“Lace plating’s great when it’s great,” Amos said, turning back to his screen.
“How’s the rest of it?” Bobbie asked.
Amos shrugged, flicked through the feed. “Is what it is, I figure.”
The silence settled between them. Bobbie scratched her neck, the soft sound of nails against skin louder than anything else in the room. She didn’t know how to ask if he was going to be okay with Holden and Naomi leaving him behind.
“Are you going to be okay with Holden and Naomi leaving?”
“Yup,” Amos said. “Why? You worried about it?”
“A little,” Bobbie said, surprised to discover that it was true. “I mean, I know you saw it coming before Holden did. I think all of us did. But you’ve shipped with them for a lot of years.”
“Yeah, but my favorite thing about Holden was knowing he’d take a bullet for any one of the crew. Pretty sure you actually have taken a few for us, so that ain’t changing,” Amos said, then paused for a moment. “You might should check in with Peaches, though.”
“You think?”
“Yup,” Amos said. And that was that. Bobbie pulled herself back out.
Clarissa was in the medical bay, strapped into one of the autodocs. Tubes ran from the gently purring machinery into the port on the woman’s side, blood flowing out of the thin body and then being pumped back in. Her skin was the color of a wax candle and stretched tight against her cheekbones. She still smiled and raised a hand in greeting when Bobbie floated in. As a technician, Clarissa Mao had always been one of the best Bobbie had worked with. She had the sense that the thin woman’s drive came out of a kind of anger and desperation. Working to keep some greater darkness at bay. It was an impulse Bobbie understood.
“Rough patch?” Bobbie asked, nodding toward the blood-filled tubes.
“Not a great one,” Clarissa said. “I’ll be back on my feet tomorrow, though. Promise.”
“No rush,” Bobbie said. “We’re doing fine.”
“I know. It’s just …”
Bobbie cracked her knuckles. The autodoc chimed to itself and took another long draw of Clarissa’s blood.
“You wanted something?” she said, looking into Bobbie’s eyes. “It’s okay. You can say it.”
“I’m not your captain yet,” Bobbie said. “But I’m going to be.” It was the first time she’d said the words out loud. They felt good enough that she said them again. “I’m going to be. And that’s going to put me in a position where I’m responsible for you. For your well-being.”
She hadn’t thought about her team in years. Her old team. Hillman. Gourab. Travis. Sa’id. Her last command before this. For a moment, they were in the room, invisible and voiceless, but as present as Clarissa. Bobbie swallowed and bit back a smile. This was it. This was what she’d been trying to find her way back to all these years. This was why it mattered that she do it right this time.
“And if I’m responsible for your well-being,” she said, “we need to talk.”
“All right.”
“This thing with your old implants. That’s going to get worse instead of better,” Bobbie said.
“I know,” Clarissa said. “I’d take the implants out if it wouldn’t kill me faster.” She smiled, inviting Bobbie to smile with her. Making the truth into something like a joke.
“When we get to Medina, I’m going to hire on fresh crew,” Bobbie said. “Not co-owners in the ship the way we are. Just paid hands. Part of that is Holden and Naomi leaving.”
“But you can also hire someone for my place,” Clarissa said. Tears welled up, sheeting across her eyes as she nodded. The autodoc chimed again, pushing her purified blood back down into her.
“If you want to stay on Medina, you can,” Bobbie said. “If you want to stay with the ship, you’re welcome here.”
On the float, Clarissa’s tears didn’t fall. Surface tension held them to her until she shook her head, and then they’d form a dozen scattered balls of saline that in time would get sucked into the recycler and leave the air smelling a little more of sorrow and the sea.
“I …” Clarissa began, then shook her head and shrugged helplessly. “I thought I’d be the first one to leave.”
She sobbed once, and Bobbie pushed over to her. Took her hand. Clarissa’s fingers were thin, but her grip was stronger than Bobbie expected. They stayed there together until Clarissa’s breath grew less ragged. Clarissa brought her other hand over and rested it on Bobbie’s arm. There was some color in her cheeks again, but Bobbie didn’t know if it was the flush of emotion or the medical systems doing their job. Maybe both.
“I understand,” Bobbie said. “It’s hard losing someone.”
“Yeah,” Clarissa said. “And … I don’t know. Something about it seems less dignified when it’s Holden. You know what I mean? Of all the people to get choked up over.”
“No,” Bobbie said. “You don’t need to make light of it.”
Clarissa opened her mouth, closed it again. Nodded. “I’ll miss him, is all.”
“I know. I will too. And … look, if you don’t want to talk about it now, I can just check your file for your medical plan and end-of-life choices. Whatever you and Holden worked out, I’m going to honor it.”
Clarissa’s pale, thin brows knotted. “Holden? I didn’t work out anything with Holden.”
Bobbie felt a little tug of surprise. “No?”
“We don’t talk about things like that,” Clarissa said. “I talked to Amos. He knows I want to stay here. With him. If things ever get too bad, he promised he’d … make it easier for me. When the time comes.”
“Okay,” Bobbie said. “That’s good to know.” And important, she thought to herself, to fully document so that if it happens in someone else’s jurisdiction no one gets arrested for murder. How the hell could Holden not have done that? “You’re sure Holden never talked about this with you?”
Clarissa shook her head. The autodoc finished its run. The tubes detached from the port in Clarissa’s skin and slid back into the body of the ship like overly polite snakes.
“Okay, then,” Bobbie said. “I know now. I’ll make sure you’re taken care of. And Amos too.”
“Thank you. And I’m sorry.”
“About what?”
“I’ve been a little self-pitying about Naomi and Holden,” Clarissa said. “I didn’t mean to make it anyone else’s problem. I’ll get back to duty.”
“Everyone gets to mourn how they need to,” Bobbie said. “And then everyone needs to get their asses back to work.”
“Yes, sir,” Clarissa said with a sharp if ironic salute. “I’m glad we had this talk.”
“I am too,” Bobbie said as she pulled herself to the door. And I’m amazed that Holden never did. For the first time, Bobbie had the sense that there were some ways—not all, but some—in which she was going to be a much better captain than he’d been.
Chapter Ten: Drummer
Okay,” Drummer said, it felt like for the thousandth time, “but are these things naturally occurring or not?”
Cameron Tur, the union’s science advisor, was an impressively tall, gangly man with an Adam’s apple the size of a thumb and faded tattoos on each of his knuckles. He’d come into the service when Tjon was president of the union, and kept the job through Walker and Sanjrani. As old as he was and as much as he’d seen, she had expected him to have an air of condescension, but he’d only ever come across as a little ill at ease. His chuckle now was apologetic.
“That’s a good question, semantically speaking,” he said. “The difference between something made by nature and something made by beings that evolved up within nature, sa sa?”
“Difficult,” Emily Santos-Baca agreed. She was the representative of the policy council for the union’s board. Officially, she didn’t have a higher rank than any of the other councilors, but she got along with Drummer better than any of the others. It made her a sort of first-among-equals. She was younger than Drummer by exactly two ye
ars. They even had the same birthday. It made Drummer like the woman just a little bit, even when she was being a pain in the ass.
Drummer looked at the images again. The whatever-it-was was little longer than two hand-widths together, curved like a claw or a seedpod, and shining green and gray in the sunlight outside Gallish Complex on Fusang. She started the image playback, and the young man sprang into life, slotting one—claw, pod, whatever the hell it was—into another with an audible click to create an empty space roughly the shape of an almond. Light flickered into the space, shifting shapes that danced on the edge of meaning. The young man grinned into the camera and said the same things he had every time she’d watched him. Watching the light is associated with feelings of great peace and connection with all forms of life in the galaxy, and appears to stimulate blah blah fucking blah. She stopped it again.
“Millions of them?” she asked.
“So far,” Tur agreed. “Once the mine goes deeper, they may find more.”
“Fuck.”
The colony worlds had begun simply enough. A few households, a few townships, a desperate scrabble against the local biosphere to make clean water and edible food. Sometimes colonies would falter and die before help could arrive. Sometimes they’d give up and evacuate. But more than a few took root on the rocks and unfamiliar soil of the distant planets. And as they found their niches, as they became stable, the first wave of deep exploration had begun. The massive underwater transport arches on Corazón Sagrado, the light-bending moths on Persephone, the programmable antibiotics from Ilus.
Evolution alone had created all the wonders and complexities of Earth. That same thing thirteen hundred times over would have been challenge enough, but added to that were the artifacts of the dead species of whatever the hell they’d been that had designed the protomolecule gates, the slow zone, the massive and eternal cities that seemed to exist somewhere on every world they’d discovered. Artifacts of alien toolmakers that had been able and willing to hijack all life on Earth just to make one more road between the stars.
Any of it could be the key to unimagined miracles. Or catastrophe. Or placebo-euphoric snake-oil light-show bullshit. The images from the seedpods could be the encrypted records of the fallen civilization that had built miracles they were still only beginning to understand. Or they could be the spores of whatever had killed them. Or they could be lava lamps. Who fucking knew?
“The science stations on Kinley are very anxious to get a shipment for study,” Santos-Baca said. “But without knowing whether these are technological artifacts or natural resources—”
“Which,” Tur apologized, “is difficult to determine with only the resources on Fusang—”
“I get it,” Drummer said and shifted to look at Santos-Baca. “Isn’t this kind of decision pretty much within your wheelhouse?”
“I have the votes to allow the contract,” Santos-Baca said, “but I don’t have enough to override a veto.”
Drummer nodded. The question wasn’t whether moving psychoactive alien seedpods between worlds was a good idea so much as whether someone was going to lose face in front of a committee meeting. Thus were the great decisions of history made.
“If we don’t think they pose any immediate danger, ship them as alien artifacts with a third-level isolation protocol, and I’ll let it pass.”
“Thank you,” Santos-Baca said, rising from her seat. A moment later, Tur did the same.
“Stay with me for a minute, Emily,” Drummer said, shutting down the demonstration video from Fusang. “There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
Tur left, closing the door behind him, and Santos-Baca sank back into her seat. Her empty half scowl was a mask. Drummer tried a smile. It worked as well as anything else.
“One of the things I learned working for Fred Johnson back in the day?” Drummer said. “Don’t let things sit for too long. It’s always tempting to just ignore the things that aren’t actually on fire just at the moment, but then you’re also committing to spend your time putting out fires.”
“You’re talking about the tariff structure Earth and Mars are proposing for Ganymede?”
Drummer’s heart sank a little. She’d managed to forget about that nascent issue, and being reminded felt oppressive. “No, I mean the Rocinante problem. And how it relates to—” She jerked a thumb toward the empty monitor where the seedpod video had been. “We’ve just taken control of the governor of a colony planet. The Association of Worlds hasn’t formally asked about his status with us yet, but it’s just a matter of time. I can feel Carrie Fisk rubbing her stubby little fingers together. It would make me very happy to get out in front of this.”
“So,” Santos-Baca said. “Well, I have had some informal conversations about it. The idea of asking the UN for a charter is … it’s a hard sell. We didn’t come all this way to go back down dirtside to ask permission for things, now did we?”
Drummer nodded. The enmity between the inners and the Belt was still the biggest obstacle Drummer faced. And even she didn’t have much use for the Earth-Mars Coalition.
“I understand that,” Drummer said. “I don’t like it either. But it gives us a level of deniability for things like James Holden’s new policing schemes. What I don’t want is thirteen hundred planets deciding that the union is the problem. If the UN is behind a crackdown—even just nominally—it spreads out the responsibility. This Houston and his band of merry men can rot in a UN jail, and then we’re still just the ships that take things from one place to another. Prisoners, among other things.”
“Or,” Santos-Baca said, “we admit what we’ve been playing footsie with since we crawled up out of the starving years. We start treating the union like the government of the thirteen hundred worlds.”
“I don’t want to be president of thirteen hundred worlds,” Drummer said. “I want to run a transport union that regulates trade through the gates. And then I want all those planets and moons and satellites to work out their own issues without it gumming up our works. We’re already stretched too thin.”
“If we had more personnel—”
“Emily,” Drummer said, “do you know the one thing I am absolutely sure won’t fix any of our problems? Another committee.”
Santos-Baca laughed, and a soft chime came from Drummer’s desk. An alert from Vaughn. High priority. She let it ride for a little bit. If it wasn’t People’s Home about to break apart, another minute wasn’t going to hurt. If it was, it wouldn’t help.
“You’ve seen all the same logistical reports that I have,” Drummer said. “Expecting the union to police the whole—”
The chime came again, louder this time. Drummer growled and tapped the screen to accept. Vaughn appeared, and before she could snap at the man, he spoke.
“Laconia put out a message, ma’am.”
Drummer looked at him. “What?”
“The warning message from Laconia gate was taken down,” Vaughn said. “It’s been replaced by a new message. The report from Medina came in”—he looked away and then back to her—“four minutes ago.”
“Is it broadcast?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Vaughn said. “Audio only. Not encrypted either. This is a press release.”
“Let me hear it,” she said.
The voice, when it came, was low and warm. It reminded her of a scratchy blanket she’d had once, comforting and rough in equal measure. She didn’t trust it.
“Citizens of the human coalition, this is Admiral Trejo of the Laconian Naval Command. We are opening our gate. In one hundred and twenty hours, we will pass into the slow zone in transit to Medina Station with a staff and support to address Laconia’s role in the greater human community going forward. We hope and expect this meeting will be amicable. Message repeats.”
“Well,” Santos-Baca said, and then stopped. “Didn’t see that coming.”
“All right,” Drummer said, and looked into Santos-Baca’s wide eyes. “Emily, get me everyone.”
The void city People’s Home was still in Mars orbit, down close to Earth and the sun, and hell and gone from the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. It took ten hours to hear back from all the experts in the union hierarchy, and five more for the system to review everything and build a unified report. Every question, every clarification, every new nuance or caveat would take about as long. Drummer was going to be spending most of the hundred and twenty hours before Laconia reopened waiting to hear from people. Their messages were flying between planets and moons, void cities and stations at the speed of light in vacuum, and it was still too damned slow.
The voice on the message matched Anton Trejo, a lieutenant in the MCRN who had gone to Laconia with the breakaway fleet after the bombardment of Earth. Yes, it was possible that the voice was faked, but the technical service tended to accept it as genuine. Medina Station reported light and radiation spikes coming through Laconia gate consistent with ships approaching on a braking burn. How many ships and of what kind, there wasn’t enough information to guess at.
Mars had lost almost a third of its ships when the Free Navy made its brief, doomed grab at power. Those had been divided between the Free Navy’s forces in Sol system and the breakaway fleet going to Laconia. In the decades since, Earth and Mars had slowly rebuilt their navies. Technological breakthroughs based on reverse engineering alien artifacts—lace plating, feedback bottles, inertial-compensating PDC cannons—were standard now. Even if the ships on the other side of Laconia gate had been able to glean some details of how the manufacturing processes worked, they would have to build shipyards and manufacturing bases before they could start using them. Thirty years without a refit was a long time.
The most likely scenario was that something in Duarte’s private banana republic had finally gone wrong enough that he was being forced back into contact to threaten or beg or barter whatever he—or whoever was in power by this time—needed to prop things up.
The flag in the intelligence report speculating about the fate of the active protomolecule sample that the Free Navy had stolen from Tycho during the war tripped Drummer up a little when she read it. She remembered that day. Fighting in her own corridors, her own station. Even now, she remembered the cold rage that came from discovering betrayal in her ranks. And Fred Johnson’s leadership in the face of it.