Her room was laid out differently than his, and the unfamiliarity made him clumsy in the dark. He fumbled around for a few minutes in her small kitchen nook, looking for a glass. By the time he found it, filled it, and headed back into the bedroom, Naomi was sitting up in bed. The sheet lay pooled on her lap. The sight of her half nude in the dimly lit room gave him an embarrassingly sudden erection.
Naomi panned her gaze up his body, pausing at his midsection, then at the water glass, and said, “Is that for me?”
Holden didn’t know which thing she was asking about, so he just said, “Yes.”
“You asleep?”
Naomi’s face was on his belly, her breathing slow and deep, but to his surprise she said, “No.”
“Can we talk?”
Naomi rolled off him and pulled herself up until her face lay next to his on the pillow. Her hair fell across her eyes, and Holden reached out and brushed it away in a move that felt so intimate and proprietary that he had to swallow a lump in his throat.
“Are you about to get serious on me?” she asked, her eyes half lidded.
“Yeah, I am,” he said, and kissed her forehead.
“My last lover was over a year ago,” she said. “I’m a serial monogamist, so as far as I’m concerned, this is an exclusive-rights deal until one of us decides it isn’t. As long as I get advance warning that you’ve decided to end the deal, there won’t be any hard feelings. I’m open to the idea of it being more than just sex, but in my experience that will happen on its own if it’s going to. I have eggs in storage on Europa and Luna, if that matters to you.”
She rolled up onto her elbow, her face hovering over his.
“Did I cover all the bases?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “But I agree to the conditions.”
She flopped onto her back, letting out a long contented sigh.
“Good.”
Holden wanted to hold her, but he felt too hot and sticky with sweat, so he just reached down and held her hand instead. He wanted to tell her that this meant something, that it was already more than sex for him, but all the words he tried out in his head came off sounding phony or maudlin.
“Thank you,” he said instead, but she was already snoring quietly.
They had sex again in the morning. After a long night with too little sleep, it wound up being far more effort than release for Holden, but there was a pleasure in that too, as if less than mind-blowing sex somehow meant something different and funnier and gentler than what they’d already done together. Afterward, Holden went to the kitchen and made coffee, then brought it back to bed on a tray. They drank it without talking, some of the shyness they’d avoided the night before coming now in the artificial morning of the room’s LEDs.
Naomi put her empty coffee cup down and touched the badly healed lump in his recently broken nose.
“Is it hideous?” Holden asked.
“No,” she said. “You were too perfect before. It makes you seem more substantial.”
Holden laughed. “That sounds like a word you use to describe a fat man or a history professor.”
Naomi smiled and touched his chest lightly with her fingertips. It wasn’t an attempt to arouse, just the exploration that came when satiation had removed sex from the equation. Holden tried to remember the last time the cold sanity following sex had been this comfortable, but maybe that had been never. He was making plans to spend the remainder of the day in Naomi’s bed, running through a mental list of restaurants on the station that delivered, when his terminal began buzzing on the nightstand.
“God dammit,” he said.
“You don’t have to answer,” Naomi replied, and moved her explorations to his belly.
“You’ve been paying attention the last couple months, right?” Holden said. “Unless it’s a wrong number, then it’s probably some end-of-the-solar-system-type shit and we have five minutes to evacuate the station.”
Naomi kissed his ribs, which simultaneously tickled him and caused him to question his assumptions about his own refractory period.
“That’s not funny,” she said.
Holden sighed and picked up the terminal off the table. Fred’s name flashed as it buzzed again.
“It’s Fred,” he said.
Naomi stopped kissing him and sat up.
“Yeah, then it’s probably not good news.”
Holden tapped on the screen to accept the call and said, “Fred.”
“Jim. Come see me as soon as you get a chance. It’s important.”
“Okay,” Holden replied. “Be there in half an hour.”
He ended the call and tossed his hand terminal across the room onto the pile of clothes he’d left at the foot of the bed.
“Going to shower, then go see what Fred wants,” he said, pulling off the sheet and getting up.
“Should I come, too?” Naomi asked.
“Are you kidding? I’m never letting you out of my sight again.”
“Don’t get creepy on me,” Naomi replied, but she was smiling when she said it.
The first unpleasant surprise was Miller sitting in Fred’s office when they arrived. Holden nodded at the man once, then said to Fred, “We’re here. What’s up?”
Fred gestured for them to sit, and when they had, he said, “We’ve been discussing what to do about Eros.”
Holden shrugged. “Okay. What about it?”
“Miller thinks that someone will try to land there and recover some samples of the protomolecule.”
“I have no trouble believing that someone will be that stupid,” Holden said with a nod.
Fred stood up and tapped something on his desk. The screens that normally showed a view of the Nauvoo construction outside suddenly switched to a 2-D map of the solar system, tiny lights of different colors marking fleet positions. An angry swarm of green dots surrounded Mars. Holden assumed that meant the greens were Earth ships. There were a lot of red and yellow dots in the Belt and outer planets. Red was probably Mars, then.
“Nice map,” Holden said. “Accurate?”
“Reasonably,” Fred said. With a few quick taps on his desk, he zoomed in on one portion of the Belt. A potato-shaped lump labeled EROS filled the middle of the screen. Two tiny green dots inched toward it from several meters away.
“That is the Earth science vessel Charles Lyell moving toward Eros at full burn. She’s accompanied by what we think is a Phantom-class escort ship.”
“The Roci’s Earth navy cousin,” Holden said.