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“I didn’t say you had to fix him. I said you needed to talk to him.”
Holden got up from his couch with a salute.
“Yes, sir,” he said. At the ladder he paused. “Again, thank you, Naomi. I’d really-”
“I know. Go be the captain,” she said, turning back to her panel and calling up the ship ops screen. “I’ll keep waving at the neighbors.”
Holden found Shed in the Knight’s tiny sick bay. Really more a sick closet. Other than a reinforced cot, the cabinets of supplies, and a half dozen pieces of wall-mounted equipment, there was just enough room for one stool stuck to the floor on magnetic feet. Shed was sitting on it.
“Hey, buddy, mind if I come in?” Holden asked. Did I actually say ‘Hey, buddy’?
Shed shrugged and pulled up an inventory screen on the wall panel, opening various drawers and staring at the contents. Pretending he’d been in the middle of something.
“Look, Shed. This thing with the Canterburyhas really hit everyone hard, and you’ve-” Holden said. Shed turned, holding up a white squeeze tube.
“Three percent acetic acid solution. Didn’t realize we had this out here. The Cant’s run out, and I’ve got three people with GW who could really use it. Why’d they put it on the Knight,I wonder,” Shed said.
“GW?” was all Holden could think to reply.
“Genital warts. Acetic acid solution is the treatment for any visible warts. Burns ’em off. Hurts like hell, but it does the job. No reason to keep it on the shuttle. Medical inventory is always so messed up.”
Holden opened his mouth to speak, found nothing to say, and closed it again.
“We’ve got acetic acid cream,” Shed said, his voice increasingly shrill, “but no elemcet for pain. Which do you think you’d need more on a rescue shuttle? If we’d found anyone on that wreck with a bad case of GW, we’d have been set. A broken bone? You’re out of luck. Just suck it up.”
“Look, Shed,” Holden said, trying to break in.
“Oh, and look at this. No coagulant booster. What the hell? Hey, no chance anyone on a rescue mission could, you know, start bleeding.Catch a case of red bumps on your crank, sure, but bleeding? No way! I mean, we’ve got four cases of syphilis on the Cantright now. One of the oldest diseases in the book, and we still can’t get rid of it. I tell those guys, ‘The hookers on Saturn Station are banging every ice bucker on the circuit, so put the glove on,’ but do they listen? No. So here we are with syphilis and not enough ciprofloxacin.”
Holden felt his jaw slide forward. He gripped the side of the hatch and leaned into the room.
“Everyone on the Cantis dead,” Holden said, making each word clear and strong and brutal. “Everyone is dead. No one needs the antibiotics. No one needs wart cream.”
Shed stopped talking, and all the air went out of him like he’d been gut punched. He closed the drawers in the supply cabinet and turned off the inventory screen with small precise movements.
“I know,” he said in a quiet voice. “I’m not stupid. I just need some time.”
“We all do. But we’re stuck in this tiny can together. I’ll be honest, I came down here because Naomi is worried about you, but now that I’m here, you’re freaking me the hell out. That’s okay, because I’m the captain now and it’s my job. But I can’t have you freaking Alex or Amos out. We’re ten days from being grabbed by a Martian battleship, and that’s scary enough without the doctor falling apart.”
“I’m not a doctor, I’m just a tech,” Shed said, his voice very small.
“You’re ourdoctor, okay? To the four of us here with you on this ship, you’re our doctor. If Alex starts having post-traumatic stress episodes and needs meds to keep it together, he’ll come to you. If you’re down here jabbering about warts, he’ll turn around and go back up to the cockpit and just do a really bad job of flying. You want to cry? Do it with all of us. We’ll sit together in the galley and get drunk and cry like babies, but we’ll do it together where it’s safe. No more hiding down here.”
Shed nodded.
“Can we do that?” he said.
“Do what?” Holden asked.
“Get drunk and cry like babies?”
“Hell yes. That is officially on the schedule for tonight. Report to the galley at twenty hundred hours, Mr. Garvey. Bring a cup.”
Shed started to reply when the general comm clicked on and Naomi said, “Jim, come back up to ops.”
Holden gripped Shed’s shoulder for a moment, then left.
In ops, Naomi had the comm screen up again and was speaking to Alex in low tones. The pilot was shaking his head and frowning. A map glowed on her screen.
“What’s up?” Holden asked.
“We’re getting a tightbeam, Jim. It locked on and started transmitting just a couple minutes ago,” Naomi replied.
“From the Do
“No. From the Belt,” Naomi said. “And not from Ceres, or Eros, or Pallas either. None of the big stations.”
She pointed at a small dot on her display.
“It’s coming from here.”
“That’s empty space,” Holden said.
“Nope. Alex checked. It’s the site of a big construction project Tycho is working on. Not a lot of detail on it, but radar returns are pretty strong.”
“Something out there has a comm array that’ll put a dot the size of your anus on us from over three AU away,” Alex said.
“Okay, wow, that’s impressive. What is our anus-sized dot saying?” Holden asked.
“You’ll never believe this,” Naomi said, and turned on the playback.
A dark-ski
Holden hit the pause button.
“This guy looks familiar. Search the ship’s database for that name,” he said.
Naomi didn’t move; she just stared at him with a puzzled look on her face.
“What?” he said.
“That’s Frederick Johnson,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Colonel Frederick Lucius Johnson.”
The pause might have been a second; it might have been an hour.
“Jesus,” was all Holden could think to say.
The man on the screen had once been among the most decorated officers in the UN military, and ended up one of its most embarrassing failures. To Belters, he was the Earther Sheriff of Nottingham who’d turned into Robin Hood. To Earth, he was the hero who’d fallen from grace.
Fred Johnson started his rise to fame with a series of high-profile captures of Belt pirates during one of the periods of tension between Earth and Mars that seemed to ramp up every few decades and then fade away again. Whenever the system’s two superpowers rattled their sabers at each other, crime in the Belt rose. Colonel Johnson-Captain Johnson at the time-and his small wing of three missile frigates destroyed a dozen pirate ships and two major bases in a two-year span. By the time the Coalition had stopped bickering, piracy was actually downin the Belt, and Fred Johnson was the name on everyone’s lips. He was promoted and given command over the Coalition marine division tasked with policing the Belt, where he continued to serve with distinction.
Until Anderson Station.
A tiny shipping depot almost on the opposite side of the Belt from the major port Ceres, most people, including most Belters, would not have been able to find Anderson Station on a map. Its only importance was as a minor distribution station for water and air in one of the sparsest stretches of the Belt. Fewer than a million Belters got their air from Anderson.
Gustav Marconi, a career Coalition bureaucrat on the station, decided to implement a 3-percent handling surcharge on shipments passing through the station in hopes of raising the bottom line. Less than 5 percent of the Belters buying their air from Anderson were living bottle to mouth, so just under fifty thousand Belters might have to spend one day of each month not breathing. Only a small percentage of those fifty thousand lacked the leeway in their recycling systems to cover this minor shortfall. Of those, only a small portion felt that armed revolt was the correct course.