“Hey there, Chetzemoka. This is Alex Kamal presently of the Razorback. Naomi? If you’re there, I’d appreciate you giving me a sign. I’d sort of like to make sure it’s you before we come over. Your ship’s been acting a mite odd, and we’re a little on the jumpy side. And, just in case it’s not Naomi Nagata? I’ve got fifteen missiles locked on you right now, so whoever you are, you might want to talk with me.”

Alex shut off the mic, and rubbed his cheek. They were on the float now, course matched with the mysterious ship only about fifty kilometers above them on the relative z-axis. The sun, larger by far than he’d ever seen it from Mars, glowed below them, heating the little pinnace almost to the limit of its ability to shed the energy. Behind him, Bobbie was watching the same feed he was.

“That doesn’t look good,” she said.

“Nope.”

As a boy, back on Mars, there had been a little improvised firework that his friends would sometimes make for fun. All it took was a length of light-duty pipe, a mining spike, and a single-use rocket motor. The way it worked, they’d spike one end of the pipe to a flat section of wall, fix the motor to the other end with industrial tape or epoxy with the thrust pointing off to one side. Fire the motor, and the whole thing turned into a ring of smoke and fire, the pipe spinning around its axis faster than the eye could follow, the flare of the motor exhaust blinding and flickering. Sometimes the motor came loose and bounced along the corridor, posing a threat to everyone watching. Sometimes the spike came loose. Most times, it just left a circle of scrapes and scorch marks on the stone of the wall that pissed off the maintenance crews. They called them fire weasels. He didn’t know why.

Above them, the Chetzemoka was spinning like a fire weasel. She wasn’t quite tumbling, but the circle she was burning in was tight. All the acceleration she’d been using to burn hard out toward the Belt and Holden was getting eaten now, each point on her pathway canceling out the point a hundred and eighty degrees off from it. Her exhaust plume was a jet of flame and plasma that would glass anything that tried to approach her unless it came from above or below. And if they did that…

“What do you think happened?” Bobbie asked.

“Maneuvering thruster fired off, never got balanced.”

“Can you match course with that? I mean even if we decided we wanted to?”