We are so close, Holden thought, to all of this going completely off the rails. But he couldn’t back down. Not with a couple hundred people living or dying on the outcome of the confrontation. Wei cleared her throat. Amos grinned back at her. Murtry cocked his head to one side, his frown deepening.
Here we go, Holden thought, and suppressed the urge to swallow a mouth suddenly full of saliva.
“Of course,” Murtry said. “We’d be happy to assist.”
“Uh,” Holden replied
“You’re right. We can’t leave them here,” Murtry continued. “And there isn’t room for them anywhere else. I’ll let the Israel know they’re taking on passengers as soon as we get comms up.”
“That would be great,” Holden said. “Thank you.”
“Doctor Okoye,” Murtry said. Holden turned to find the diminutive scientist had come in, her usual tentative smile on her face.
“Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “But we’ve gotten the radio back up. We’re on with the Israel right now. You said to tell you as soon as we got through.”
“Thank you,” Murtry said and started to follow her out of the room. He paused, as though something had suddenly occurred to him, and turned to Holden. “You know, we’re only in this situation because these people came down and built a shantytown. We’d brought much better structures with us on the heavy shuttle. Much of this could have been avoided.”
Holden started to reply, but Elvi said, “Oh, no. I’m unhappy about the loss of the dome and the permanent structures too. But we clocked gusts of three hundred and seventy kilometers an hour out there. Nothing we set up would have withstood that.”
“Thank you, Doctor Okoye,” Murtry said with a tight smile, “for correcting me. Let’s go call the ship, shall we?”
Elvi blinked in puzzlement as Murtry left. “Is he mad at me?”
“Sweetie,” Amos said, clapping her on the back, “that just means you’re not an asshole.”
Chapter Thirty-Two: Havelock
After they’d lost radio contact with Murtry, Havelock had tried to sleep. He should have slept. There was nothing he could do. Not yet, anyway. Not until it was over. He floated in his couch, the straps keeping him centered over the gel, and willed his consciousness to fade. His mind wouldn’t rest. Were they still alive down there? What if the explosion was just the first of several? What if the planet detonated and took out the Israel? Should he have Marwick pull the ship into a higher orbit? Or even away from the planet entirely? And if the Barbapiccola tried to do the same… then what? He wasn’t supposed to let them break orbit with a full load of RCE’s lithium ore.
He closed his eyes again, but they opened as soon as he stopped consciously willing them shut. After three hours, he gave up, took off his straps, and went to the gym instead. His float-atrophied muscled complained with every set, and he put the feed of the planet below on the screen. The contours of New Terra were gone. The whole planet had become a flat and uniform gray, clouds obscuring whatever violence was happening beneath them. After the exercise round, he bathed, changed into a fresh uniform, and went to his office. His incoming message queue was filled with requests for comments from every news organization there was, and several he doubted were real. He forwarded them all to the RCE corporate headquarters on Luna. Let them answer if they wanted to. At this point, they knew as much as he did.
He checked on comms from the planet, but the signal wasn’t getting through. So he checked again. And again. The gray planet was silent.
“Any word?” the prisoner asked.
“Nothing,” Havelock replied. And then, a moment later, “I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” she said. “They’ll be all right.”
“I hope so.”
“Are you all right?”
Havelock looked over at her. For a detained saboteur who’d been in the box for days now, she looked calm. Almost amused. He found himself smiling back at her.
“Might be a little stressed,” he said.
“Yeah. Sorry about that.”
“Not your fault,” Havelock said. “You aren’t the one calling the shots around here.”
“There’s someone calling the shots around here?” Naomi asked, and a man cleared his throat behind him. Havelock shifted his couch, the bearing hissing, to look back at the hatch. The chief engineer floated there. He wore the militia armband over his uniform sleeve.
“Hey there, chief,” he said, pulling himself into the room. “Wondering if we could have a talk. Alone, maybe.”
“You can put up the privacy shield if you want,” Naomi said. “I’ll still hear everything.”
Havelock undid his straps and pushed off. “I’ll be back,” he said over his shoulder.
“You shall always find me at home,” Naomi said.
The commissary was between rushes. The chief engineer grabbed a bulb of coffee for himself and another for Havelock. They floated together near a table bolted to the deck. Force of habit.
“So we’ve been talking,” Chief Engineer Koenen said. “About the event.”
“Yeah, it’s been pretty much the only thing on my mind too.”
“How sure are we that it’s… well… natural?”
“I’d have gone pretty much a hundred percent it wasn’t,” Havelock said with a grim laugh. The chief engineer’s expression seemed to close, and Havelock pressed on. “But maybe that depends on what you mean by natural. Is there something bothering you?”
“I don’t want to sound paranoid. It’s just that the timing on this seems pretty convenient. You and me and the boys catch the UN mediator red-handed. Throw the bitch in the brig. And then this big disaster comes out of nowhere, takes everyone’s attention off her.”
Havelock sipped at the coffee.
“What are you thinking, chief? That it was rigged?”
“Those squatters got here before we did. We don’t know what they found and just never told us about. And Holden worked for the OPA. He worked for Fred fucking Johnson, right? Hell, everything I heard says he’s been sleeping with that Belter girl we brought in. His loyalty isn’t to Earth. And he was the one who went on the alien whatever-the-hell-it-is that Medina Station’s floating around and came back out. I’ve been following some independent casts. The Martian marines that went there after him? There’s some pretty weird shit that’s gone on with all of them since then.”
“Weird shit like what?”
The chief engineer’s eyes brightened and he hunched forward, a posture of intimacy and complicity that was a habit of gravity. For the next half hour, he ran down half a dozen strange occurrences. One of the marines had died of an embolism during a heavy-g burn just before she’d been scheduled to talk with her cousin who ran a popular newsfeed. Another had quit the military and wasn’t talking about anything that had happened. There had been rumors of a secret report that suggested—strongly suggested—that James Holden had been killed on the station, and a doppelgänger put in his place. It stood to reason with all the other changes the protomolecule could make to a human body that recreating one wouldn’t be hard for it. Only the report had never been made public, and the people who had read it had been targets of whisper campaigns to discredit them.
Havelock drank his coffee and listened, nodding and asking the occasional question—usually for the sources of the information the chief engineer was reporting. When they were done, Havelock promised to look into the issue, then hauled himself back to his desk. On the readout, the planet was still covered in clouds.