“I think you may have an exaggerated idea of how much influence the second-in-command of a long-distance water hauler actually has. Yes, there’s a war. And yes, I was there when it started up. But the Belt has hated the inner planets since a long time before the Cant was attacked.”
“You’ve got the inner planets divided up too,” Miller said.
Holden tilted his head.
“Earth has always hated Mars,” Holden said like he was reporting that water was wet. “When I was in the navy, we ran projections for this. Battle plans if Earth and Mars ever really got into it. Earth loses. Unless they hit first, hit hard, and don’t let up, Earth just plain loses.”
Maybe it was distance. Maybe it was a failure of imagination. Miller had never seen the inner planets as divided.
“Seriously?” he asked.
“They’re the colony, but they have all the best toys and everyone knows it,” Holden said. “Everything that’s happening out there right now has been building up for a hundred years. If it hadn’t been there to start with, this couldn’t have happened.”
“That’s your defense? ‘Not my powder keg; I just brought the match’?”
“I’m not making a defense,” Holden said. His blood pressure and heart rate were spiking.
“We’ve been through this,” Miller said. “So let me just ask, why is it you think this time will be different?”
The needles in Miller’s arm seemed to heat up almost to the point of being painful. He wondered if that was normal, if every blood flush he had was going to feel the same way.
“This time is different,” Holden said. “All the crap that’s going on out there is what happens when you have imperfect information. Mars and the Belt wouldn’t have been going after each other in the first place if they’d known what we know now. Earth and Mars wouldn’t be shooting each other if everyone knew the fight was being engineered. The problem isn’t that people know too much, it’s that they don’t know enough.”
Something hissed and Miller felt a wave of chemical relaxation swim through him. He resented it, but there was no calling the drugs back.
“You can’t just throw information at people,” Miller said. “You have to know what it means. What it’s going to do. There was a case back on Ceres. Little girl got killed. For the first eighteen hours, we were all sure Daddy did it. He was a felon. A drunk. He was the last one who saw her breathing. All the classic signs. Hour nineteen, we get a tip. Turned out Daddy owed a lot of money to one of the local syndicates. All of a sudden, things are more complicated. We have more suspects. Do you think if I’d been broadcasting everything I knew, Daddy would still have been alive when the tip came? Or would someone have put it all together and done the obvious thing?”
Miller’s medical station chimed. Another new cancer. He ignored it. Holden’s cycle was just finishing, the redness of his cheeks speaking as much to the fresh, healthy blood in his body as to his emotional state.
“That’s the same ethos they have,” Holden said.
“Who?”
“Protogen. You may be on different sides, but you’re playing the same game. If everyone said what they knew, none of this would have happened. If the first lab tech on Phoebe who saw something weird had gotten on his system and said, ‘Hey, everyone! Look, this is weird,’ none of this would have happened.”
“Yeah,” Miller said, “because telling everyone there’s an alien virus that wants to kill them all is a great way to maintain calm and order.”
“Miller,” Holden said. “I don’t mean to panic you, but there’s an alien virus. And it wants to kill everyone.”
Miller shook his head and smiled like Holden had said something funny. “So look, maybe I can’t point a gun at you and make you do the right thing. But lemme ask you something. Okay?”
“Fine,” Holden said. Miller leaned back. The drugs were making his eyelids heavy.
“What happens?” Miller said.
There was a long pause. Another chime from the medical system. Another rush of cold through Miller’s abused veins.
“What happens?” Holden repeated. It occurred to Miller he could have been more specific. He forced his eyes open again.
“You broadcast everything we’ve got. What happens?”
“The war stops. People go after Protogen.”
“There’s some holes in that, but let it go. What happens after that?”
Holden was quiet for a few heartbeats.
“People start going after the Phoebe bug,” he said.
“They start experimenting. They start fighting for it. If that little bastard’s as valuable as Protogen thinks, you can’t stop the war. All you can do now is change it.”
Holden frowned, angry lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes. Miller watched a little piece of the man’s idealism die and was sorry that it gave him joy.
“So what happens if we get to Mars?” Miller went on, his voice low. “We trade out the protomolecule for more money than any of us have ever seen. Or maybe they just shoot you. Mars just wins against Earth. And the Belt. Or you go to the OPA, who are the best hope the Belt has of independence, and they’re a bunch of crazy zealots, half of ’em thinking we can actually sustain out there without Earth. And trust me, they’ll probably shoot you too. Or you just tell everyone everything and pretend that however it comes down, you kept your hands clean.”
“There’s a right thing to do,” Holden said.
“You don’t have a right thing, friend,” Miller said. “You’ve got a whole plateful of maybe a little less wrong.”
Holden’s blood flush finished. The captain pulled the needles out of his arm and let the thin metallic tentacles retract. As he rolled down his sleeve, the frown softened.
“People have a right to know what’s going on,” Holden said. “Your argument boils down to you not thinking people are smart enough to figure out the right way to use it.”
“Has anyone used anything you’ve broadcast as something besides an excuse to shoot someone they already didn’t like? Giving them a new reason won’t stop them killing each other,” Miller said. “You started these wars, Captain. Doesn’t mean you can stop them. But you have to try.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?” Holden said. The distress in his voice could have been anger. It could have been prayer.
Something in Miller’s belly shifted, some inflamed organ calming enough to slip back into place. He hadn’t been aware he’d felt wrong until he suddenly felt right again.
“You ask yourself what happens,” Miller said. “Ask yourself what Naomi’d do.”
Holden barked out a laugh. “Is that how you make your decisions?”
Miller let his eyes close. Juliette Mao was there, sitting on the couch at her old apartment on Ceres. Fighting the crew of the stealth ship to a standstill. Burst open by the alien virus on the floor of her shower stall.
“Something like it,” Miller said.
The report from Ceres, a break from the usual competing press releases, came that night. The governing council of the OPA announced that a ring of Martian spies had been rooted out. The video feed showed the bodies floating out an industrial airlock in what looked like the old docks in sector six. At a distance, the victims seemed almost peaceful. The feed cut to the head of security. Captain Shaddid looked older. Harder.
“We regret the necessity of this action,” she said to everyone everywhere. “But in the cause of freedom, there can be no compromise.”
That’s what it’s come to, Miller thought, rubbing a hand across his chin. Pogroms after all. Cut off just a hundred more heads, just a thousand more heads, just ten thousand more heads, and then we’ll be free.
A soft alert sounded, and a moment later, gravity shifted a few degrees to Miller’s left. Course change. Holden had made a decision.
He found the captain sitting alone and staring at a monitor in ops. The glow lit his face from below, casting shadows up into his eyes. The captain looked older too.
“You make the broadcast?” Miller asked.
“Nope. We’re just one ship. We tell everyone what this thing is and that we’ve got it, we’ll be dead before Protogen.”
“Probably true,” Miller said, sitting at an empty station with a grunt. The gimbaled seat shifted silently. “We’re going someplace.”
“I don’t trust them with it,” Holden said. “I don’t trust any of them with that safe.”
“Probably smart.”
“I’m going to Tycho Station. There’s someone there I… trust.”
“Trust?”
“Don’t actively distrust.”
“Naomi think it’s the right thing?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask her. But I think so.”
“Close enough,” Miller said.
Holden looked up from the monitor for the first time.
“You know the right thing?” Holden said.
“Yeah.”
“What is it?”
“Throw that safe into a long collision course with the sun and find a way to make sure no one ever, ever goes to Eros or Phoebe again,” Miller said. “Pretend none of this ever happened.”
“So why aren’t we doing that?”
Miller nodded slowly. “How do you throw away the holy grail?”
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Holden
Alex had the Rocinante running at three-quarters of a g for two hours while the crew prepared and ate dinner. He would run it back up to three when the break was over, but in the meantime, Holden enjoyed standing on his own two legs at something not too far off from Earth gravity. It was a little heavy for Naomi and Miller, but neither of them complained. They both understood the need for haste.
Once the gravity had dropped from the crush of high acceleration, the whole crew quietly gathered in the galley and started making dinner. Naomi blended together fake eggs and fake cheese. Amos cooked tomato paste and the last of their fresh mushrooms into a red sauce that actually smelled like the real thing. Alex, who had the duty watch, had forwarded ship ops down to a panel in the galley and sat at a table next to it, spreading the fake cheese paste and red sauce onto flat noodles in hopes that the end result would approximate lasagna. Holden had oven duty and had spent the lasagna prep time baking frozen lumps of dough into bread. The smell in the galley was not entirely unlike actual food.
Miller had followed the crew into the galley but seemed uncomfortable asking for something to do. Instead, he set the table and then sat down at it and watched. He wasn’t exactly avoiding Holden’s eyes, but he wasn’t going out of his way to catch his attention. By unspoken mutual agreement, no one had any of the news channels on. Holden was sure everyone would rush back to check the current state of the war as soon as dinner was over, but for now they all worked in companionable silence.
When the prep was done, Holden switched off bread duty and on to moving lasagna-filled cookware into and out of the oven. Naomi sat down next to Alex and began a quiet conversation with him about something she’d seen on the ops screen. Holden split his time between watching her and watching the lasagna. She laughed at something Alex said and unconsciously twisted one finger into her hair. Holden felt his belly tighten a notch.
Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Miller staring at him. When he looked, the detective had turned away, a hint of a smile on his face. Naomi laughed again. She had one hand on Alex’s arm, and the pilot was blushing and talking as fast as his silly Martian drawl would let him. They looked like friends. That both made Holden happy and filled him with jealousy. He wondered if Naomi would ever be his friend again.
She caught him looking and gave him a conspiratorial wink that probably would have made a lot of sense if he’d been able to hear what Alex was saying. He smiled and winked back, grateful just to be included in the moment. A sizzling sound from inside the oven called his attention back. The lasagna was beginning to bubble and run over the sides of the dishes.
He pulled on his oven mitts and opened the door.
“Soup’s on,” he said, pulling the first of the dishes and putting it on the table.
“That’s mighty ugly-looking soup,” Amos said.
“Uh, yeah,” Holden said. “It’s just something Mother Tamara used to say when she’d finished cooking. Not sure where it comes from.”
“One of your three mothers did the cooking? How traditional,” Naomi said with a smirk.
“Well, she split it pretty evenly with Caesar, one of my fathers.”
Naomi smiled at him, a genuine smile now.
“It sounds really nice,” she said. “Big family like that.”
“Yeah, it really was,” he replied, a vision in his head of nuclear fire tearing apart the Montana farmhouse he’d grown up in, his family blowing into ash. If it happened, he was sure Miller would be there to let him know it was his fault. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to argue anymore.
As they ate, Holden felt a slow release of tension in the room. Amos belched loudly, then reacted to the chorus of protests by doing it again even more loudly. Alex retold the joke that had made Naomi laugh. Even Miller got into the mood and told a long and increasingly improbable story about hunting down a black market cheese operation that ended in a gunfight with nine naked Australians in an illegal brothel. By the finish of the story, Naomi was laughing so hard she’d drooled on her shirt, and Amos kept repeating “No fucking way!” like a mantra.
The story was amusing enough, and the detective’s dry delivery suited it well, but Holden only half listened. He watched his crew, saw the tension falling from their faces and shoulders. He and Amos were both from Earth, though if he had to guess, he’d say Amos had forgotten about his home world the first time he’d shipped out. Alex was from Mars and clearly still loved it. One bad mistake on either side and both planets might be radioactive rubble by the end of dinner. But right now they were just friends having a meal together. It was right. It was what Holden had to keep fighting for.
“I actually remember that cheese shortage,” Naomi said once Miller had stopped talking. “Belt-wide. That was your fault?”
“Yeah, well, if they’d only been sneaking cheese past the government auditors, we wouldn’t have had a problem,” Miller said. “But they had this habit of shooting the other cheese smugglers. Makes the cops notice. Bad business.”
“Over fucking cheese?” Amos said, tossing his fork onto his plate with a clack. “Are you serious? I mean, drugs or gambling or something. But cheese?”
“Gambling’s legal, most places,” Miller said. “And a chemistry class dropout can cook up just about any drug you like in his bathroom. No way to control supply.”
“Real cheese comes from Earth, or Mars,” Naomi added. “And after they tack on shipping costs and the Coalition’s fifty percent in taxes, it costs more than fuel pellets.”
“We wound up with one hundred and thirty kilos of Vermont Cheddar in the evidence lockup,” Miller said. “Street value that would have probably bought someone their own ship. It had disappeared by the end of the day. We wrote it up as lost to spoilage. No one said a word, as long as everyone went home with a brick.”
The detective leaned back in his chair with a distant look on his face.
“My God, that was good cheese,” he said with a smile.
“Yeah, well, this fake stuff does taste like shit,” Amos said, then added in a hurry, “No offense, Boss, you did a real good job whipping it up. But that’s still weird to me, fighting over cheese.”
“It’s why they killed Eros,” Naomi said.
Miller nodded but said nothing.
“How do you figure that?” Amos said.
“How long have you been flying?” Naomi asked.
“I dunno,” Amos replied, his lips compressing as he did the mental math. “Twenty-five years, maybe?”
“Fly with a lot of Belters, right?”
“Yeah,” Amos said. “Can’t get better shipmates than Belters. ’Cept me, of course.”
“You’v
e flown with us for twenty-five years, you like us, you’ve learned the patois. I bet you can order a beer and a hooker on any station in the Belt. Heck, if you were a little taller and a lot skinnier, you could pass for one of us by now.”
Amos smiled, taking it as a compliment.
“But you still don’t get us,” Naomi said. “Not really. No one who grew up with free air ever will. And that’s why they can kill a million and a half of us to figure out what their bug really does.”
“Hey now,” Alex interjected. “You serious ’bout that? You think the inners and outers see themselves as that different?”
“Of course they do,” Miller said. “We’re too tall, too skinny, our heads look too big, and our joints too knobby.”
Holden noticed Naomi glancing across the table at him, a speculative look on her face. I like your head, Holden thought at her, but the radiation hadn’t given him telepathy either, because her expression didn’t change.
“We’ve practically got our own language now,” Miller said. “Ever see an Earther try to get directions in the deep dig?”
“ ‘Tu run spin, pow, Schlauch tu way acima and ido,’ ” Naomi said with a heavy Belter accent.
“Go spinward to the tube station, which will take you back to the docks,” Amos said. “The fuck’s so hard about that?”
“I had a partner wouldn’t have known that after two years on Ceres,” Miller said. “And Havelock wasn’t stupid. He just wasn’t… from there.”
Holden listened to them talk and pushed cold pasta around on his plate with a chunk of bread.
“Okay, we get it,” he said. “You’re weird. But to kill a million and a half people over some skeletal differences and slang…”
“People have been getting tossed into ovens for less than that ever since they invented ovens,” Miller said. “If it makes you feel better, most of us think you’re squat and microcephalic.”
Alex shook his head.
Leviathan Wakes: Book One of The Expanse Page 35