LEVIATHAN WAKES

Naomi tilted her head back, her eyes moving as though she was ru

“We’ve got a full tank of water, the injectors have enough fuel pellets to run the reactor for about thirty years, and the galley is fully stocked. You’ll have to tie me up if you plan to give her back to the navy. I love her.”

“She is a cu

“Two tubes and twenty long-range torpedoes with high-yield plasma warheads,” Naomi said. “Or at least that’s what the manifest says. They load those from the outside, so I can’t physically verify without climbing around on the hull.”

“The weapons panel is sayin’ the same thing, Cap,” Alex said. “And full loads in all the point defense ca

Except the burst you fired into the men who killed Gomez.

“Oh, and, Captain, when we put Kelly in the cargo hold, I found a big crate with the letters map on the side. According to the manifest, it stands for ‘Mobile Assault Package.’ Apparently navy-speak for a big box of guns,” Naomi said.

“Yeah,” Alex said. “It’s full kit for eight marines.”

“Okay,” Holden said. “So with the fleet-quality Epstein, we’ve got legs. And if you guys are right about the weapons load out, we’ve also got teeth. The next question is what do we do with it? I’m inclined to take Colonel Johnson’s offer of refuge. Any thoughts?”

“I’m all for that, Captain,” Amos said. “I always did think the Belters were getting the short end of the stick. I’ll go be a revolutionary for a while, I guess.”

“Earthman’s burden, Amos?” Naomi asked with a grin.

“What the fuck does that even mean?”

“Nothing, just teasing,” she said. “I know you like our side because you just want to steal our women.”

Amos gri

“Well, you ladies do have the legs that go allthe way up,” he said.

“Okay, enough,” Holden said, raising his hand. “So, two votes for Fred. Anyone else?”

Naomi raised her hand.

“I vote for Fred,” she said.

“Alex? What do you think?” Holden asked.

The Martian pilot leaned back in his chair and scratched his head.

“I got nowhere in particular to be, so I’ll stick with you guys, I guess,” he said. “But I hope this don’t turn into another round of bein’ told what to do.”

“It won’t,” Holden replied. “I have a ship with guns on it now, and the next time someone orders me to do something, I’m using them.”

After di

“Which cabin did Naomi take?” he asked.

Amos shrugged. “She’s still up in ops, fiddling with something.”

Holden decided to put off sleep for a while and rode the keel ladder-lift- we have a lift!-up to the operations deck. Naomi was sitting on the floor, an open bulkhead panel in front of her and what looked like a hundred small parts and wires laid out around her in precise patterns. She was staring at something inside the open compartment.

“Hey, Naomi, you should really get some sleep. What are you working on?”

She gestured vaguely at the compartment.

“Transponder,” she said.

Holden moved over and sat down on the floor next to her.

“Tell me how to help.”

She handed him her hand terminal; Fred’s instructions for changing the transponder signal were open on the screen.

“It’s ready to go. I’ve got the console hooked up to the transponder’s data port just like he says. I’ve got the computer program set up to run the override he describes. The new transponder code and ship registry data are ready to be entered. I put in the new name. Did Fred pick it?”

“No, that was me.”

“Oh. All right, then. But… ” Her voice trailed off, and she waved at the transponder again.

“What’s the problem?” Holden asked.

“Jim, they make these things notto be fiddled with. The civilian version of this device fuses itself into a solid lump of silicon if it thinks it’s being tampered with. Who knows what the military version of the fail-safe is? Drop the magnetic bottle in the reactor? Turn us into a supernova?”

Naomi turned to look at him.

“I’ve got it all set up and ready to go, but now I don’t think we should throw the switch,” she said. “We don’t know the consequences of failure.”

Holden got up off the floor and moved over to the computer console. A program Naomi had named Trans01 was waiting to be run. He hesitated for one second, then pressed the button to execute. The ship failed to vaporize.

“I guess Fred wants us alive, then,” he said.

Naomi slumped down with a noisy, extended exhale.

“See, this is why I can’t ever be in command,” she said.

“Don’t like making tough calls with incomplete information?”

“More I’m not suicidally irresponsible,” she replied, and began slowly reassembling the transponder housing.

Holden punched the comm system on the wall. “Well, crew, welcome aboard the gas freighter Rocinante.”

“What does that name even mean?” Naomi said after he let go of the comm button.

“It means we need to go find some windmills,” Holden said over his shoulder as he headed to the lift.

Tycho Manufacturing and Engineering Concern was one of the first major corporations to move into the Belt. In the early days of expansion, Tycho engineers and a fleet of ships had captured a small comet and parked it in stable orbit as a water resupply point decades before ships like the Canterburybegan bringing ice in from the nearly limitless fields in Saturn’s rings. It had been the most complex, difficult feat of mass-scale engineering humanity had ever accomplished until the next thing they did.

As an encore, Tycho had built the massive reaction drives into the rock of Ceres and Eros and spent more than a decade teaching the asteroids to spin. They had been slated to create a network of high-atmosphere floating cities above Venus before the development rights fell into a labyrinth of lawsuits now entering its eighth decade. There was some discussion of space elevators for Mars and Earth, but nothing solid had come of it yet. If you had an impossible engineering job that needed to be done in the Belt, and you could afford it, you hired Tycho.

Tycho Station, the Belt headquarters of the company, was a massive ring station built around a sphere half a kilometer across, with more than sixty-five million cubic meters of manufacturing and storage space inside. The two counter-rotating habitation rings that circled the sphere had enough space for fifteen thousand workers and their families. The top of the manufacturing sphere was festooned with half a dozen massive construction waldoes that looked like they could rip a heavy freighter in half. The bottom of the sphere had a bulbous projection fifty meters across, which housed a capital-ship-class fusion reactor and drive system, making Tycho Station the largest mobile construction platform in the solar system. Each compartment within the massive rings was built on a swivel system that allowed the chambers to reorient to thrust gravity when the rings stopped spi