The server reappeared with a tray of drinks, and Ip leaned across to get hers, then didn’t lean all the way back. Alex felt something in the back of his mind relax. It had been a long time since he’d made this particular kind of mistake. Figured he was about due.
“Y’all excuse me for just a minute,” he said. “Need to find the head.”
“Hurry back,” Ip said.
“Count on it.”
Walking across the floor, past the bar, and to the back hall, Alex felt like something out of a bawdy joke. Soldiers pairing off after battle was about as old and worn a scenario as there was. But it had gotten that way for a reason. The tension going into battle wasn’t like any other feeling Alex had ever had, and the relief when it let up was bone-deep and intoxicating. It wasn’t only him or Ip. It wasn’t even only sex. He’d known sailors as locked down and shipshape as a training-manual picture who’d come through action and spent the hours afterward weeping or puking. There was one pilot—Genet, her name was—suffered chronic insomnia that even medication could only manage. Every night, she’d be up for an hour between two and three in the morning. Except after an action, when she slept like a baby the whole night through. It was what came of being a primate with a body built for the Pleistocene savanna. Fear and relief and lust and joy were all packed into the same little network of nerves somewhere deep in his amygdalae, and sometimes they touched.
The flight out from Earth had been short and hard and seemed to last forever. The long-range sensors showed no active threats between the ports on Luna and the Belt, but all the way out the thought hung in the air like smoke: Were there rocks falling undetected toward Earth? Toward Mars? Was Marco Inaros three steps ahead of them, the way he always seemed to be? Even Fred Johnson had seemed preoccupied, pacing through the halls with his hands clasped behind his back. The Battle of Ceres was coming. The first fight in the war since the first straight-up ambush. The combined fleet would find out just how badass a bunch of Belters piloting stolen Martian warships really were, and there was reason to expect that would be pretty damned badass.
When the drive plumes had lit up the scans of Ceres, Alex felt it in his throat. Long-range battle. Torpedoes launched at extreme range in unpredictable vectors, designed to come in fast and hard, hoping to slip by the PDCs. He wondered if Mars had ever managed to build a good stealth torpedo, and if the traitors who’d supplied the Free Navy would have traded in them if they did exist. He’d spent hours in his crash couch, chasing every anomaly the Roci’s sensor arrays spat out, whether they were above threat threshold or not. When he did sleep, it was all he dreamed about.
When the data came back that the Free Navy ships were burning away, scattered as seeds, he—like every pilot in the combined fleet—looked for the strategy in it. The loops of gravity and thrust that showed where the battle would come together, what the enemy had in its mind. Every time he came up with nothing felt like a threat. The certainty that there was a pattern and he just wasn’t smart enough to see it knotted at the base of his skull until his eyes throbbed. His only comfort was that the crews of the Earth and Mars navies, who lived and breathed battle tactics, were as frustrated as he was. When the Free Navy’s trap snapped shut, they’d all die surprised together.
Only it kept not happening.
When the first ships reached the docks—two troop carriers from Earth, one from Mars—Alex had held his breath. Ceres was the port city of the Belt, and it was sitting there as unguarded and inviting as bait in a trap. Traffic control gave permission to approach. The combined fleet took berths, soldiers spilled out into the docks, the moment for resistance came and went. Reports started filtering back, many of them to Fred Johnson. The Free Navy was gone. There was no armed resistance. No soldiers, only a handful of booby traps, empty storerooms and reservoirs, and a security force stripped to its skeleton and anxious to surrender to anyone willing to take charge.
The battle for Ceres Station never came. Instead, the combined fleet and the local engineering unions put together an emergency response team that was even now jerry-rigging the environmental systems and recycling plants to keep the station from collapsing. Fred Johnson had spent all his time before the Rocinante docked trading tightbeam messages with Avasarala on Luna and whoever would answer back from Mars, where the no-confidence vote on Smith had ballooned to a full-scale constitutional crisis. After they’d docked, Fred, a security detail in tow, had vanished into a whirlwind of meetings with local OPA groups, unions, and the thin, traumatized remains of the administrative staff.
The rest of the crew went to the bar.
It had been strange at first—still was strange when he thought about it—watching the people of Ceres Station react to their new invaders. Everyone Alex met seemed built out of confusion and relief and anger and a kind of formless grief that spread out through the station hallways like a vapor. Ceres was a huge port, independent of the inner planets for years, and now maybe reconquered by them. Or maybe rescued. No one seemed to know if the combined fleet was the avenging hammer of Earth or the final proof that Fred Johnson’s OPA was a legitimate political force. Or if maybe something bigger and stranger had happened.
The smiles of the Ceres natives were tentative, and they carried shards of rage and loss in their eyes. Even here at the Blue Frog, where the crews were welcomed and served the best of what little remained, the fleet and the natives pulled apart, uncertain of each other. Segregated by choice and history. Alex found himself thinking of it as Belters at the bar and inners at the tables, but that wasn’t true. Ip and Mfume and all of Fred’s people were OPA. Even the divisions between people seemed new, and nobody was quite sure yet which unspoken rules applied.
Alex came out of the men’s room to a wall of sound. In the few minutes he’d been indisposed, someone had cranked up the karaoke and was shouting out a boozy version of Noko Dada’s version of “No Volveré” but without any of the harmony parts. He paused at the end of the bar and looked out over the tables, hoping to find a corner where he could have a quiet word with Sandra Ip away from the stage.
Holden was at a table by himself, hunched over a white mug with a ferocious scowl on his face. Alex felt a tug of anxiety. Back at his table, Bobbie and Ip were talking over each other while Mfume laughed. Ip looked over toward him, grinned, and patted the seat beside her. He held up a finger—one minute—and sloped over toward Holden.
“Hey there, partner,” Alex said. “You holding together all right?”
Holden looked up and around like he was surprised to find himself there. Then, after a moment, “Yeah, no. I’m all right.”
Alex tilted his head. “Seems like you just said three different things in a row.”
“I … ah. Yeah, I did, didn’t I? I’m fine.” He nodded at the small gold packet in Alex’s hand. “What’s that?”
Alex held it up. He’d gotten the packet from a dispenser in the men’s room. The foil had a dragon’s head embossed on it and some nonsense kanji that didn’t mean anything.
Holden’s brow furrowed. “Sobriety meds?”
Alex felt himself blushing and tried to hide it by smiling. “Well, I’m thinking I may be in a situation here pretty soon where everybody needs to be able to agree to whatever they’re agreeing to.”
“Always a gentleman,” Holden said.
“Mama raised me right. But seriously, are you doing okay? Because you’re staring at that coffee like it called you bad names.”
Holden glanced down at his cup. The song sloped down to the rough trill at the end. The applause was scattered and weak. Holden turned his coffee mug on the table, setting the black surface dancing. The porcelain scraped against the tabletop until the chords of a new tune crashed out and a woman’s voice starting on a Belter Creole cover of Cheb Khaled drowned it out. When Holden spoke, his voice barely carried over the music.
“I keep thinking about my dad calling Belters skinnies right in front of Naomi. And the way she took it.”
“Family can be ro
ugh,” Alex said. “Especially when emotions are kind of high.”
“True, but that’s not what’s …” Holden opened his hands. A gesture of frustration. “I always thought that if you gave people all the information, they’d do the right thing, you know? Not always, maybe, but usually. More often than when they chose to do the wrong thing anyway.”
“Everybody’s a little naïve sometimes,” Alex said, feeling as the words passed his lips that maybe he wasn’t quite following Holden’s point. Maybe he should have taken the first of the sobriety pills before he’d left the men’s room.
“I meant fact,” Holden went on as if he hadn’t heard Alex at all. “I thought if you told people facts, they’d draw their conclusions, and because the facts were true, the conclusions mostly would be too. But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people. Naomi told me that when the rocks fell, the people on Inaros’ ship cheered. They were happy about it.”
“Yeah, well.” Alex paused, rubbing a knuckle across his upper lip. “Consider they might all be a bag of assholes.”
“They weren’t killing people. In their heads? They were striking a blow for freedom or independence. Or making it right for all the Belter kids that got shitty growth hormones. All the ships that got impounded because they were behind on the registration fees. And it’s just the same back home. Father Cesar’s a good man. He’s gentle and he’s kind and he’s funny, and to him Belters are all Free Navy and radical OPA. If someone killed Pallas, he’d be worried about what the drop in refining capacity would do before he thought about how many preschools there are on the station. Or if the station manager’s son liked writing poetry. Or that blowing the station meant that Annie down in Pallas central accounting wasn’t going to get to throw her big birthday party after all.”
“Annie?” Alex asked.
“I made her up. Whoever. The thing is I wasn’t wrong. About telling people the truth? I was right about that. I was wrong about what they needed to know. And … and maybe I can fix that. I mean, I feel like I should at least try.”
“Okay,” Alex said. He was pretty sure he’d lost the thread of whatever they were talking about a while back, but Holden seemed at least less brooding. “So that means you’re about to do something?”
Holden nodded slowly, then drank off all that was left of his coffee at once, put the mug on the table, and clapped Alex’s shoulder. “Yeah. I am. Thank you.”
“Glad I could help,” he said. And then, to Holden’s retreating back. “Least I think I am.”
Back at the table, Sandra Ip had switched to club soda. Bobbie and Arnold were comparing stories about free climbing at different gravities, and Naomi and Clarissa Mao were at the edge of the stage, getting ready to take a turn singing. Ip caught a glimpse of the foil package in Alex’s hand, and her smile was a promise that things were going to go very, very well for him. Still, she must have read something in his expression or the way he held himself when he sat down.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
Alex shrugged. “I’ll tell you when I find out.”
Chapter Seventeen: Holden
The girl was something like a hundred ninety-two centimeters, and she would have towered over him if she weren’t sitting down. Her hair was cut close to her scalp in what Holden figured was fashionable for adolescent Belter girls these days. There were probably hundreds of microfeeds about it, which he didn’t follow. Or maybe she was a rebel and the hairstyle was all her own. Either way, it made the slightly enlarged head less pronounced. She sat at the edge of the bench, looking around at the Rocinante’s galley like she was regretting that she’d come. The older woman she called Tía stood against the wall, scowling. A chaperone who wasn’t impressed with anything she saw.
“I’ll just be a second here,” Holden said. The software package Monica Stuart had sent him assumed a level of proficiency he didn’t have, and he’d managed somehow to turn off some of its intelligence defaults. The girl nodded tightly and plucked at her sari. Holden hoped his smile was reassuring. Or failing that, amusing. “Really. I’ve just about … Wait, wait, wait. Okay. There.”
Her image appeared in his hand terminal with tiny overlays for color correction, sound correction, and something labeled DS/3 that he didn’t know what it was. Still, she looked good.
“All right,” Holden said. “So, I figure anyone who watches this is going to know who I am. Could you maybe just say your name?”
“Alis Caspár,” she said, her voice flat. She could have been a political prisoner the way she spoke. So, it wasn’t going too well yet.
“Great,” he lied. “Okay, and where do you live?”
“Ceres Station,” she said, and then an awkward pause. “Salutorg District.”
“And, um, what do you do?”
She nodded, settling into herself. “Ever since Ceres broke away from Earth control, my family has been running a financial coordination service. Converting scrip from different corporations and governments into compatible. Mi family bist peace-loving people. The pressure that the inner planets put on the Belters is not the fault of—”
“Let me break in for just a second,” Holden said. Alis went silent, looked down. Somehow Monica made doing this seem really easy. Holden was starting to see how that might actually be the product of years of experience and practice and not something he could jump into without guidance. Except he didn’t have time for that, so he forged ahead. “When we met … we met like four hours ago … you were with some of your friends. In the corridor?”
Alis blinked, confused, and looked at Tía. The little incredulous glance was the first time the girl had looked like herself since she’d come on board.
“It was really amazing,” Holden said. “I mean, I was walking by and I saw you all there. And I was really impressed. Could you tell me about that?”
“Shin-sin?” Alis said.
“Is that what you call it? The thing with the glass balls?”
“Not glass,” Alis said. “Resin.”
“Okay, yes,” Holden said, pouring enthusiasm out toward her like dropping water onto a sponge. It all seemed to just soak in and vanish. But then Alis chuckled. It didn’t matter that it was more at him than with him. “Could you do it again? Here?”
She laughed, covering her mouth with one hand. For a long second, he thought she might call the whole thing to a halt. But then she plucked a little bag from her hip and took out four brightly colored clear spheres a little larger and softer than the marbles Holden had played with as a boy. Carefully, she set them between her fingers, resting between the second knuckles. She started singing, a high, choppy chant, and then stopped, laughed, and shook her head.
“Can’t do this,” she said. “I can’t.”
“Please, just try. It’s really great.”
“It’s dumb,” she said. “It’s kid thing.”
“I’m … really immature.”
When she looked at Tía again, Holden glanced too. The old woman was glowering just as deeply as before, but there was a glimmer of amusement in her ancient eyes. Alis settled, laughed, settled again, and started chanting. When the rhythm was established, she started clapping her hands together gently, and passing the spheres from hand to hand, making them seem to dance independently of her. Every now and then the chant would hit a syncopated passage so that one of the balls could drop into her palm and get tossed across to be captured between her opposite fingers. When she reached the end, she stopped, looked shyly toward Holden, and shook her head.
“Better with two people,” she said.
“Like partners?” he said.
“Dui.” Her glance behind him was no more than a flutter, but Holden knew what it meant, and a touch of glee leapt into his heart. He turned to the stone-faced chaperone, who hoisted an eyebrow at him.
“Do you … Tía?” he said. “Do you know how to do shin-sin?”
She snorted in military-grade derision. When she came forward, Alis made room for her and ha
nded over two of the spheres. They seemed smaller between Tía’s thick fingers. The old woman lifted her chin, and for a moment, Holden knew exactly what she’d looked like at Alis’ age.
The chant was more complex this time, sung as a round with the rhythms of one part informing and supporting whatever was happening in the other woman’s voice. The clear, colored spheres danced between their hands as they clapped palms together, crossing and recrossing, adding their claps to the song. At the moments of syncopation, they tossed the spheres across the space between them and caught them in their knuckles. By the end, both women were grinning. At the end, Tía tossed all the spheres up one after another so quickly they were all in the air at the same moment and then caught them in one hand. It wasn’t a trick that could have worked at a full g.
Holden clapped and the older woman nodded, accepting his applause like a queen.
“That is amazing. It’s wonderful,” Holden said. “How do you learn how to do that?”
Alis shook her head in disbelief at the strange Earther and his childish delights. “Is just shin-sin,” she said. And then her eyes went wide, and the blood drained from her face.
“Mr. Holden,” Fred Johnson said. “When you have a moment?”
“Yes, sure,” Holden said. “We were just … Yeah. Give me a second.”
“I’ll be in Ops.” Fred smiled and nodded to the two Belter women. “Ladies.”
Holden closed down the software, thanked Alis and Tía, and walked them to the airlock, out and into the docks. After they’d gone, he watched the captured video—girl and woman with their voices and hands playing against each other, the not quite marbles weaving between them like a third player in the game. It was exactly the kind of thing he’d hoped for. He ran the compression and sent it to Tycho Station and Monica Stuart, just the same way he had the others.
He’d hoped to get a lot more done. He’d interviewed a researcher who worked on Ceres Station, self-educated through networked tutorials, plying him with yeasty beer until the older man was loose and comfortable enough to wax passionate about the beauty of tardigrades. He’d talked to a nutritionist from the hydroponic fields who’d only agreed if she could explain the water shortage situation on Ceres, and wound up being the clearest voice of grief and fear that he’d heard. He’d talked to a man who was alleged to be the oldest Belter on the station, who told a long and probably apocryphal story about the first licensed brothel to open there.
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