“Unless they conflict with your rules.”
“Of course.”
Holden sipped his coffee. “That’s the thing. The people you’re controlling don’t have a voice in how you control them. As long as everyone’s on the same page, things may be great, but when there’s a question, you win. Right?”
“There has to be a way to come to a final decision.”
“No, there doesn’t. Every time someone starts talking about final anythings in politics, that means the atrocities are warming up. Humanity has done amazing things by just muddling through, arguing and complaining and fighting and negotiating. It’s messy and undignified, but it’s when we’re at our best, because everyone gets to have a voice in it. Even if everyone else is trying to shout it down. Whenever there’s just one voice that matters, something terrible comes out of it.”
“And yet, I understand from Ms. Fisk that the Transport Union was condemning whole colonies that didn’t follow its rule.”
“Right?” Holden said. “And so I disobeyed that order and I quit working for them. I was all set to go retire in Sol system. Can you do that?”
“Can I do what?”
“If you are given an immoral order, can you resign and walk away? Because everything I’ve seen about how you’re running this place tells me that isn’t an option for you.”
Singh crossed his arms. He had the sense that the interrogation was getting away from him.
“The high consul is a very wise, very thoughtful man,” he said. “I have perfect faith that—”
“No. Stop. ‘Perfect faith’ really tells me everything I need to know,” Holden said. “You think this is a gentle, bloodless conquest, don’t you?”
“It is, to the degree that you allow it to be.”
“I was there for the war Duarte started to cover his tracks. I was there for the starving years afterward. Your empire’s hands look a lot cleaner when you get to dictate where history begins and what parts of it don’t count.”
“So you and your friends decide instead?” Singh said, trying to keep his tone light. “You know that sooner or later, you’re going to tell us who they are.”
Holden took a long drink from the coffee cup and set it down gently on the floor beside his feet. “I’m hoping for later,” he said. “But I see we’re already done with the part where we make friendly with each other.”
Singh felt the warmth he’d cultivated toward Holden slipping away into frustration. He’d started in too quickly. He should have spent more time building up the relationship, and now they’d both fallen into adversarial stances with each other. It was time to change tack.
“Tell me what you can,” Singh said, “about Ilus.”
Holden frowned, but not angrily. “What do you want to know?”
Singh waited without answering.
Holden shrugged. “All right. It was the first contested colony. I went out there to try to mediate between the different claimants, and it all pretty much turned to shit. People shooting each other. Old artifacts coming to life and blowing up the ocean. Local ecosystem trying to mine us for fresh water. And there were death slugs. It wasn’t great.”
“Artifacts coming to life?”
“Yeah,” Holden said, shifting on his little stool. “We had a trace of active protomolecule on the ship. We didn’t know about it. It was trying to report in about the Sol gate being complete, but everything it wanted to report to was dead or turned off. So it started turning things on. Only part of it was this guy I used to know, and … It’s kind of a weird story. Why do you want to know about Ilus?”
“What about the other artifact?”
Holden shook his head, opened his hands. What other artifact?
Singh pulled up the image from the Tempest on his monitor. A bright-black nothingness. He enlarged it and held it out for Holden to see.
“Yeah, the bullet,” Holden said. “It was the thing that turned everything off again. Deactivated the protomolecule.”
Singh felt a chill in his heart. The calmness and innocence of the way Holden said the words was deeper than any threat.
“It did what?”
“The guy I used to know? The dead one? He was a detective, and it was using him to look for where to report in. Only he—the reconstructed version of him—noticed that there was this place that killed off protomolecule activity. He said it was like a bullet that someone had fired to kill off the … the civilization … that … Bring that where I can see it better?”
Singh enlarged the image. Holden blinked. The weariness seemed to fall away from him, the pain of his injuries forgotten. When he spoke, his voice had a firmness and command Singh hadn’t heard there before. “That’s not Ilus. Where is that?”
“It appeared in Sol system. On one of our ships.”
“Oh. Fuck that,” Holden said. “All right, listen. There’s a woman you need to find. Her name’s Elvi Okoye. She was a scientist on Ilus. I don’t know where she is now, but she spent years researching the artifacts there, including that one. She went through it.”
“Went through it to where?”
“Not like a door. Like she carried part of the protomolecule’s network into it, and it killed off the sample. Turned it all inert. And she said it turned her sort of off while it did.”
“Turned her off. Like she lost consciousness?” Singh said. “Lost time?”
“Something like that,” Holden said. “I don’t know. I didn’t go through it. But I did see the thing on the station. I saw what happened to them.”
Singh found he was leaning forward. His blood felt like it was fizzing. And what was more, he saw the same feelings echoed in Holden’s battered face.
“There was a station on Ilus?” he asked.
“No. The one here. The station that controls the ring space. The first time anyone came though the ring, that same dead guy took me to the station. It was part of how the rings turned on. But I saw things there. Like a record of the old civilization? My friend, the dead guy, was looking through it for something, and because he was using me to do it, I saw it all too. Whatever made this? All of this? They were wiped out a long time before you and me got here. Billions of years, maybe. I saw whole systems going dark. I saw them trying to stop it by burning away entire solar systems. And it didn’t work. Whatever they tried to do, it failed, and they were all just wiped away with just their roads and their old machines left for us to stumble across. That thing that showed up on your ship? That’s them. The other them. That’s the thing that killed everything before Earth and Mars were part of the gate network.”
“But why would it appear now?”
Holden choked on a laugh. “Well, I don’t know. Have you people been doing anything different recently?”
Singh felt a little stab of embarrassment. It was a fair point. For the first time, the Tempest had employed the magnetic-field generator in an uncontrolled environment both here and in Sol system. Maybe this was a side effect. Or something else about the battleships built on the platforms. Or …
“Look,” Holden said. “You and me? We’re not friends. We aren’t going to be friends. I will oppose you and your empire to my dying breath. But right now, none of that matters. Whatever built the gates and the protomolecule and all these ruins we’re living in? They were wiped out. And the thing that wiped them out just took a shot at you.”
Singh couldn’t sleep that night. He was exhausted, but whenever he closed his eyes, Holden was there, squinting through his injured eyes, pointing with his broken hand. And the enigma of the bullet, the threat and mystery it represented. They defied him to sleep.
In the middle of his sleep shift, he gave up, put on a robe, and ordered a pot of tea delivered from the commissary. When it arrived, he was already searching through the station records for other documentation of Holden’s ravings. He was hoping to find something to suggest that the man was either insane or playing a game to deflect attention from his terrorism. But file after file, report after report, confi
rmed him. Even when there was no other witness to what he’d seen, there was at least a history to show that his claims had been consistent.
It would have been so much easier if James Holden were only a madman.
Your empire’s hands look a lot cleaner when you get to dictate where history begins, and what parts of it don’t count.
He knew the story of Laconia’s founding. He’d been there for it, though he’d been a child at the time. The gates to the thirteen hundred worlds had opened, and the probes had gone through. They’d brought back reports of the different systems, the stars and planets, and the stranger things that they’d seen. All humanity had seen the opportunity of new lands, of new worlds to inhabit, but alone of them all Winston Duarte had recognized the terrible danger that expansion would bring. The chaos and violence as humanity pressed out past the limits of civilization. The choke point of the slow zone and the endless wars it would generate. The unanticipated environmental collapses made worse by the lack of a central response. And he alone had the will to solve the problem.
From among all the planets on the far sides of the gates, he chose Laconia because of the orbital construction platforms. He found the live culture of the protomolecule that he could use to harness Laconia’s power. He found Dr. Cortazár to lead the research and development. And he took a third of the Martian Navy as the seed that would grow to become the world tree. The fraction of humanity that would rebuild on Laconia and come forth to bring order to humanity’s chaos. To bring the peace that would last forever. The end of all wars. Singh doubted none of it. Holden’s version wasn’t incompatible, even if it chose a different emphasis. Holden himself had used the protomolecule on Ilus—or been used by it—to turn on the ancient mechanisms. Only he had done it haphazardly, and with terrible results. Duarte had done it carefully, and to glorious effect.
He sipped his tea. It hadn’t quite gone cold, but it wasn’t as warm as he’d expected. Holden was a problem. He was the key to breaking the terrorist network on Medina. He was also the key to the mystery of the thing that had appeared on the Tempest. His was the only report on the visions from the ring station. He was singular in all humanity because he’d bumbled into being in so many of the right places at so many of the right times. If there was one thing Laconia’s history taught, it was the power of the right person at the right moment.
Singh had always known that the history of Laconia and the history of Sol system were connected. He’d never felt those common roots more deeply than now. The sense that his world and Holden’s were part of a single, much vaster story. The makers of the protomolecule were also a part of that larger frame. The things that had killed them, and then vanished.
The things that had returned.
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Amos
I was thinking about the recyclers,” Peaches said. She sounded tired. She always sounded a little tired, but this was more.
“Yeah?” he said.
They were alone in the bunk. She was sitting up, paring her toenails with a little knife he’d found for her. Something about her meds made them thicker and yellow. He knew it was important to her to keep them short, even though she never said anything.
His hands imagined what it would feel like to snap her neck. The tension first, then the grinding feeling of cartilage ripping as it gave way. He saw the look of betrayal in her eyes as the life went out of them. It was as clear as if he’d actually done it.
“The returns aren’t as good as they ought to be,” she said. “We’ve been able to get eighty-eight, ninety percent recovery, but I don’t think we broke eighty-five on the Freehold run.”
“Worth looking at,” Amos said. “You got any suspects?”
“I want to take a look at the water filters. I know they’re supposed to be the best there is without retrofitting to a straight gel system, but I don’t think they’re doing what’s on the label.”
He closed his eyes and the Rocinante’s recycling system appeared in his mind. If the filters were underperforming … yeah, could throw off the pressure going into the recyclers. Might be enough to drop the reclamation percentages. He pictured what else it would do.
“We should take a peek at the feed lines,” he said.
“Look for distention?” she said.
He grunted. Peaches scowled and nodded once, the way she did when they’d come to an agreement. There were still a few things about the Roci that he knew better than she did, but those were few and far between. And mostly about the weapons systems. She didn’t like those, and it had an effect on how much she thought about them. There were conversations he had with her that he couldn’t have with anybody else.
That didn’t keep the thoughts from coming. It didn’t do anything about the thing in his throat. “You think Holden’s okay?” she asked.
“Is or he isn’t,” Amos said. The thing in his throat got a little bigger. A little tighter. He wasn’t sure why.
“I wish there was something more I could do,” she said.
“Naomi’ll come up with something. Whatever needs doing, we’ll do it.”
She finished the last nail and tossed him the knife. He caught it in the air, folded it closed, and put it under his pillow, where it would stay. Peaches got another couple of her pills and swallowed them dry, then lay back on her bunk. There wasn’t room enough between her bunk and the one above her to get a decent punch going, but he knew what it would feel like to do a straight-kick to her ribs. Or her head. Push her back against the bulkhead, then the next kicks, she wouldn’t be able to avoid. He wasn’t going to do it, but the thoughts came anyway.
“You need some sleep?” he asked.
“Little.”
“You should try to eat some afterward.”
“I’m not keeping much down right now.”
“That’s why they call it ‘try,’” he said. “Worst case, just smear it around your face like a little kid. Absorb some nutrients through your skin.”
She chuckled. “You talked me into it, big guy. After I rest.”
“I’m going to get a jump on it,” he said. “You need anything, you just say it.”
“Thank you,” Peaches said.
He made his way down toward the galley, his shoulders brushing against the conduit and pipes on both sides. In the galley, one of Saba’s people was drinking a cup of coffee. Nice-looking guy, always been pleasant. The thing in his throat moved a little, and Amos felt the coffee cup slamming into the other guy’s face. The edge of the cup folding against the guy’s upper lip. The coffee burning them both. He felt what it would be like, bending him back, trapping his legs under the table so he couldn’t writhe away, pulling until his back snapped. There’d be others by then. The guy’s friends. He thought about how to kill them too.
Amos smiled amiably and nodded. The guy nodded back. Amos got a bowl of oatmeal and honey flavoring. He sat by himself to eat. Saba’s guy finished his drink and walked away. There was a moment when his back was turned, Amos felt his own foot driving into the back of the man’s knee, knocking him forward and down where he’d be in the right place for a choke hold. Amos only sighed and took another spoonful of grain mush. The stuff on the Roci was better, but this was warm anyway. It soothed his throat.
“Hey there, big guy,” Babs said from the doorway.
She stepped over, sat across from him. Her jaw was set and her gaze was firm and straight-ahead. Looking right at him like she was playing at being Holden.
“Got a minute?”
Amos took his half-empty bowl, dropped the spoon in it, and threw them all away as he walked out the door.
There was an environmental-control station about seven doors down. Saba’d been using it to store food, but they’d all been eating at a pretty fair clip, and it was mostly empty space now. Only one entrance, so no one spent much time there. Thick walls filled with insulation foam. The kind that just ate up sound like it was nothing. If the Laconians came, it was a death trap. He shouldered the door open. Babs’ footsteps came from
behind him, hard and fast and authoritative. Like a schoolteacher about to chew out her students.
The room was dark, but he found the switch. Too-bright utility lights. They were down to half a pallet of textured protein and some tubs of grain and yeast. The walls were all steel plate except for a patch in one corner where they’d used carbon-silicate lace. A pipe ran along the corner where the ceiling met the left wall. The actual environmental controls were all in locked cabinets and behind security doors that would take a crowbar, a welding torch, and a couple hours to get through. The whole place was maybe three meters by four, and a couple high. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good. He didn’t have anyplace better.
Babs stepped in behind him and closed the door. Her nose had the two little half-moons beside the nostrils that she got when she was pissed. The thing in his throat throbbed like a tumor. For a second, he thought it was maybe going to rupture.
Babs crossed her arms, blocking the door.
“Look, Amos. I understand you’re pissed off at me. And honest to God, I’m more than a little pissed off at you right now too. But we’re a crew. We’re friends, and we can work this out, whatever it is. I’m here, okay? So whatever it is—”
“When did you turn into such a fucking pussy, Babs?” he said. His hands were tingling like they had too much energy in them. Like he was about to ground out. “Did you really come in here to talk about your feelings?”
Her face went blank, her eyes flat. She uncrossed her arms. Her weight sunk into her hips. Her knees bent a little. He figured she was good for maybe one or two more rounds of insults, but he’d gauged wrong.
She shifted her shoulders, swung at the hips, her right arm unfurling. A few years earlier, he might have been able to slip it and get inside. But a few years earlier, she might have been faster. Either way, all he managed was to turn his head away and pull back a couple centimeters before her knuckles slapped into his cheekbone. If he’d been slower, it would have splashed his nose across his face. Her next punch was already coming, and he turned so that it got his shoulder at an angle. The pain was sudden and wide and familiar as an old song. He felt this thing in his throat blowing up like a balloon, expanding out bigger than he was.