BY JAMES S. A. COREY

The Expanse 

Leviathan Wakes

Caliban’s War

Abaddon’s Gate

Cibola Burn

Nemesis Games

Babylon’s Ashes

The Expanse short fiction 

The Butcher of Anderson Station

Gods of Risk

The Churn

The Vital Abyss

COPYRIGHT

Published by Orbit

978-0-3565-0428-5

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. 

Copyright © 2016 by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

ORBIT

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DZ

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

To Matt, Hallie, and Kenn, who get none of the credit and make everything possible

Prologue: Namono

The rocks had fallen three months ago, and Namono could see some blue in the sky again. The impact at Laghouat – first of the three strikes that had broken the world – had thrown so much of the Sahara into the air that she hadn’t seen the moon or stars for weeks. Even the ruddy disk of the sun struggled to penetrate the filthy clouds. Ash and grit rained down on Greater Abuja until it piled up in drifts, changing her city to the same yellow-gray as the sky. Even as she’d helped the volunteer teams to clear the rubble and care for the injured, she’d understood that her wracking cough and the black phlegm she spat out came from breathing in the dead.

Three and a half thousand kilometers stretched between the crater where Laghouat had been and Abuja. The shock wave still had blown out windows and collapsed buildings. Two hundred dead in the city, the newsfeeds said, four thousand wounded. The medical clinics were swamped. If you were not in immediate distress, please stay home.

The power grid degraded quickly. There was no sun to drive the solar panels, and the gritty air fouled the wind farms faster than the teams could clean them. By the time a fusion reactor was trucked north from the yards at Kinshasa, half of the city had spent fifteen days in the dark. With the hydroponic houses and hospitals and government buildings taking precedence, there were still brownouts more days than not. Network access through their hand terminals was spotty and unreliable. Sometimes they were cut off from the world for days at a time. It was to be expected, she told herself, as if any of this could have been foreseen.

And still, three months in, there came a break in the vast, blindfolded sky. As the reddened sun slid toward the west, the city lights of the moon appeared in the east, gems on a field of blue. Yes, it was tainted, dirty, incomplete, but it was blue. Nono took comfort in it as she walked.

The international district was recent, historically speaking. Few of the buildings were over a hundred years old. A previous generation’s fondness for wide thoroughfares between thin, mazy streets and curved, quasi-organic architectural forms marked the neighborhoods. Zuma Rock stood above it all, a permanent landmark. The ash and dust might streak the stone, but they could not change it. This was Nono’s hometown. The place she’d grown up, and the place she’d brought her little family back to at the end of her adventures. The home of her gentle retirement.

She coughed out a bitter laugh, and then she just coughed.

The relief center was a van parked at the edge of a public park. It had a leafy trefoil icon on its side, the logo of the hydroponic farm. Not the UN, not even basic administration. The layers of bureaucracy had been pressed thin by the urgency of the situation. She knew she should have been grateful. Some places, vans didn’t come at all.

The pack of dust and ash had made a crust over the gently sloping hills where the grass had been. Here and there, jagged cracks and furrows like vast snake tracks showed where children had tried to play anyway, but no one was sliding down it now. There was only the forming queue. She took her place in it. The others that waited with her had the same empty stare. Shock and exhaustion and hunger. And thirst. The international district had large Norwegian and Vietnamese enclaves, but no matter the shade of their skin or the texture of their hair, ash and misery had made a single tribe of them all.

The side of the van slid open, and the queue shifted in anticipation. Another week’s rations, however thin they might be. Nono felt a little stab of shame as her turn came near. She’d lived her whole life without ever needing basic. She was one of those who provided for others, not one who needed support. Except that she needed support now.

She reached the front. She’d seen the man handing out the packs before. He had a wide face, brown speckled with black freckles. He asked her address, and she gave it. A moment’s fumbling later, he held out a white plastic pack to her with the practiced efficiency of an automaton, and she took it. It felt terribly light. He only made eye contact with her when she failed to move away.

“I have a wife,” Namono said. “A daughter.”

A flash of raw anger rose in his eyes, hard as a slap. “If they can make the oats grow faster or conjure rice out of thin air, then do send them to us. Else, you’re holding us up.”

She felt tears welling up in her eyes, stinging them.

“One to a household,” the man snapped. “Move on.”

“But —”

“Go on!” he shouted, snapping his fingers at her. “There’s people behind you.”

She stepped away and heard him mutter something obscene at her as she left. Her tears weren’t thick. Hardly enough to wipe away. It was only that they stung so much.

She tucked her relief pack under her arm and, as soon as her eyes had recovered enough to see, put down her head and started home again. She couldn’t linger. There were others more desperate or less principled than herself who were waiting at the corners and in the doorways for the chance to steal water filters and food from the unwary. If she didn’t walk with purpose, they might mistake her for a victim. For a few blocks, her starved and exhausted mind entertained itself with fantasies of fighting off thieves. As if the catharsis of violence might somehow bring her to peace.

When she’d left their rooms, she’d promised Anna that she’d stop by Old Gino’s on the way home and make sure the elderly man was getting to the relief van. But when she reached the turn, she kept going straight. Weariness was already sucking at her marrow, and the prospect of propping the old man up and going back through the queue with him was more than she could face. She’d say she forgot. It would almost be true.

At the curve that led from the wide avenue into the residential cul-de-sac that was home, she found the violent fantasies in her mind had shifted. The men she imagined herself beating until they apologized and begged her forgiveness weren’t thieves, but the freckled relief man. If they can make the oats grow faster. What was that supposed to mean, anyway? Had he been joking about using their bodies as fertilizer? Had he dared to make a threat against her family? Who in hell did he think he was?

No, a voice said in her mind, as clearly as if Anna had been there to speak the words. No, he was angry because he wanted to help more, and he couldn’t. Knowing that all you can give isn’t enough is its own burden. That was all. Forgive him.

Namono knew that she should, but she didn’t.

Their house was small. A half dozen rooms pressed together like a child squeezing a handful of damp sand. Nothing quite lined up; no corner was perfectly square. It gave the space the feel of something natural – a cave or a grotto – more than something built. She paused before she opened the door, trying to clear her mind. The setting sun had fallen behind Zuma Rock, and the grit and smoke in the air showed where the wide beams of light streamed past it. It looked like the stone had a halo. And in the darkening sky, a pinpoint of light. Venus. Tonight, there might be stars. She latched onto the thought like a lifeboat in the sea. There might be stars.

Inside, the house was clean. The rugs had been shaken out, the brick floors swept. The air smelled of lilac thanks to the little sachet-and-candle that one of Anna’s parishioners had brought them. Namono wiped away the last of her tears. She could pretend the redness in her eyes was only the outside air. Even if they didn’t believe her, they could pretend to.

“Hello?” she called. “Is anyone home?”

Nami squeaked from the back bedroom, her bare feet slapping on the brick as she barreled toward the door. Her little girl wasn’t so little anymore. She came up to Nono’s armpit now. Or Anna’s shoulder. The gentle pudge of childhood was gone, and the awkward coltish beauty of adolescence was clearing its throat. Her skin was barely lighter than Nono’s and her hair was as rich and kinky, but the girl had a Russian smile.

“You’re back!”

“Of course I am,” Nono said.

“What did we get?”

Namono took the white relief package and pressed it into her daughter’s hands. With a smile that was like complicity, she leaned close. “Why don’t you go find out, and then come tell me?”

Nami grinned back and loped off to the kitchen as if the water recyclers and fast-grown oats were a brilliant present. The girl’s enthusiasm was vast and partly sincere. The other part was to show her mothers that she was all right, that they didn’t need to worry for her. So much of their strength – all their strengths – grew from trying to protect each other. She didn’t know if that made it better or worse.

In the bedroom, Anna lay on her cushions. A thick volume of Tolstoy rested beside her, its spine bent by being reread. War and Peace. Her complexion was grayish and drawn. Nono sat beside her carefully, putting her hand on the exposed skin of her wife’s right thigh just above where her knee had been crushed. The skin didn’t feel hot anymore, and it wasn’t stretched drum-tight. Those had to be good signs.

“The sky was blue today,” Nono said. “There may be stars out tonight.”

Anna smiled her Russian smile, the one her wife’s genes had also given Nami. “That’s good, then. Improvement.”

“God knows there’s room for it,” Namono said, regretting the discouragement in her voice even as she spoke. She tried to soften it by taking Anna’s hand. “You’re looking better too.”

“No fever today,” Anna said.

“None?”

“Well, only a little.”

“Many guests?” she asked, trying to keep her tone light. After Anna’s injury, her parishioners had made such a fuss, bringing by tokens and offers of support until it was impossible for Anna to rest. Namono had put her foot down and sent them away. Anna had allowed it mostly, she thought, because it also kept her flock from giving away the supplies they couldn’t afford to do without.

“Amiri came by,” Anna said.

“Did he? And what did my cousin want?”

“We’re having a prayer circle tomorrow. Only about a dozen people. Nami helped clean the front room for it. I know I should have asked you first, but…”

Anna nodded at her distended, swollen leg as if her inability to stand at the pulpit was the worst thing that had happened to her. And maybe it was.

“If you’re strong enough,” Namono said.

“I’m sorry.”

“I forgive you. Again. Always.”

“You’re good to me, Nono.” Then, softly so that Nami couldn’t hear them, “There was an alert while you were out.”

Namono’s heart went cold. “Where’s it going to hit.”

“It won’t. They got it. But…”

The silence carried it. But there had been another one. Another rock thrown down the gravity well toward the fragile remnants of the Earth.

“I didn’t tell Nami,” Anna said, as if protecting their child from the fear was another sin that required forgiveness.

“It’s all right,” Namono said. “I will if we need to.”

“How is Gino?”

I forgot floated at the back of Namono’s throat, but she couldn’t speak the lie. To herself, maybe, but Anna’s clear eyes forbade it. “I’m going there next.”

“It’s important,” Anna said.

“I know. It’s just that I’m so tired —”

“That’s why it’s important,” Anna said. “When the crisis comes, we all pull together naturally. It’s easy then. It’s when things drag on too long that we have to make the effort. We need to make sure everyone sees we’re all in this together.”

Unless another rock came and the Navy didn’t catch it in time. Unless the hydroponics collapsed under the strain and they all went hungry. Unless the water recyclers failed. Unless a thousand different things happened, any one of which meant death.

But even that wouldn’t be failure for Anna. Not as long as they were all good and kind to each other. If they helped carry each other gently into the grave, Anna would feel she was following her calling. Perhaps she was right.

“Of course,” Namono said. “I just wanted to bring the supplies back to you first.”

Nami rushed in a moment later, a water recycler in either hand. “Look! Another glorious week of drinking cleaned-up piss and filthy rainwater!” she said with a grin, and it struck Namono for the millionth time what a perfect distillation of her mothers their daughter could be.

The rest of the package was oatmeal pucks ready to be cooked, packets of something that claimed in Chinese and Hindi to be chicken stroganoff, and a handful of pills. Vitamins for all of them. Painkillers for Anna. So that was something.

Namono sat with her wife, holding her hand until Anna’s eyelids began to droop and her cheeks took on the softness that spoke of coming sleep. Through the window, the last of the twilight glowed red, fading to gray. Anna’s body relaxed a degree. The tightness in her shoulders released. The furrows in her brow smoothed. Anna didn’t complain, but the pain of her injury and the stress of being suddenly crippled had mixed with the fear they all shared. It was a pleasure to watch it all fall away, if only for a moment. Anna was always a handsome woman, but when she slept, she was beautiful.

Nono waited until her wife’s breath was deep and regular before she rose from the bedside. She was almost to the door when Anna spoke, her voice rusty with sleep.

“Don’t forget Gino.”

“Going there now,” Nono said softly, and Anna’s breath went back to its deep sleep-slow tide.

“Can I come too?” Nami asked as Nono went back to their street door. “The terminals are down again, and there’s nothing to do here.”

Nono considered It’s too dangerous out there and Your mother might need you, but her daughter’s eyes were so hopeful. “Yes, but put your shoes on.”

The walk back to Gino’s was a dance in shadows. Enough sunlight had struck the emergency lights’ solar panels that half the houses they passed were glowing a little from within. Not much more than a candle’s brightness, but more than there had been. The city itself was still black. No streetlights, no glow in the skyscrapers, and only a few bright points along the sinuous length of the arcology to the south.

Namono had the sudden, powerful memory of being younger than her own daughter was now and going up to Luna for the first time. The utter brilliance of the stars and the starkly beautiful Milky Way. Even with the dust grit still in the high air above them, there were more stars out now than when the light pollution of the city had drowned them. The moon shone: a crescent of silver cupping a webwork of gold. She took her daughter’s hand.

The girl’s fingers seemed so thick, so solid compared to what they had once been. She was growing up. Not their little baby anymore. There had been so many plans for her university and traveling together. All of them gone now. The world they’d thought they were raising her in had vanished. She felt a twinge of guilt about that, as if there were something that she could have done to stop all this from happening. As if it were somehow her fault.

In the deepening darkness, there were voices, though not so many as there had been. Before, there had been some nightlife in the quarter. Pubs and street performers and the hard, rattling music recently come into fashion that clattered out into the street like someone spilling bricks. Now people slept when the darkness came and rose with the light. She caught the smell of something cooking. Strange how even boiled oats could come to mean comfort. She hoped that Old Gino had gone to the van, or that one of Anna’s parishioners had gone for him. Otherwise Anna would insist that he take part of their supplies, and Namono would let her.

But it hadn’t happened yet. No need to call for trouble before it came. There was enough on the road already. When they reached the turn to Old Gino’s street, the last of the sunlight was gone. The only sign that Zuma Rock was even there was a deeper darkness rising up thousands of meters above the city. The land itself raising a defiant fist to the sky.

“Oh,” Nami said. Not even a word so much as the intake of breath. “Did you see it?”

“See what?” Namono asked.

“Shooting star. There’s another one. Look!”

And yes, there among the fixed if flickering stars, a brief streak of light. And then another. While they stood there, hand in hand, a half dozen more. It was all she could do not to turn back, not to push her daughter into the shelter of a doorway and try to cover her. There had been an alert, but the remnants of the UN Navy had caught this one. These smears of fire across the upper atmosphere might not even be the debris from it. Or they might.

Either way, shooting stars had been something beautiful once. Something innocent. They would not be again. Not for her. Not for anyone on Earth. Every bright smear was a whisper of death. The hiss of a bullet. A reminder as clear as a voice. All of this can end, and you cannot stop it.

Another streak, bright as a torch, that bloomed out into a silent fireball as wide as her thumbnail.

“That was a big one,” Nami said.

No, Namono thought. No it wasn’t.

Chapter One: Pa

“You have no fucking right to this!” the owner of the Hornblower shouted, not for the first time. “We worked for what we have. It’s ours.”

“We’ve been over this, sir,” Michio Pa, captain of the Connaught, said. “Your ship and its cargo are under conscript order of the Free Navy.”

“Your relief effort bullshit? Belters need supplies, let them buy some. Mine is mine.”

“It’s needed. If you’d cooperated with the order —”

“You shot us! You broke our drive cone!”

“You tried to evade us. Your passengers and crew —”

“Free Navy, my fucking ass! You’re thieves. You’re pirates.”

At her left, Evans – her XO and the most recent addition to her family – grunted like he’d been hit. Michio glanced at him, and his blue eyes were there to meet her. He grinned: white teeth and a too-handsome face. He was pretty, and he knew it. Michio muted her microphone, letting the stream of invective pour from the Hornblower without her, and nodded him on. What is it?

Evans pointed a thumb toward the console. “So angry,” he said. “Like to hurt a poor coyo’s feelings, he goes on like that.”

“Be serious,” Michio said, but through a smile.

“Am serious. Fragé bist.”

“Fragile. You?”

“In my heart,” Evans said, pressing a palm to his sculpted chest. “Little boy, me.”

On the speaker, the owner of the Hornblower had worked himself into a deeper froth. To hear him tell it, Pa was a thief and a whore and the kind of person who didn’t care whose babies died so long as she got her payday. If he was her father, he’d kill her instead of letting her dishonor her family. Evans snickered.

Despite herself, Michio laughed too. “Did you know your accent gets thicker when you flirt?”

“Yeah,” Evans said. “I’m just a complex tissue of affectation and vice. Took your mind off him, though. You were starting to lose your temper.”

“Not done losing it yet,” she said, and turned the mic back to live. “Sir. Sir! Can we at least agree that I’m the pirate who’s offering to lock you in your cabin for the trip to Callisto instead of throwing you into space? Would that be all right?”

There was a moment of stunned silence on the radio, then a roar of incoherent rage that resolved into phrases like drink your fucking Belter blood and kill you if you try. Michio lifted three fingers. Across the command deck, Oksana Busch waved her own hand in acknowledgment and tapped the weapons controls.

The Connaught wasn’t a Belter ship. Not originally. She’d been built by the Martian Congressional Republic Navy, and she’d come equipped with a wide variety of military and technical expert systems. They’d been on it for the better part of a year now, training in secret at first. And then when the day came, leading her into the fray. Now Michio watched her own monitor as the Connaught identified and targeted six places on the floating cargo ship where a stream of PDC fire or a well-placed missile would peel open the hull. The targeting lasers came on, painting the Hornblower. Michio waited. Evans’ smile was a little less certain than it had been. Slaughtering civilians wasn’t his first choice. In fairness, it wasn’t what Michio would have picked either, but the Hornblower wasn’t going to make its journey through the gates and out to whatever alien planet they’d thought to colonize. The negotiation now was only what the terms of that failure would be.

“Want to fire, bossmang?” Busch asked.

“Not yet,” Michio said. “Watch that drive. If they try to burn out of here? Then.”

“They try to burn on that busted cone, we can save the ammunition,” Busch said, derision in her voice.

“There’s people counting on that cargo.”

“Savvy me,” Busch said. Then, a moment later, “They’re still cold.”

The radio clicked, spat. On the other ship, someone was shouting, but not at her. Then there was another voice, then several, each trying to cut above the others. The report of a gun rang out, the sound of the attack pressed thin and nonthreatening by the radio.

A new voice came.

“Connaught? You there?”

“Still here,” Michio said. “To whom am I speaking, please?”

“Name’s Sergio Plant,” the voice said. “Acting captain of the Hornblower. I’m offering up our surrender. Just no one gets hurt, okay?”

Evans grinned their triumph and relief.

“Besse to hear from you, Captain Plant,” Michio said. “I accept your terms. Please prepare for boarding.”

She killed the connection.

History, Michio believed, was a long series of surprises that seemed inevitable in retrospect. And what was true of nations and planets and vast corporate-state complexes also applied to the smaller fates of men and women. As above, so below. As the OPA and Earth and the Martian Congressional Republic, so with Oksana Busch and Evans Garner-Choi and Michio Pa. For that matter, so with all the other souls who lived and worked on the Connaught and her sister ships. It was only because she sat where she did, commanded as she did, and carried the weight of keeping the men and women of her crew safe and well and on the right side of history that the smaller personal histories of the Connaught’s crew seemed to have more significance.

For her, the first surprise in the many that had brought her here was becoming part of the military arm of the Belt at all. As a young woman, she’d expected to be a systems engineer or an administrator on one of the big stations. If she’d loved mathematics more than she did, it might have happened. She’d put herself through upper university because she thought she was supposed to, and failed because it had been a horrible fit. When the counselors sent her the message that she was being disenrolled, it had been a shock. Looking back, it was obvious. The clarifying lens of history.

She’d fit better with the OPA, or at least the arm of it she’d joined. Within the first month, it became clear that the Outer Planets Alliance was less the unified bureaucracy of the revolution than a kind of franchise title adopted by the people of the Belt who thought that something like it should exist. The Voltaire Collective considered itself OPA, but so did Fred Johnson’s group based on Tycho Station. Anderson Dawes acted as governor of Ceres under the split circle, and Zig Ochoa opposed him under the same symbol.

For years, Michio had styled herself as a woman with a military career, but with an awareness in the back of her mind that her chain of command was a fragile thing. There was a time it had made her reflexively protective of authority – her authority over her subordinates and the authority of her superiors over her. It was what put her in the XO’s chair of the Behemoth. What put her in the slow zone when humanity first passed through the gate and into the hub of the thirteen-hundred-world empire to which they were heir. It was what had gotten her lover, Sam Rosenberg, killed. After that, her faith in command structures had become a little less absolute.

Once again obvious in retrospect.

As to the second surprise, she couldn’t have said exactly what it was. Falling into a collective marriage or her recruitment by Marco Inaros or taking possession of her new ship and its revolutionary mission with the Free Navy. Lives had more turning points than seams of ore, and not every change was obvious, even looking back.

“Boarding team’s ready,” Carmondy said, his voice flattened by the suit mic. “You want us to breach?”

As the leader of the assault team, Carmondy was technically in a different branch of command than Michio, but he’d deferred to her as soon as he and his soldiers had come aboard. He’d lived on Mars for a few years, wasn’t part of the plural marriage that formed the core of the Connaught’s crew, and was professional enough to accept his status as an outsider. She liked him for that, if little else.

“Let’s let them be nice,” Michio said. “If they start shooting at us, do what needs doing.”

“Savvy,” Carmondy said, and then switched channels.

Both ships were on the float now, so she couldn’t lean back in her crash couch. If she’d been able to, she would have.

When the news had come out that the Free Navy was taking control of the system and that the ring gate was closed to through traffic, the fleet of colony ships on the burn for the new worlds beyond faced a choice. Stand down and give their supplies over for redistribution to the stations and ships most in need, and they would be allowed to keep their ships. Run, and they wouldn’t.

The Hornblower – like who knew how many others – had done the calculation and decided the risk was worth the reward. They’d killed their transponders, spun their ship, and burned like hell, but briefly. Then spun again, burned again, spun again, burned. Hotaru, they called it. The strategy of going bright only for a moment, and then going dark in hopes that the vastness of space would conceal them until the political situation changed. The ships had enough food and supplies to last the would-be colonists for years. The volume of the system was so massive that if they avoided detection at the front, finding them later could be the work of lifetimes.

The Hornblower’s drive plume had been detected by Free Navy arrays on Ganymede and Titan both. The thing she hated most was that the chase had led them up out of the plane of the ecliptic. The vast majority of the sun’s heliosphere extended above and below the thin disk where the planets and the asteroid belt spun in their orbits. Michio had a superstitious dislike of those reaches, the huge emptiness that, in her mind, loomed above and below human civilization.

The ring gate and the unreal space beyond it might be stranger – were stranger – but her unease about traveling outside the ecliptic had been with her since childhood. It was part of her personal mythology, and a herald of bad luck.

She set her monitor to show the boarding team’s suit cameras and play soft music. The Hornblower, as seen through twenty different perspectives while harps and finger drums tried to soothe her. A dark-skinned Earther was in the airlock, his arms spread wide. Half a dozen of the cameras were locked on him, barrels of their weapons visible. The others shifted, watching for movement on the periphery or coming from outside the ship. The man reached up and used a handhold to flip himself around, putting his arms behind him for the zip-tie restraint. It had a sense of practice that left Michio thinking that Captain Plant – if that’s who this was – had been forcibly detained before.

The boarding team moved into the ship, its eyes and attention shifting down the corridors in teams. Movement on one screen mapped to a figure seen in another. When they reached the galley, the crew of the Hornblower floated in ranks, arms out, ready to accept whatever fate the Connaught had in store for them. Even at the very small size the individual panes had taken to fit her monitor, she could see the clinging sheen of tears creeping over the captives’ faces. Grief masks formed of saline and surface tension.

“They’re going to be fine,” Evans said. “Esá? It’s our job, yeah?”

“I know,” Michio said, her gaze fixed on the screen.

The boarding team moved through the decks, locking down control. Their coordination made them feel like a single organism with twenty eyes. The group consciousness of professionalism and drills. The command deck looked ill kept. A hand terminal and a drinking bulb on the float had been sucked against an air intake. Without thrust gravity to coordinate them, the crash couches lay at a variety of angles. It reminded her of old videos she’d seen of shipwrecks back on Earth. The colony ship was drowning in the endless vacuum.

She knew that Carmondy would be calling her before he did it, and drew the music gently down. The request came through with a polite chime.

“We’ve taken control of the ship, Captain,” he said. Two of his men were watching him say it, so she saw his lips and his jaw making the words from two angles even as she heard them. “No resistance. No trouble.”

“Officer Busch?” Michio said.

“Their firewalls are already down,” Oksana said. “Toda y alles.”

Michio nodded, more to herself than to Carmondy. “The Connaught has control of the enemy ship’s systems.”

“We’re setting a perimeter and securing the prisoners. Automatic check-in set.”

“Understood,” Michio said. Then, to Evans, “Let’s pull back far enough to be outside the blast range if it turns out they’re hiding nukes in the grain silo.”

“On it,” Evans said.

The maneuvering thrusters shifted her against her restraints, not even a tenth of a g, for the burn’s scant handful of seconds. Taking the things that other people thought they deserved to keep was dangerous work. The Connaught would watch over the boarding team of course, the ship’s gentle fingers on all their pulses. And in addition, Carmondy would ping every half hour using a onetime pad protocol. If he failed to check in, Michio would turn the Hornblower into a diffuse cloud of hot gas as a warning to the next ship. And a few thousand people on Callisto, Io, and Europa would have to hope the other Free Navy conscription missions came through.

The Belt had finally shrugged off the yoke of the inner planets. They had Medina Station at the heart of the ring gates, they had the only functioning navy in the solar system, and they had the gratitude of millions of Belters. In the long term, it was the greatest statement of independence and freedom the human race had ever made. In the short term, it was her job to see the victory didn’t starve them all to death.

For the next two days, Carmondy and his men would see that the would-be colonists were sealed on secured decks, where they could ride out the transit to a stable orbit around Jupiter. Then make a complete inventory of what had been gained by the taking of the Hornblower. Once they were done, it would still be a week before the salvage drives were in place. In that time, the Connaught would stand as guard and captor, and little enough for Michio to do but scan the darkness for other refugees.

She wasn’t looking forward to it, and she was sure the others in her marriage group weren’t either. Still, there was more than that in Oksana’s voice when she spoke.

“Bossmang. We got confirmation from Ceres.”

“Good,” Michio said, but with an uptick in her inflection that meant she’d heard whatever Oksana wasn’t saying. Oksana Busch had been her wife almost as long as the group had been together. They knew each other’s moods well.

“Got something else too. Message from himself.”

“What does Dawes want?” Michio asked.

“Not Dawes. Big himself.”

“Inaros?” Michio said. “Play it.”

“Under captain-only encrypt,” Oksana said. “I can pipe it to your cabin or your terminal if —”

“Play it, Oksana.”

Marco Inaros appeared on the monitor. From the drape of his hair, he was either on Ceres or under burn. There wasn’t enough visible background behind him to say if he was on a ship or in an office. His smile was charming and reached his warm, dark eyes. Michio felt her pulse step up a little, and told herself it was dread and not an attraction. For the most part, that was truth. He was a charismatic bastard, though.

“Captain Pa,” Marco said. “I’m glad to hear you took the Hornblower cleanly. It’s another testament to your ability. We were right to have you in command of the conscription. Things have gone well enough, we’re ready to move on to the next stages of our plan.”

Michio glanced over at Evans and Oksana. He was plucking at his beard, and she was trying not to look at Michio.

“We’ll want to route the Hornblower directly to Ceres,” Marco said. “And before that, I’m calling a meeting. Strictly inner-circle. You, me, Dawes, Rosenfeld, Sanjrani. At Ceres Station.” His grin widened. “Now that we’re running the system, there are some changes we should make, eh? The Pella says you can make it there in two weeks. It’ll be good to see you in person.”

He made a sharp Free Navy salute. The one he’d come up with. The screen went blank. The mix of confusion and distress and relief that flooded Michio’s gut wasn’t easy to make sense of. Having her mission change like that, so quickly and with so little explanation, left her on the wrong foot. And going into a meeting of the inner circle still had a little of the sense of danger that it had before the Free Navy had announced itself. Years of moving in shadows left habits of thought and feeling that were hard to step out of, even if they’d won. But at least they’d be back in the plane of the ecliptic, and not high up in the black, where ominous things happened. Bad things.

Things, a small, still voice in her head said, like being called to an unexpected meeting.

“Two weeks?” Michio asked.

“Possible,” Busch answered almost before the question was out. She’d already run the plan. “But it’ll mean burning hard. And no waiting for the Hornblower.”

“Carmondy won’t like that,” Pa said.

“What’s he going to say?” Oksana said. “It’s himself giving the order.”

“It is,” Michio agreed.

Evans cleared his throat. “So we’re going?”

Michio held up a fist. Yes. “It’s Inaros,” she said, ending the coming argument by invoking his name.

“Well. Bien,” Evans said, but the tone of his voice said something different.

“Something?” Pa asked.

“Just isn’t the first time plans changed,” Evans said, his face wrinkled with worry. He wasn’t as pretty that way, but he was her newest husband, so she didn’t point it out. Pretty men could be so fragile.

“Continue,” she said instead.

“Well, there was the money thing with Sanjrani. And the Martian prime minister wound up making it safe to Luna when half the Free Navy was trying to take him out. And I hear we tried to kill Fred Johnson and James Holden both, and both still breathing and walking free. Leaves me wondering.”

“Like maybe Marco isn’t as infallible as he plays?” Michio asked.

For a moment, he didn’t answer. She thought he might not. “Something like,” Evans finally said. “But even thinking like that feels like it might get sticky, no?”

“Something like,” Michio agreed.