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The corps trained at high g all the time and did lengthy endurance drills at one g at least once a month. No one ever said it was to prepare for the possibility of having to fight a ground war on Earth. No one had to.
It was a nice smile, full of even white teeth, below almond-shaped eyes so dark they were almost black. Bobbie smiled back and glanced at the name on his suit. Corporal Matsuke. Never knew who you’d run into in the galley or the weight room. It didn’t hurt to make a friend or two.
The Anomaly they called it now. You could hear them capitalize the word when they said it. Anomaly, like something that just happens. A strange random event. It was because everyone was still afraid to call it what it really was. The Weapon.
If you spoke up, he wanted to make sure you actually had something useful to say.
The acrid, competing scents of gun oil and hydraulic fluid, old and aged right into the metal no matter how many times the Navy boys swabbed the decks.
The best scientific minds of the system were staring at the data with their jaws slack, and the reason no one was panicking yet was that no one could agree on what they should panic about.
Analyses were confidential, follow-up studies were proprietary, but the raw data was orbiting the sun for anyone to see. Only, so far, it was like a bunch of lizards watching the World Cup. Politely put, they weren’t sure what they were looking at.
It was raining that day. Even if the raindrops hadn’t been pelting the windows, blurring city and sky, she’d have known by the smell.
“Whatever’s on Venus thinks inertia’s optional and gravity isn’t a constant. We don’t know what a launch would look like. As far as we know, they could walk to Jupiter.”
She felt a stab of annoyance that was half embarrassment. She’d forgotten that the background on the man was in her queue.
She’d meant to review the information before breakfast. She’d forgotten. But she wasn’t going to admit it to some European brat just because he was smart, competent, and did everything she said.
Avasarala’s eyes flickered over him, taking in the details: well-tailored silk suit that straddled the line between beige and gray, receding hairline unmodified by medical therapies, startling blue eyes that he had probably been born with. He wore his age like a statement that fighting the ravages of time and mortality was beneath his notice. Twenty years earlier, he’d just have been devastatingly handsome. Now he was that and dignified too, and her first, animal impulse was that she wanted to like him.
The silence between them stretched. She watched his face, his body, looking for signs, but the man was unreadable. He’d been doing this too long, and he was too good at it. A professional.
The mask of his persona slipped. It lasted less than a second, nothing more than a shift in the angle of his spine and a hardness in his jaw, here and gone again. It was anger. That was interesting.
Something tickled at the back of Avasarala’s mind. A hunch. An impulse. She went with it.
It was interesting watching him pretend to be angry now. It was almost like the real thing. She couldn’t have said what about it was inauthentic. The intelligence in his eyes, maybe. The sense that he was more present than he had been before. Real rage swept people away. This was rage as a gambit.
Avasarala countered soft. She lowered her voice, let her face take on a concerned, grandmotherly expression. If he was going to play the injured man, she could play the mother.
My tea?” “Coming, ma’am. I got sidetracked. I have a report for you that might be interesting.” “Less interesting if the tea’s cold,” she said, and dropped the channel. Putting any kind of real surveillance on Mao would probably be impossible. Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile would have its own communications arrays, its own encryption schemes, and several rival companies at least as well funded as the United Nations already bent on ferreting out corporate secrets.
took another sip of tea. She had to give it to the boy; he could brew a fine pot of tea. Or he knew someone who could, which was just as good. If Holden was there, that meant the OPA was interested
“They don’t know what it is,” she said aloud. “Ma’am?” “They smuggled in someone with experience in the protomolecule for a reason. They’re trying to figure out what the hell’s going on. Which means they don’t know. Which means…” She sighed. “Which means it wasn’t them.
If he realizes he’s being watched, he’ll start broadcasting pictures of all our Ganymede sources or something.
From his professional work, Prax knew that the inner planets thought of Belter slang as a statement about location. He knew from living as a food botanist on Ganymede that it was also about class. He had grown up with tutors in accent-free Chinese and English. He’d spoken with men and women from everywhere in the system. From the way someone said allopolyploidy, he could tell if they came from the universities around Beijing or Brazil, if they’d grown up in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains or Olympus Mons or in the corridors of Ceres.
Today he was looking for Mei in exchange for enough leafy greens to make a small meal. Agricultural barter, the oldest economy in humanity’s record, had come to Ganymede.
A wide hall. A door half melted and forced open. Scorch marks on the walls and, worse, a puddle of water. There shouldn’t be free water. The environmental controls were getting further and further away from their safe levels.
People had started trying Prax’s strategy, grazing off the plants in the parks and hydroponics. They hadn’t bothered with the homework, though. Inedibles were eaten all the same, degrading the air-scrubbing functions and throwing the balance of the station’s ecosystem further off.
In his own home, the lights were dim and wouldn’t go bright. The soybean plant had stopped growing but didn’t fade, which was an interesting datapoint, or would have been. Sometime during the day, an automated system had clicked into a conservation routine, limiting energy use. In the big picture, it might be a good sign.
He turned back to the line of the traumatized and desperate waiting their turns to beg for help, for justice, for law. A flash of anger lit him, then flickered. He needed help, but there wasn’t any to be had here. He
The small sane part of his brain whispered that if he died, no one would look for Mei. She’d be lost. It whispered that he needed food, that he’d needed it for days. That he didn’t have very much time left.
It stank of ketone-acrid breath. Saint’s breath, his mother called it. The smell of protein breakdown, of bodies eating their own muscles to survive. He wondered how many people in the crowd knew what that scent was.
That was why he recognized the face and felt that he’d never seen it before. Prax felt a tug from somewhere near the center of his chest and found himself stepping forward.
And at the bottom of the page, in simple block characters: Get help. Prax turned toward the man who’d started wars and saved planets, suddenly shy and uncertain. “Get help,” he said, and walked forward.
Santichai and Melissa Supitayaporn were a pair of eighty-year-old earthborn missionaries from the Church of Humanity Ascendant, a religion that eschewed supernaturalism in all forms, and whose theology boiled down to Humans can be better than they are, so let’s do that. They also ran the relief depot headquarters with the ruthless efficiency of natural-born dictators.
“I’ve never met anyone else in my life who cared more about other people’s welfare, and less about their feelings,” she said.
“How can they have had a whole battle here,” she said, “and no one knows why?” “They know,” Holden said. “Someone knows.”
“Should we…” Naomi said, looking at the people running toward the commotion. “We’re here to see what’s going on,” Holden replied. “So let’s go see.”
That’s the only way you ever do anything. By yourself. It was the kind of thing Detective Miller would have said. For him, it had been true. That was a strong enough argument against doing it that way.
Suri was pointing and gesturing and retelling the grand adventure of finding a common worm in the mud as if it were a thing of epics.
She hugged the children twice before they left, sneaking bits of chocolate to them each time, then kissed her daughter, nodded to her son-in-law, and waved to them all from her doorway. The security team followed their car. No one so closely related to her was safe from kidnapping. It was just another fact of life.
“Do you know what I’m talking about?” “As a rule? No. But Maxwell Asinnian-Koh just posted a paper about post-lyricism that’s going to get him no end of hate mail.” Avasarala chuckled. “You live in your own world, dear one.”
Her mother had taken the tight-bound clump from her, but instead of fixing it herself and handing it back, her mother sat cross-legged on the floor beside her and spoke aloud about how to solve the knot. She’d been gentle, deliberate, and patient, looking for places where she could work more slack into the system until, seemingly all at once, the yarn spilled free.
And because of that, the Martians would only take offense if they were looking for an excuse. She didn’t think they would. And if she was wrong, that would be interesting too.
“Neither does anyone else, but the brains are thinking it may be a set of very high-temperature superconductors. They’re trying to replicate the crystal structures in the labs, and they’ve found some things they don’t understand. Turns out, the thing down there’s a better physical chemist than we are.
The bond initiative to rebuild the water reclamation center at Cairo almost failed last year because a millennialist group said we wouldn’t need it.”
The whole solar system. Them and us and the Belters. It’s not healthy having God sleeping right there where we can all watch him dream.
And so we all look away and go about things as if the universe were the same as when we were young, but we know better.
“Humanity’s always lived with the inexplicable,” Errinwright said.
“Everything’s going to be fine.” And, looking at the dead screen where her superior had been, Avasarala decided that maybe he even thought it was true. Avasarala wasn’t sure any longer. Something was bothering her, and she didn’t yet know what it was.
Kiki and Suri were going to grow up in a world where this had happened, where Venus had always been the colony of something utterly foreign, uncommunicative, and implacable. The fear that carried would be normal to them, something they didn’t think about any more than they did their own breath.
Genies didn’t get put back into bottles, and from the moment the protomolecule had been set loose on the civilian population of Eros just to see what it would do, civilization had changed. Changed so fast and so powerfully that they were still playing catch-up. Playing catch-up. There was something there. Something in the words, like a lyric from a song she almost remembered. She ground her teeth and stood up, pacing the length of her window. She hated this part. Hated it.
All the while, the botanist spoke only of Mei, of his need to find her. Holden realized that he’d never in his life needed anything as badly as this man needed to see his daughter again. To his surprise, it made him sad. Prax had been robbed of everything, had all his fat boiled away; he’d been rendered down to the bare minimum of humanity. All he had left was his need to find his little girl, and Holden envied him for it.
