Текст книги "Caliban’s War"

Автор книги: James S.A. Corey

Соавторы: Daniel Abraham
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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

“Okay,” she said. “Last chance for feedback.”

“Wish I had some popcorn,” Amos said, and the medical scanner flashed once, showed a broadcast code and then white block letters: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Avasarala and Holden appeared on the screen. She was speaking, her hands out before her as if illustrating a point. Holden, looking sober, leaned toward her. Naomi Nagata’s voice was calm, strong, and professional.

“In a surprising development, the deputy to Undersecretary of Executive Administration Sadavir Errinwright met with OPA representative James Holden and a representative of the Martian military today to address concerns over the potentially earth-shattering revelations surrounding the devastating attack on Ganymede.”

The image cut to Avasarala. She was leaning forward to make her neck longer and hide the loose skin under her chin. Long practice made her look natural, but she could almost hear Arjun laughing. A runner at the bottom of the screen identified her by name and title.

“I expect to be traveling with Captain Holden to the Jovian system,” Avasarala said. “The United Nations of Earth feel very strongly that a multilateral investigation into this is the best way to restore balance and peace to the system.”

The image shifted to Holden and Avasarala sitting in the galley with the botanist. This time the little scientist was talking and she and Holden pretended to listen. The voice-over came again.

“When asked about the accusations leveled against Praxidike Meng, whose search for his daughter has become the human face of the tragedy on Ganymede, the Earth delegation was unequivocal.”

Then back to Avasarala, her expression now sorrowful. Her head shaking in an almost subliminal negation.

“Nicola Mulko is a tragic figure in this, and I personally condemn the irresponsibility of these raw newsfeeds that allow statements from mentally ill people to be presented as if they were verified fact. Her abandonment of her husband and child is beyond dispute, and her struggles with her psychological issues deserve a more dignified and private venue.”

From off camera, Nagata asked, “So you blame the media?”

“Absolutely,” Avasarala said as the image shifted to a picture of a toddler with smiling black eyes and dark pigtails. “We have absolute faith in Dr. Meng’s love and dedication to Mei, and we are pleased to be part of the effort to bring her safely home.”

The recording ended.

“All right,” Avasarala said. “Any comments?”

“I don’t actually work for the OPA anymore,” Holden said.

“I’m not authorized to represent the Martian military,” Bobbie said. “I’m not even sure I’m still supposed to be working with you.”

“Thank you for that. Are there any comments that matter?” Avasarala asked. There was a moment’s silence.

“Worked for me,” Praxidike Meng said.

  There was one way that the Rocinantewas infinitely more expansive than the Guanshiyin, and it was the only one that she cared about. The tightbeam was hers. Lag was worse and every hour took her farther from Earth, but knowing that the messages she sent were getting off the ship without being reported to Nguyen and Errinwright gave her the feeling of breathing free. What happened once they reached Earth, she couldn’t control, but that was always true. That was the game.

Admiral Souther looked tired, but on the small screen it was hard to tell much more than that.

“You’ve kicked the beehive, Chrisjen,” he said. “It’s looking an awful lot like you just made yourself a human shield for a bunch of folks that don’t work for us. And I’m guessing that was the plan.

“I did what you asked, and yes, Nguyen took meetings with Jules-Pierre Mao. First one was just after his testimony on Protogen. And yes, Errinwright knew about them. But that doesn’t mean very much. I’ve met with Mao. He’s a snake, but if you stopped dealing with men like him, you wouldn’t have much left to do.

“The smear campaign against your scientist friend came out of the executive office, which, I’ve got to say, makes a damn lot of us over here in the armed forces a bit twitchy. Starts looking like there’s divisions inside the leadership, and it gets a little murky whose orders we’re supposed to be following. If it gets there, our friend Errinwright still outranks you. Him or the secretary-general comes to me with a direct order, I’m going to have to have a hell of a good reason to think it’s illegal. This whole thing smells like skunk, but I don’t have that reason yet. You know what I’m saying.”

The recording stopped. Avasarala pressed her fingers to her lips. She understood. She didn’t like it, but she understood. She levered herself up from her couch. Her joints still ached from the race to the Rocinante, and the way the ship would sometimes shift beneath her, course corrections moving gravity a degree or two, left her vaguely nauseated. She’d made it this far.

The corridor that led to the galley was short, but it had a bend just before it entered. The voices carried well enough that Avasarala walked softly. The low Martian drawl was the pilot, and Bobbie’s vowels and timbre were unmistakable.

“—that tellin’ the captain where to stand and how to look. I thought Amos was going to toss her in the airlock a couple of times.”

“He could try,” Bobbie said.

“And you work for her?”

“I don’t know who the hell I work for anymore. I think I’m still pulling a salary from Mars, but all my dailies are out of her office budget. I’ve pretty much been playing it all as it comes.”

“Sounds rough.”

“I’m a marine,” Bobbie said, and Avasarala paused. The tone was wrong. It was calm, almost relaxed. Almost at peace. That was interesting.

“Does anyone actually like her?” the pilot asked.

“No,” Bobbie said almost before the question was done being asked. “Oh hell no. And she keeps it like that. That shit she pulled with Holden, marching on his ship and ordering him around like she owned it? She’s always like that. The secretary-general? She calls him a bobble-head to his face.”

“And what’s with the potty mouth?”

“Part of her charm,” Bobbie said.

The pilot chuckled, and there was a little slurp as he drank something.

“I may have misunderstood politics,” he said. And a moment later: “You like her?”

“I do.”

“Mind if I ask why?”

“We care about the same things,” Bobbie said, and the thoughtful note in her voice made Avasarala feel uncomfortable eavesdropping. She cleared her throat and walked into the galley.

“Where’s Holden?” she asked.

“Probably sleeping,” the pilot said. “The way we’ve been keepin’ the ship’s cycle, it’s about two in the morning.”

“Ah,” Avasarala said. For her, it was mid-afternoon. That was going to be a little awkward. Everything in her life seemed to be about lag right now, waiting for the messages to get through the vast blackness of the vacuum. But at least she could prepare.

“I’m going to want a meeting with everyone on board as soon as they’re up,” she said. “Bobbie, you’ll need your formal wear again.”

It took Bobbie only a few seconds to understand.

“You’ll show them the monster,” she said.

“And then we’re going to sit here and talk until we figure out what exactly it is they know on this ship. It has the bad guys worried enough they were willing to send their boys to kill them,” she said.

“Yeah, about that,” the pilot said. “Those destroyers cut back to a cruising acceleration, but they aren’t turning back yet.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Avasarala said. “Everybody knows I’m on this ship. No one’s going to shoot at it.”

In the local morning and Avasarala’s subjective early evening, the crew gathered again. Rather than bring the whole powered suit into the galley, she’d copied the stored video and given it to Naomi. The crew members were bright and well rested apart from the pilot, who had stayed up entirely too late talking to Bobbie, and the botanist, who looked like he might just be permanently exhausted.

“I’m not supposed to show this to anyone,” Avasarala said, looking pointedly at Holden. “But on this ship, right now, I think we all need to put our cards on the table. And I’m willing to go first. This is the attack on Ganymede. The thing that started it all off. Naomi?”

Naomi started the playback, and Bobbie turned away and stared at the bulkhead. Avasarala didn’t watch it either, her attention on the faces of the others. As the blood and carnage played out behind her, she studied them and learned a little more about the people she was dealing with. The engineer, Amos, watched with the calm reserve of a professional killer. No surprise there. At first Holden, Naomi, and Alex were horrified, and she watched as Alex and Naomi slid into a kind of shock. There were tears in the pilot’s eyes. Holden, on the other hand, curled in. His shoulders bent outward from each other, and an expression of banked rage smoldered in his eyes and around the corners of his mouth. That was interesting. Bobbie wept openly with her back to the screen, and her expression was melancholy, like a woman at a funeral. A memorial service. Praxidike—everyone else called him Prax—was the only one who seemed almost happy. When at the segment’s end, the monstrosity detonated, he clapped his hands and squealed in pleasure.

“That was it,” he said. “You were right, Alex. Did you see how it was starting to grow more limbs? Catastrophic restraint failure. It wasa fail-safe.”

“Okay,” Avasarala said. “Why don’t you try that again with an antecedent. What was a fail-safe?”

“The other protomolecule form ejected the explosive device from its body before it could detonate. You see, these c things—protomolecule soldiers or whatever—are breaking their programming, and I think Merrian knows about it. He hasn’t found a way to stop it, because the constraints fail.”

“Who’s Marion, and what does she have to do with anything?” Avasarala said.

“You wanted more nouns, Gramma,” Amos said.

“Let me take this from the top,” Holden said, and recounted the attack by the stowaway beast, the damage to the cargo door, Prax’s scheme to lure it out of the ship and reduce it to its component atoms with the drive’s exhaust.

Avasarala handed over the data she had about the energy spikes on Venus, and Prax grabbed that data, looking it over while talking about his determination of a secret base on Io where the things were being produced. It left Avasarala’s head spinning.

“And they took your kid there,” Avasarala said.

“They took all of them,” Prax said.

“Why would they do that?”

“Because they don’t have immune systems,” Prax said. “And so they’d be easier to reshape with the protomolecule. There would be fewer physiological systems fighting against the new cellular constraints, and the soldiers would probably last a lot longer.”

“Jesus, Doc,” Amos said. “They’re going to turn Mei into one of those fucking things?”

“Probably,” Prax said, frowning. “I only just figured that out.”

“But why do it at all?” Holden said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“In order to sell them to a military force as a first-strike weapon,” Avasarala said. “To consolidate power before c well, before the fucking apocalypse.”

“Point of clarification,” Alex said, raising his hand. “We have an apocalypse comin’? Was that a thing we knew about?”

“Venus,” Avasarala said.

“Oh. That apocalypse,” Alex said, lowering his hand. “Right.”

“Soldiers that can travel without ships,” Naomi said. “You could fire them off at high g for a little while, then cut engines and let them go ballistic. How would you find them?”

“But it won’t work,”Prax said. “Remember? They escape constraint. And since they can share information, they’re going to get harder to hold to any kind of new programming.”

The room went silent. Prax looked confused.

“They can share information?”Avasarala said.

“Sure,” Prax said. “Look at your energy spikes. The first one happened while the thing was fighting Bobbie and the other marines on Ganymede. The second spike came when the other one got loose in the lab. The third spike was when we killed it with the Rocinante. Every time one of them has been attacked, Venus reacted. They’re networked. I’d assume that any critical information could be shared. Like how to escape constraints.”

“If they use them against people,” Holden said, “there won’t be any way to stop them. They’ll ditch the fail-safe bombs and just keep going. The battles won’t end.”

“Um. No,” Prax said. “That’s not the problem. It’s the cascade again. Once the protomolecule gets a little freedom, it has more tools to erode other constraints, which gets it more tools to erode more constraints and on and on like that. The original program or something like it will eventually swamp the new program. They’ll revert.”

Bobbie leaned forward, her head canted a few degrees to the right. Her voice was quiet, but it had a threat of violence that was louder than shouting.

“So if they set those things loose on Mars, they stay soldiers like the first one for a while. And then they start dropping the bombs out like your guy did. And then they turn Mars into Eros?”

“Well, worse than Eros,” Prax said. “Any decent-sized Martian city is going to have an order of magnitude more people than Eros did.”

The room was quiet. On the monitor, Bobbie’s suit camera looked up at star-filled sky while battleships killed each other in orbit.

“I’ve got to send some messages out,” Avasarala said.

  “These half-human things you’ve made? They aren’t your servants. You can’t control them,” Avasarala said. “Jules-Pierre Mao sold you a bill of goods. I know why you kept me out of this, and I think you’re a fucking moron for it, but put it aside. It doesn’t matter now. Just do not pull that fucking trigger. Do you understand what I’m saying? Don’t. You will be personally responsible for the single deadliest screwup in the history of humankind, and I’m on a ship with Jim fucking Holden, so the bar’s not low.”

The full recording clocked in at almost half an hour. The security footage from the Rocinantewith its stowaway was attached. A fifteen-minute lecture by Prax had to be scrapped when he reached the part about his daughter being turned into a protomolecule soldier, and this time broke into uncontrollable weeping. Avasarala did her best to recapitulate it, but she wasn’t at all certain she had the details right. She’d considered bringing Jon-Michael into it, but decided against it. Better to keep it in the family.

She sent the message. If she knew Errinwright, he wouldn’t get back to her immediately. There would be an hour or two of evaluation, weighing what she’d said, and then when she’d been left to stew for a while, he’d reply.

She hoped he’d be sane about it. He had to.

She needed to sleep. She could feel the fatigue gnawing at the edges of her mind, slowing her, but when she lay down, rest felt as far away as home. As Arjun. She thought about recording a message for him, but it would only have left her feeling more powerfully isolated. After an hour, she pulled herself up and walked through the halls. Her body told her it was midnight or later, and the activity on board—music ringing out of the machine shop, a loud conversation between Holden and Alex about the maintenance of the electronics systems, even Praxidike’s sitting in the galley by himself, apparently grooming a box of hydroponics cuttings—had a surreal late-night feeling.

She considered sending another message to Souther. The lag time would be much less to him, and she was hungry enough for a response that anything would do. When the answer came, it wasn’t a message.

“Captain,” Alex said over the ship-wide comm. “You should come up to ops and look at this.”

Something in his voice told Avasarala that this wasn’t a maintenance question. She found the lift to ops just as Holden went up, and pulled herself up the ladder rather than wait. She wasn’t the only one who’d followed the call. Bobbie was in a spare seat, her eyes on the same screen as Holden’s. The blinking tactical data scrolled down the screen, and a dozen bright red dots displayed changes. She didn’t understand most of what she saw, but the gist was obvious. The destroyers were on the move.

“Okay,” Holden said. “What’re we seeing?”

“All the Earth destroyers hit high burn. Six g,” Alex said.

“Are they going to Io?”

“Oh, hell no.”

This was Errinwright’s answer. No messages. No negotiations. Not even an acknowledgment that she’d asked him to restrain himself. Warships. The despair only lasted for a moment. Then came the anger.

“Bobbie?”

“Yeah.”

“That part where you told me I didn’t understand the danger I was in?”

“And you told me that I didn’t how the game was played.”

“That part.”

“I remember. What about it?”

“If you wanted to say ‘I told you so,’ this looks like the right time.”

Chapter Forty-Two: Holden

Holden had spent a month at the Diamond Head Electronic Warfare Lab on Oahu as his first posting after officer candidate school. During that time, he’d learned he had no desire to be a naval intelligence wonk, really disliked poi, and really liked Polynesian women. He’d been far too busy at the time to actively chase one, but he’d thoroughly enjoyed spending his few spare moments down at the beach looking at them. He’d had a thing for curvy women with long black hair ever since.

The Martian Marine was like one of those cute little beach bunnies that someone had used editing software on and blown up to 150 percent normal size. The proportions, the black hair, the dark eyes, everything was the same. Only, giant. It short-circuited his neural wiring. The lizard living at the back of his brain kept jumping back and forth between Mate with it! and Flee from it! What was worse, she knew it. She seemed to have sized him up and decided he was only worth a tired smirk within moments of their meeting.

“Do you need me to go over it again?” she said, the smirk mocking him. They were sitting together in the galley, where she’d been describing for him the Martian intelligence on the best way to engage the Munroe-class light destroyer.

No! he wanted to yell. I heard you. I’m not a freak. I have a lovely girlfriend that I’m totally committed to, so stop treating me like some kind of bumbling teenage boy who’s trying to look down your dress!

But then he’d look up at her again, and his hindbrain would start bouncing back and forth between attraction and fear, and his language centers would start misfiring. Again.

“No,” he said, staring at the neatly organized list of bullet points she’d forwarded to his hand terminal. “I think this information is very c informative.”

He saw the smirk widen out of the corner of his eye and focused more intently on the list.

“Okay,” Bobbie said. “I’m going to go catch some rack time. With your permission, of course. Captain.”

“Permission granted,” Holden said. “Of course. Go. Rack.”

She pushed herself to her feet without touching the arms of the chair. She’d grown up in Martian gravity. She had to mass a hundred kilos at one g, easy. She was showing off. He pretended to ignore it, and she left the galley.

“She’s something, isn’t she?” Avasarala said, coming into the galley and collapsing into the recently vacated chair. Holden looked up at her and saw a different kind of smirk. One that said the old lady saw right through him to the warring lizards at the back of his head. But she wasn’t a giant Polynesian woman, so he could vent his frustration on her.

“Yeah, she’s a peach,” he said. “But we’re still going to die.”

“What?”

“When those destroyers catch us, which they will, we are going to die. The only reason they aren’t raining torpedoes down on us already is because they know our PDC network can take out anything fired at this range.”

Avasarala leaned back in her chair with a heavy sigh, and the smirk shifted into a tired but genuine smile. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you could find an old woman a cup of tea, could you?”

Holden shook his head. “I’m sorry. No tea drinkers on the crew. Lots of coffee, though, if you’d like a cup.”

“I’m actually tired enough to do that. Lots of cream, lots of sugar.”

“How about,” Holden said, pulling her a cup, “lots of sugar, lots of a powder that’s called ‘whitener.’”

“Sounds like piss. I’ll take it.”

Holden sat down and pushed the sweetened and “whitened” cup of coffee across to her. She took it and grimaced through several long swallows.

“Explain,” she said after another drink, “everything you just said.”

“Those destroyers are going to kill us,” Holden repeated. “The sergeant says you refuse to believe that UN ships will fire on you, but I agree with her. That’s naive.”

“Okay, but what’s a ‘PDC network’?”

Holden tried not to frown. He’d expected any number of things from the woman, but ignorance hadn’t been one.

“Point defense cannons. If those destroyers fire torpedoes at us from this distance, the targeting computer for the PDCs won’t have any trouble shooting them down. So they’ll wait until they get close enough that they can overwhelm us. I give it three days before they start.”

“I see,” Avasarala said. “And what’s your plan?”

Holden barked out a laugh with no humor in it. “Plan? My plan is to die in a ball of superheated plasma. There is literally no way that a single fast-attack corvette, which is us, can successfully fight six light destroyers. We aren’t in the same weight class as even one of them, but against one, a lucky shot maybe. Against six? No chance. We die.”

“I’ve read your file,” Avasarala said. “You faced down a UN corvette during the Eros incident.”

“Yeah, one corvette. We were a match for her. And I got her to back down by threatening the unarmed science ship she was escorting. This isn’t even remotely the same thing.”

“So what does the infamous James Holden do at his last stand?”

He was silent for a while.

“He rats,” Holden said. “We know what’s going on. We have all the pieces now. Mao-Kwik, the protomolecule monsters, where they’re taking the kids c everything. We put all the data in a file and broadcast it to the universe. They can still kill us if they want to, but we can make it a pointless act of revenge. Keep it from actually helping them.”

“No,” Avasarala said.

“Uh, no? You might be forgetting whose ship you’re on.”

“I’m sorry, did I seem to give a fuck that this is your ship? If I did, really, I was just being polite,” Avasarala said, giving him a withering glare. “You aren’t going to fuck up the whole solar system just because you’re a one-trick pony. We have bigger fish to fry.”

Holden counted to ten in his head and said, “Your idea is?”

“Send it to these two UN admirals,” she said, then tapped something on her terminal. His buzzed with the received file. “Souther and Leniki. Mostly Souther. I don’t like Leniki, and he hasn’t been in the loop on this, but he’s a decent backup.”

“You want my last act before being killed by a UN admiral to be sending all of the vital information I have to a UN admiral.”

Avasarala leaned back into her chair and rubbed her temples with her fingertips. Holden waited. “I’m tired,” she said after a few moments. “And I miss my husband. It’s like an ache in my arms that I can’t hold him right now. Do you know what that’s like?”

“I know exactly what that ache feels like.”

“So I want you to understand that I’m sitting here, right now, coming to terms with the idea that I won’t see him again. Or my grandchildren. Or my daughter. My doctors said I probably had a good thirty years left in me. Time to watch my grandkids grow up, maybe even see a great-grandchild or two. But instead, I’m going to be killed by a limp-dick, whiny sonofabitch like Admiral Nguyen.”

Holden could feel the massive weight of those six destroyers bearing down on them, murder in their hearts. It felt like having a pistol pushed into his ribs from behind. He wanted to shake the old woman and tell her to hurry up.

She smiled at him.

“My last act in this universe isn’t going to be fucking up everything I did right up to now.”

Holden made a conscious effort to ignore his frustration. He got up and opened the refrigerator. “Hey, there’s leftover pudding. Want some?”

“I’ve read your psych profile. I know all about your ‘everyone should know everything’ naive bullshit. But how much of the last war was yourfault, with your goddamned endless pirate broadcasts? Well?”

“None of it,” Holden said. “Desperate psychotic people do desperate psychotic things when they’re exposed. I refuse to grant them immunity from exposure out of fear of their reaction. When you do, the desperate psychos wind up in charge.”

She laughed. It was a surprisingly warm sound.

“Anyone who understands what’s going on is at least desperate and probably psychotic to boot. Dissociative at the least. Let me explain it this way,” Avasarala said. “You tell everyone, and yeah, you’ll get a reaction. And maybe, weeks, or months, or years from now, it will all get sorted out. But you tell the rightpeople, and we can sort it out right now.”

Amos and Prax walked into the galley together. Amos had his big thermos in his hand and headed straight toward the coffeepot. Prax followed him and picked up a mug. Avasarala’s eyes narrowed and she said, “Maybe even save that little girl.”

“Mei?” Prax said immediately, putting the mug down and turning around.

Oh, that was low, Holden thought. Even for a politician.

“Yes, Mei,” Avasarala replied. “That’s what this is about, right, Jim? Not some personal crusade, but trying to save a little girl from very bad people?”

“Explain how—” Holden started, but Avasarala kept talking right over the top of him.

“The UN isn’t one person. It isn’t even one corporation. It’s a thousand little, petty factions fighting against each other. Their side’s got the floor, but that’s temporary. That’s always temporary. I know people who can move against Nguyen and his group. They can cut off his support, strip him of ships, even recall and court-martial him given enough time. But they can’t do any of that if we’re in a shooting war with Mars. And if you toss everything you know into the wind, Mars won’t have time to wait and figure out the subtleties; they’ll have no choice but to preemptively strike against Nguyen’s fleet, Io, what’s left of Ganymede. Everything.”

“Io?” Prax said. “But Mei—”

“So you want me to give all the info to your little political cabal back on Earth, when the entire reason for this problem is that there are little political cabals back on Earth.”

“Yes,” Avasarala said. “And I’m the only hope she’s got. You have to trust me.”

“I don’t. Not even a little bit. I think you’re part of the problem. I think you see all of this as political maneuvering and power games. I think you want to win. So no, I don’t trust you at all.”

“Hey, uh, Cap?” Amos said, slowly screwing the top onto his thermos. “Ain’t you forgetting something?”

“What, Amos? What am I forgetting?”

“Don’t we vote on shit like this now?”

  “Don’t pout,” Naomi said. She was stretched out on a crash couch next to the main operations panel on the ops deck. Holden was seated across the room from her at the comm panel. He’d just sent out Avasarala’s data file to her two UN admirals. His fingers itched with the desire to dump it into a general broadcast. But they’d debated the issue for the crew, and she’d won the vote. The whole voting thing had seemed like such a good idea when he’d first brought it up. After losing his first vote, not so much. They’d all be dead in two days, so at least it probably wouldn’t happen again.

“If we get killed, and Avasarala’s pet admirals don’t actually do anything with the data we just sent, this was all for nothing.”

“You think they’ll bury it?” Naomi said.

“I don’t know, and that’s the problem. I don’t know what they’ll do. We met this UN politician two days ago and she’s already running the ship.”

“So send it to someone else too,” Naomi said. “Someone who you can trust to keep it quiet, but can get the word out if the UN guys turn out to be working for the wrong team.”

“That’s not a bad idea.”

“Fred, maybe?”

“No.” Holden laughed. “Fred would see it as political capital. He’d use it to bargain with. It needs to be someone that has nothing to gain or lose by using it. I’ll have to think about it.”

Naomi got up, then came over to straddle his legs and sit on his lap facing him. “And we’re all about to die. That’s not making any of this any easier.”

Not all of us.

“Naomi, gather the crew up, the marine and Avasarala too. The galley, I guess. I have some last business to announce. I’ll meet you guys there in ten minutes.”

She kissed him lightly on the nose. “Okay. We’ll be there.”

When she disappeared from sight down the crew ladder, Holden opened up the chief of the watch’s locker. Inside were a set of very out-of-date codebooks, a manual of Martian naval law, and a sidearm and two magazines of ballistic gel rounds. He took out the gun, loaded it, and strapped the belt and holster around his waist.

Next he went back to the comm station and put Avasarala’s data package into a tightbeam transmission that would bounce from Ceres to Mars to Luna to Earth, using public routers all the way. It would be unlikely to send up any red flags. He hit the video record button and said, “Hi, Mom. Take a look at this. Show it to the family. I have no idea how you’ll know when the right time to use it is, but when that time comes, do with it whatever seems best. I trust you guys, and I love you.”

Before he could say anything else or think better of the whole thing, he hit the transmit key and turned the panel off.

He called up the ladder-lift, because riding it would take longer than climbing the ladder and he needed time to think out exactly how to play the next ten minutes. When he reached the crew deck, he still didn’t have it all figured out, but he squared his shoulders and walked into the galley anyway.

Amos, Alex, and Naomi were sitting on one side of the table, facing him. Prax was in his usual perch on the counter. Bobbie and Avasarala sat sideways on the other side of the table so that they could see him. That put the marine less than two meters away, with nothing between her and him. Depending on how this went, that might be a problem.

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