“Bertold,” she said as they followed the other captain.
“Savvy,” he said, his hand on the butt of his gun as if it had only happened to come to rest there. Nadia was the same. They fell into a guarding formation as naturally as blinking. When Rodriguez reached the walls of the port, he landed with a clank, turning on his mag boot and killing his momentum with his knees. The music they’d heard before was gone now, and Rodriguez looked behind them, as if making sure they weren’t followed. Or else that they were.
“Making me nervous, coyo,” Michio said, walking after him. “Something you want to say?”
“Bon sí, aber not here,” Rodriguez said, the lightness gone from his voice and a grim tension in its place. “Smuggled past the smugglers, this one.”
“Not feeling better.”
“You will or you won’t. Come alles la.”
The container he took them to had a little office built out from the side. Scrapwelded together with its own airlock. Rodriguez keyed in a passcode by hand. Bertold stretched his arms, blew out his breath, like a weight lifter about to try more than his usual load.
“Love you,” Nadia said, her voice calm and conversational as if she wasn’t saying it in case they were her last words.
The airlock opened, and a man popped out. Thin frame, dark hair in curls. “Is she here?” he said, and then, “Oh. There you are.”
A shock of surprise, the uncertainty of whether this was a threat or something more interesting. “Sanjrani.”
“Nico, Nico, Nico,” Rodriguez said, pushing Sanjrani back through the airlock. “Not here. Didn’t sneak through te ass end of nothing to wave you like a flag. Get back safe in.” When Sanjrani had retreated, Rodriguez turned to Michio, motioning that she should follow. When she hesitated, he lifted his arm to his sides, cruciform. “Got no guns, me. Esá goes bad, la dué la can shoot me.”
“Can,” Bertold agreed. His sidearm was drawn, but not pointed. Not yet.
“All right, then,” Michio said, clomping forward in her boots, the magnets dragging her down against the floors, holding her, and letting her go again with every step.
In the little office, Sanjrani sat strapped onto a stool before a thin desk. Another waited across from him. She didn’t see a trap. Didn’t know what she was looking at. “Are you looking to change sides?” she asked.
Sanjrani made a deep, impatient cough. “I’m here to tell you why you’re killing everyone in the fucking Belt. You and Marco both. You two should be on my side.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
“Am I dead already? No, he doesn’t. That’s how desperate I’ve gotten. I try to talk to Rosenfeld, but he’s only talking to Marco. No one knows where Dawes got to. They won’t listen.” There was a desperation in his voice, high and thin as a bow against a string.
“All right,” she said, moving to the stool, pulling the belt across her lap. “I’ll listen.”
Sanjrani relaxed and pulled up a diagram from the desk’s display. A complex series of curves laid over x and y axes. “We made assumptions when we started this,” he said. “We made plans. Good ones, I think. But we didn’t follow them.”
“Dui,” Michio said.
“First thing we did,” he said, “was destroy the biggest source of wealth and complex organics in the system. The only supply of complex organics that work with our metabolisms. The worlds on the other side of the ring? Different genetic codes. Different chemistries. Not something we can import and eat. But that was okay. Projections were clear. We could build a new economy, put together infrastructure, make a sustainable network of microecologies in a cooperative-competitive matrix. Base the currencies on—”
“Nico,” she said.
“Right. Right. We needed to start building it all as soon as the rocks fell.”
“I know,” she said.
“You don’t,” he said. Tears sheeted across his eyes, clung to his skin. “No recycling process is perfect. Everything degrades. The colony ships? The supplies? They’re all stopgap. They’re the measure of how long we have to make a living Belt. Look here. This green curve is the projected output of the new economic models. The ones we’re not doing, yeah? And this”—he pointed to a descending red curve—“is the best case of how long the conscripted supplies will last. Equilibrium is here. Five years out.”
“All right.”
“And this line here, the base we would need between them to keep the present population of the Belt alive.”
“We stay above it.”
“We would have,” Sanjrani said, “if we’d kept to the plan. Here’s where we are now.”
He shifted the green line. Michio felt her throat tighten as she understood what she was looking at.
“We’re fine now,” Sanjrani said. “We’ll be fine for three years. Maybe three and a half. Then the recycling systems stop being able to meet demand. We won’t have infrastructure in place to fill the gaps. And then we’ll starve. Not just Earth. Not just Mars. The Belt too. And once we start, we’ll have no way to stop.”
“All right,” Michio said. “How do we fix it?”
“I don’t know,” Sanjrani said.
The Panshin left a day later, taking Sanjrani and what little remained of Michio’s peace of mind with it. Her crew did their part, building out the port, ringing the new wires. Messages seeped into the Connaught’s antennas, some of them for her. Iapetus needed more food-grade magnesium. A collection of prospecting ships had exhausted their filters and needed replacements. The Free Navy poured out what they called news, some of it about how much Belter material she’d given over to the enemy.
Whenever she tried to sleep, the sense of dread welled up in her heart. When the hard times came, when the starving began, it would come like a ratchet. It was hard to make a new, shining city in the void when the people designing it, building it, living in it were dying from want. When they were dying because she and Marco were at each other’s throats instead of following the plan.
She had to remind herself that she hadn’t been the one to change things. Marco had gone off script before her. She’d made her break because he had. She was trying to help. Only when she closed her eyes, she saw the red line sloping down toward nothing, and no upward green swoop to answer it. Three years. Maybe three and a half. But to make it work, they had to start now. Had to have started already.
Or they had to make a very new plan, and neither she nor Sanjrani knew what that was.
The others avoided her, giving her food and water and space to think. She woke alone, worked her shift, slept alone, and didn’t feel the loss of company. And so she was surprised when Laura came to find her in the gym.
“Message came for you, Captain,” she said. Not Michi, but Captain. So Laura was not her wife then, but her comm officer on duty.
Michio let the tension bands slide back into their housings and wicked the sweat off her skin with a towel. “What is it?”
“Tightbeam relayed through Ceres,” Laura said. “It’s from the Rocinante en route to Tycho Station. It’s flagged captain-to-captain.”
Michio considered telling Laura to play it. That they were family, and didn’t have any secrets. It was a dangerous impulse. She stifled it.
“I’ll take it in my quarters,” she said.
When she opened the message, James Holden looked out from the screen. Her first thought was that he looked like crap. Her second thought was that she probably did too. She tucked her sweat-damp towel into the recycler. No recycling process is perfect. She shuddered, but Holden had started talking.