Holden sat on the couch beside Fred’s and leaned in.
“What do we know about this guy?”
“Inaros?” Fred said. “He was on my short list of possibilities when the rocks dropped. Not the head of it, but in the top five. He leads a splinter group of high-poverty Belters. The kind of people who live in leaky ships and post screeds about taxation being theft. I’ve spoken to him a time or two, usually to deescalate a situation he wanted to set on fire.”
“You think he’s the one behind it all?”
Fred sat back, his couch gimbals hissing as they shifted. From the headphones, Holden could hear the man’s voice even over the murmurs of ra? – “We will begin again and remake humanity without the corruption, greed, and hatred that the inner planets could not transcend…”
Fred grunted and shook his head. “I don’t see it. Inaros is charismatic. And he’s smart. Watching his press release, he certainly thinks he’s in charge, but he’d have to. The man’s a first-rate narcissist and a sadist besides. He’d never knowingly share power with anyone if he could help it. This level of organization? Of coordination? It seems beyond his reach.”
“How so?”
Fred gestured toward the screen. The light from it glowed in his eyes; tiny images of Inaros giving his salute. “It doesn’t feel right. He’s the kind of man who carries a lot of weight in a small circle. Playing at this scale isn’t what he does best. He isn’t a bad tactician, and the timing of the attacks was showy in a way that seems like he was likely behind them. And he’s charming at the negotiating table. But…”
“But?”
“But he’s not a first-class mind, and this is a first-class operation. I don’t know how to put it better than that. My gut says that even if he’s taking credit for it, he has a handler.”
“What would your gut have said before the rocks dropped?”
Fred coughed out a laugh. “That he was an annoyance and a small-time player. So yes, it may just be sour grapes on my part. I’d rather think I was outplayed by someone who’s a genius at something grander than self-mythologizing.”
“Do you have any idea why Naomi would be on his ship?”
Fred’s gaze shifted from the hazy middle distance of thought to directly on Holden. “Is that someplace we want to go right now?”
“Do you?”
“I don’t. But I can speculate. Naomi is a Belter, and what I know of her says she grew up in the same circles as Inaros and his crew. I have to assume they crossed paths before and had some unfinished business. Maybe they were on the same side, maybe they were enemies, maybe both. But not neither.”
Holden leaned forward, elbows on his knees. As general as they were, as gently as he’d said them, the words were like little hammer blows. He swallowed.
“Holden. Everyone has a past. Naomi was a grown woman when you met her. You didn’t think she’d popped out of the packaging right when you set eyes on her, did you?”
“No, of course not. Everyone on the Canterbury was there because they had a reason. Including me. It’s just if there was something big, like ‘part of a cabal that went on to destroy Earth’ big, I don’t know why she wouldn’t have told me.”
“Did you ask?”
“No. I mean, she knew that I was interested. That she could tell me whatever she wanted to tell me. I figured if she didn’t want to, that was up to her.”
“And now you’re upset that she didn’t. So what changed? Why are you entitled to know things now that you weren’t entitled to know before?”
The ra? from the cockpit paused, silence filling the ops deck. On Fred’s screen, the playback had reached the split circle as it faded to white. “I may,” Holden said, “be a small, petty person. But if I’m going to lose her, I at least need to know why.”
“We’ll see if we can’t put you in a position to ask her yourself,” Fred said. The music from the cockpit kicked in again, and Fred scowled up at the hatch. “If it’s any comfort, I think we have a chance. I don’t think it’ll be long before he’s ready to open negotiations.”
“No?” Holden said. It was such a thin sliver of hope, but he felt himself jumping to it all the same.
“No. He got the jump on us tactically. I will absolutely give him that. But the next part is where he has to actually consolidate and hold power. That’s not tactics. That’s strategy, and I don’t see anything in him that leads me to think he has a handle on that.”
“I do.”