“Right as rain,” Alex said. “Said my goodbyes.”
Bobbie nodded once. Holden sat down facing them all, sideways on the bench. His hair was unkempt, his eyes focused on something only he could see. The attention of the room—Naomi’s, Amos’, Alex’s own—turned toward him. An ancient and barely familiar anticipation shifted in Alex’s chest, like a fragment of childhood beginning of school year.
“So, Cap,” he said. “What’s the plan?”
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Avasarala
Avasarala screamed.
Her breath ripped out of her throat, abrading her flesh as it passed. She tasted bile in the back of her mouth, and her legs trembled, ached, burned as she tried to push the steel plate another centimeter away.
“Come on,” Pieter said. “You can do this.”
She screamed again, and the plate moved away. Her legs went almost straight. The impulse to push through and lock her knees took effort to resist. It might snap her knees back the other way, but then at least this would be done.
“That’s eleven,” Pieter said. “Go for twelve. One more.”
“Fuck your mother.”
“Come on. Just one more rep. I’ll be here to help.”
“You’re an asshole and nobody loves you,” she gasped, lowering her head. The worst was the nausea. Leg day always seemed to mean nausea. Pieter didn’t care. He was paid not to care.
“You’re going down the well in twelve days,” he said. “If you want the leader of Earth, the hope and light of civilization, to get wheeled off the shuttle in a chair, you can stop. If you want her to stride out in front of the cameras like a Valkyrie returned from the underworld and ready for battle, you’ll go for twelve.”
“Sadistic fuck.”
“You’re the one who fell behind on your exercise schedule.”
“I’ve been saving the fucking species.”
“Saving humanity doesn’t prevent bone-density loss or muscular atrophy,” he said. “And you’re stalling. One more.”
“I hate you so much,” she said, letting her knees bend, easing the steel plate back closer to her. She wanted to cry. She wanted to puke all over Pieter’s pretty white exercise shoes. She wanted to be doing anything else at all.
“I know, sweetie. But you can do this,” he said. “Come on.”
Avasarala screamed and pushed the steel plate away.
Afterward, she sat on the fake-wood bench in the locker room with her head in her hands until the idea of moving didn’t disgust her. When she did finally stand up, the gray-clad woman in the mirror seemed unfamiliar. Not foreign precisely, but certainly not her. Thinner, for one thing, with sweat stains at the armpits and under the breasts. White hair that didn’t fall to her shoulders so much as flow out, the thin lunar gravity too weak to pull it down. The woman in the mirror looked Avasarala up and down with dark, judgmental eyes.
“Some fucking Valkyrie,” Avasarala said, then headed for the shower. “You’ll have to do.”
The good news was that Mars had finally slogged its way through its constitutional crisis, done the obvious thing, and put Emily Richards in as prime minister. No, that wasn’t fair. There was more going well than just that. The rioting in Paris was under control now, and the racist cells in Colombia had been identified and isolated without any more murders. Saint Petersburg had fixed its water-recycling problem, at least for the moment. Gorman Le’s mystery yeast was doing everything it had claimed on the tin, which increased the overall food supply for the survivors, and the reactors in Cairo and Seoul were working again so they could make use of it. Fewer dead people. Or at least fewer dead right now. Next week was always next week, and always would be.
The bad news still outweighed the good. The second wave of deaths hadn’t slowed yet. The medical infrastructure was saturated. Thousands of people were dying every week from conditions that even a year ago would have been easily treated or cured. The violence over resources hadn’t by any means stopped either. There were vigilante raids in Boston and Mumbai. Reports of whole police forces going rogue and hoarding relief supplies in Denver and Phoenix. The oceans were being choked. The sludge of dust and debris wasn’t sinking as quickly as the models had suggested, and the light-eating plants and microbiota were dying off as a result. If there hadn’t been so many fucking human beings stressing the food webs over the last few centuries, the system might have been more robust. Or it might not have. It wasn’t as though they had a second Earth to use as a control. History itself was a massive n=1 study, irreproducible. It was what made it so difficult to learn from.
After her shower, she changed into a lime-green sari, did her hair and her makeup. She was starting to feel a little better. It was the pattern she was noticing. The actual exercise left her miserable, but once she’d recovered, the rest of her day seemed to go a little better. If it was only the placebo effect, that was enough. She’d take what she could get, even if it was only tricks of the mind.
When she was almost ready to face the rest of her day, she opened an audio-only connection to Said. “Where do we stand?” she said instead of hello.
“The security group from Mars is finishing their meal,” Said answered without missing a beat. “They’ll be in the conference hall in half an hour. Admiral Souther will be there with you if you need him.”
“Always good to have a penis in uniform in the room,” Avasarala said sourly. “God knows they might not take me seriously otherwise.”
“If you say so, ma’am.”
“It was a joke.”
“If you say so, ma’am. There’s also a report in from Ceres Station. Admiral Coen has confirmed that the Giambattista is under burn just the way Aimee Ostman promised.”
Avasarala held a pearl earring to her left ear, considering it. Nice. Understated. Didn’t go with the sari, though.
“I’m sorry, ma’am?” Said’s voice was confused.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You … ah … you growled.”
“Did I? Probably just an editorial comment about how pleased I am that we’re trusting the fucking OPA now. Ignore it and continue.”
“That’s all you have on the schedule for today,” he said, almost apologetically. “You did ask me to keep the afternoon clear in case the security briefing went long.”
“So I did,” she said, trying a pair of aquamarine studs that were much better. “Word from The Hague?”
“They say your office will be ready and the critical staff will be in place. We’re on track to move the seat of governance back to the planet surface on schedule.”
She imagined she heard a certain pride in Said’s voice at that. Well, good. He ought to be proud. They all ought to be. Earth might be a pile of corpses and shit, but it was their pile of corpses and shit, and she was tired of looking up at it from the moon.
“About fucking time,” she said. “All right. Tell Souther I’m on my way. And to bring me a sandwich or something.”
“What sort would you like? I can meet you with—”
“No, tell Souther to do it,” she said. “He’ll think it’s funny.”
The conference room was the single most secure chamber in the solar system, but it didn’t wear that on its sleeve. It was small enough for six people to sit comfortably. Red curtains on the walls to hide the air recyclers and the heaters. The table was wide, dark, and set just a little low to give a few centimeters more room for the holographic display. Not that anyone ever used holographic displays. Showy, but not functional. The Martian military attaché wasn’t here to be wowed by graphic design, and Avasarala liked him for that.
The man himself—Rhodes Chen—sat on one side of the table with his secretary and assistant to either hand. Souther was already there too when she arrived, leaning back in his chair and laughing with Rhodes. A small tin plate waited at her chair—white bread and cucumbers. When Chen saw her, he stood, and all the others with him. She waved him back down.