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

Monica and her tea a few small crates of equipment that they carried themselves In person, Monica was thinner than she seemed on screen Her camera creere a sturdy Earth woman named Okju and a brown-skinned Martian man ent by Clip The cameras they carried looked like shoulder-s that could telescope out to alhtest corner in the ship

The sound of short white hair and opaque black glasses His teeth were yellowed like old ivory, and his s to the paperwork, his name was Elio Casti, but for some reason the docualley, Holden’s four people and Monica’s He could see each group quietly considering the other They’d be living in one another’s laps for ers trapped in a metal-and-ceramic box in the vast ocean of the vacuum Holden cleared his throat

“Welcome aboard,” he said

Chapter Seven: Melba

I

f the Earth-Mars alliance hadn’t collapsed, if there hadn’t been a war—or tars depending on how the line between battles was marked—civilian ships like the Cerisier would have had no place in the great convoy The ships lost at Ganymede and in the Belt, the skirravity well Hundreds of ships had been lost, fro, and the Hyperion to countless small three- and four-person support ships

Nor, Melba kneere those the only scars Phobos with its listening station had becoone Phoebe had been subjected to a sustained nuclear hell and pushed into Saturn The farms at Ganymede had collapsed Venus had been used and abandoned by the alien protoen and the Mao-Kski e and transport coutted, stolen, and sold

The Cerisier began her life as an exploration vessel Now she was a flying toolshed The bays of scientific equipment were machine shops now What had once been sealed labs were stacked from deck to deck with the mundane necessities of environ, sealants, and alar vacuum on the fusion plume of her Epstein drive The crew of a hundred and six souls was made of a small elite of ship command—no more than a dozen, all told—and a vast body of technicians, ht, this ship had been on the bleeding edge of huh the skies of Jovian s humanity had never seen before Noas the handservant of the govern more exotic than what had been flushed into the water reclaave Melba a sense of kinship with the ship’s narrow halls and gray plastic ladders Once, Clarissa Melpoht of her school Popular and beautiful, and suffused with the power and influence of her father’s name Now her father was a numbered prisoner in a nameless prison, allowed only a few minutes of external connection every day, and those to his lawyer, not his wife or children

And she was Melba Koh, sleeping on a gel couch that smelled of someone else’s body in a cabin smaller than a closet She commanded a team of four electrochemical technicians: Stanni, Ren, Bob, and Soledad Stanni and Bob were decades older than her Soledad, three years younger, had been on two sixteen-month tours Ren, her official second, was a Belter and, like all Belters, passionate about environmental control systeion She didn’t ask how he’d ended up on an Earth ship, and he didn’t volunteer the infor would be hard, but she’d misunderstood what the worst parts would be

“She’s a fking bitch, right?” Stanni said It was a private channel between him and Ren If she’d been who she pretended to be, she wouldn’t have been able to hear it “She doesn’t know dick”

Ren grunted, neither defending her nor joining the attack

“If you hadn’t caught that brownout buffer wrong way on the Macedon last week, it would have been another cascade failure, si no? Would have had to throw off the whole schedule to go back and fix it”

“Might’ve,” Ren said

She was a level above the Un muttered around her The creas on a maintenance run Scheduled, routine, predictable They’d left the Cerisier ten hours earlier in one of the dozen transports that clung to the maintenance ship’s skin They would be here for another fifteen hours, changing out the high-yield scrubbers and checking the air supply continuity The greatest danger, she’d learned, was condensation degrading the seals