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 said. “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—”
“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.