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“A ship, then?”

Naomi gave another nod.

“Probably,” she said. “I’ve been playing with the locations, and I can’t find anything in the registry that looks likely. No stations or inhabited rocks. A ship would make sense. But—”

Holden waited for Naomi to finish, but Miller leaned forward impatiently.

“But what?” he said.

“But how did they know where it would be?” she replied. “I have no incoming comms in the log. If a ship was moving around randomly in the Belt, how’d they know where to send these messages?”

Holden squeezed her shoulder, lightly enough that she probably didn’t even feel it in the heavy environment suit, then pushed off and allowed himself to drift toward the ceiling.

“So it’s not random,” he said. “They had some sort of map of where this thing would be at the time they sent the laser comms. Could be one of their stealth ships.”

Naomi turned around in her chair to look up at him.

“Could be a station,” she said.

“It’s the lab,” Miller broke in. “They’re running an experiment on Eros, they need the white coats nearby.”

“Naomi,” Holden said. “ ‘Materials secured.’ There’s a safe in the captain’s quarters that’s still locked down. Think you can get it open?”

Naomi gave a one-handed shrug.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. Amos could probably blast it open with some of the explosives we found in that big box of weapons.”

Holden laughed.

“Well,” he said. “Since it’s probably full of little vials of nasty alien viruses, I’m going to nix the blasting option.”

Naomi shut down the comm log and pulled up a general ship’s systems menu.

“I can look around and see if the computer has access to the safe,” she said. “Try to open it that way. It might take some time.”

“Do what you can,” Holden said. “We’ll get out of your hair.”

Holden pushed himself off the ceiling and over to the ops compartment hatch, then pulled himself through, into the corridor beyond. A few moments later, Miller followed. The detective planted his feet on the deck with magnetic boots, then stared at Holden, waiting.

Holden floated down to the deck next to him.

“What do you think?” Holden asked. “Protogen being the whole thing? Or is this another one where it looks like them, so it isn’t?”

Miller was silent for the space of two long breaths.

“This one smells like the real thing,” Miller said. He sounded almost grudging.

Amos pulled himself up the crew ladder from below, dragging a large metal case behind him.

“Hey, Cap’n,” he said. “I found a whole case of fuel pellets for the reactor in the machine shop. We’ll probably want to take these with us.”

“Good work,” Holden said, holding up one hand to let Miller know to wait. “Go ahead and take those across. Also, I need you to work up a plan for scuttling this ship.”

“Wait, what?” Amos said. “This thing is worth a jillion bucks, Captain. Stealth missile ship? The OPA would sell their grandmothers for this thing. And six of those tubes still have fish in them. Capital-ship busters. You could slag a small moon with those. Forget their grannies, the OPA would pimp their daughters for that gear. Why the fuck would we blow it up?”

Holden stared at him in disbelief.

“Did you forget what’s in the engine room?” he asked.

“Hell, Cap,” Amos snorted. “That shit is all frozen. Couple hours with a torch and I can chop it up and chuck it out the airlock. Good to go.”

The mental image of Amos hacking the melted bodies of the ship’s former crew apart with a plasma torch and then cheerfully hurling the chunks out an airlock tipped Holden over the edge into full-fledged nausea. The big mechanic’s ability just to ignore anything that he didn’t want to notice probably came in handy while he was crawling around in tight and greasy engine compartments. His ability to shrug off the horrible mutilation of several dozen people threatened to change Holden’s disgust into anger.

“Forgetting the mess,” he said, “and the very real possibility of infection by what made that mess, there is also the fact that someone is desperately searching for this very