LEVIATHAN WAKES

When the prep was done, Holden switched off bread duty and on to moving lasagna-filled cookware into and out of the oven. Naomi sat down next to Alex and began a quiet conversation with him about something she’d seen on the ops screen. Holden split his time between watching her and watching the lasagna. She laughed at something Alex said and unconsciously twisted one finger into her hair. Holden felt his belly tighten a notch.

Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Miller staring at him. When he looked, the detective had turned away, a hint of a smile on his face. Naomi laughed again. She had one hand on Alex’s arm, and the pilot was blushing and talking as fast as his silly Martian drawl would let him. They looked like friends. That both made Holden happy and filled him with jealousy. He wondered if Naomi would ever be his friend again.

She caught him looking and gave him a conspiratorial wink that probably would have made a lot of sense if he’d been able to hear what Alex was saying. He smiled and winked back, grateful just to be included in the moment. A sizzling sound from inside the oven called his attention back. The lasagna was begi

He pulled on his oven mitts and opened the door.

“Soup’s on,” he said, pulling the first of the dishes and putting it on the table.

“That’s mighty ugly-looking soup,” Amos said.

“Uh, yeah,” Holden said. “It’s just something Mother Tamara used to say when she’d finished cooking. Not sure where it comes from.”

“One of your threemothers did the cooking? How traditional,” Naomi said with a smirk.

“Well, she split it pretty evenly with Caesar, one of my fathers.”

Naomi smiled at him, a genuine smile now.

“It sounds really nice,” she said. “Big family like that.”

“Yeah, it really was,” he replied, a vision in his head of nuclear fire tearing apart the Montana farmhouse he’d grown up in, his family blowing into ash. If it happened, he was sure Miller would be there to let him know it was his fault. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to argue anymore.

As they ate, Holden felt a slow release of tension in the room. Amos belched loudly, then reacted to the chorus of protests by doing it again even more loudly. Alex retold the joke that had made Naomi laugh. Even Miller got into the mood and told a long and increasingly improbable story about hunting down a black market cheese operation that ended in a gunfight with nine naked Australians in an illegal brothel. By the finish of the story, Naomi was laughing so hard she’d drooled on her shirt, and Amos kept repeating “No fucking way!” like a mantra.

The story was amusing enough, and the detective’s dry delivery suited it well, but Holden only half listened. He watched his crew, saw the tension falling from their faces and shoulders. He and Amos were both from Earth, though if he had to guess, he’d say Amos had forgotten about his home world the first time he’d shipped out. Alex was from Mars and clearly still loved it. One bad mistake on either side and both planets might be radioactive rubble by the end of di

“I actually remember that cheese shortage,” Naomi said once Miller had stopped talking. “Belt-wide. That was your fault?”

“Yeah, well, if they’d only been sneaking cheese past the government auditors, we wouldn’t have had a problem,” Miller said. “But they had this habit of shooting the other cheese smugglers. Makes the cops notice. Bad business.”

“Over fucking cheese?” Amos said, tossing his fork onto his plate with a clack. “Are you serious? I mean, drugs or gambling or something. But cheese?”

“Gambling’s legal, most places,” Miller said. “And a chemistry class dropout can cook up just about any drug you like in his bathroom. No way to control supply.”

“Real cheese comes from Earth, or Mars,” Naomi added. “And after they tack on shipping costs and the Coalition’s fifty percent in taxes, it costs more than fuel pellets.”

“We wound up with one hundred and thirty kilos of Vermont Cheddar in the evidence lockup,” Miller said. “Street value that would have probably bought someone their own ship. It had disappeared by the end of the day. We wrote it up as lost to spoilage. No one said a word, as long as everyone went home with a brick.”

The detective leaned back in his chair with a distant look on his face.

“My God, that was good cheese,” he said with a smile.

“Yeah, well, this fake stuff does taste like shit,” Amos said, then added in a hurry, “No offense, Boss, you did a real good job whipping it up. But that’s still weird to me, fighting over cheese.”

“It’s why they killed Eros,” Naomi said.

Miller nodded but said nothing.

“How do you figure that?” Amos said.

“How long have you been flying?” Naomi asked.

“I du

“Fly with a lot of Belters, right?”

“Yeah,” Amos said. “Can’t get better shipmates than Belters. ’Cept me, of course.”

“You’ve flown with us for twenty-five years, you like us, you’ve learned the patois. I bet you can order a beer and a hooker on any station in the Belt. Heck, if you were a little taller and a lot ski

Amos smiled, taking it as a compliment.

“But you still don’t get us,” Naomi said. “Not really. No one who grew up with free air ever will. And that’s why they can kill a million and a half of us to figure out what their bug really does.”

“Hey now,” Alex interjected. “You serious ’bout that? You think the i

“Of course they do,” Miller said. “We’re too tall, too ski

Holden noticed Naomi glancing across the table at him, a speculative look on her face. I like your head,Holden thought at her, but the radiation hadn’t given him telepathy either, because her expression didn’t change.

“We’ve practically got our own language now,” Miller said. “Ever see an Earther try to get directions in the deep dig?”

“ ‘Tu run spin, pow, Schlauch tu way acima and ido,’ ” Naomi said with a heavy Belter accent.

“Go spinward to the tube station, which will take you back to the docks,” Amos said. “The fuck’s so hard about that?”

“I had a partner wouldn’t have known that after two years on Ceres,” Miller said. “And Havelock wasn’t stupid. He just wasn’t… fromthere.”

Holden listened to them talk and pushed cold pasta around on his plate with a chunk of bread.

“Okay, we get it,” he said. “You’re weird. But to kill a million and a half people over some skeletal differences and slang… ”

“People have been getting tossed into ovens for less than that ever since they invented ovens,” Miller said. “If it makes you feel better, most of us think you’re squat and microcephalic.”

Alex shook his head.

“Don’t make a lick of sense to me, turnin’ that bug loose, even if you hated every single human on Eros personally. Who knows what that thing’ll do?”

Naomi walked to the galley sink and washed her hands, the ru

“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said, then turned around, wiping her hands on a towel. “The point of it, I mean.”

Miller started to speak, but Holden hushed him with a quick gesture and waited for Naomi to continue.

“So,” she said. “I’ve been thinking of it as a computing problem. If the virus or nanomachine or protomolecule or whatever was designed, it has a purpose, right?”

“Definitely,” Holden said.

“And it seems like it’s trying to do something-something complex. It doesn’t make sense to go to all that trouble just to kill people. Those changes it makes look intentional, just… not complete, to me.”