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.
And that was all. So far. Four interviews, none of them terribly long. Hopefully it was enough for Monica to work with. She’d promised him that a lot could be saved in editing.
The docks weren’t as busy as he was used to seeing them. Especially after the press and barely controlled chaos of Luna, Ceres seemed wounded. Still reeling from the blows it had suffered. The carts and loading mechs stood idle, waiting for a ship to arrive with supplies or some warehouse on the station that still had something worth sending away.
He’d heard once about reperfusion injuries. When a limb had been pressed until all the blood was gone, the flood when it came back could break vessels, bleed into the cellular matrix. He remembered thinking at the time how strange it was for something normal, necessary, and life-giving to cause damage just by showing back up. Ceres was like that now, but he couldn’t tell if the combined fleet was the blood returning or if some other flood would have to come before Ceres could take stock of how badly it had been wounded.
On his way back in, he passed Gor Droga and Amos in the locker room running down a short that was making one of the ventilation fans run slow. Clarissa Mao was talking to them both from down in engineering. It was the sort of problem that a ship with a full crew had the spare cycles to address. At the lift, he had to wait for Chava Lombaugh to squeeze past him before he got on.
The truth was that with all of Fred’s people and Holden’s, the Rocinante still had a little less than the full crew she’d been meant to carry. That it felt crowded to him wasn’t the ship design, but his own habits and expectations. A full crew would be tighter, more compressed, more like a normal Navy ship. Holden knew that. He even knew that in some ways having the extra people would keep them all safer. The Rocinante was built with a lot of redundant backups. The crew was supposed to be the same way. It hadn’t worked out that way, though. Another mechanic wouldn’t be Amos. Another pilot wouldn’t be Alex. People were more than the roles they played in the function of the ship, and they weren’t replaceable. And what was true of the Rocinante held for the larger field of humanity as well.
The lift stopped. Fred Johnson looked up from the ship controls, nodding to Holden. The lights were at the same dim settings that Alex preferred, and the backsplash from the screens left Fred’s skin looking darker than it was. Maura Patel sat across the deck, diagnostics spooling across the communications controls on her screen and headphones over her ears. Holden dropped into a couch beside Fred’s and swiveled to face him.
“You wanted me?”
“Couple things. I’m setting up shop on Ceres for now. Avasarala’s going to recognize me as acting governor,” Fred said. “I’m pulling in all my favors. Everyone I know with any influence from the OPA. I’ll bring them here.”
“That sounds like an invitation to assassinate you.”
“The risk is necessary. I don’t know if my crew will be staying here or going to Tycho without me. I’m waiting on word from Drummer about that. One way or the other, I’ll get them out of your hair.”
“That’s… I mean, okay. But they’re sort of growing on me. So what did you really want to talk about?”
Fred nodded once, a short, hard motion. “Do you think Draper will be able to speak for Mars?”
Holden laughed. “Like speak for ambassador speak for? Negotiate with the OPA? Because I was pretty sure that was up to Mars.”
“We may not be in a position to wait for them to get their ducks in a row. Smith’s out, and Richards is in, but an opposition coalition’s formed that want to put investigating the remaining military ahead of anything else.”
“You mean like ahead of fighting the war?”
“For example. Richards and Avasarala are working on it, but I need a Martian face with me if I’m going to make this combined navy hold together. With my background, I can represent the best of Earth to the Belt. I’ve been doing that for years, and I’ve built up a lot of trust. But unless I have a representative of Mars, I won’t be bringing anything new to the table. Especially with the Free Navy flying Martian ships. Inaros’ stock is very high right now.”
“Seriously? Because it looks a lot like he just walked away from the biggest port in the Belt.”
Fred shrugged eloquently. “His apologists are good at their jobs. And everything is in the shadow of what he did to Earth. Sorrento-Gillis, Gao, all of them. They underestimated the anger in the Belt. And the desperation. People want Inaros to be a hero, and so what he does, they interpret as heroism.”
“Even running away?”
“He won’t only run away. Don’t know what he’s got in mind, but he isn’t about to retire. And Ceres Station… it’s a white elephant now. Just keeping the environmental systems running isn’t going to be trivial. We may have to consolidate. Concentrate people physically and abandon parts of the station. Which will be interpreted as Earth and Mars kicking Belters out of their homes by Inaros and his cabal.”
Holden ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, that’s messed up.”
“It’s politics. And it’s why we need the OPA. There is support for us in the Belt, but it needs cultivation. And we have a few things going for us. They can call themselves a navy, but they’re amateurs. The kind of roughshod that thinks discipline is the same as punishment. Rumor is there’s already some dissent in Marco’s leadership. Probably, it’s over his tactics with Ceres. I still don’t understand why Dawes would let him walk away from the station, but… well, clearly he did. And Avasarala’s keeping a lid on Earth. If the UN had crumbled the way Mars has, I don’t know what we’d do.”
“This,” Holden said. “Try to gather some allies. Pretty much the same thing you’re going to do anyway. Only with less hope that it would work.”
Fred stretched, his joints popping, then sighed back down into the gel of the couch. The diagnostics on the comm panel flickered, and Patel tapped the run results. As far as she was concerned, the two of them might as well not have been there.
“You’re probably right,” Fred said. “Still, I’m glad it’s not worse. Not yet, anyway.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and Inaros will get himself killed without us.”
“It wouldn’t be enough,” Fred said. “Earth’s broken. It will be for generations. Mars may or may not collapse, but there’s still the gates. Still the colony worlds. Still all the pressures that keep the Belt on the edge of starvation and even less of what makes it valuable. There’s no getting back to status quo ante. We’ve got to move forward. Which brings us back to Draper. You’ve worked with her. Can she do the job?”
“Honestly, I think the best person to ask is her. We all know her. We all like her. I’d trust her with my ship, and I wouldn’t trust you with that. If she thinks she can, then I think she can.”
“And if she thinks she can’t?”
“Then ask Avasarala,” Holden said.
“I already know her opinion. All right, thank you. And… I’m going to regret asking. Do I want to know what you were doing with those two women in the galley?”