“You knew that wasn’t going to work,” he said.
“I expected it wasn’t,” Naomi said. “I didn’t know.”
“Just suspected.”
“Strongly suspected,” she said. It was almost an apology. “I could have been surprised.”
“You got to give Bobbie her room, Cap,” Alex said. “She’ll come out the other side of it.”
“I just … I wish I understood what’s bothering her so much.”
Alex blinked. “She’s been spoiling to take the fight to some bad guys ever since Io. Now she got one, and she was stuck in a box while the rest of us did the shooting.”
“But we won.”
“We did,” Naomi said. “And she watched us do it while we tried to figure out how to get her out of a trap. By the time she was free, it was over.”
Holden sipped at the coffee. It was a little better. That didn’t help. “Okay, so what I meant was I wish I understood what was bothering her in hopes that then there’d be something I could do about it.”
“We know,” Naomi said. “The difficulty isn’t lost on us.”
Amos’ voice came over the ship’s comm. “Anybody there? I’ve been paging ops for the last ten minutes.”
Alex thumbed the system on. “On my way up now.”
“Okay. I think I tracked down the last leak. Let me know what it looks like from your end.”
“Will do,” Alex said, nodded to the two of them, and headed up toward ops and the ongoing repair effort. The Azure Dragon’s crew hadn’t had all that long, but they hadn’t been trying for clean either. It was easier to cut through a lot of hull quickly when you didn’t care what broke while you did it. Knowing that the ship wasn’t right yet was like an itch he couldn’t quite reach. Part of that came from knowing how strapped the shipyards on Luna were going to be. The days of sloping into Tycho and having Fred Johnson’s teams patch the ship up were probably gone, and Luna had Earth’s navy to take precedence over Holden and his crew.
It wasn’t just that, though. It was also the same thing he’d felt driving him to talk to Bobbie. And to Clarissa Mao before that. He wanted things to be all right, and he had the growing feeling that they weren’t. That they weren’t going to be.
“What about you?” Naomi said, looking at him from under a spill of dark, gently curled hair. “Want to talk?”
He chuckled. “I do, but I don’t know what to say. Here we are, the conquering heroes with prisoners and a salvaged data core, and it doesn’t feel like enough.”
“It isn’t.”
“Always so comforting.”
“I mean you’re not wrong. You aren’t uneasy and disturbed by all this because there’s something wrong with you. This is all uneasing and disturbing. You aren’t fucked up. The situation is.”
“That doesn’t … You know, that actually does make me feel a little better.”
“Good,” she said. “Because I need to know this isn’t about Marco and Filip. That … all that isn’t making it hard for you to have me around.”
“No,” Holden said. “We covered that.”
“And we’ll cover it again after this, I’m sure. But if you’d just keep saying it?”
“I would put everyone else that exists headfirst out an airlock just to keep you around. It isn’t that. The only concern I have about you and Marco Inaros is that he’ll try to hurt you again.”
“That’s nice to know.”
“I still love you. I will always love you.”
He was answering the question he thought she was asking, but her gaze cut away. Her smile was rueful, but it was also real. “Always is a long time.”
“I’m captain of this ship. Technically, I could marry us right now.”
Now she laughed. “Would you want to?”
“I’m easy. It seems a little redundant. Husband and wife seems like a less interesting and committed relationship than Holden and Naomi,” he said. “He can’t win, you know.”
“Of course he can. Marco’s the one who decides when he wins.”
“No, I’ve been thinking about it. The Free Navy … is untenable. They did a lot of damage. They killed a lot of people. But all of this is really about the gates. If it wasn’t for all the people rushing out to try to found a new colony, Mars wouldn’t be collapsing. The Belters wouldn’t be worried that they’ll get marginalized out of existence. None of the things that gave Marco a toehold would have happened. But the gates aren’t going away. So all the pressures he’s fighting against? They’ll outlast him. People are still going to want to get out to the new systems, and they’re going to find ways to do it. And the colonies that are already out there are going to want to keep in contact and trade with us. At least until they’re really on their feet, and that could take generations.”
“You think he’s on the wrong side of history.”
“He is,” Holden said.
“Then what does that say about people like me? I grew up in the Belt. I wouldn’t want to live down a gravity well. The gates aren’t going away, but neither are the Belters. Unless they are.”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “Human history has seen plenty of genocides. If you’re right, then the long term is either the gates or the Belters. And Belters … We’re human. We’re fragile. We die. The gates? Even if we could destroy them, we wouldn’t. There’s too much real estate involved.”
Holden looked down. “All right. That was my turn.”
Naomi lifted a questioning eyebrow.
“That was less comforting than I meant it to be,” he said. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right. Anyway, that’s not what I meant when I said Marco decides when he wins. You don’t understand how slippery he can be. Whatever happens, he’ll shift so it was his plan all along. If he were the last person alive, he’d say we needed the apocalypse and declare victory. It’s what he is.”
Even though they were the agents of Chrisjen Avasarala’s will, it took seventeen hours for the Rocinante and the Azure Dragon to get berths on Luna. When they finally did, they were at a military yard outside Patsaev complex, where the civilian relief ships were landing. The docks were crowded with people in bunches and lines, some of them staring blankly ahead like victims of a fever, some weeping with relief or exhaustion or both. The air stank of sweat and felt stale, even where the intakes made the greatest breeze.
The Luna Station complex—shipyards and convention centers, hotels and residence centers, schools and office complexes and warehouses—was big enough to fit a hundred million bodies, but the environmental infrastructure would overload at something like half that, even with the advantage of the moon’s mass and conduction to soak up waste heat. The Lagrange stations had less margin. Holden tried to do the math in his head as they forged their path through the crowd. The estimates said that one-half of Earth was dead already. Fifteen billion gone or going so fast there was no way to save them. Of those still alive, two-thirds were living in what the newsfeeds were calling “distressed situations.” Ten billion people who needed food or water or shelter. And up the well, there were places for maybe as many as a quarter million. Two-and-a-half-hundred-thousandths of a percent of the people in need. He couldn’t believe that was right, and tried to figure it again. He came to the same number.
And a thousand worlds out there, just on the other side of the gates. Hostile worlds, most of them, but not more hostile than Earth. Not now. If there were a way to teleport them from Boston and Lisbon and Bangkok, maybe they’d be saved. Maybe they’d go on to raise something new and beautiful out of the ruins of Earth, and if one system didn’t, there’d be a thousand other chances.