“Yeah,” he said. “I’d love that.”
The galley of the Rocinante smelled like coffee and maple-flavored syrup. Naomi shifted when Alex came in, making room for him on the bench. Amos sat on her other side, looking into nothing and scooping scrambled eggs from a bowl with two fingers. His eyes were still puffy from sleep, but he seemed alert otherwise. Clarissa stood in the doorway, uncertain but present. Alex thought about getting some food, but he wasn’t hungry. It would only have been so he had something to do with his hands.
A conversation between Bobbie and Holden echoed down the lift as they approached, their voices hard and competent and businesslike. Maybe even a little excited. There was an anticipation in the air that didn’t feel like joy, but wasn’t entirely unlike it either.
The melancholy in Alex’s chest and throat eased a little as they came in, Bobbie taking the bench across from him while Holden headed for the coffee. When he’d left Sandra’s quarters to come here, he’d carried a sense of loss with him. He still felt it. Would feel it for maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe forever. But not as strongly. And his people were here. His crew, his ship. The worst of the sting was already over and the sweet, he thought, would last. For him. Hopefully for Sandra. It was great sharing a moment with a genuinely good woman. There was a pleasure in coming home again too.
Holden took a sip of his coffee, coughed, and took another one. Clarissa slid in and took a seat behind Amos as if she could hide behind him. As Holden ambled over—head down, expression distracted—Bobbie reached across and tapped Alex on the wrist.
“You good?”
“Right as rain,” Alex said. “Said my goodbyes.”
Bobbie nodded once. Holden sat down facing them all, sideways on the bench. His hair was unkempt, his eyes focused on something only he could see. The attention of the room—Naomi’s, Amos’, Alex’s own—turned toward him. An ancient and barely familiar anticipation shifted in Alex’s chest, like a fragment of childhood beginning of school year.
“So, Cap,” he said. “What’s the plan?”
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Avasarala
Avasarala screamed.
Her breath ripped out of her throat, abrading her flesh as it passed. She tasted bile in the back of her mouth, and her legs trembled, ached, burned as she tried to push the steel plate another centimeter away.
“Come on,” Pieter said. “You can do this.”
She screamed again, and the plate moved away. Her legs went almost straight. The impulse to push through and lock her knees took effort to resist. It might snap her knees back the other way, but then at least this would be done.
“That’s eleven,” Pieter said. “Go for twelve. One more.”
“Fuck your mother.”
“Come on. Just one more rep. I’ll be here to help.”
“You’re an asshole and nobody loves you,” she gasped, lowering her head. The worst was the nausea. Leg day always seemed to mean nausea. Pieter didn’t care. He was paid not to care.
“You’re going down the well in twelve days,” he said. “If you want the leader of Earth, the hope and light of civilization, to get wheeled off the shuttle in a chair, you can stop. If you want her to stride out in front of the cameras like a Valkyrie returned from the underworld and ready for battle, you’ll go for twelve.”
“Sadistic fuck.”
“You’re the one who fell behind on your exercise schedule.”
“I’ve been saving the fucking species.”
“Saving humanity doesn’t prevent bone-density loss or muscular atrophy,” he said. “And you’re stalling. One more.”
“I hate you so much,” she said, letting her knees bend, easing the steel plate back closer to her. She wanted to cry. She wanted to puke all over Pieter’s pretty white exercise shoes. She wanted to be doing anything else at all.
“I know, sweetie. But you can do this,” he said. “Come on.”
Avasarala screamed and pushed the steel plate away.
Afterward, she sat on the fake-wood bench in the locker room with her head in her hands until the idea of moving didn’t disgust her. When she did finally stand up, the gray-clad woman in the mirror seemed unfamiliar. Not foreign precisely, but certainly not her. Thinner, for one thing, with sweat stains at the armpits and under the breasts. White hair that didn’t fall to her shoulders so much as flow out, the thin lunar gravity too weak to pull it down. The woman in the mirror looked Avasarala up and down with dark, judgmental eyes.
“Some fucking Valkyrie,” Avasarala said, then headed for the shower. “You’ll have to do.”
The good news was that Mars had finally slogged its way through its constitutional crisis, done the obvious thing, and put Emily Richards in as prime minister. No, that wasn’t fair. There was more going well than just that. The rioting in Paris was under control now, and the racist cells in Colombia had been identified and isolated without any more murders. Saint Petersburg had fixed its water-recycling problem, at least for the moment. Gorman Le’s mystery yeast was doing everything it had claimed on the tin, which increased the overall food supply for the survivors, and the reactors in Cairo and Seoul were working again so they could make use of it. Fewer dead people. Or at least fewer dead right now. Next week was always next week, and always would be.
The bad news still outweighed the good. The second wave of deaths hadn’t slowed yet. The medical infrastructure was saturated. Thousands of people were dying every week from conditions that even a year ago would have been easily treated or cured. The violence over resources hadn’t by any means stopped either. There were vigilante raids in Boston and Mumbai. Reports of whole police forces going rogue and hoarding relief supplies in Denver and Phoenix. The oceans were being choked. The sludge of dust and debris wasn’t sinking as quickly as the models had suggested, and the light-eating plants and microbiota were dying off as a result. If there hadn’t been so many fucking human beings stressing the food webs over the last few centuries, the system might have been more robust. Or it might not have. It wasn’t as though they had a second Earth to use as a control. History itself was a massive n=1 study, irreproducible. It was what made it so difficult to learn from.
After her shower, she changed into a lime-green sari, did her hair and her makeup. She was starting to feel a little better. It was the pattern she was noticing. The actual exercise left her miserable, but once she’d recovered, the rest of her day seemed to go a little better. If it was only the placebo effect, that was enough. She’d take what she could get, even if it was only tricks of the mind.
When she was almost ready to face the rest of her day, she opened an audio-only connection to Said. “Where do we stand?” she said instead of hello.
“The security group from Mars is finishing their meal,” Said answered without missing a beat. “They’ll be in the conference hall in half an hour. Admiral Souther will be there with you if you need him.”
“Always good to have a penis in uniform in the room,” Avasarala said sourly. “God knows they might not take me seriously otherwise.”
“If you say so, ma’am.”
“It was a joke.”
“If you say so, ma’am. There’s also a report in from Ceres Station. Admiral Coen has confirmed that the Giambattista is under burn just the way Aimee Ostman promised.”
Avasarala held a pearl earring to her left ear, considering it. Nice. Understated. Didn’t go with the sari, though.
“I’m sorry, ma’am?” Said’s voice was confused.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You… ah… you growled.”