“It’s important that the board be involved in any serious decisions,” Drummer said, meaning Suck it up. Emily Santos-Baca chuckled, and half against her will, Drummer smiled. But only for a few seconds.
She suffered through the small talk and pleasantries that came before and after all meetings like social plaque, then went back to her private office as soon as she could. Vaughn or one of his staff had left a bowl of soy pasta with mushrooms and a glass of wine for her. She started with the wine.
She pulled up the display of the full Sol system. Planets, void cities, stations. The asteroids swirling in the complex orbital dances where gravity and system geography made pools of stability. It looked like images of a snowstorm on Earth. She’d never seen snow to know how accurate that was.
She cut out most of the data, simplifying it enough for a human eye to make sense of. There was People’s Home, in Mars’ orbit, but not near the planet. And there, nearer the ring gate, was Independence. She placed a query, and the Malaclypse appeared—a single bright-yellow dot that seemed like it was almost on top of People’s Home. Like the ship had never left.
It was a failure of scale. That superposition of light in the display was a hundred thousand kilometers by now. More than the circumference of Earth twice over and getting larger every second. It was just that the unbridgeable distance between her and Saba was nothing compared to the vastness around them. Here in the system, and then out in all the other systems beyond the gates.
Even for a woman born to the void, it was overwhelming. And everyone seemed to want her to control it for them. To take responsibility for it all so that they could feel like someone, somewhere was in charge.
She’d never have said it aloud, but there was part of her that missed the way it had been in her youth. The Belt had been the OPA. Earth and Mars had been the enemy. That had seemed overwhelming at the time. It was only everything that had happened since then that made it seem small and manageable by comparison. A nostalgia for the age that had forged her into who she was. That had given her all the skills she’d needed and then changed into a place where half the time she felt like an impostor in her own clothes.
The Rocinante was light-hours away through the gates. Light-centuries by more traditional paths. She pictured Holden as if he were across the table. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and then started the recording.
“Captain Holden. I’ve gotten your status report about the situation on Freehold. Politely put, your proposed solution isn’t going to work …”
Chapter Six: Holden
Politely put,” Drummer said on the screen, “your proposed solution isn’t going to work. What you’re doing would fundamentally change the union. Jailing someone isn’t a thing we do. We’re a transport union, not a police force. We don’t have prisons. We don’t have prisoners. We don’t have judges. We have contracts. When someone breaks the terms of the contract, we object. Then we levy fines and penalties. And then, if they still won’t do what they said, we stop playing with them. What we don’t do is arrest them.”
“She sounds pissed,” Alex said.
Holden paused the message playback. The ops deck was dim, the way Alex liked it. The air recycler clicked and the drive hummed through the bones of the ship, as familiar as silence.
“Yeah,” Holden said. “That doesn’t sound like her happy voice, does it?”
Alex scratched at his beard and gave Holden a sympathetic shrug. “You want to finish that someplace private?”
“I don’t think that’ll make it better.” Holden took the pause back off, and Drummer sprang back into motion.
“The other thing we don’t do is let everyone who captains a ship on our registry make their own policies for the union as a whole. What you did on Freehold doesn’t get to set precedent for what I have to do on every other system that decides to break the rules. I sent you out there with a mission to deliver a message. Not negotiate. Not broker deals. You were there because it was important for everyone else who’s watching—and everyone’s watching—to see what happens when you break the terms of your contract with the Transport Union.”
“So it was theater first, and then an execution,” Holden said to the screen. Not that she could hear him. Still, she paused, looked down, and gathered herself as if she had.
“My problem now,” she said, “is how to fix what you’ve broken with the least amount of damage. I will be consulting with the board and our legal counsel, and when we decide what needs to happen, I’ll tell you. And you’ll do it. I really hope this is clear enough that it doesn’t confuse you.”
“I’m getting the feeling she may not actually like me,” Holden said.
“She’s working herself up a little,” Alex said. “I wouldn’t take it personally.”
“For now,” Drummer said, “I am instructing you to proceed on to Medina with Governor Houston. I will have someone ready to meet your ship when you dock. At that time, I will expect you to read a statement that I will put together for you. It may be an apology. It may be a clarification of the Transport Union rules. Whatever it is, I’ll deliver it to you before you get there. And you’ll recite it word for word.
“You don’t get to make the universe be what you want just by saying it, Holden. There are other people who live here too. Next time, show some respect.”
The message ended. Alex blew out a long, slow breath. “Well, maybe take it a little personally,” he said as Holden closed the message out. The screen returned to its series of rolling system reports. Drive output, environmental stability, waste-heat management. The Rocinante doing what she did best. What she always did. The knot in his stomach sat there, quietly. He couldn’t tell if it was anger or disappointment or something altogether else.
Alex cracked his knuckles. “You’ve got that look,” he said.
“No, I don’t,” Holden said. “I don’t look like anything.”
“She’s got a point. There’s a lot of colonies out there. If we’re going to start hauling in bad guys from all of them … well, there’s a lot of mission creep in that. Telling them they can’t come play if they won’t play nice? It’s rough, but it doesn’t change what the Transport Union is, you know?”
“It’s more convenient,” Holden said more sharply than he’d intended. “It is. No, I see that. I understand that it’s easier to run the union if everything’s in terms of who’s violated the terms of the contract and withholding service and … and give it a few more decades so the colonies are all able to support themselves, maybe cutting off trade will be a slap on the wrist. But the fact of the matter right now? It’s a death sentence.”
“Maybe,” Alex said. “What I heard about Bara Gaon Complex and Auberon, they’re already—”
“This isn’t Bara Gaon Complex or Auberon. This is Freehold. If we cut them off for three years, the colony would collapse, and they’d all starve. So right now, yeah, she’s saying we should kill them. Only she’s phrasing it so it sounds like it’s just the natural consequence of their choices and not also ours.”
“Well, yeah,” Alex said, but Holden wasn’t done. The words kept pushing their way out of him.
“They didn’t vote for Drummer,” he said, tapping hard on the screen. “They can’t appeal her decisions, and she has the power of life and death over them. She needs to be held to a higher standard than ‘whatever’s most convenient.’ And in every military service in history, when the commander gave an immoral command, it was the duty of the soldiers to disobey it.”
“Every military service in history?”
“All the good ones.”
“All right,” Alex said. Then a moment later, “They didn’t elect us either.”
“Exactly! That’s my point.”
“Right,” Alex said.
“So we’re agreeing with each other.”
“Yes. But it still kind of sounds like we’re fighting.”
“It does,” Holden said, and leaned back. His crash couch shifted under him, hissing. The tightness in his gut hadn’t lessened at all. He’d really hoped it would. “Shit.”
“You think she’s going to shut them out again? Put the quarantine back in place?”
“I don’t know,” Holden said. “Except if she was going to do that, she’d probably make us take Houston back to die with his friends. And it doesn’t do great things for your political dog-and-pony show when the captain of one of your pet gunships starts refusing your orders. She’ll have to give us this one.”
“That sounds right,” Alex agreed. “Next one’s going to be interesting, though.”
“Yeah.”
They were quiet for a moment. He knew Alex was going to speak even before the words came. Decades of living and working in the same place meant you never had to ask for someone to pass the salt at galley time. This was just the same.
“If you want, we could yell at each other some more.”