“Twelve hours? For what?”
“I may have renegotiated the deal a little,” he said. “I said if they turned over the governor to us for trial, there wouldn’t be a quarantine.”
Naomi lifted an eyebrow. “Does the union know about this?”
“I figured I’d send them a message when I got back here.”
“You think Drummer’ll be okay with it?”
“Cap changing the rules?” Amos said with a shrug. “That’s just a day that ends in y far as I can tell. If she didn’t leave some wiggle room for it, that’s her mistake.”
“I’m not going to hold the whole colony responsible for what a few administrators did,” Holden said. “It’s collective punishment, and it’s not the kind of thing that the good guys should do.”
“At least not without twelve hours’ warning?” Naomi said.
Holden shrugged. “This is the window they have to make a choice. If they have the chance to do something different and they still double down, I feel a little better about closing them off. At least we’ll have tried.”
“‘A little better’ meaning ‘not totally guilt-ridden.’”
“Not totally,” Holden said, lying back. The gel was cool against the back of his head and shoulders. “Still don’t love the whole cutting-people-off-from-supplies-they-need thing.”
“Should have agreed to run the union when you had the chance,” Alex said. “Then it could all be the way you wanted.”
“It’d be pretty to think so anyway,” Holden said.
Twelve hours. A night and part of a day, for Freehold. And not quite enough time for a message to go from the Roci to Medina to the office of the president of the Transport Union and come back again. If Drummer threw a fit, they’d still be burning for Medina before her message came through. He’d have given the Freeholders more time to think things through if he could have. But lightspeed was lightspeed.
It was the irony of making threats while having mass. The messages and voices, culture and conversation, could move so much more quickly than even the fastest ship. In the best case, it would have made persuasion and argument much more important. Moving ideas across the gap between planets was easy. Moving objects was hard. But it meant that whoever was on the other side had to be listening and willing to let their minds be changed. For all the other times, it was gunships and threats, same as ever.
Holden was asleep when the answer finally came.
“Wake up,” Naomi said. “We’ve got visitors.”
He wiped his eyes, swung his feet to the wall that was now temporarily the floor, ran his hands through his hair, and looked blearily at the screen. A crowd of people were outside the ship. He recognized a couple of the faces from the council meeting. And in the middle of them, Governor Houston was hog-tied in a wide, gray ceramic wheelbarrow. The relief that poured through Holden’s body was only tempered a little bit by the prospect of months on the burn with the disgraced governor on board.
He opened a connection. “This is Captain Holden of the Rocinante. Hang tight. We’ll be right out.”
“Be careful,” Naomi said. “Just because this looks like one thing, that doesn’t mean it can’t be something different.”
“Right,” he said, opening a connection to ops. “Alex? You there?”
“He’s sleeping,” Clarissa answered. “I have the PDCs warmed up, and Amos and Bobbie are on their way to the airlock. If it’s an ambush, it will be a very unsuccessful one.”
“Thank you for that,” Holden said, walking along the side of the lift shaft toward the airlock. The mixed voices of Bobbie and Amos already echoed down toward him.
“Give the sign if you need me to do more than watch,” Clarissa said, and cut the connection.
When the airlock opened and they lowered the ladder, Holden went first. A woman with sharp features and thick gray-black hair pulled back in a bun stepped out toward him.
“Captain Holden,” she said. “I’m Interim Governor Semple Marks. We’re here to accede to your government’s demands.”
“Thank you for that,” Holden said as Bobbie slid down the ladder behind him. Amos followed, his shotgun clanking as he came.
“We’re lodging a formal complaint with the union about this infringement on our sovereignty,” Marks said. “This should have been handled internally in Freehold.”
“I’ll let you take that up with the union,” Holden said. “Thank you for being willing to bend on this one. I didn’t want to quarantine your system.”
Marks’ eyes said, I think you did, but she stayed silent. Bobbie helped the prisoner to his feet. Houston’s face was gray where it wasn’t red. He seemed unsteady.
“Hey,” Amos said. A moment later, Houston seemed to find him. Amos nodded encouragement. “I’m Amos. This is Bobbie. We’ve done this kind of duty before, so there’s some rules about how this goes you’re going to want to listen to very carefully …”
Chapter Five: Drummer
Drummer didn’t want to be awake, but she was. The couch was built for the two of them, Saba and her. Acceleration gel over a frame designed to give them freedom to spoon while People’s Home, first and largest of the void cities, was spun up or under gentler thrust or to divide them if they went into an unexpected hard burn while they were asleep. Balancing to keep from shifting the couch and troubling Saba, she checked the system console in the wall nearest her bedside. It was still two hours before she needed to get up. Not long enough for a full sleep cycle. Not short enough to ignore. She was, by some measures, the most influential woman in thirteen hundred worlds, but it didn’t fix insomnia.
Saba shifted in his sleep and muttered something she couldn’t make out. Drummer put a hand on his back, petting down his spine, not sure if she hoped to quiet him back to sleep or wake him up. He picked the former, snuggling himself down into the gel the way animals in their nests had been doing since before humanity had been more than an upstart hamster trying to avoid the dinosaurs.
She smiled in the darkness and tried not to be disappointed. She needed to pee, but if she got up now, it would wake Saba for certain, and then she’d feel bad. She could suffer a little instead. People’s Home muttered around her like it was glad to have her back.
There were ways that she didn’t have a home anymore. Hadn’t since she’d accepted the presidency. Their quarters on Medina near the administration levels. The captain’s cabin of Saba’s ship, the Malaclypse. Back before she’d become the leader of the Transport Union, they’d been enough. Now she had more space devoted to her than she would ever see. Like a palace minced and scattered across light-years. Medina Station, Ganymede, Ceres, Pallas, Iapetus, Europa. The Vanderpoele, which was at her disposal as long as she held office. TSL-5 had quarters set aside for her, as would all the transfer stations when they were built. And the three void cities that made up the spine of the Belters’ dominion: Independence and Guard of Passage and People’s Home.
At rest, the central core of People’s Home stayed on the float, seventy decks of permanent facilities and infrastructure that wore the drum section like a cloak. The dock at one end, the drive at the other. Magnetic fields more powerful than a maglev track held the core separate from the drum levels and corrected when the drum spun up, holding the core stationary while the body shifted from thrust gravity to spin. The rooms and hallways in the drum were fashioned to shift, their floors orthogonal to the direction of thrust when the drive was on, their feet pointing down to the stars at a constant tenth of a g when they were at rest. Enough to make a consistent up and down, but light enough for even the most float-adapted. Not a ship, but a city that had never suffered a gravity well.