“What?”
“The planet. What’s its name?”
Holden leaned forward, the word Ilus on his lips. He paused. Murtry’s smile was thin.
“You’ve spent a lot of time working for the OPA, Captain Holden. And you’re on record as harboring a deep-seated dislike of the kind of business that employs me. I have some reservations about your ability to address the situation here in an unbiased manner. Threatening me and calling me names doesn’t do much to reassure me.”
“You undermined my authority by killing a Belter within five minutes of my arrival,” Holden said.
“I did. And I understand that could make you feel that I’m not taking your role here seriously. But your friends in the UN are a year and a half away,” Murtry said. “Think about that. It takes between eight and eleven hours to have the first two exchanges of a conversation, and almost nineteen months to get here from there at civilian speeds. Our local governor has been murdered by terrorists. My people have been killed for trying to enforce our legal rights. Do you honestly think I’m going to wait for you to fix what’s wrong here? No, I’ll shoot everyone who threatens the RCE expedition or its employees, and I’ll sleep well afterward. That’s the reality of where you are now. Better get used to it.”
“I know who you are,” Amos said.
The big man had been so quiet that both Murtry and Holden started with surprise.
“Who am I?” Murtry asked, playing along.
“A killer,” Amos said. His face was expressionless, his tone light. “You’ve got a nifty excuse and the shiny badge to make you seem right, but that’s not what this is about. You got off on smoking that guy in front of everyone. You can’t wait to do it again.”
“Is that right?” Murtry asked.
“Yeah. So, one killer to another, you don’t want to try that shit with us.”
“Amos, easy,” Holden warned, but the other two men ignored him.
“That sounded like a threat,” Murtry said.
“Oh, it really was,” Amos replied with a grin.
Holden realized both men had their hands below the table. “Hey, now.”
“I think maybe one of us is going to end bloody,” Murtry said.
“How about now?” Amos replied with a shrug. “I’m free now. We can just skip all the middle part.”
Murtry and Amos smiled at each other across the table for an endless moment while Holden ran though contingencies in his mind: What if Amos gets shot, what if Murtry gets shot, what if I get shot.
“You fellas have a nice day,” Murtry said, standing slowly. His hand was not on his gun. “Keep the bottle.”
“Thanks!” Amos replied, pouring another drink.
Murtry nodded at them, then walked out of the bar.
Holden let out an exhalation that he’d been holding for what seemed like an hour. “Yeah, I think we are in way over our heads here,” he admitted.
“I’m gonna need to shoot that guy at some point,” Amos said, then tossed back another shot.
“I wish you wouldn’t. This is already looking like a train wreck, and in addition to chewing up a few hundred colonists and scientists, which is bad enough, it will also be my fault when it all falls apart.”
“Shooting him might help.”
“I hope not,” Holden said, but he was worried that Amos was right.
Interlude: The Investigator
— it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out—
One hundred and thirteen times a second, nothing answers and it reaches out. It feels no frustration, though parts of it do. It is not designed to incorporate consciousness or will, but to use whatever it finds. The minds within it are encysted, walled off. They are used when they are of use, as is everything and it reaches out.
It is not a plan. It is not even a desire, or it is only a desire without knowledge of that longing’s object. It is a selective pressure pressed against chaos. It does not think of itself this way because it does not think, but the environment changes, a new branch of possibilities opens, and it forms the investigator and leans into the new crack. The new space. The minds within it interpret this differently. As a hand reaching up through graveyard soil. As finding a door in a room where no door had been before. As a breath of air to a drowning woman. It is not aware of these images, but awareness of them is part of it.
The investigator puts pressure on the aboriginal, and the aboriginal takes action. The environment changes again. Patterns begin to match patterns, but there can be no recognition because it is not conscious to recognize. It would be aware of the aboriginal accelerating, of it slowing, the vectors shifting zero to one to a different zero in a different location, if it were aware, but it is not aware. It reaches out.
Patterns match, and it reorients and reaches out. Cascades of implicit information bloom, and the conscious parts of it see a lotus opening forever, hear a shout that is made of other shouts that are made of other shouts in a fractal constructed of sound, pray to God for a death that does not come.
It reaches out, but the ways in which it reaches change. It improvises, as it always has, the insect twitch, the spark closing the gap it reaches out.
It touches something, and for a moment, a part of it that can feel, feels hope. It is unaware of hope. The reply does not come. It is not over. It will never be over. It reaches out, and finds new things. Old things. It flows into places that are comfortable for it to flow. There are responses, and the responses feed the impulses that caused them, and there are more responses. All automatic and empty and dead as it is. Nothing reaches back. It feels no disappointment. It does not shut down. It reaches out.
It does not experience the wariness, but the wariness is part of it. It reaches out, rushing into the new possibility space, and something deep in it, wider than it should be, watches it reach.
Doors and corners. It reaches out it reaches out it reaches out. Doors and corners.
This could get ugly, kid.
Chapter Twelve: Basia
James Holden came too late.
Along with everyone else in the colony, Basia watched the drive plume of the Rocinante light the sky of Ilus. For him, maybe, it was already too late. He’d made the bombs that destroyed the RCE shuttle and killed the UN governor. He’d been there when Coop and the others murdered the RCE security team. And maybe there was no coming back from that. Maybe he was already a dead man, or a man destined for life in prison, the same thing really. But looking up at the line of white fire in sky, he couldn’t help but feel a spark of hope. Jim Holden had saved the Ganymede children, too late for Katoa, but he’d saved the others. He’d brought down the evil corporation that had killed Basia’s little boy. Neither Mao-Kwikowski nor Protogen existed anymore because of Holden. And while Basia had never met the man in person, he’d watched him on video casts and read about him in newsfeeds. It created a strange sense of intimacy, to watch the man who’d avenged Katoa on-screen, talking and smiling.
And that man was coming to Ilus. Perhaps he could save Basia too?
So when the bright line in the sky vanished, and Basia knew Holden and his crew were in orbit, he let himself feel a swell of hope. The first he’d felt in a long time.
And when he heard the thunderclap of a descending shuttle, he ran outside just like all the other colonists, watching to see where it would land. The UN mediator is coming! they shouted to each other. The man who saved Earth, they meant. The man who saved Ganymede. The man who will save us.
A small shuttle dropped out of the sky and settled on the hard-packed earth to the south of First Landing, and half the town’s population ran to meet it. Basia ran too.