Saba shifted, sipped his tea, and nodded. “Good point, coyo,” he said. “Maybe also, we start looking at evacuation plans. How not to spend a long life in a jail cell or a short one in an airlock.”
“Whatever goals we pick,” Holden said. “I just don’t think we should spend the extra effort to make it something that’s going to last a decade when we’re probably looking at less than eight or ten weeks of freedom.”
The way he said it, it sounded like an apology. Saba rubbed his palm across his chin. The room had gone so quiet, Holden could hear the hush of the man’s stubble against his hand even over the whir of the fan. Eight or ten weeks of freedom. It was the first time anyone in the meetings had guessed at the time frame. Whatever little apocalypse took out the underground, Holden expected it would be less than a springtime back on Earth.
“Is fair point,” Saba said as a noise came from the corridor. Voices. A thin-faced man with a scar over his left eye leaned into the room, looked around, and nodded.
“New reports from upstairs if you want them,” Scar-eye said. “Doesn’t look like much of anything new. Checkpoints still on the move, and they put some stupid coyo in their public prison for being out after curfew, is all.”
“I don’t think—” Saba began.
Bobbie interrupted him. “Maybe you should. We could take a break. Right, Holden?”
“Um,” Holden said. “Sure.”
Saba shrugged with his hands. “Bien á. Maybe bring in some lunch, yeah?”
The meeting shifted. It was all the same people in the same space, but the motion of it changed. Holden leaned in and kissed Naomi gently on the cheek. She leaned her head against his as if it were only affection.
“What the fuck is going on?” Holden whispered. “Did I do something to piss Bobbie off? Because I really try not to do that unintentionally.”
Naomi shook her head so slightly, he only felt it. “You’ll have to ask her what’s up,” Naomi said. “But you’re not wrong. It’s something.”
The conversations in the room rose and shifted, swirling like birds. A word or phrase that passed between Amos and Clarissa got overheard by one of Saba’s people, shifted what he was saying, and soon Saba mentioned it to Alex. Controlling people is usually having stuff they want. Don’t want nothing, and they’re pretty much just down to hitting you until you do what they say became Was easier with the inners because they wanted to get rich and make rich-people toys became What do these Laconia coyos want, anyway? What do they think they do it for, yeah? Everyone in conversation with everyone else, whether they were aware of it or not.
Holden watched it, listening and waiting for Bobbie to come over. If humanity ever developed a hive mind, it wouldn’t be psychic brain links that welded it together. It’d be gossip and cocktail parties.
“Hey, Holden,” Bobbie said, touching his shoulder. “Can I borrow you for a minute?”
“You bet,” he said, hauling himself up from the floor. Bobbie slouched out toward the corridor, and he followed. The air outside the room was cooler and seemed less like it had just come out of someone else’s lungs. The lighting was strung maintenance LEDs, harsh and bright. The walls were painted in a dozen different colors, guides to the pipes and conduits behind them. The map and the territory both.
Bobbie paused at the junction of a service crawl with the main corridor. Voices murmured behind them, too distant to make out, but present. As tight as the spaces were, she could have leaned against both corridors’ walls at the same time, one with each shoulder. She flexed her hands like a fighter about to go into the ring. There had been a time, when they’d first met, that he’d found Bobbie’s physicality intimidating. Over the years, she’d grown in his mind into a place where she was only herself. Every now and again, he’d be reminded that she was a professional warrior and well trained in violence.
Her expression was intense, focused. She could have been thinking her way through a hard problem or restraining herself from a killing rage. The two looked similar with her.
“Hey,” Holden said. “What’s on your mind?”
Her focus shifted to him, and she nodded like he’d said something worth agreeing to. “So are you here to help this or hinder it?”
“Well,” Holden said. “I would have said help until you asked me that, but now it’s feeling like a trick question. Am I missing something?”
Bobbie put out her hand palm first, like she was telling someone to slow down, but it seemed intended as much for herself as for him. “I’m thinking this through while I’m saying it, so just …”
“Got it,” Holden said. “Whatever it is, take a swing at it. We’ll work it out.”
“Other people? People like me? We can show up and maybe not have an effect. That’s not how it is with you. Either you’re helping or you’re holding things back. There’s no middle setting.”
A little discomfort tugged at him, and he crossed his arms. “Is this … Bobbie, is this about you being the captain of the Roci? Because that hasn’t changed. Naomi and I—”
“Yes,” Bobbie said. “It’s exactly like that. Look, you’ve seen all those people who keep interrupting the meetings, right? They’re all just swinging by to be in the room for a minute, even if it’s something they could have done on hand terminals. Or not done at all.”
“I know the ones you mean,” Holden said. “But that’s not me.”
“That’s absolutely you. James Holden, who led the fight against the Free Navy. And stopped Protogen from killing Mars. And captained the first ship through the ring gates. Brought people together on Ilus in the face of fifty different kinds of shit falling apart. You’re in the center of everything just by walking into the room.”
“Not because I like it,” Holden said.
“When you showed up, Amos and I were getting ready to fight our way into all this. But then there you were, and you got recognized, and now we’re all sitting in the absolute center of the conspiracy. Even if I’d pushed my way into this, there would have been days, maybe weeks, of proving to Saba and his people that they could trust me. You got that for free, and the rest of us drafted off you. I came in as the captain of the Rocinante, and it wasn’t enough to be taken as seriously as you got for free.”