
“I don’t understand,” Holden said.
“When I come back, I promise full and complete disclosure.”
“Wait. Come back? Where are you going?”
“Ceres, to start,” Naomi said. “But it may be more than that. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone.”
“Naomi,” Holden said, reaching across the table to take her hand. “You’re scaring the shit out of me right now. There’s no way you can jet off to Ceres without me. Especially if it’s something bad, and I’m getting the feeling it’s something really bad.”
Naomi put down her tea, and gripped his hand in both of hers. The fingers that had been holding the mug were warm, the others cool. “Except that is what’s happening. There’s no negotiation on this. So, either I go because you understand and will give me the space to handle this on my own, or I go because we’ve broken up and you no longer get any vote in what I do.”
“Wait, what?”