Leviathan Wakes

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 beginning to bubble and run over the sides of the dishes.

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 three mothers 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 dinner. But right now they were just friends having a meal together. It was right. It was what Holden had to keep fighting for.

“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 dunno,” Amos replied, his lips compressing as he did the mental math. “Twenty-five years, maybe?”

“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 skinnier, you could pass for one of us by now.”

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 inners and outers see themselves as that different?”

“Of course they do,” Miller said. “We’re too tall, too skinny, our heads look too big, and our joints too knobby.”