“Well, Secretary-General Gao’s with her gods now, and I hope she died screaming”—Rosenfeld mimed spitting to the side after he said it—“but this Avasarala who’s taken her place—”
“A bureaucrat,” Marco said as they hauled themselves around the corner and into the mess. The tables and benches bolted to the floor, the smell of Martian military food, the colors that had until recently been the banner of the enemy. They all stood in contrast to the men and women in the space. Belters all, and still Filip could pick out the Free Navy he served with from Rosenfeld’s guard. Self from not-self. They could pretend the division wasn’t there, but they all knew better. A dozen people, all told, like it was the change of shift. One of the Pella’s crew for each of Rosenfeld’s, so Karal wasn’t the only one to think a little vigilance between friends was a good thing.
One of the guards tossed Rosenfeld a bulb. Coffee, tea, whiskey, or water, there was no way to know. Rosenfeld caught it without missing a beat in the conversation. “Seems like a bureaucrat with a hate on. You think you can handle her? Nothing personal, coyo, but you’ve got a blind spot underestimating women.”
Marco went still. Even as Filip saw it, his mouth flooded with a coppery taste. Karal grunted softly, and when Filip looked to him, his jaw had slid forward and his hands were fists at his sides.
Rosenfeld took a place against a wall, his expression a mask of empathy and apology. “But maybe this isn’t the place to say it. Sorry for the sore spot.”
“Nothing hurt,” Marco said. “We’ll chew it all through on Ceres.”
“Gathering of the tribes,” Rosenfeld said. “Looking forward to it. Next phase should be interesting.”
“Will be,” Marco said. “Karal can put you and yours in the right cabins. Should plan to keep there. It’s going to be a hard burn.”
“Will do, Admiral.”
Marco pulled himself out of the room, floating down toward the machine shop and engineering without so much as meeting Filip’s eye.
Filip waited for a moment, uncertain whether to follow or stay here, whether he’d been dismissed from duty or was still at his post. Rosenfeld smiled and winked a bumpy eyelid at him before turning to his men. Something had happened there; he could feel it in the air and in the way Karal held himself. Something important. And from the way his father acted, he had to think it was something to do with him.
He put his hand on Karal’s wrist. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” Karal said, lying badly. “Nothing to worry over.”
“Karal?”
The older man pressed his lips together, stretched his neck. He didn’t look at Filip.
“Karal. Something I should ask them?”
Slowly, Karal shook his head. He shouldn’t ask. Karal licked his lips nervously, shook his head again, sighed, and spoke low and calm. “Was a report back a while. Observation data from the … ah … from the Chetzemoka. About how the ships with Johnson and Smith didn’t die?”
“And?”
“And,” Karal said, the word as dense as lead.
Then he went on, which was how Filip Inaros, in front of Rosenfeld and his half dozen smirking guards, learned that his mother was still alive. And that everyone on the Pella knew it but him.
Under burn, he dreamed.
He was standing at the same door as before. Even though it would change what it looked like, it was always the same door. He was screaming, beating his hands against it, trying to get in. Before, there had been the sense of fear, the oceanic sorrow of impending loss, the dread. Now there was only humiliation. Rage lit him like a fire, and he pushed to get through the door, into whatever chamber lay beyond it, not to save something precious but to end it.
And shouting, he woke. The weight of a full g pressed him into the gel. The Pella murmured around him, the vibration of the drive and the hushing of the air recyclers like a voice whispering something just too softly to make out. It was an effort to wipe away the tears. They weren’t tears of sorrow. For that he’d have to be sad. He was only certain.
There was someone he hated more than James Holden.
Chapter Three: Holden
There was something to be said for living a life that didn’t involve lengthy interrogations. By that standard, at least, Holden had not lived his well. When he and the rest of the Rocinante’s crew had agreed to be debriefed, he’d guessed that it would be more than just the events surrounding the attack on Earth by the Free Navy. There was more than enough to talk about, after all. The chief engineer on Tycho Station who’d been exposed as a mole for Marco Inaros, the abduction and rescue of Monica Stuart, the loss of the protomolecule sample, the attack that had nearly killed Fred Johnson. And that was just for him. Naomi and Alex and even Amos would have whole volumes of their own to contribute.
He hadn’t expected that the questioning would spread out from there like a gas to fill all available space. For weeks now, his days had been filled with twelve to sixteen hours of talking through anything and everything in his life. The names and histories of all eight of his parents. His school records. His abortive naval career. What he knew about Naomi, about Alex, about Fred Johnson. His relationship with the OPA, with Dmitri Havelock, with Detective Miller. Even after hours of review, he wasn’t sure about that last one. Sitting in the small room across from the UN interrogators, Holden had done his best to take apart his life until that point and lay it open before them.
The process chafed him. The questions cycled back and jumped around, as if they were trying to catch him out in a lie. They went into strange little cul-de-sacs—What were the names of the people he’d served with in the Navy? What did he know about each of them?—and stayed there far longer than seemed justified. His two primary questioners were a tall, light-skinned woman with a long, serious face named Markov and a short, pudgy man called Glenndining with hair and skin the same color of brown. They took turns pushing him and building rapport, subtly cutting him down to see if he’d get angry and what he’d say when he did, and then being almost uncomfortably affectionate with him.
They brought him limp, greasy sandwiches to eat or fresh pastries with some of the best coffee he’d ever had. They turned the lights down almost to darkness or brightened them until they were nearly blinding. They strolled in the hopping lunar shuffle down through the hallways from the docks or they stayed in a cramped steel box of a room. Holden felt as though his personal history was being scraped down to dry pulp like a lime at a really cheap bar. If there was a drop more of juice in him, they’d press it out somehow. It was easy to forget that these were his allies, that he’d agreed to this. More than once, he’d been curled up in his bunk after a long day, hovering on the edge of sleep, and found his mind half-dreaming plans to break the ship out of prison and escape.
It didn’t help that, in the dark sky above them, Earth was dying by centimeters. The newsfeeds that remained had mostly relocated to the Lagrange stations and Luna, but a few were still functioning down on the planetary surface. Between the interrogation sessions and sleep, Holden didn’t have much time to watch them, but the snippets he heard were enough. Overstrained infrastructure, ecosystem trauma, chemical changes in the ocean and atmosphere. There had been thirty billion people on the overcrowded Earth, dependent on a vast network of machinery to keep them fed and hydrated and not drowning in their own waste. A third of those, by the more pessimistic estimates, had already died. Holden had seen a few seconds of a report discussing how the death count in Western Europe was being done by assaying atmospheric changes. How much methane and cadaverine were in the air let them guess how many people were rotting in the ruined streets and cities. That was the scale of the disaster.