Текст книги "Caliban;s war"

Автор книги: James S.A. Corey

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Amos chuckled. He seemed to be in a very good mood. There was a relaxed look about his shoulders, and something in the set of his jaw had changed. Prax remembered the previous night’s conversation with the captain.

“You got laid, didn’t you?”

“Oh hell yes,” Amos said. “But that’s not the best part.”

“It’s not?”

“Oh, it’s a fucking good part, but there’s nothing better in the world than getting a job the day after your ass gets canned.”

A pang of confusion touched Prax. Amos pulled his hand terminal out of his pocket, tapped it twice, and slid it across the table. The screen showed a red security border and the name of the credit union Alex had been working with the night before. When he saw the balance, his eyes went wide.

“Is… is that…?”

“That’s enough to keep the Roci flying for a month, and we got it in seven hours,” Amos said. “You just hired yourself a team, Doc.”

“I don’t know… really?”

“Not just that. Take a look at the messages you’ve got coming in. Captain made a pretty big splash back in the day, but your kiddo? All that shit that came down on Ganymede just got itself a face, and it’s her.”

Prax pulled up his own terminal. The mailbox associated with the presentation had over five hundred video messages and thousands of texts. He began going through them. Men and women he didn’t know-some of them in tears – offered up their prayers and anger and support. A Belter with a wild mane of gray-black hair gibbered in patois so thick Prax could barely make it out. As near as he could tell, the man was offering to kill someone for him.

Half an hour later, Prax’s eggs had congealed. A woman from Ceres told him that she’d lost her daughter in a divorce, and that she was sending him her month’s chewing tobacco money. A group of food engineers on Luna had passed the hat and sent along what would have been a month’s salary if Prax had still been a botanist. An old Martian man with skin the color of chocolate and powdered-sugar hair gazed seriously into a camera halfway across the solar system and said he was with Prax.

When the next message began, it looked just like the others before it. The man in the image was older-eighty, maybe ninety-with a fringe of white hair clinging to the back of his skull and a craggy face. There was something about his expression that caught Prax’s attention. A hesitance.

“Dr. Meng,” the man said. He had a slushy accent that reminded Prax of recordings of his own grandfather. “I’m very sorry to hear of all you and your family have suffered. Are suffering.” The man licked his lips. “The security video on your presentation. I believe I know the man in it. But his name isn’t Strickland…”

Chapter Thirty-Four: Holden

According to the station directory, the Blauwe Blome was famous for two things: a drink called the Blue Meanie and its large number of Golgo tables. The guidebook warned potential patrons that the station allowed the bar to serve only two Blue Meanies to each customer due to the drink’s fairly suicidal mixture of ethanol, caffeine, and methylphenidate. And, Holden guessed, some kind of blue food coloring.

As he walked through the corridors of Tycho’s leisure section, the guidebook began explaining the rules of Golgo to him. After a few moments of utter confusion– goals are said to be “borrowed” when the defense deflects the drive-he shut it off. There was very little chance he was going to be playing games. And a drink that removed your inhibitions and left you wired and full of energy would be redundant right now.

The truth was Holden had never felt better in his life.

He’d messed a lot of things up over the last year. He’d driven his crew away from him. He’d aligned himself with a side he wasn’t sure he agreed with in exchange for safety. He might have ruined the one healthy relationship he’d had in his life. He’d been driven by his fear to become someone else. Someone who handled fear by turning it into violence. Someone who Naomi didn’t love, who his crew didn’t respect, who he himself didn’t like much.

The fear wasn’t gone. It was still there, making his scalp crawl every time he thought about Ganymede, and about what might be loose and growing there right now. But for the first time in a long time, he was aware of it and wasn’t hiding from it. He had given himself permission to be afraid. It made all the difference.

Holden heard the Blauwe Blome several seconds before he saw it. It began as a barely audible rhythmic thumping, which gradually increased in volume and picked up an electronic wail and a woman’s voice singing in mixed Hindi and Russian. By the time he reached the club’s front door, the song had changed to two men in an alternating chant that sounded like an argument set to music. The electronic wail was replaced by angry guitars. The bass line changed not at all.

Inside, the club was an all-out assault on the senses. A massive dance floor dominated the center space, and the dozens of bodies writhing on it were bathed in a constantly changing light show that shifted and flashed in time to the music. The music had been loud out in the corridor, but inside, it became deafening. A long chrome bar was set against one wall, and half a dozen bartenders were frantically filling drink orders.

A sign on the back wall read GOLGO and had an arrow pointing down a long hallway. Holden followed it, the music fading with each step so that by the time he reached the back room with the game tables, it was back to being muted bass lines.

Naomi was at one of the tables with her friend Sam the engineer and a cluster of other Belters. Her hair was pulled back with a red elastic band wide enough to be decorative. She’d switched out her jumpsuit for a pair of gray tailored slacks he hadn’t known she owned and a yellow blouse that made her caramel-colored skin seem darker. Holden had to stop for a moment. She smiled at someone who wasn’t him, and his chest went tight.

As he approached, Sam threw a small metal ball at the table. The group at the other end reacted with sudden violent movements. He couldn’t see exactly what was happening from where he stood, but the slumped shoulders and halfhearted curses coming from the second group led Holden to believe that Sam had done something good for her team.

Sam spun around and threw up her hand. The group at her end of the table, which included Naomi, took turns slapping her palm. Sam saw him first and said something he couldn’t hear. Naomi turned around and gave him a speculative look that stopped him in his tracks. She didn’t smile and she didn’t frown. He raised his palms in what he hoped was an I didn’t come to fight gesture. For a moment, they stood facing each other across the noisy room.

Jesus, he thought, how did I let it come to this?

Naomi nodded at him and pointed at a table in one corner of the room. He sat down and ordered himself a drink. Not one of the blue liver-killers the bar was famous for, just a cheap Belt-produced scotch. He’d grown to, if not appreciate, at least tolerate the faint mold aftertaste it always had. Naomi said goodbye to the rest of her team for a few minutes and then walked over. It wasn’t a casual stroll, but it wasn’t the gait of someone going to a dreaded meeting either.

“Can I order you something?” Holden asked as she sat.

“Sure, I’ll take a grapefruit martini,” she said. While Holden entered the order on the table, she looked him over with a mysterious half smile that turned his belly to liquid.

“Okay,” he said, authorizing his terminal to open a bar tab and pay for the drinks. “One hideous martini on its way.”

Naomi laughed. “Hideous?”

“A near-fatal case of scurvy being the only reason I can imagine drinking something with grapefruit juice in it.”

She laughed again, untying at least one of the knots in Holden’s gut, and they sat together in companionable silence until the drinks arrived. She took a small sip and smacked her lips in appreciation, then said, “Okay. Spill.”

Holden took a much longer drink, nearly finishing off the small glass of scotch in a single gulp, trying to convince himself that the spreading warmth in his belly could stand in for courage. I didn’t feel comfortable with where we left things, and I thought that we should talk. Kind of process this together. He cleared his throat.

“I fucked everything up,” he said. “I’ve treated my friends badly. Worse than badly. You were absolutely right to do what you did. I couldn’t hear what you were saying at the time, but you were right to say it.”

Naomi took another drink of her martini, then casually reached up and pulled out the elastic band holding her masses of black curls behind her head. Her hair fell down around her face in a tangle, making Holden think of ivy-covered stone walls. He realized that for as long as he’d known her, Naomi had always let her hair down in emotional situations. She hid behind it, not literally, but because it was her best feature. The eye was just naturally drawn to its glossy black curls. A distraction technique. It made her suddenly seem very human, as vulnerable and lost as he was. Holden felt a rush of affection for her that must have showed on his face, because she looked at him and then blushed.

“What is this, Jim?”

“An apology?” he said. “An admission that you were right, and that I was turning into my own screwed-up version of Miller? Those at the very least. Hopefully opening the dialogue to reconciliation, if I’m lucky.”

“I’m glad,” Naomi said. “I’m glad you’re figuring that out. But I’ve been saying this for months now, and you-”

“Wait,” Holden said. He could feel her pulling back from him, not letting herself believe. All he had left to offer her was absolute truth, so he did. “I couldn’t hear you. Because I’ve been terrified, and I’ve been a coward.”

“Fear doesn’t make you a coward.”

“No,” he said. “Of course it doesn’t. But refusing to face up to it. To not admit to you how I felt. To not let you and Alex and Amos help me. That was cowardice. And it may have cost me you, the crew’s loyalty, everything I really care about. It made me keep a bad job a lot longer than I should have because the job was safe.”

A small knot of the Golgo players began drifting toward their table, and Holden was gratified when he saw Naomi wave them off. It meant she wanted to keep talking. That was a start.

“Tell me,” she said. “Where are you going from here?”

“I have no idea,” Holden replied with a grin. “And that’s the best feeling I’ve had in ages. But no matter what happens next, I need you there.”

When she started to protest, Holden quickly put up a hand to stop her and said, “No, I don’t mean like that. I’d love to win you back, but I’m perfectly okay with the idea that it might take some time, or never happen at all. I mean the Roci needs you back. The crew needs you there.”

“I don’t want to leave her,” Naomi said with a shy smile.

“She’s your home,” Holden said. “Always will be as long as you want it. And that’s true no matter what happens between us.”

Naomi began wrapping one thick strand of hair around her finger and drank off the last of her drink. Holden pointed at the table menu, but she shook her hand at him.

“This is because you confronted Fred, right?”

“Yeah, partly,” Holden said. “I was standing in his office feeling terrified and realizing I’d been afraid for a long, long time. I’ve screwed things up with him too. Some of that’s probably his fault. He’s a true believer, and those are bad people to climb into bed with. But it’s mostly still mine.”

“Did you quit?”

“He fired me, but I was probably going to quit.”

“So,” Naomi said. “You’ve lost us our paying gig and our patron. I guess I feel a little flattered that the part you’re trying to patch up is me.”

“You,” Holden said, “are the only part I really care about fixing.”

“You know what happens now, right?”

“You move back onto the ship?”

Naomi just smiled the comment away. “Now we pay for our own repairs. If we fire a torpedo, we have to find someone to sell us a new one. We pay for water, air, docking fees, food, and medical supplies for our very expensive automated sick bay. Have a plan for that?”

“Nope!” Holden said. “But I have to say, for some reason, it feels great.”

“And when the euphoria passes?”

“I’ll make a plan.”

Her smile grew reflective and she tugged on her lock of hair.

“I’m not ready to move back to the ship right now,” Naomi said, reaching across the table to take his hand in hers. “But by the time the Roci is patched up, I’ll need my cabin back.”

“I’ll move the rest of my stuff out immediately.”

“Jim,” she said, squeezing his fingers once before letting go. “I love you, and we’re not okay yet. But this is a good start.”

And yes, Holden thought, it really was.

Holden woke up in his old cabin on the Rocinante feeling better than he had in months. He climbed out of his bunk and wandered naked through the empty ship to the head. He took an hour-long shower in water he actually had to pay for now, heated by electricity the dock would be charging him for by the kilowatt-hour. He walked back to his bunk, drying skin made pink by the almost scalding water as he went.

He made and ate a large breakfast and drank five cups of coffee while catching up on the technical reports on the Roci’s repairs until he was sure he understood everything about what had been done. Holden had switched to reading a column about the state of Mars-Earth relations by a political humorist when his terminal buzzed at him, and a call came through from Amos.

“Hey, Cap,” he said, his big face filling the small screen. “You coming over to the station today? Or should we come meet you on the Roci?”

“Let’s meet here,” Holden replied. “Sam and her team will be working today and I want to keep an eye on things.”

“See you in a few, then,” Amos said, and killed the connection.

Holden tried to finish the humor column but kept getting distracted and having to read the same passage over again. He finally gave up and cleaned the galley for a while, then set the coffee-maker to brew a fresh pot for Amos and the work crew when they arrived.

The machine was gurgling happily to itself like a content infant when the deck hatch clanged open and Amos and Prax climbed down the crew ladder and into the galley.

“Cap,” Amos said, dropping into a chair with a thump. Prax followed him into the room but didn’t sit. Holden grabbed mugs and pulled two more cups of coffee, then set them on the table.

“What’s the news?” he said.

Amos answered with a shit-eating grin and spun his terminal across the table to Holden. When Holden looked at it, it was displaying the account information for Prax’s “save Mei” fund. It had just over half a million UN dollars in it.

Holden whistled and slumped into a chair. “Jesus grinned, Amos. I’d hoped we might… but never this.”

“Yeah, it was a little under 300k this morning. It’s gone up another 200k just over the last three hours. Seems like everyone following the Ganymede shit on the news has made little Mei the poster child for the tragedy.”

“Is this enough?” Prax cut in, anxiety in his voice.

“Oh, hell yes,” Holden said with a laugh. “Way more than enough. This will fund our rescue mission just fine.”

“Also, we got a clue,” Amos said, pausing dramatically to sip his coffee.

“About Mei?”

“Yep,” Amos said, adding a little more sugar to his cup. “Prax, send him that message you got.”

Holden watched the message three times, grinning wider with each viewing. “The security video on your presentation. I believe I know the man in it,” the elderly gentleman on the screen was saying. “But his name isn’t Strickland. When I worked with him at Ceres Mining and Tech University, his name was Merrian. Carlos Merrian.”

“That,” Holden said after his final viewing, “is what my old buddy Detective Miller might have called a lead.”

“What now, chief?” Amos asked.

“I think I need to make a phone call.”

“Okay. The doc and I will get out of your hair and watch his money roll in.”

They left together, Holden waiting until the deck hatch slammed behind them to send a connection request to the switchboard at Ceres M amp;T. The lag was running about fifteen minutes with Tycho’s current location, so he settled back and played a simple puzzle game on his terminal that left his mind free to think and plan. If they knew who Strickland had been before he was Strickland, they might be able to trace his career history. And somewhere along the way, he’d stopped being a guy named Carlos who worked at a tech school, and became a guy named Strickland who stole little kids. Knowing why would be a good start to learning where he might be now.

Almost forty minutes after sending out the request, he received a reply. He was a little surprised to see the elderly man from the video message. He hadn’t expected to connect on his first try.

“Hello,” the man said. “I’m Dr. Moynahan. I’ve been expecting your message. I assume you want to know the details about Dr. Merrian. To make a long story short, he and I worked together at the CMTU biosciences lab. He was working on biological development constraint systems. He was never good at playing the university game. Didn’t make many allies while he was here. So when he crossed some ethical gray areas, they were only too happy to run him out of town. I don’t know the details on that. I wasn’t his department head. Let me know if you need anything else.”

Holden watched the message twice, taking notes and cursing the fifteen-minute lag. When he was ready, he sent a reply back.

“Thank you so much for the help, Dr. Moynahan. We really appreciate it. I don’t suppose you know what happened after he was kicked out of the university, do you? Did he go to another institution? Take a corporate job? Anything?”

He hit send and sat back to wait again. He tried the puzzle game but got annoyed and turned it off. Instead, he pulled up the Tycho public entertainment feed and watched a children’s cartoon that was frantic and loud enough to distract him.

When his terminal buzzed with the incoming message, he almost knocked it off the table in his haste to start the video.

“Actually,” Dr. Moynahan said, scratching at the gray stubble on his chin while he spoke, “he never even made it in front of the ethics review. Quit the day before. Made a lot of fuss, walking through the lab and yelling that we weren’t going to be able to push him around anymore. That he had a bigwig corporate job with all the funding and resources he wanted. Called us small-minded pencil pushers stagnating in a quagmire of petty ethical constraints. Can’t remember the name of the company he was going to work for, though.”

Holden hit pause and felt a chill go down his spine. Stagnating in a quagmire of petty ethical constraints. He didn’t need Moynahan to tell him which company would snatch a man like that up. He’d heard almost those exact words spoken by Antony Dresden, the architect of the Eros project that had killed a million and a half people as part of a grand biology experiment.

Carlos Merrian had gone to work for Protogen and disappeared. He’d come back as Strickland, abductor of small children.

And, Holden thought, the murderer too.

Chapter Thirty-Five: Avasarala

On the screen, the young man laughed as he had laughed twenty-five seconds earlier on Earth. It was the level of lag Avasarala hated the most. Too much for the conversation to feel anything like normal, but not quite enough to make it impossible. Everything she did took too long, every reading of reaction and nuance crippled by the effort to guess what exactly in her words and expression ten seconds before had elicited it.

“Only you,” he said, “could take another Earth-Mars war, turn it into a private cruise, and then seem pissed off about it. Anyone in my office would give their left testicle to go with you.”

“Next time I’ll take up a collection, but-”

“As far as an accurate military inventory,” he said twenty-five seconds ago, “there are reports in place, but they’re not as good as I’d like. Because it’s you, I’ve got a couple of my interns building search parameters. My impression is that the research budget is about a tenth of the money going to actual research. With your clearances, I have rights to look at it, but these Navy guys are pretty good at obscuring things. I think you’ll find…” His expression clouded. “A collection?”

“Forget it. You were saying?”

She waited fifty seconds, resenting each individually.

“I don’t know that we’ll be able to get a definitive answer,” the young man said. “We might get lucky, but if it’s something they want to hide, they can probably hide it.”

Especially since they’ll know you’re looking for it, and what I asked you to look for, Avasarala thought. Even if the income stream between Mao-Kwikowski, Nguyen, and Errinwright was in all the budgets right now, by the time Avasarala’s allies looked, it would be hidden. All she could do was keep pushing on as many fronts as she could devise and hope that they fucked up. Three more days of information requests and queries, and she could ask for traffic analysis. She couldn’t know exactly what information they were hiding, but if she could find out what kinds and categories of data they were keeping away from her, that would tell her something.

Something, but not much.

“Do what you can,” she said. “I’ll luxuriate out here in the middle of nowhere. Get back to me.”

She didn’t wait fifty seconds for a round of etiquette and farewell. Life was too short for that shit.

Her private quarters on the Guanshiyin were gorgeous. The bed and couch matched the deep carpet in tones of gold and green that should have clashed but didn’t. The light was the best approximation of mid-morning sunlight that she’d ever seen, and the air recyclers were scented to give everything just a note of turned earth and fresh-cut grass. Only the low thrust gravity spoiled the illusion of being in a private country club somewhere in the green belt of south Asia. The low gravity and the goddamned lag.

She hated low gravity. Even if the acceleration was perfectly smooth and the yacht never had to shift or move to avoid debris, her guts were used to a full g pulling things down. She hadn’t digested anything well since she’d come on board, and she always felt short of breath.

Her system chimed. A new report from Venus. She popped it open. The preliminary analysis of the wreckage from the Arboghast was under way. There was some ionizing in the metal that was apparently consistent with someone’s theory of how the protomolecule functioned. It was the first time a prediction had been confirmed, the first tiny toehold toward a genuine understanding of what was happening on Venus. There was an exact timing of the three energy spikes. There was a spectral analysis of the upper atmosphere of Venus that showed more elemental nitrogen than expected. Avasarala felt her eyes glazing over. The truth was she didn’t care.

She should. It was important. Possibly more important than anything else that was happening. But just like Errinwright and Nguyen and all the others, she was caught up in this smaller, human struggle of war and influence and the tribal division between Earth and Mars. The outer planets too, if you took them seriously.

Hell, at this point she was more worried about Bobbie and Cotyar than she was about Venus. Cotyar was a good man, and his disapproval left her feeling defensive and pissed off. And Bobbie looked like she was about to crack. And why not? The woman had watched her friends die around her, had been stripped of her context, and was now working for her traditional enemy. The marine was tough, in more ways than one, and having someone on the team with no allegiance or ties to anyone on Earth was a real benefit. Especially after fucking Soren.

She leaned back in her chair, unnerved by how different it felt when she weighed so little. Soren still smarted. Not the betrayal itself; betrayal was an occupational hazard. If she started getting her feelings hurt by that, she really should retire. No, it was that she hadn’t seen it. She’d let herself have a blind spot, and Errinwright had known how to use it. How to disenfranchise her. She hated being outplayed. And more than that, she hated that her failure was going to mean more war, more violence, more children dying.

That was the price for screwing up. More dead children.

So she wouldn’t screw up anymore.

She could practically see Arjun, the gentle sorrow in his eyes. It isn’t all your responsibility, he would say.

“It’s everyone’s fucking responsibility,” she said out loud. “But I’m the one who’s taking it seriously.”

She smiled. Let Mao’s monitors and spies make sense of that. She let herself imagine them searching her room for some other transmission device, trying to find who she’d been speaking to. Or they’d just think the old lady was losing her beans.

Let ’em wonder.

She closed out the Venus report. Another message had arrived while she was in her reverie, flagged as an issue she’d requested follow-up on. When she read the intelligence summary, her eyebrows rose.

“I’m James Holden, and I’m here to ask for your help.”

Avasarala watched Bobbie watching the screen. She looked exhausted and restless both. Her eyes weren’t bloodshot so much as dry-looking. Like bearings without enough grease. If she’d needed an example to demonstrate the difference between sleepy and tired, it would have been the marine.

“So he got out, then,” Bobbie said.

“Him and his pet botanist and the whole damned crew,” Avasarala said. “So now we have one story about what they were doing on Ganymede that got your boys and ours so excited they started shooting each other.”

Bobbie looked up at her.

“Do you think it’s true?”

“What is truth?” Avasarala said. “I think Holden has a long history of blabbing whatever he knows or thinks he knows all over creation. True or not, he believes it.”

“And the part about the protomolecule? I mean, he just told everyone that the protomolecule is loose on Ganymede.”

“He did.”

“People have got to be reacting to that, right?”

Avasarala flipped to the intelligence summary, then to feeds of the riots on Ganymede. Thin, frightened people, exhausted by tragedy and war and fueled by panic. She could tell that the security forces arrayed against them were trying to be gentle. These weren’t thugs enjoying the use of force. These were orderlies trying to keep the frail and dying from hurting themselves and each other, walking the line between necessary violence and ineffectiveness.

“Fifty dead so far,” Avasarala said. “That’s the estimate, anyway. That place is so ass-fucked right now, they might have been going to die of sickness and malnutrition anyway. But they died of this instead.”

“I went to that restaurant,” Bobbie said.

Avasarala frowned, trying to make it into a metaphor for something. Bobbie pointed at the screen.

“The one they’re dying in front of? I ate there just after I arrived at the deployment. They had good sausage.”

“Sorry,” Avasarala said, but the marine only shook her head.

“So that cat’s out of the bag,” she said.

“Maybe,” Avasarala said. “Maybe not.”

“James Holden just told the whole system that the protomolecule’s on Ganymede. In what universe is that maybe not?”

Avasarala pulled up a mainstream newsfeed, checked the flags, and pulled the one with the listed experts she wanted. The data buffered for a few seconds while she lifted her finger for patience.

“-totally irresponsible,” a grave-cheeked man in a lab coat and kufi cap said. The contempt in his voice could have peeled paint.

The interviewer appeared beside him. She was maybe twenty years old, with hair cut short and straight and a dark suit that said she was a serious journalist.

“So you’re saying the protomolecule isn’t involved?”

“It isn’t. The images James Holden and his little group are sending have nothing to do with the protomolecule. That webbing is what happens when you have a binding agent leak. It happens all the time.”

“So there isn’t any reason to panic.”

“Alice,” the expert said, turning his condescension to the interviewer. “Within a few days of exposure, Eros was a living horror show. In the time since hostilities opened, Ganymede hasn’t shown one sign of a live infection. Not one.”

“But he has a scientist with him. The botanist Dr. Praxidike Meng, whose daughter-”

“I don’t know this Meng fellow, but playing with a few soybeans makes him as much an expert on the protomolecule as it makes him a brain surgeon. I’m very sorry, of course, about his missing daughter, but no. If the protomolecule were on Ganymede, we’d have known long ago. This panic is over literally nothing.”

“He can go on like that for hours,” Avasarala said, shutting down the screen. “And we have dozens like him. Mars is going to be doing the same thing. Saturating the newsfeeds with the counter-story.”

“Impressive,” Bobbie said, pushing herself back from the desk.

“It keeps people calm. That’s the important thing. Holden thinks he’s a hero, power to the people, information wants to be free blah blah blah, but he’s a fucking moron.”

“He’s on his own ship.”

Avasarala crossed her arms. “What’s your point?”

“He’s on his own ship and we’re not.”

“So we’re all fucking morons,” Avasarala said. “Fine.”

Bobbie stood up and started pacing the room. She turned well before she reached the wall. The woman was used to pacing in smaller quarters.

“What do you want me to do about it?” Bobbie asked.

“Nothing,” Avasarala said. “What the hell could you do about it? You’re stuck out here with me. I can hardly do anything, and I’ve got friends in high places. You’ve got nothing. I only wanted to talk to someone I didn’t have to wait two minutes to let interrupt me.”

She’d taken it too far. Bobbie’s expression eased, went calm and closed and distant. She was shutting down. Avasarala lowered herself to the edge of the bed.

“That wasn’t fair,” Avasarala said.

“If you say so.”

“I fucking say so.”

The marine tilted her head. “Was that an apology?”

“As close to one as I’m giving right now.”

Something shifted in Avasarala’s mind. Not about Venus, or James Holden and his poor lost girl appeal, or even Errinwright. It had to do with Bobbie and her pacing and her sleeplessness. Then she got it and laughed once mirthlessly. Bobbie crossed her arms, her steady silence a question.