It kept the fear at bay. Not perfectly, but nothing short of death was going to end fear perfectly. No matter how she distracted herself, there was a timer ticking down in the back of her mind. The days and hours until Marco and his ships arrived. There were other problems, other risks—the Free Navy loyalists still on the station, the strobing do-not-approach signal that was the only thing coming out of the Laconia gate—but none of them would matter once Marco arrived. All of it pushed her to get her work done quickly, efficiently. When the next thing came—and she didn’t look what that would be straight in its eyes—she wanted to know that she’d gotten her work done.
And still, sometimes she paused. She found a personal journal tucked among the environmental reports like printed pornography tucked under a mattress. Entry after entry of a young man’s private struggles with his longings and ambitions and feelings of betrayal. Another time, she was trying to recover what she could from a half-erased partition and came up with a short video of a girl—four years old at most—leaping off a bed somewhere on the station, landing on a pile of pillows, and dissolving into laughter. Reviewing the traffic-control logs, she listened to the voices of desperate men and women from the systems on the far sides of the ring gates demand and beg and plead for the supplies they felt they deserved, wanted, and sometimes needed to survive.
It was the first time she’d really understood the scale of the destruction Marco had brought. All the lives he’d traumatized and ended, all the plans he’d shattered. Most of the time, it was too big to wrap her mind around, but little glimpses like this made it all comprehensible. Terrible and sad and enraging, but comprehensible.
And it informed some of her decisions.
“Um,” Jim said, sloping in through the door of his office. “So, sweetie? Did you mean to have the data feeds go out through all the rings? Because I’m noticing that you’ve started sending everything to everyone.”
“I meant to,” Naomi said, brushing the hair back from her eyes. It was almost the end of her second shift. Her back ached a little from sitting too long in the same position, and her eyes were dry and scratchy. “I don’t know what’s going to be useful, or who it’s going to be useful to. And since it doesn’t look like we’ll be on Medina long enough to go through everything, I thought I’d send copies out everywhere. Give other people a chance to find whatever I’m missing.”
“That’s … ah.”
“I know,” she said. “I may have been spending too much time with you. I’m starting to think like you. Only, well. The way you used to, anyhow.”
“I still think like that,” Jim said, pulling a chair over behind hers and sitting. He rested his head on her shoulder. When he spoke, she could feel the vibration in his throat against her skin. “I worry more that it’s going to do something unexpected and terrible and huge that I’ll be responsible for, but I still think that way.”
“An unshakable faith in humanity.”
“It’s true,” he said, shaking his head. Or maybe nuzzling a little. “Against all evidence, I keep thinking the assholes are outliers.”
She leaned her head against him, taking a little pleasure in his simple presence. He had a peculiar scent, low and complex and pleasant as potting soil. She didn’t think she’d ever get tired of it. And he hadn’t shaved recently. The stubble of ragged whiskers tickled her ear like a cat’s tongue. On the monitor, the data broadcasts ticked over another tenth of a percent. Somewhere in the office, Bobbie was talking, her voice familiar and strong. The air recyclers clicked and hummed to themselves, the soft breeze smelling like plastic and dust.
She didn’t want to ask the question, but she couldn’t hold it in either.
“Any news from home?”
She felt him tighten. He sat back, and the part of her skin he’d been against felt cooler without him. She turned her chair so she could look at him. His face had the artificial mildness that meant he was trying to downplay something, as if by treating it casually he could diminish it. She’d seen all his expressions so many times, she knew what he meant, whatever he said.
“They’re coming. Free Navy. There’s still no sign of activity from Laconia at all, but Avasarala’s tracking fifteen ships converging on the gate. Mostly from the Jovian moons.”
“Any chance they’ll come through one at a time so Alex and Bobbie can shoot them?” she asked with a feigned innocence. It worked the way she hoped. Jim laughed.
“I’m pretty sure they’re all going to come through like a rugby team. If we could get a couple of the rail guns from the station working again, I think we’d have a chance. And some more rounds for them. Turns out shooting down a couple thousand targets can kind of burn through your supplies.”
“Do we have a plan?”
“A couple,” Jim said.
“Either of them good?”
“Oh, no. Not at all. Just different flavors of terrible.”
The data feed chimed. The batch sent off, and waiting for Naomi to pick something else. More messages, more bottles. “All right. What are they?”
“The classics. Fight or flight. We’ve got the Roci and the boats that still work as boarding craft. One option is that we fill up the boats with troops, place them around the edge of the ring, and try to get people onto the Free Navy ships. It won’t matter that they have ten times as many torpedoes as us if all the fighting’s corridor to corridor. The Roci and Medina’s defenses go after the ships we can’t take control of. Massive slugfest, and hopefully we come out on top.”
“And the chances that’ll work?”
“Terrible, terrible chances. Very low. Dumb plan on every level. Much more likely that the boats will all get turned into metal shavings by Marco’s PDCs before they even get close to boarding. And even if they do, those ships are going to have full crews to fight our people back.”
“And flight?”
“Stock up the Roci, pick a gate, and get the hell out of Dodge before the bad guys show up in the first place.”
“And leave Medina?”
“Medina. The Giambattista. Everything. Just turn tail and run like hell. Let the Free Navy hole back up in the slow zone and hope that the next wave the consolidated fleet sends can take it all back again and hold it next time.”
“Where’s the Pella?”
Jim sighed. “Oh, leading the howling pack.”
Naomi turned back to her screen. “Then we’re staying here.”
“I haven’t decided,” Holden said.
“No, you haven’t talked yourself into it yet,” she said. “You know if we go, Marco’s going to follow us. Maybe if we were a different ship or Marco was a different man, things wouldn’t play out this way. We’ve got the choice of fighting here, with a few allies and insufficient supplies, or fighting on the far side of a ring gate with even less. That’s the only distinction.”
“I … well …” Jim took a deep breath, blew out. “Shit.”
“How much of the debris from the wave of decoys can we police up?”
“Anything that hasn’t drifted out past the rings,” Holden said. “You’re thinking put it all just inside the Sol ring and hope the Free Navy runs into it?”
“The gate’s not that big,” Naomi said.
“Three-quarters of a million square klicks,” Holden said. “And fifteen ships coming through it. Even if we turned all our scrap metal into sand, the Free Navy’s more likely to miss them and not even know they were there.”
“I know,” Naomi said. “But maybe one will get a lucky hit. And then there’ll be one less. If we aren’t playing the long shots, we’re giving up. Long shots are all we’ve got left. And even if we lose—”
“I’m not looking at—”
“Even if we lose,” Naomi said, “how we lose matters. You didn’t set yourself to be a symbol of anything. I know that. It’s just something that happened. But after it happened, you used it. All those video essays you put out, trying to show everyone that the people on Ceres were just people?”
“Those weren’t about me,” Jim said, but the guilt in his voice said he didn’t believe it.
“They were you using the famous Captain James Holden to make people look at what you needed them to see. Don’t be ashamed of that. It was the right thing to do. But everyone out there who saw them? Who made their own versions of them and added to the project of trying to remind each other that war isn’t all ships and torpedoes and battle lines? If we’re going to …” Her throat was tight now. The words stuck there. “If we’re going to die, we should make it mean at least as much as your video pieces did.”