She forced a breath. She could do that. Inhale, exhale. Something gurgled in her lungs. Not blood, though. She told herself it wasn’t blood. She rolled onto her side, tucked her legs up, rose to sitting, and then lay back down again as the world swam. That was more than a g. That had to be more than a g. She couldn’t be that weak, could she?
The Chetzemoka hummed under her. She realized vaguely that she was hearing words. Voices. A voice. She knew that didn’t make sense, but she didn’t know why. She pressed her hands to her face. A storm of emotions ran through her – elation, grief, triumph, rage. Her brain wasn’t working well enough yet to associate them with anything. They just happened, and she watched and waited and gathered her scattered self together. Her hands and feet started hurting, tortured nerve endings screaming at her. She ignored them. Pain was only pain, after all. She’d lived through worse.
Next time, she made it to her feet. The little black thumb of the decompression kit was still lodged in her leg. She pulled it out, lifted it to shoulder high, and dropped it. It fell like maybe one and a half, two gs. That was nice. If she’d felt this bad at just one g, she’d have been worried. She should probably have been worried anyway.
She cycled the inner door open and stumbled out to the cheap locker room. The lockers hung open, EVA suits hanging in them or scattered on the floor. The air bottles were all gone. The voice – it was just one voice, but her ears seemed to have lost all their treble and left only an incomprehensible soup of bass tones – was familiar. She thought she should know it. She moved through the abandoned ship. She wondered how long she’d been unconscious, and if there was any way to know where she was, what heading she was on, and how fast she was already traveling.
She reached a control panel and tried to access the navigation system, but it was locked down. As was the comm, the system status, the repair and diagnostics. She laid her forehead against the panel more from exhaustion than despair. The direct contact of bone on ceramic changed the voice, sound conduction through contact, like pressing helmets together and shouting. She knew the voice. She knew the words. “This is Naomi Nagata of the Rocinante. If you get this message, please retransmit. Tell James Holden I am in distress. Comm is not responding. I have no nav control. Please retransmit.” She chuckled, coughed up the clear fluid, spat it on the deck, and laughed again. The message was a lie built by Marco to lure Jim to his death.
Every bit of it was true.
Chapter Forty-two: Holden
Arnold Mfume, who wasn’t Alex, came out of the crew quarters still drying his hair. When he saw Holden and Foster – the two captains – by the coffee machine, he grimaced.
“Running a little late there, Mister Mfume,” Foster Sales said.
“Yes, sir. Chava just pointed that out to me. I’m on my way.”
“Coffee?” Holden said, holding out a freshly brewed bulb. “Little milk, no sugar. Might not be how you take it, but it’s ready now.”
“I won’t say no,” Mfume said with a fast, nervous smile. Holden couldn’t place his accent. Flat vowel sounds and swallowed consonants. Wherever it came from, it sounded good on him.
As Holden handed over the bulb, Foster cleared his throat. “You know it’s a bad habit to be late for your shift.”
“I know, sir. I’m sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.”
And then, Mfume was gone, bolting up the ladder toward the cockpit faster than the lift would have taken him. Foster sighed and shook his head. “It’s good being young,” he said, “but some people wear it better than others.”
Holden tapped in an order for another coffee. “I wouldn’t want people to judge me by what I did in my twenties. What about you? Can I get you one?”
“More of a tea man, myself,” the other captain said. “If that’s an option.”
“Don’t know that I’ve ever tried.”
“No?”
“There was always coffee.”
The morning meeting had started off as just part of the shakedown. Between the new crew and the uncertainty surrounding the ship, it had seemed like a good idea for Holden and Foster Sales to touch base with each other, compare notes, make sure that everything was the way it was supposed to be. The care Foster took to treat the Roci with respect had helped Holden. The new crew wasn’t his, and he didn’t feel comfortable with them, but they weren’t going through the real crew’s lockers while no one was looking. And day by day, their presence was growing more familiar. Less strange.
When he called down to engineering and Kazantzakis or Ip replied, it didn’t seem as wrong anymore. Finding Sun-yi and Gor wired into gaming goggles shooting the crap out of each other in simulated battles – because as weapons techs with no one to shoot at they were getting antsy – stopped being weird and edged into sort of endearing. Maura Patel was spending her insomniac, sleepless shifts upgrading the tightbeam system. Holden knew it was something Naomi had on her list of projects, but he let Maura do it anyway. And after the long, quiet days in the dock, sleeping in his couch and waking to an empty ship, part of him even appreciated the company. They might be the wrong people, but they were people. Having guests in his house kept him from descending into his fear and anxiety. He was only putting on a brave face, but it actually made him feel a little braver.
“Anything else I should be aware of?” Foster asked.
“Just I want to know if anything happens with the Razorback or the Pella,” Holden said. “Or if we get a message from Earth. Amos Burton or my family, either one.” As if they were different.
“I think you’ve made that clear to the crew,” Foster said solemnly, but with a glimmer of amusement in his eye. Probably Holden had made the point a few times. To everyone. The coffee machine chimed and gave Holden a fresh bulb. Foster made his way to the ladder, and then down toward the torpedo bays where Kazantzakis was cleaning things that were already clean. Holden waited a few seconds and then headed up to the ops deck. Chava, coming down, met him, and they did a little awkward no-you-first dance before they got past each other.
Fred was in the crash couch that he’d appropriated as his office. The hatch to the cockpit was closed, but Holden could still hear the wailing of the raï that Mfume liked to listen to during his shift in the pilot’s seat. Between that and the coffee, he wouldn’t be sleeping, but Fred had put headphones on and so didn’t hear Holden coming. The image on his screen was familiar. Marco Inaros, the self-styled head of the Free Navy and public face of the devastation of Earth. And – Holden tried the thought carefully in case it hurt too much to think it – if Naomi was dead, the man who’d probably killed her. His chest contracted painfully and he pushed the idea away. Thinking about Amos and Naomi was too dangerous.
Fred turned sharply, noticing him, and pulled off the headphones. “Holden. How long have you been there?”
“Just came up.”
“Good. Hate to think I’m getting too feeble to know when there’s someone in the room. Everything all right?”
“Apart from being in the middle of a system-wide coup with half of my crew missing? Peachy. I mean, I’m not sleeping, and when I do it’s nightmares from start to finish, but peachy.”
“Well, it was kind of a stupid question. Sorry about that.”
Holden sat on the couch beside Fred’s and leaned in.
“What do we know about this guy?”
“Inaros?” Fred said. “He was on my short list of possibilities when the rocks dropped. Not the head of it, but in the top five. He leads a splinter group of high-poverty Belters. The kind of people who live in leaky ships and post screeds about taxation being theft. I’ve spoken to him a time or two, usually to deescalate a situation he wanted to set on fire.”
“You think he’s the one behind it all?”
Fred sat back, his couch gimbals hissing as they shifted. From the headphones, Holden could hear the man’s voice even over the murmurs of raï – “We will begin again and remake humanity without the corruption, greed, and hatred that the inner planets
could not transcend…”
Fred grunted and shook his head. “I don’t see it. Inaros is charismatic. And he’s smart. Watching his press release, he certainly thinks he’s in charge, but he’d have to. The man’s a first-rate narcissist and a sadist besides. He’d never knowingly share power with anyone if he could help it. This level of organization? Of coordination? It seems beyond his reach.”
“How so?”
Fred gestured toward the screen. The light from it glowed in his eyes; tiny images of Inaros giving his salute. “It doesn’t feel right. He’s the kind of man who carries a lot of weight in a small circle. Playing at this scale isn’t what he does best. He isn’t a bad tactician, and the timing of the attacks was showy in a way that seems like he was likely behind them. And he’s charming at the negotiating table. But…”
“But?”
“But he’s not a first-class mind, and this is a first-class operation. I don’t know how to put it better than that. My gut says that even if he’s taking credit for it, he has a handler.”
“What would your gut have said before the rocks dropped?”
Fred coughed out a laugh. “That he was an annoyance and a small-time player. So yes, it may just be sour grapes on my part. I’d rather think I was outplayed by someone who’s a genius at something grander than self-mythologizing.”
“Do you have any idea why Naomi would be on his ship?”
Fred’s gaze shifted from the hazy middle distance of thought to directly on Holden. “Is that someplace we want to go right now?”
“Do you?”
“I don’t. But I can speculate. Naomi is a Belter, and what I know of her says she grew up in the same circles as Inaros and his crew. I have to assume they crossed paths before and had some unfinished business. Maybe they were on the same side, maybe they were enemies, maybe both. But not neither.”
Holden leaned forward, elbows on his knees. As general as they were, as gently as he’d said them, the words were like little hammer blows. He swallowed.
“Holden. Everyone has a past. Naomi was a grown woman when you met her. You didn’t think she’d popped out of the packaging right when you set eyes on her, did you?”
“No, of course not. Everyone on the Canterbury was there because they had a reason. Including me. It’s just if there was something big, like ‘part of a cabal that went on to destroy Earth’ big, I don’t know why she wouldn’t have told me.”
“Did you ask?”
“No. I mean, she knew that I was interested. That she could tell me whatever she wanted to tell me. I figured if she didn’t want to, that was up to her.”
“And now you’re upset that she didn’t. So what changed? Why are you entitled to know things now that you weren’t entitled to know before?”
The raï from the cockpit paused, silence filling the ops deck. On Fred’s screen, the playback had reached the split circle as it faded to white. “I may,” Holden said, “be a small, petty person. But if I’m going to lose her, I at least need to know why.”
“We’ll see if we can’t put you in a position to ask her yourself,” Fred said. The music from the cockpit kicked in again, and Fred scowled up at the hatch. “If it’s any comfort, I think we have a chance. I don’t think it’ll be long before he’s ready to open negotiations.”
“No?” Holden said. It was such a thin sliver of hope, but he felt himself jumping to it all the same.
“No. He got the jump on us tactically. I will absolutely give him that. But the next part is where he has to actually consolidate and hold power. That’s not tactics. That’s strategy, and I don’t see anything in him that leads me to think he has a handle on that.”
“I do.”
Fred waved a hand like Holden’s words had been smoke and he was clearing the air. “He’s playing a short-run game. Yes, his stock’s high right now, and probably will be for a little while. But he’s standing in the way of the gates. All of this is to stop people from going out and setting up colonies. But the hunger is already out there. Smith couldn’t stop Mars from depopulating itself. Avasarala couldn’t put the brakes on the process, and God knows she tried. Marco Inaros thinks he can do it at the end of a gun, but I don’t see it working. Not for long. And he doesn’t understand fragility.”
“You mean Earth?”
“Yes,” Fred said. “It’s the blind spot of being a Belter. I’ve seen it over and over in the past few decades. There’s a faith in the technology. In the idea of maintaining an artificial ecosystem. We’re able to grow food on Ganymede, so they think humanity’s freed from the bonds of Earth. They don’t think about how much work we had to do for those crops to grow. The mirrors to concentrate the sun, the genetic modifications to the plants. The process of learning to build rich soil out of substrate and fungus and full-spectrum lights. And backstopping all of that, the complexity of life on Earth. And now these new worlds… well I don’t have to tell you how much less hospitable they are than it says on the box. Once it becomes clear that he’s got it wrong —”
“He doesn’t, though,” Holden said. “Yeah, okay, the ecological part maybe he hasn’t thought all the way through, but when it comes to the Belt, he isn’t wrong. Look at all the people who just pulled up stakes and headed out for the rings. Ilus or New Terra or whatever the hell you want to call it? It’s a terrible, terrible planet, and there are people living on it. All those colony ships that left Mars to go try terraforming a place that’s already got air and a magnetosphere? A lot of those people are really, really smart. Even now, just now, you said how the pressure to get out to the new systems is more than this guy expects or is prepared for. That means he’s doomed, maybe. But that doesn’t make him wrong. We have to make him be wrong.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Fred said. “What I was doing with Medina Station would have —”
“Would have made a place for all the people living on Medina Station. But asteroid prospectors? Water haulers? The crews that are barely eking by? Those are who Marco’s talking to, and he’s right because no one else is taking them into account. Not even you. They’re looking at the future, and they’re seeing that no one needs them anymore. Everything they do will be easier in a gravity well, and they can’t go there. We have to make some kind of future that has a place for them in it. Because unless we do, they have literally nothing to lose. It’s all already gone.”
The system chimed and Maura’s voice came over the speakers. “Captain Holden, sir?”
“I’m here,” Holden said, still looking at Fred’s angry scowl. “And aren’t you supposed to be off shift, Mister Patel?”
“I am off shift, sir. But I couldn’t sleep, so I was running some diagnostics. But Captain Sales said you wanted an alert if the situation changed with the Razorback and its pursuers?”
Holden’s mouth flooded with the metallic taste of fear. “What’s going on?”
“We’re getting reports that the Free Navy ships have broken off, sir. The UN forces are still half a day out, but the thought is the Free Navy vessels are trying to steer well clear of any large-scale confrontation.”
“The Pella?” Holden said.
“With the Free Navy fleet, sir, but when they made the course change, a civilian ship broke off from the grouping, turning the other way. It’s got a lot of inertia to overcome, but unless it changes its acceleration profile, it looks to be on a course that will bring it within a million klicks of us.”
“That’s not accidental,” Fred said.
“It isn’t, sir,” Maura said. “The vessel’s registered at the Chetzemoka, and it’s broadcasting a message on loop. Message follows.”
Holden’s knuckles hurt and he forced himself to relax his fists. Naomi’s voice filled the ops deck, and it was like being on the verge of passing out from dehydration and being handed a glass of water. As dire as the message was, Holden still felt every syllable untying his knots. When Naomi’s message was done, he fell back in his couch, limp as a rag. She was in trouble, but it was tr
ouble they could fix. She was on her way back toward him.
“Thank you, Mister Patel,” Holden said. “In thanks, you may now have all my stuff. I don’t care about any of it anymore.”
“Including the coffee maker, sir?”
“Almost all my stuff.”
When Fred spoke, his voice was hard. Sharp. Unrelieved. “Mister Patel, what relief ships are in the vicinity?”
“Transponder data shows nothing, sir. The inner system’s been pretty much shut down. UN order.”
Holden rolled to his side and called up a connection to Mfume. Music blared out of the console. Mixed with the sounds filtering through the deck, it made the ops deck seem larger than it was. “Mfume!” Holden shouted, and then a few seconds later, “Mister Mfume!”
The music turned down, but not off. “Sir?”
“I need you to take a look at the flight path for the Chetzemoka. See what it’s going to take to match orbits with her.”
“What ship?” Mfume said.
“The Chetzemoka,” Holden said. “Just check the newsfeeds. It’ll be there. Let me know what you figure out as quickly as you possibly can. Like now would be good.”
“I’m on it,” Mfume said, and the music turned off both on the console and from the hatch. Holden took a deep breath, then another, then laughed. The relief wasn’t an emotion. It was too physical and profound for that. It was a state of being. It was a drug that poured invisibly through his veins. He started laughing and it turned into a moan that sounded like pain, or else pain’s aftermath.
Fred clicked his tongue against his teeth. “So. If I were to suggest that we not rendezvous with that ship?”
“I would be happy to let you and your friends off anywhere between here and there,” Holden said. “Because unless you’ve decided to turn to piracy and throw me out the airlock, that ship is where we’re going.”
“I thought as much,” Fred said. “Can we at least agree to be careful approaching it?”