“Aren’t like stories about wars,” Vandercaust answered solemnly. “Stories about wars come after. Like Qin Shi Huang unified China or when you look and say this led to this led to this, and then it was over. How did anything begin? War start when Marco hit Earth? When Earth hit Anderson Station? And it ends when Earth and Mars are dead? When Belters have a home? When everyone agrees it’s done?”
Roberts rolled her eyes, but Salis leaned forward, fingers laced across his knee. Jakulski took his new bulb from the server and drank. It was cold and rich, but something made him a little sorry he’d stayed to drink it. Martians on Medina, and Pa running her own crew, and Fred Johnson taking Ceres back. It all felt like someone building the solar system’s biggest mousetrap. And Jakulski thought maybe he was living inside the cheese.
Chapter Twenty-Two: Holden
It hadn’t really been that long since Fred had crewed up the Rocinante for its burn down to Luna, but it had also been a lifetime. Now, with the Tycho-based crew gone, the ship seemed bigger. Emptier. It was like the end of a really long party when all the guests have gone home, and Holden couldn’t quite decide if it left him feeling lonely or relieved. When they headed out this time, they’d only have one pilot. One engineer. Still two mechanics, assuming that was Clarissa’s official title. After flying with the Roci for so many years with just his little family, it was strange to feel the loss of that redundancy, but some deep training was still there in the back of his mind saying that everyone had to be replaceable. As if keeping Chava Lombaugh on the ship would have really made it bearable losing Alex to a badly placed PDC round or a stroke during a high-g burn or any of the other thousand things that could go wrong in space. As if Sandra Ip could ever have taken Naomi’s place.
On one hand, it was unthinkable. On the other, it was reasonable. Alex was Alex, and no one else would ever be. If something did go wrong, though, they’d want a pilot. And the chances of things going wrong seemed pretty high.
The Minsky had started its life burning out of Luna with colonists funded by Royal Charter Energy. The same company that had landed on Ilus and Longdune and New Egypt. If things had gone the way they’d intended, they’d have passed through the ring gates on their way to landfall in a system called San Esteban. Instead, they’d been taken over by the Serrio Mal, looted, and were in a braking burn toward Ceres with what was left of the crew and supplies after Michio Pa and her people were done with it. Food and water, hydroponics and medical supplies, construction mechs and scientific equipment and the people to use them. And burning at its side, a Free Navy gunship as escort. Probably one of Pa’s. Probably not a trap.
Probably not going to get reduced to radioactive gas by Fred. But only probably.
Alone on the command deck, he had the Roci’s inventory schematic pulled up on the screen and the latest edited piece from Monica spooling on his hand terminal. The inventory chirped and updated. It took him a second to find the new data.
“Alex?”
“Right here, Hoss,” Alex replied, his voice coming through the comm and down from the cockpit both.
“Confirm that you’re seeing the juice on your couch topped up?”
A moment passed. “I am showing full-on shitty synthetic juice guaranteed to give a migraine and diarrhea if you use it for more than eight hours.”
“Seriously?”
“We had better than this on the Canterbury,” Alex said.
Holden felt a twitch of concern. “Why did we get third-rate juice?”
Naomi answered as if she were beside him instead of strapped into the loading mech on the dock. “Because the alternative was loading the injectors with morphine so you don’t care so much about being crushed. There’s a war on, you know.”
“So there is,” he said as the inventory chimed another update.
Amos said, “Should show we’re at eighty percent on PDC rounds.”
“Showing eighty-one point seven,” Holden said.
“Really? I’m pretty sure that ain’t right.”
“Track it down,” Holden said. “I’ll let you know if the ship changes her mind in the meantime.”
“We’re on it,” Amos agreed.
We. Meaning Clarissa. He was really going to have to get over that. He felt guilty that he hadn’t already, but he didn’t have a clear idea how to let his discomfort with her go. He pushed the issue back down his priority list again, the way he always did. And who knew? Maybe they’d all die in a hail of gunfire before it came up again and he wouldn’t have to worry about it.
On his hand terminal, the new edit of latest video flickered. This would be the tenth one when it came out. Most of it was an interview with a couple of musicians he’d met up in the shitty part of the station. Two Belters with patois so thick, he’d fed it through a translation program, but their voices were musical and there was an affection in them that transcended the language. Monica had redone the subtitles, putting them at the top of the image, so that the words were beside their faces, close enough to see their expressions as they spoke. They looked like grandfather and grandson, but they called each other “cousin.”
As he watched, they talked about the music scene on Ceres, the difference between live music and recordings, between what they called tényleges performance and using microphones. They didn’t talk about Earth or Mars, the OPA or the Free Navy. Holden hadn’t asked, and the few times that they’d strayed in a political direction, he’d brought it back to the music. Two more reminders that not everyone who lived outside a gravity well had dropped the rocks on Earth. He liked this one a lot, and he wanted to get it approved for release before they left dock. In case, without ever quite letting himself think in case of what. Just in case.
The first nine pieces he’d released had gotten a little traction. Some of that was, he knew, because his name was on it. Being a minor political celebrity had its perks, and one was a small but reliable audience baked in for this project. Better than that, though, he’d started getting copycats. People with their own feeds on Titan and Luna and Earth doing interviews and slice-of-life bits like the ones he’d put out.
Or maybe they’d always been doing that, and he was copying them. Only he hadn’t noticed any of it until now.
“Cap?” Amos said, and Holden realized it wasn’t the first time. “You okay up there?”
“I’m here. I’m fine. Distracted. What’ve you got?”
Clarissa answered. “One of the feeds didn’t zero before. We got it. The count’s confirmed.”
“Great,” Holden said. On his hand terminal, the older man struck a chord on his guitar and the younger man laughed. He closed the file. He couldn’t tell if it was working or not anymore. His brain couldn’t imagine what it would be like to run into it for the first time. Whether the humanity that he saw in it would be there for someone on Earth or Mars or in the colony ships. Or on the far side of the gates.
He heard Naomi coming up before he saw her. He looked back over his shoulder as she stepped off the lift. Her jumpsuit still showed lines of sweat where the loading mech’s straps had held her, and when she leaned over to kiss his forehead, he took her arm. Her eyes were a little bloodshot, the way they got when she was tired. She looked back down at him, laughed a little.
“What?”
“You’re very beautiful,” Holden said. “I hope I tell you that often enough.”
“You do.”
“Then I hope I don’t tell you so often it gets annoying.”
“You don’t,” she said, and sat in the crash couch beside his, stretching her arm as she did so she could keep her fingers twined in his. “Are you all right?”
“A little exhausted.”
“Just a little?”
“I’m not hallucinating yet.”
Naomi shook her head. Just a few millimeters one way and then the other. “You know you’re not responsible for fixing everything.”
“Saving humanity from itself is a group project, yes,” he said. “Really, all I’m doing is trying to show everyone on Earth and Mars and the Belt and Medina and the colonies that really we’re all still just one tribe.”
“So just transcend all lived human experience since before the dawn of history?”
“And keep the part where we kill each other to a minimum,” he said. “Shouldn’t be hard.”