“Tell her to bring her go set. Play better when I’m stoned.”
“I’ll tell her,” Michio said. Josep took her hand in his, squeezing her fingers gently. He meant something by it—something deep and subtle and probably not comprehensible by a sober mind. All she saw was the love in it. She dimmed the lights, had the system play soft music—harp and a woman’s voice so perfect she assumed it was artificial—and left him alone. On her way up to the command deck, she sent a message to Laura and got a response. Josep probably didn’t need a minder, but better to be safe. She laughed at herself as she steadied her ankle against a foothold. Safe in the little things, reckless in the big ones.
Bertold was in Pa’s usual crash couch, music leaking from the earphones on his head and the ship’s status monitors showing green and happy on his screen. Everything was fine as long as he didn’t look out too far.
He lifted his chin to her as she pulled herself into Oksana’s customary station instead. It still felt strange, being in a ship designed by Mars. It was all built with a sensibility she couldn’t quite put her finger on: military and rigorous and straight. She couldn’t help thinking it was because the designers had grown up with a constant gravity pulling them down, but maybe that wasn’t true. Maybe it was just Martian because Mars was like that. Not inners against outers, but the rigid and brittle against the flowing and free.
“Matter? Geht gut?” Bertold asked as she retrieved the tactical schematic.
“Fine. But Josep decided to get stoned, and I’m just not doing work that goes well with intoxicated mysticism.”
She felt a stab of regret as soon as she’d said it, though she knew Bertold wouldn’t take her snapishness as more than it was. Still, if the family fell apart in the middle of everything else failing, she wouldn’t be able to do this. She needed her rock.
Good, then, that she had it.
“You mind if I …?” Bertold asked, and she mirrored her display to his. All the ships, all their vectors. The final refutation of the one-ship. Here was humanity in all its fissures and disconnections. She went back to her analysis. Here was how to get a quarter of the lost resources back and only lose two of her ships. Here was how to deliver a tenth, but not to the people most in need. Here was how to keep her ships safe and achieve nothing else.
“Looks like an amoeba giving birth to twins,” Bertold said. “Sehr feo.”
“Ugly indeed,” Michio said, running another scenario. “Stupid, wasteful, and cruel.”
Bertold sighed. When they’d first been married, Michio had been deeply infatuated with him and Nadia both. Their shared passions had mellowed since then into an intimacy that she appreciated more than sex. It was the trust that let her say what she was seeing, what she was thinking. Let her hear the hard truth spoken in her own voice. “If we’re going to do this, I’m going to have to do some things I don’t like.”
“Knew that going in, didn’t we?”
“Didn’t see the details.”
“Bad?”
In answer, she flipped a variable in the tactical readout. New options opened that hadn’t been there before: Recover sixty percent and lose nothing. Supply the five stations at greatest risk of collapse and keep Marco away from Iapetus. Open and possibly control a path to Ganymede for a few weeks at least. Bertold scowled, working out what she’d done and how she’d done it. When he saw, he grunted.
“That’s a dream,” he said.
“It’s not,” Michio said. “It’s an agreement, and two enemies willing to respect it as long as their interests align.”
“It’s putting your back to the Butcher of Anderson Station.”
“Well, yes. It is that. But I know what he is. I won’t make the mistake of trusting him. He’ll use us if he can. I’d be stupid not to repay that in kind. If Marco wasn’t putting us as his top priority, it would be different, but he’s burning hard for our ships.”
“Injured his pride, sa sa?”
“All we need is that the consolidated fleet agree not to fire on us and we don’t fire on them, and it opens up zones where Marco won’t follow. Safe havens.”
“‘Safe’ meaning huddled underneath Fred Johnson’s guns. Waiting for him to turn them on us.”
“I know,” Michio said. “And with Johnson, that time will come. When it does, we won’t be there.”
“This is a bad plan, Captain,” Bertold said. His voice was gentle, though. He already understood.
“It is. It’s the best bad plan I’ve got.”
He sighed. “Yeah.”
“Well,” she said. “We could have done things Marco’s way.”
“Don’t think we could have,” Bertold said.
“Don’t either.”
“What about the stations and ships we’re giving to? Some of them going to have guns. Have guards.”
“Withhold aid unless they agree to fight and die for us?” Michio said. “Let them starve if they won’t? No, don’t. I’m not saying no to that. I’m asking. Which is worse? Extort people into being soldiers for us, or negotiate with Fred fucking Johnson?”
Bertold pressed a palm to his forehead. “No third side to that coin?”
“Die noble?” Michio said.
Bertold laughed, and then he didn’t. “Depends on what the Butcher wants.”
“It does,” Michio said. “So we should ask him.”
“Yeah, fuck,” Bertold said. She saw her own dread and anger and humiliation reflected in his eyes. He knew what even considering this was costing her. And the ruthlessness she treated herself with that made it necessary. “I love you. You know that. Always.”
“You too,” she said.
“Doesn’t take much before we have to compromise ourselves, does it?”
“Get born,” Michio said, pulling the comm controls and setting the tightbeam for Ceres.
Chapter Twenty: Naomi
The danger is overreach,” Bobbie said, hunching over the table and making it seem small. “They sucker-punched us. We got a couple easy wins coming back. It’s tempting to drive it as far as we can, and try to break them. Seems like we’ve got them on the back foot. But the truth is, we’re still sizing his forces up. He’s still seeing what we do.”
“And what are we doing?” Naomi asked, handing across a bowl of scrambled egg and tofu with hot sauce.
Bobbie scooped up a bite and chewed thoughtfully. Naomi sat across from her and tried a bite from her own bowl. Ever since Maura Patel had upgraded the food systems, the Roci’s hot sauce tasted a little different, but Naomi was coming to like it. There was a pleasure in the novelty. And also a sense of nostalgia for what had changed. That wasn’t only food. That was everything.
“I don’t think anyone knows,” Bobbie said. “My tactics teacher back in bootcamp? Sergeant Kapoor. He was an entomologist—”
“Your sergeant in bootcamp was an entomologist?”
“It’s Mars,” Bobbie said, shrugging. “That isn’t weird there. Anyway, he talked about shifting strategies like they were the middle part of metamorphosis. Apparently when a caterpillar makes a cocoon, the next thing it does is melt. Completely liquefies. And then all the little bits of what used to be caterpillar come back together as a moth or a butterfly or something. Finds a different way to assemble all the same pieces and make it something else.”
“Sounds like the protomolecule.”
“Huh. Yeah. Guess it kind of does.” Bobbie took another bite of her eggs, her gaze on the far wall. She was quiet for long enough that Naomi didn’t know if she’d come back.
“But he meant something tactical?” Naomi said.
“Yes. That pivoting your strategy was like that too. You go into a situation thinking about it a particular way, and then something changes. Then either you stick with the ideas you had before or you look at everything you have to work with and find a new shape. We’re in the find-a-new-shape part. Avasarala’s busy trying to keep what’s left of Earth out of environmental collapse, but once that’s stabilized, she’s going to try to capture Inaros and everyone else who ever breathed his air and put them all on trial. She wants it to be crime.”