Fred was silent. The distant sound of Sakai’s laughter filtered through from the screen. They both ignored it. Holden looked at his hands. He felt like he was confessing something. Maybe he was.
“Whatever’s going on here?” Holden said. “Whatever she’s involved with, I can’t fix it by putting on my shining armor and riding into battle. The only way I can see to do her any good at all is to do what we had planned. Get you to Luna. If you can use Dawes and Sakai and Avasarala to open some kind of communication with these sons of bitches, Naomi can be a bargaining chip. We can trade her for some of the people you’ve got in the brig. Or Sakai. Or something.”
“That’s the conclusion you’ve reached?”
“It is,” Holden said, the words tasting like ashes.
“You’ve grown up some since the first time we met,” Fred said. Holden heard the sympathy in it. The consolation. “It’s making me regret my ‘reckless’ comment.”
“I’m not convinced that’s a good thing. Have you ever done this? Loved someone like they were part of you and then left them in danger?”
Fred put a hand on Holden’s shoulder. For all the frailty that age and trouble had put in the older man’s face and body, his grip was still firm. “Son, I’ve grieved for more people than you’ve met. You can’t trust your heart on this. You have to do what you know, not what you feel.”
“Because if I do what I feel…” Holden said, thinking that the end of the sentence was something like I’d beat Sakai’s teeth in or I’d get us all killed. Fred surprised him.
“Then we lose her.”
“Course set,” Chava Lombaugh said from the cockpit. “On your order, sir.”
Holden tried to lean back into his crash couch, but without thrust gravity to give him weight, it ended up as just a straightening of the neck. His heart was racing, adrenaline ticking coolly through his veins.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The command deck felt too full. Sun-yi, serious and relaxed, was at weapons. Maura had comm controls up, monitoring them because that was what she did more than from any actual need. It should have been Alex’s voice. It should have been him and Naomi in the couches.
He shouldn’t have been scared.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s do this.”
“Sir,” Chava said. The warning light went from amber to red and Holden fell back into his couch. Tycho Station fell away behind them. It wouldn’t be an hour before it was too small to make out without assistance. Holden waited for three long, shuddering breaths. Four.
“How are we looking, Mister Ip?”
From the engineering deck, Sandra Ip – who should have been Amos – said, “All systems are within tolerance.”
“Meaning not all blowed up,” Holden said.
There was a pause on the channel. “Yes, sir. Not all blowed up, sir.”
Holden hated it that he wasn’t sure of his own ship. The Rocinante had been nothing but solid for him since the day he’d gotten aboard her. He’d trusted the ship with his life the way he trusted his heart to beat. It was more than instinct. It was automatic. To do anything else would have been strange.
But that was before. Sakai’s sabotage hadn’t killed him, but it hadn’t left him unscathed either. It would be a long time before Holden was sure that there were no more unpleasant surprises hidden in the ship. Software waiting for the right moment to evacuate the air or throw the ship into a fatal acceleration or any of the other thousand ways a ship could fail and kill its crew. They had looked everything over and found nothing, but they’d done that before and nearly died from their oversights. There was no amount of double-checking that would ever prove that nothing had been missed. From now on – maybe for a long time, maybe forever – he would wonder about things he hadn’t before. He was resentful, even angry, that his faith had been shaken.
He wondered if he was still thinking about the Rocinante.
“All right,” he said, unstrapping. “I’m going to get some coffee. You folks try not to break anything, and if you do, let me know.”
The chorus of yessirs was oddly disheartening. He wished they’d known he was joking. Or felt comfortable enough to joke back. Their formality was just another way it didn’t feel like his ship anymore.
He found Fred in the galley, talking into his hand terminal, recording a message that was clearly meant for Anderson Dawes. Holden got his coffee quietly between phrases like lines of communication and profound lack of trust. When Fred finished, he folded his hands and looked over.
“I’d take one of those too. Cream, no sugar.”
“Coming up,” Holden said. “Anything new?”
“Two of the original Martian escort surrendered.”
“Seriously?”
“They were too far from the action to affect the outcome, and they were getting hammered. I don’t like it, but I won’t second-guess their command.”
“Is it just my imagination, or are these people handing us our asses on a plate?” Holden said, bringing the coffee mugs to the table. “Are they really this good, or do we all just suck a lot worse than I thought we did?”
Fred sipped the coffee. “Ever heard of the Battle of Gaugamela?”
“No,” Holden said.
“Darius the third, emperor of Persia, had two hundred thousand soldiers under his command. Bactrians, Arachosians, Scythians. Some Greek mercenaries. On the other side, thirty-five thousand soldiers, and Alexander of Macedon. Alexander the Great. Five Persians to every Macedonian. It should have been a slaughter. But Alexander pulled so much of the enemy out to the flank that a gap opened in the middle of the Persian lines. Alexander called his men to form a wedge, and leading with his own cavalry, he pushed through and headed straight for the emperor. There were vast forces to either side, surrounding him. But it didn’t matter, because he saw how to reach Darius. Alexander saw something no one else had seen.
“These people? This little faction of the OPA? Between Earth and Mars and me, we outnumber them. We outgun them. All this has happened because someone saw an opportunity that no one else did. They had the audacity to strike where no one else would even have considered an attack. That’s the power of audacity, and if a general is lucky and strong-minded, they can take that advantage and keep the enemy on their back foot forever.”
“You think that’s their plan?”
“It would be mine,” Fred said. “This isn’t someone making a play to control the Belt or the Jovian moons. This is someone trying to grab all of it. Everything. It takes a certain kind of mind to succeed in something like that. Charisma, brilliance, discipline. It takes an Alexander.”
“That sounds a little discouraging,” Holden said.
Fred held up the coffee cup. The name TACHI hadn’t quite worn off the side, red and black letters half-erased by use. But not gone. Not yet. “I understand better now how Darius felt,” Fred said. “Having power, position, advantage. Especially when you think you know how wars work. It blinds you to other things. And by the time you see them, there’s a Macedonian cavalry with spears set coming right at you. But that wasn’t how Darius lost.”
“It’s not? Because the story you just told me sounded a lot like that’s how he lost.”
“No. He ran.”
Holden drank. From the crew quarters, the murmur of unfamiliar voices was a reminder that things were wrong. That the patterns of the past were broken, and might never be put right. “He was going to get killed if he didn’t, though. Alexander would have killed him.”
“Maybe. Or maybe Darius would have withstood the charge. Or maybe he would have fallen and his army would have crushed Alexander’s in rage and grief. The end of an emperor isn’t always the end of an empire. I look at Earth and what happened there. I look at Mars. At what happened on Tycho, and what I’m afraid happened on Medina. I’m seeing Alexander’s wedge bursting through the line at me. The same shock as Darius, the same dismay. The fear. But I’m not Darius. And I think Chrisjen Avasarala isn’t either.”
“So y
ou don’t think we’re screwed?”
Fred smiled. “I don’t know what to think yet. I won’t until I know more about the enemy. But looking back through history, there are a lot more men who thought they were Alexander the Great than men who actually were.”
Chapter Thirty-seven: Alex
They burned across the emptiness, and the enemy came hard behind them. Four Martian military ships with target locks on Alex’s drive burned toward him as they all dropped toward the sun. The other two had stayed behind to continue the attack on the main force. More than half the attackers had peeled off to come for him. Alex hoped it was enough to let Captain Choudhary get a toehold. Nothing he could do about that from here, though, but watch and hope.
For the first few hours, it had all been hard burn and dodging. Once he’d opened up some distance between the Razorback and the attackers, the nature of the chase altered. It wasn’t about catching or being caught anymore. Alex had the lead, had seventy-two missiles left flying around him in a cloud, a path to Luna, and reinforcements burning out to join him. If nothing went wrong, he’d be safe in less than two days.
The enemy’s job now was to make something go wrong.
“You’ve got another couple PDC arcs coming in,” Bobbie said.
“That’s cute,” Alex said. “I’m moving to avoid. You want to let the missiles know?”
“Already done.”
The tungsten slugs of the enemy point defense cannons were meant to chew through missiles at close range. At the distances they were holding now, they were something between an invitation for the crew of the Razorback to blunder into them by mistake and an uplifted middle finger. Alex tracked the incoming fire and braced as the maneuvering thrusters pushed them down and to the left to avoid the gently curving arcs of enemy fire, then up and right to correct to the original course. Around him the cloud of missiles parted to let the slugs pass through their flock of exhaust cones and warheads.
“Any enemy missiles following that up?” he asked.
A moment later Bobbie said, “Nope.”
“Keep an eye out. Our friends there are gettin’ antsy.”
“Happens when you’re losing,” Bobbie said. Even without turning, Alex could hear the smile in her voice.
From the cabin in the back, Smith’s voice came in staccato gasps. Even the relatively modest one-g flight was three times what the man was used to. He’d been burning up the tightbeam for hours. Sometimes, Alex caught Chrisjen Avasarala’s recorded voice, other times a man’s warm drawl. Someone on Mars, he figured.
The Razorback had been a toy once, and while the screens were decades out of date, they still had some bells and whistles. He set the wall screens to match external cameras, and the wide starscape bloomed around them. The sun was bigger and brighter here than it would have been on Earth, but constrained by the limits of the screen to a burning whiteness. The curves of the Milky Way glowed all along the plane of the ecliptic, the billions of stars made soft by distance. Being surrounded by missiles was like floating in a cloud of fireflies, and behind them, bright as seven Venuses in an Earth twilight, the drive plumes of the attackers who wanted them dead.
And also Naomi.
Bobbie sighed. “You know, a thousand of those stars out there are ours now. That’s like, what? Three ten-thousandths of a percent of our galaxy? That’s what we’re fighting over.”
“You think?”
“You don’t?”
“Nah,” Alex said. “I figure we’re fighting over who gets the most meat from the hunt and first access to the water hole. Mating rights. Who believes in which gods. Who has the most money. The usual primate issues.”
“Kids,” Bobbie said.
“Kids?”
“Yeah. Everyone wanting to make sure their kids have a better shot than they did. Or than everyone else’s kids. Something like that.”
“Yeah, probably,” Alex said. He shifted his personal screen back to tactical, pulling up the latest data on the Pella. It still had the strange, cheap-looking civilian craft tethered to it. Alex couldn’t tell if they were taking something off it or putting something on. So far, it was the only craft in the little force that wasn’t clearly military design. There hadn’t been any more contacts from Naomi. He didn’t know whether that was a good thing or a problem, but he couldn’t help checking on the ship every five minutes like he was picking at a scab.
“You ever worry about your kid?” Bobbie asked.
“Don’t have one,” Alex said.
“You don’t? I thought you did.”
“Nope,” Alex said. “Never really had the situation for one, you know? Or I guess I did, and it didn’t fit. What about you?”
“Never had the urge,” Bobbie said. “The family I’ve got has been more than enough.”
“Yeah. Family.”
Bobbie was silent for a moment. Then, “You’re thinking about her.”
“Naomi, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
Alex turned in his couch. Bobbie’s armor reached against both walls, servomotors locked in place to brace her. She looked crucified. The wound in the deck where she’d pulled out the crash couch made it seem like she’d burst through the bottom of the ship. Her expression managed to be both sympathetic and hard.
“Of course, I’m thinking about her,” Alex said. “She’s right there. And probably she’s in trouble. And I can’t figure out how the hell she got there in the first place. It’s not going to be too long before the cavalry gets here to save us, and when they do, I don’t know if I should be helping to attack the Pella or protect her.”
“That’s hard,” Bobbie agreed. “But you know we’ve got our mission. Get Smith to Luna. We’ve got to stand our watch.”
“I know. Can’t help thinking about it, though. I keep putting together schemes where we use the missiles we’ve got left to make them turn her over to us.”
“Any of them even remotely plausible?”
“Not a one,” Alex said.
“There’s nothing worse than keeping to your duty when it means leaving one of your own in danger.”
“No shit.” Alex looked at the readouts from the Pella. “You know, maybe —”
“Stand your watch, sailor. And heads up. We’ve got more PDCs coming in.”
Alex had already seen them and started laying in the course corrections. “Optimistic little shits. Got to give them that.”
“Maybe they think you’ll get sleepy.”
The overloading of the pinnace was awkward and strange. Moving from the pilot’s seat to the head meant both Alex and the prime minister of Mars squeezing past Bobbie’s power armor. Or, for Bobbie, exiling Smith to the empty space where her couch had been while she used the tiny cabin to break down her armor or climb back into it. No one even suggested that they sleep by hot-bunking in the cabin.
Smith himself seemed like a personable man, polite and thoughtful. Inoffensive was a word that came to mind. Alex had stopped following Martian politics sometime around the slow zone, so he didn’t come in with any preconceptions about the man or his policies. When they did talk, it was usually about small things – the popular culture of Mars when they were both growing up, Smith’s gratitude for the efforts he and Bobbie were putting into keeping him alive, some questions about what Ilus had been like. Alex had the sense that Smith was, if anything, a little starstruck by him. Which was pretty thoroughly odd, when he thought about it.
Still, when Smith popped his head out of the cabin to tell Bobbie that there was a message specifically for her from Avasarala, it had the sense of a secretary who was vaguely uneasy interrupting his boss. Alex felt a weird impulse to reassure the man it was all right, but wasn’t sure how to say it without being even more awkward.
Bobbie thanked him, and for a while she was silent. Alex kept his eyes on the enemy and the sun and the data from the incoming UN escort ships that were still hidden by the sun’s corona.
“Alex?” Bobbie sounded frustrated.
?
??Yup.”
“I can’t make this thing’s incoming feed talk to my suit. Can you put this up on a screen for me? I’d do it myself, but —”
He switched over to the comm system, opened a panel on the wall screen, and sent the message to it. Chrisjen Avasarala appeared. She looked older than Alex remembered her. There were dark circles under her eyes and a grayness to her skin that didn’t belong there. Her sari only made her look paler. When she spoke, though, her voice was just as sure as ever.
“Bobbie, I need any data you have about the missing Martian ships. I know, you’re going to tell me how you’ve already given me everything, and of course I trust and believe all that you say, blah blah fucking blah. But I need it. Now. I’ve got confirmation of two dozen Martian military vessels that are burning hard for the Ring. Everything from the Barkeith to a couple resupply barges. It’s like a little fucking fleet all its own. Smith says he’s looking into it, which could mean anything from he knows exactly what’s going on and doesn’t want to tell me to Mars is in the middle of a coup and he doesn’t want to tell me. One way or the other, he’s locked up tight as a rat’s asshole.”
“Sorry about this,” Bobbie said over her shoulder.
“It’s nothing she hasn’t said to my face,” Smith replied.
“You want me to stop the playback?” Alex asked, but Avasarala was already talking again.
“If these are more ships that got sold to whoever’s chasing you, I need to know. If they’re all MCRN vessels with actual Martian Navy crews, that’s something very different. And since they’re not answering, I’m stuck trying to peep in the windows. If you’ve held something back – something sensitive, something that made you uncomfortable to share with me – I absolutely understand. Your patriotism and loyalty to Mars has been a thorn in my fucking side since the day I met you, but I respect it. It speaks well of you as a soldier and as a person, and now it’s time to get the fuck over it.
“Also, Nathan, if you’re listening, and I assume you are, I’m the best and only friend you’ve got. Give her permission to share what she has, or I swear to God I’ll have you turning tricks out of a prefab shed on the side of the highway. I’m trying to save humanity here. It would be just fantastic if someone would help.”