“I think you’ve made that clear to the crew,” Foster said solemnly, but with a glimmer of amusement in his eye. Probably Holden had made the point a few times. To everyone. The coffee machine chimed and gave Holden a fresh bulb. Foster made his way to the ladder, and then down toward the torpedo bays where Kazantzakis was cleaning things that were already clean. Holden waited a few seconds and then headed up to the ops deck. Chava, coming down, met him, and they did a little awkward no-you-first dance before they got past each other.

Fred was in the crash couch that he’d appropriated as his office. The hatch to the cockpit was closed, but Holden could still hear the wailing of the raï that Mfume liked to listen to during his shift in the pilot’s seat. Between that and the coffee, he wouldn’t be sleeping, but Fred had put headphones on and so didn’t hear Holden coming. The image on his screen was familiar. Marco Inaros, the self-styled head of the Free Navy and public face of the devastation of Earth. And – Holden tried the thought carefully in case it hurt too much to think it – if Naomi was dead, the man who’d probably killed her. His chest contracted painfully and he pushed the idea away. Thinking about Amos and Naomi was too dangerous.

Fred turned sharply, noticing him, and pulled off the headphones. “Holden. How long have you been there?”

“Just came up.”

“Good. Hate to think I’m getting too feeble to know when there’s someone in the room. Everything all right?”

“Apart from being in the middle of a system-wide coup with half of my crew missing? Peachy. I mean, I’m not sleeping, and when I do it’s nightmares from start to finish, but peachy.”

“Well, it was kind of a stupid question. Sorry about that.”

Holden sat on the couch beside Fred’s and leaned in.

“What do we know about this guy?”

“Inaros?” Fred said. “He was on my short list of possibilities when the rocks dropped. Not the head of it, but in the top five. He leads a splinter group of high-poverty Belters. The kind of people who live in leaky ships and post screeds about taxation being theft. I’ve spoken to him a time or two, usually to deescalate a situation he wanted to set on fire.”

“You think he’s the one behind it all?”

Fred sat back, his couch gimbals hissing as they shifted. From the headphones, Holden could hear the man’s voice even over the murmurs of raï – “We will begin again and remake humanity without the corruption, greed, and hatred that the inner planets could not transcend…”