They didn’t talk. Didn’t make jokes. Clarissa swabbed Fred’s body with a calm, businesslike intimacy. Compassionate and unsentimental. Amos helped when Fred needed to be moved and dressed in a fresh uniform and when she needed to slide the body bag under him. It took a little less than an hour from start to finish. Holden didn’t know if that seemed like too long or not long enough. Clarissa hummed something as she worked. A soft melody he didn’t recognize, but one that didn’t seem to rest in either a major key or a minor one. Her thin, pale face and Amos’ thickness seemed perfectly matched. When the bag was sealed, Amos hefted it. Easy to do. They were still barely above a third of a g.
Clarissa nodded to Holden as they passed out of the medical bay. Her skin was bruised at the back of her neck and all along the arms where the blood had pooled during the burn. “We’ll take care of him,” she said.
“He was important,” Holden replied, and wasn’t ashamed at the catch in his voice.
Something like sorrow or amusement flickered in Clarissa’s eyes. “I’ve spent a lot of time with the dead. He’ll be okay now. You go take care of the ones that lived through it.”
Amos smiled amiably and carried the bag out. “You need to get drunk or in a fistfight later, just let me know.”
“Yeah,” Holden said. “All right.”
After they left, he stood beside the empty medical table. He’d been on it more than once. Naomi had. Alex. Amos. Amos had regrown most of a hand in this room. That death had come randomly—stupidly—seemed obscene even though it was mundane enough. People stroked out. Fred was older than he’d once been. He was dealing with high blood pressure. He’d been going without sleep, pushing himself. The juice they had was lousy. It had been a long battle and a hard burn. All of it was true. All of it made sense. And none of it did.
The others were still at their stations, but the word had gotten out by now. He was going to have to face them at some point. He didn’t know what he’d say to Fred’s crew. I’m so sorry, but after that?
He brushed his hand on the mattress, listened to the hiss of skin against plastic. It felt colder than he’d expected. It took him a second to realize it was the dampness from Clarissa’s cloth evaporating. He recognized Naomi by her footsteps.
“Do you remember when it came out he was working with the OPA?” Holden asked.
“I do.”
“It was the only thing on any of the newsfeeds for … I don’t know. A week. Everyone saying he was a traitor and a disgrace. Talking about whether there should be an investigation. Whether he could still be brought up on charges even though he’d resigned years before.”
“What I heard was more equivocal,” Naomi said. She came into the room, leaned against one of the other tables. She pulled her hair down over her eyes like a veil as she spoke, then scowled and brushed it back. “The people I knew assumed he was a mole. Earthers trying to Trojan horse their way into our organization.”
“Was it still your organization back then?”
“Yeah. It was.”
He turned, pulled himself up to sit on the table. The autodoc, sensing his weight, pulled up the start screen, glowed hopefully for a few seconds, and turned back off. “I just can’t remember a time when Fred Johnson wasn’t someone important. It’s just …”
Naomi sighed. He looked at her. The lines on her face that hadn’t been there when he’d met her. The way the line of her jaw had changed. She was beautiful. She was mortal. He didn’t want to think about it.
“Every faction of the OPA Fred could bully or beg or cajole into coming together is waiting for us at Tycho,” Holden said. “And we’re going to have to tell them Marco won.”
“He didn’t win,” Naomi said.
“We’ll have to tell them we were ambushed and Fred died, but Marco totally didn’t win.”
Naomi smiled. Laughed. It was strange how it made the darkness better. Not less dark. Just better, even though it still was what it was. “Well, all right, when you put it that way. Look, worst-case scenario is we don’t get them on our side. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be great to have more of the Belt on our side. But if we don’t have them to work with, we don’t. We can still win.”
“Only the war,” he said. “Not the part that matters.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Avasarala
Gorman Le blinked, rubbed his entirely-too-green eyes, and waited for her to respond.
“And you don’t know where it came from?” Avasarala said.
“Well, Ganymede,” he said. “The transmission records are clear. It definitely came from Ganymede.”
“But we don’t know who on Ganymede.”
“No,” he said, nodding to mean yes, she was right. Fucking confusing way to express himself.
The meeting room was a smaller one in Nectaris facility. The lights were cold, the walls a brushed ceramic that hadn’t been fashionable in thirty years. It was on a physically separate environmental system, so the air didn’t have the recently rebreathed smell that most of Luna suffered these days. If the gunpowder stink of lunar fines was there, she’d gotten so used to it that she couldn’t tell.
Gorman Le sat hunched forward like a schoolboy, a glass of water forgotten in his hand. He was wearing the same suit he’d had on yesterday and the day before. She was starting to think he kept it in a closet and threw it on whenever he had to talk with her. Weariness radiated from him like he was a medic on the last hour of a four-day shift, but there was something else in him. Something she hadn’t seen recently. Excitement, maybe. Hope.
That was bad. Lately, hope was a poison.
“So the report schema or whatever the hell you call it could be real,” she said. “Or it could be the Free Navy trying to fuck with us. Or it could be … what?”
“Nutritional yeast with advanced radioplasts. We’ve been looking at how the protomolecule was able to grow based on some kinds of ionizing radiation?” The rise of inflection at the end made it a question, as if he were asking her permission instead of debriefing her. “Nonionizing too, but that’s really easy. Light’s nonionizing radiation, and plants have been harvesting that since forever. But—”
Avasarala raised her hand, palm out. Le’s mouth kept moving for a few seconds, part of him still speaking while the rest was reined in. “I care deeply about all the fine details,” she said, “only actually, I don’t. Sum it up.”
“If the numbers are right, we could feed maybe half a million more people on this base right now. The first runs we did looked really good. But if it’s something that doesn’t scale and the farms crash, we could lose days cleaning it back out.”
“And then people starve.”
Gorman nodded some more. Maybe he didn’t mean anything by it. “Resetting would definitely mean missing some production goals.”
She leaned forward, plucked the glass from his hand, and looked into his eyes. “Then people starve. We’re grown-ups here. You should be able to say it.”
“Then people starve.”
She nodded and leaned back. The terrible thing was that her back felt better. She’d been at one-tenth of a g for so long, she was getting used to it. When she went back down the well, she’d have to reacclimatize. When. Not if. Gorman was looking at her, his jaw set, his nostrils flared like a panicky horse. She had to restrain herself from patting his head. She wanted some fucking pistachios.
“What’s your doctorate in?” she asked.
“Um. Structural biochemistry?”
“Do you know what mine’s in?”
He shook his head for a change.
“Not structural biochemistry,” she said gently. “I don’t know anything about whether this magic yeast recipe is bullshit or not. So if you can’t tell, I’m less than fucking useless. So what are we here for?”
“I don’t know what to do.” He looked young. He looked lost.
The impulse to snap at him fought with the impulse to hug him. She closed her eyes, and damn it but they felt good closed. This morning, it had been a coordination meeting with the Lagrange stations talking about refugee loads, then security and resources talking about policing guidelines for the people still coming up the well. Over lunch, reports of an armed uprising in what was left of Sevastopol—people panicking as food and water ran low. It was all bleeding together in her mind, one long, ongoing, weary sense of urgency.
She wanted to be angry with Le, but either she understood his frozen panic too well or else she just didn’t have the energy anymore. “Is it a good bet?”
“I think so,” he said, almost at once. “The data looks—”