James Holden's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Holden had not slept in two days, and the witness would die if he waited a third. He stood at the comms bench on the Rocinante and watched his own ship's signature flash red across every public channel. Someone had tagged the gunship as hostile on the open relay grid, so any outbound call from this hull would point a line straight back to him. He needed to reach a woman inside the corporation that had cut civilians apart and rebuilt them into something else. She had names. She had files. She would not survive being found first. The engineer set the new box on the bench between them. It was the size of a footlocker, fortified, its front panel crowded with shielded switches and a single narrow screen. She had cannibalized half the galley wiring to build it. She told him it pushed a packet sideways in time by a few milliseconds before it left the antenna, so the public towers read the signal as noise and dropped it. The big corporate spire above the dock, the one broadcasting his ship as a threat across the system, would never log the call. He asked her what it cost her to build it. She said she had stopped keeping that list. He ran the first test against a small civilian tower outside the corporate net, a slim mast with tinted glass and stacked antennas that handled freight traffic and nothing else. The console held green. He keyed in the whistleblower's private string and spoke for ninety seconds: a meeting point, a window, a code phrase her sister would know. The screen showed receipt. No flag pinged back from the corporate spire. No patrol burn lit up on the scope. For the first time since the ice hauler, since the bodies in the drifting ship, he had said something the wrong people could not hear. The reply came four minutes later, routed back through the same freight mast. It was not from the whistleblower. It was from a man who said he was holding her, and he had read every word Holden sent. He gave a berth number and a clock. He said Holden could come alone, or he could listen to her die over an open channel his crew would not be able to mute. The engineer's hand stopped over the console. Holden told her to plot a burn. The line they had built to save the witness had delivered him an address instead.