“Hi,” Amos said. He was grinning back at her.

“Who are you?” Holden said, keeping his gun trained on her.

“My name’s Adri. Are you James Holden?”

“I can be,” Amos said, “if you want.” She smiled. Amos smiled back, but his weapon was still in a carefully neutral position.

“What’ve we got down there?” Naomi asked, her voice tense in his ear. “Do we have a threat?”

“I don’t know yet,” Holden said.

“You are, though, right? You’re James Holden,” Adri said, walking toward him. The assault rifle in his hands didn’t seem to bother her at all. Up close, she smelled like strawberries and vanilla. “ CaptainJames Holden, of the Rocinante?”

“Yes,” he said.

She held out a slim, throwaway hand terminal. He took it automatically. The terminal displayed a picture of him, along with his name and his UN citizen and UN naval ID numbers.

“You’ve been served,” she said. “Sorry. It was nice meeting you, though.”

She turned back to the door and walked away.

“What the fuck?” Amos said to no one, dropping the muzzle of his gun to the floor and rubbing his scalp again.

“Jim?” Naomi said.

“Give me a minute.”

He paged through the summons, jumping past seven pages of legalese to get to the point: The Martians wanted their ship back. Official proceedings had been started against him in both Earth and Martian courts challenging the salvage claim to the Rocinante. Only they were calling it the Tachi. The ship was under an order of impound pending adjudication, effective immediately.

His short conversation with Outer Fringe Exports suddenly made a lot more sense.

“Cap?” Alex said through the connection. “I’m getting a red light on the docking clamp release. I’m puttin’ a query in. Once I get that cleared, we can pop the cork.”

“What’s going on out there?” Naomi asked. “Are we still leaving?”

Holden took a long, deep breath, sighed, and said something obscene.

The longest layover the Rocinantehad taken since Holden and the others had gone independent had been five and a half weeks. The twelve days that the Rocispent in lockup seemed longer. Naomi and Alex were on the ship most of the time, putting inquiries through to lawyers and legal aid societies around the system. With every letter and conversation, the consensus grew. Mars had been smart to begin legal proceedings in Earth courts as well as their own. Even if Holden and the Rocislipped the leash at Ceres, all major ports would be denied them. They’d have to skulk from one gray-market Belter port to the next. Even if there was enough work, they might not be able to find supplies to keep them flying.

If they took the case before a magistrate, they might or might not lose the ship, but it would be expensive to find out. Accounts that Holden had thought of as comfortably full suddenly looked an order of magnitude too small. Staying on Ceres Station made him antsy; being on the Rocileft him sad.

There had been any number of times in his travels on the Rocithat he’d imagined—even expected—it all to come to a tragic end. But those scenarios had involved firefights or alien monstrosities or desperate dives into some planetary atmosphere. He’d imagined with a sick thrill of dread what it would be like if Alex died, or Amos. Or Naomi. He’d wondered whether the three of them would go on without him. He hadn’t considered that the end might find all of them perfectly fine. That the Rocinantemight be the one to go.

Hope, when it came, was a documentary streamcast team from UN Public Broadcasting. Monica Stuart, the team lead, was an auburn-haired freckled woman with a professionally sculpted beauty that made her seem vaguely familiar when he saw her on the screen of the pilot’s deck. She hadn’t come in person.

“How many people are we talking about?” Holden asked.

“Four,” she said. “Two camera jockeys, my sound guy, and me.”

Holden ran a hand across eight days’ worth of patchy beard. The sense of inevitability sat in his gut like a stone.

“To the Ring,” he said.

“To the Ring,” she agreed. “We need to make it a hard burn to get there before the Martians, the Earth flotilla, and the Behemoth. And we’d like some measure of safety once we’re out there, which the Rocinantewould be able to give us.”

Naomi cleared her throat, and the documentarian shifted her attention to her.

“You’re sure you can get the hold taken off the Roci?” Naomi asked.

“I am protected by the Freedom of Journalism Act. I have the right to the reasonable use of hired materials and personnel in the pursuit of a story. Otherwise, anyone could stop any story they didn’t like by malicious use of injunctions like the one on the Roci. I have a backdated contract that says I hired you a month ago, before I arrived at Ceres. I have a team of lawyers ten benches deep who can drown anyone that objects in enough paperwork to last a lifetime.”

“So we’ve been working for you all along,” Holden said.

“Only if you want to get that docking lock rescinded. But it’s more than just a ride I’m looking for. That’s what makes it reasonable that I can’t just hire a different ship.”

“I knew there was a but,” Holden said.

“I want to interview the crew too. While there are a half dozen ships I could get for the trip out, yours is the one that comes with the survivors of Eros.”

Naomi looked across at him. Her eyes were carefully neutral. Was it better to be here, trapped on Ceres while the Rociwas pulled away from him by centimeters, or flying straight into the abyss with his crew? And the Ring.

“I have to think about it,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

“I respect that,” Monica said. “But please don’t take long. If we’re not going with you, we’ve still got to go with someone.”

He dropped the connection. In the silence, the deck seemed larger than it was.

“This isn’t coincidence,” Holden said. “We just happento get locked down by Mars, and the only thing that can get us out of the docking clamps just happensto be heading for the Ring? No way. We’re being manipulated. Someone’s planning this. It’s him.”

“Jim—”

“It’s him. It’s Miller.”

“It’s not Miller. He can barely string together a coherent sentence,” Naomi said. “How is he going to engineer something like this?”

Holden leaned forward and the seat under him shifted. His head felt like it was stuffed with wool.

“If we leave, they can still take her away from us,” he said. “Once this story is done, we won’t be in any better position than we are right now.”

“Except that we wouldn’t be locked on Ceres,” Naomi said. “And it’s a long way out there. A long way back. A lot could change.”

“That wasn’t as comforting as you meant it to be.”

Naomi’s smile was thin but not bitter.

“Fair point,” she said.

The Rocinantehummed around them, the systems running through their automatic maintenance checks, the air cycling gently through the ducts. The ship breathing and dreaming. Their home, at rest. Holden reached out a hand, lacing his fingers with Naomi’s.

“We still have some money. We can take out a loan,” she said. “We could buy a different ship. Not a good one, butc It wouldn’t have to be the end of it all.”

“It would be, though.”

“Probably.”

“No choice, then,” Holden said. “Let’s go to Nineveh.”

Monica and her team arrived in the early hours of the morning, loading a few small crates of equipment that they carried themselves. In person, Monica was thinner than she seemed on screen. Her camera crew were a sturdy Earth woman named Okju and a brown-skinned Martian man who went by Clip. The cameras they carried looked like shoulder-mounted weapons, alloy casings that could telescope out to almost two meters or retract to fit around the tightest corner in the ship.