“The part where I don’t know if he’s dead or alive. The part where I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again. The part where I think how much I want him to be here and safe and not hurting. And telling me not to hurt either.”
“I know it’s … that’s got to be—”
“Alex, I live here,” Naomi said. “I can’t tell you how many times he’s put me here. How many times he’s seen the right thing to do and rushed off to do it without thinking about the price. Without letting me or you or the Roci scare him into being less than his conscience demands. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it. It’s natural to him. Who he is. It’s the only thing about him I’m really angry about.” The buzz in her voice wasn’t sorrow.
Alex took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I may not have really understood the whole situation.”
“You remember Io? When he went off to a ship with active protomolecule all over it because maybe he’d be able to save Mars? Or Ilus, when he vanished with whatever that weird version of Miller was because maybe he’d be able to keep you and me from falling out of orbit? Or on Marais, when he went into the cliffs so we wouldn’t run out of water? So this time he went to keep Amos and Katria playing nice, and instead, he saved the whole operation and maybe opened the way for all of us to get away safely. All it cost was him. And he paid that price without hesitating. Same as fucking always.”
A tear tracked down her cheek, and he felt his own eyes stinging.
“We’ll get him,” Alex said. “We’ll always get him back.”
“Sure we will. Until the time we don’t,” she said. “It’s like this for everyone. There’s always going to be a last time, eventually. I just wish with Jim there could only be one last time, and not all of them, over and over and over.”
He took her hand. Her fingers were warm, but thinner than he remembered them being. He could feel the little bones beneath the skin, and her skin was dry.
“He’s exhausting,” she said.
“But we love him.”
She sighed. “We do.”
They sat in silence for a moment before she drew her hand back from his and wiped her cheeks dry. She leaned forward, setting the legs of her stool down against the deck. Her sigh came from a thousand klicks away. “Let me get cleaned up, and I’ll get to work,” she said.
Alex stood when she did, but waited behind as she walked out. He’d been traveling with Naomi for a lot of years. It was amazing how easy it was to forget how much she knew herself. He didn’t know if that said more about her or him.
Probably him.
Clarissa made a soft sound, somewhere between a grunt and cough. She turned toward him. Her skin was pale, sheened with sweat, but her smile was strong and unforced. “Hey,” she said. “What did I miss? Did we hear about Holden? What’s news?”
“No, it wasn’t that. I was just getting a little pep talk,” Alex said. “How’re you doing?”
Clarissa’s eyes drifted closed and then open again, like a blinking in slow motion. “Living the dream,” she said, and chuckled. “Have you seen Amos? He was going to get me … something.”
“I think he’s still out doing that. He’ll be back, though. Don’t worry.”
“I never do,” Clarissa said, and shuddered like she was cold. The room wasn’t cold. “You think they could fix me?”
“Who?”
“The Laconians,” Clarissa said. “I keep thinking about how their tech is all levels and levels above ours. And I wonder if maybe their medicine is too. Maybe they could get these fucking implants out of me. Plaster over the worst of the damage.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Kind of ironic that I’m working to fuck them all the way up, isn’t it?” She made a single, low sound. If she’d strung a few like it together, it would have been chuckling.
“I guess it is,” he said. And then a moment later, “If you want to go to one of their clinics? I mean it would probably mean getting out of this underground business, but if you want to, we can work something out.”
Her smile was love and pity. “You really think that’s true? That we could work something out?”
“Hell yes,” Alex said.
“Well, I’ll keep that option in mind,” she said. “You’re a good man, Alex Kamal.”
“You’re not too bad yourself,” he said.
“I am not presently at my best,” Clarissa said. “But I appreciate the thought. I really do.”
Her eyes fluttered closed again. Her face relaxed. She looked like a wax model of herself. She’ll be better when we get the Roci back, he thought. Not better-better. Just improved, but better than this. And once he was back in the pilot’s seat, he wasn’t ever going dockside again if he could help it. Being on the Rocinante was being home.
Everywhere else was where the trouble came.
Bobbie came with the news about Holden, and something else besides. It felt almost like something foreordained. As soon as he had told Naomi that they’d save Holden, Holden appeared in the station brig and the document outlining how to free him fell into their hands. It was perfect enough to make him very nervous.
“This is astounding,” Naomi said, paging through the file.
Alex leaned over her, trying to see the screen of her terminal and not interrupt her at the same time, and doing a middling job of both. If there was any sure sign of Naomi’s relief, it was that she was back on the job.
The room was small, the door firmly closed, and Saba had set the monitor to the local newsfeed with the volume high. A young man he didn’t recognize was interviewing Carrie Fisk about the war in Sol system and the traffic between the colony worlds that was just about to begin. The colonies don’t care who’s running Medina, so long as we’re running it well. The Transport Union was fine, and Laconian oversight will be fine too. Better, even, because the Laconian model respects self-rule. The Laconian Congress of Worlds is a real voice for its members. That’s never been the case before. Alex tried watching her, just so he’d have something to do besides hover. It didn’t work very well.
Bobbie paced along the wall behind her, three strides one way, then turned, then three back. Saba was more subdued, his body held still and only his eyes flickering. The two of them had the same sense of barely restrained action. Like a boulder on a mountaintop that’s just starting to shift toward the slope.
Naomi made a small, satisfied sound at the back of her throat and followed a linked passage to a schematic of a ship that looked from the outside like the Gathering Storm.
“Who knows about this?” Alex asked. “I mean, who’s seen it?”
“One of mine broke the encryption,” Saba said. “She brought it to me straight. Didn’t read it, even. Maha, she solid like stone. Not everyone of mine is, but her? I tell her she didn’t see it, and it never got seen.”
“This has the operational plans for the Gathering Storm,” Naomi said. “Whatever else you want to say about these Laconians, they are thorough.”
“Most of it’s MRCN and MMC protocols and practices,” Bobbie said. “Five-sixths of it are the operating procedures Alex and I trained on, word for word.”
“You should both read the thing, then,” Saba said. “Alles la. Mark down where it’s changed. There’s reasons to change things. Might point us the right way. Know what’s behind it, maybe even better than this on its own.”
“I don’t know,” Naomi said. “This on its own is pretty damned good.”
The excitement in Alex’s chest felt like champagne bubbles. Bright and dancing. He’d forgotten what a good break felt like after all the dread. It was astounding to think how close he’d come to scrubbing the mission, leaving the waldoes abandoned in the air duct, and calling it impossible. And if this was the key that let them get themselves and everyone else in the underground off Medina before the Typhoon appeared, his balking would have pissed their best chances away.
Holden’s gambit had worked. He’d thrown himself to the wolves so that they’d have this,
and it was everything they’d hoped for. Everything but having him back, and maybe that too.
“Is there anything in there about where the prisoners are held?” he asked.
“There is,” Naomi said, her inflection landing on the words in a way that meant it was the first thing she’d looked for. All the rest of it was important, but that part—where Holden was, how to get him out—was a settled issue in her mind. That was enough for Alex. He could hear the details later, so long as there were details to hear.
“Problemas son,” Saba said, shifting his weight. “Maybe is too good, yeah? Maybe is designed to look like something it’s not.”
“You think it’s fake?” Naomi asked.
Saba made a ticking sound with his tongue and teeth. “No. But can’t make the assumption without risking everybody’s ass, yeah? Hoping more than not. If it is what it is, it won’t stay secret for long. Too proud a victory, yeah? Someone finds out, gets a little drunk, then everyone knows.”
“You don’t trust your people’s discipline?” Bobbie asked.
Saba pointed at the closed door. “My people are the crew on the Malaclypse. These others weren’t mine until they stopped being Drummer’s. And she’s had five or six layers of bureaucrats between. It’s not I don’t trust, it’s that I don’t trust blind. People are people. Fucked up like we all are, it amazes me when we can even make a sandwich.”
“A man of infinite cynicism,” Naomi said, but Alex could hear the calm behind the words. Whatever she was seeing there, it soothed her more than he’d been able to. And then, “Bobbie, when you were active Martian Marine Corps, did your Goliath suits have a command override?”
“A what?” Bobbie said.
“Command override. Something that let your commanding officer shut the suit down?”
“Sure, we called it a radio. CO said stand down, and we did. What are you seeing?”
Naomi leaned back so that Bobbie—and since he was right there, Alex—could see better. Back when he’d been in the service, there had always been a clear chain of command, and procedures in place for when someone bucked it. Most of the time it involved MPs dragging someone off for a little summary roadside attitude adjustment followed by a court-martial. Maybe it was different in the Marines, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t seen anything like what was outlined on the screen.
“They can … they can turn them off?” Bobbie said, her voice caught between outrage and laughter. “Because that right there looks like it’s saying the governor can push a button and turn all those pretty suits of power armor into a couple thousand sarcophagi.”
“Life-support functions stay in place,” Naomi said. “But disables the weapons and comm systems, and freezes all the joints.”
Alex whistled appreciatively. “These folks must really be scared of mutineers.”
“Well,” Bobbie said. “Think about how they got here. Duarte managed to build a schismatic faction inside the MCRN big enough to start his own navy. Going on with the assumption that no one would ever try the same thing on him would seem stupid. He’s not stupid. This solve in particular, though …”
“Seems a mite overaggressive,” Alex said.
“And it’s always the aggressor who exposes their weakness,” Bobbie said. She put her hand on Naomi’s. “What are the chances we could spoof that lockdown signal?”
“Get me one of their powered suits,” Naomi said, “and I’m pretty sure we could manage it.”
“The Storm, Medina’s scopes, and the Marines,” Bobbie said. “This looks like we can build a plan that’s three for three.”
“And the prisoners,” Naomi said. “Freeing the prisoners.”
She meant Holden, Alex knew. Bobbie did too.
“Goes without saying,” Bobbie said.
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Singh
Singh found it unsettling to think of a time before Laconia. He’d been young enough when his parents made the crossing that he had virtually no memories of anything but Laconia as home. And yet, Laconia wasn’t even the first of the thirteen hundred worlds to be colonized. First, there had been a ball of mud and water that the settlers called Ilus.
The government of Earth, faced with the daunting prospect of surveying, studying, then exploiting the potentially vast riches of these new worlds, did what it always did. It gave out a government contract to a civilian company to do it for them. But when the prospecting vessel from Royal Charter Energy arrived at what the UN was calling New Terra, they found a couple hundred squatters already there digging up mineral resources and calling themselves an independent government.
A lot of violence later, RCE left the planet, Ilus had its own charter from the UN, and it was, up until recently, a founding member of Carrie Fisk’s Association of Worlds and an exporter of lithium and heavy metals.
James Holden had been there during the worst of that initial violence. Now he was in an observation room with his ankles shackled to the deck.
Singh considered the man on his monitor. Holden was older than he’d expected, his temples gone white. The images he’d pulled from the public archives going back decades showed that same open, serious-eyed face on a man very nearly Singh’s own age.
Now Holden sat with his head bowed forward. Blood streaked the chest and sleeves of his prison uniform. Round drops of it spotted his paper slippers. He cradled one hand against this belly, and his cheek was swollen and bruised. The stool he sat on had a single leg bolted to the deck, and he swayed forward and back like a man nodding himself to sleep. The restraints on his wrists looked like wide black ribbon, but Singh knew they were strong enough that the man’s bones would break before they did. He wasn’t a person so much as a distillation of human misery.
“Should I ask how many of those wounds came from the explosion?” Singh said.
Overstreet didn’t smile, but a subtle merriness came to his eyes. “If that’s important to you, sir, I’m sure I could find out.”
After the prisoner had set off false alarms throughout the engineering deck, he had been captured. Five minutes after that the real alarms had begun. In other circumstances, Holden would already be dead. All that had kept him alive until now was his connection to the mechanisms and people involved in his terrorist group and his own stubbornness.
But if this was going to work, Singh knew he would have to somehow reach this man. Make a human connection with someone ready to kill Laconians out of prejudice and hatred. If he was going to find something that he could exploit, he had to believe there was good in him, even if he only maintained the illusion for a little while. If he could reframe Holden in his own mind, if he could see some other version of the man than the obvious one, it might be possible. “He did warn people. The alarms before the detonation? They let more people get to safety. When he was taken, he warned the security forces to take shelter. If he hadn’t done what he did, the loss of life would have been worse.”
“That’s true,” Overstreet said. “He could also have chosen not to bomb the air supply.”
What was this man? A patriot to his government? A man so frightened of change he’d resort to violence? A rabble-rouser who took Singh’s governorship as another opportunity to start trouble that he would have been making under any circumstances?
What he came back to—what he brought himself back to—was that point: Holden had let himself be captured in order to save lives. It wasn’t much, but it was all Singh had.
“Well,” he said. “Let’s see what happens.”
Holden looked up as he entered the room. The older man’s left eye was nearly shut and his upper lip was split and scabby. He nodded to Singh as a guard brought a light chair for the governor to sit on.
“Captain Holden,” Singh said. “I’m sorry we couldn’t meet under better circumstances.”
“Me too,” Holden said. His voice was low and graveled. Singh had the sense that it wasn’t always that way.
“Can I get you anything? A cup of water?”
“Coffee,” Holden sai
d. “I could stand a cup of coffee.”
Singh tapped his wrist monitor, and a moment later the same guard reentered with a bulb. Holden accepted it with both hands and sipped it. His smile seemed genuine.
“This is actually pretty good.”
“I’m glad you approve. I’m more of a tea man myself.”
“It’ll do in a pinch,” Holden said, then lifted his gaze to meet Singh’s. He had surprisingly clear and focused eyes, considering all he’d been through. “Just to clarify, are you trying to build rapport with me, or am I trying to build rapport with you? I’m a little hazy on it.”
“Both, I think,” Singh said. “I haven’t done this before. I’m a novice.”
“Yeah, well. No offense, but you look like a teenager.”
“I’m the same age you were when you were thrown out of Earth’s navy.”
Holden laughed. It was a warm, rueful sound. “I’m not sure you’ll do yourself any favors comparing yourself to me back then. I was kind of an idiot.”
Singh found it was easy to chuckle. He could imagine coming to like this man. That was good. It made the next part easier.
“So why do you hate us? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“You personally? I don’t. But this conquistador bullshit? It’s true I don’t think much of it.”
Singh leaned back in his chair, cocked his head. “This is all a conversation about politics for you, then? It matters to you that much whose vision guides the government, no matter what that vision is?”
“Not that academic,” Holden said. “I’ve spent a lot of years trying to get people to get along without anyone’s boot being on anyone’s neck. Your plan A is what I’ve spent a lifetime pushing against.”
“Do you really think we’re so bad? Look at what we’ve done, how we’ve done it. We haven’t opened fire on a single ship that didn’t attack us first. In all of history, when has a conqueror been able to say that? We have embraced local rule. Any of the colony worlds that submits can make their own local government, keep their own local customs—”