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Ganymede didn’t erode or weather. It changed when rocks fell on it from space, or when warm water from the liquid core forced itself onto the surface and created short-lived lakes. Neither thing happened all that often.
At a bit over two meters tall, she was only slightly above average height for a Martian male, but thanks in part to her Polynesian ancestry, she weighed in at over a hundred kilos at one g. None of it was fat, but her muscles seemed to get bigger every time she even walked through a weight room. As a marine, she trained all the time.
Dying she could handle. Dying without any answers seemed terribly cruel.
Rocinante, newly stenciled onto the galley wall, and said, “Baby, why do you hurt me when I love you so much?”
“I can’t fight pirates without coffee. I’m going to find Amos,” Holden said,
“Okay,” he said. “But I wish you’d warned me ahead of time. I’m going to be cranky without my coffee.”
The Mariner Valley had originally been settled by Chinese, East Indians, and Texans. Alex had the dark complexion and jet-black hair of an East Indian. Coming as he did from Earth, Holden always found it strangely disconcerting when an exaggerated Texas drawl came from someone his brain said should be speaking with Punjabi accents.
Whatever the alien’s hijacked, confused programming was, it was still going on under that planet’s thick cloud cover, and no one had so far been able to offer any scientific conclusions more compelling than Hmm. Weird.
With its magnetosphere, it was the safest place for pregnant women to gestate, claiming the lowest incidence of birth defects and stillbirth in the outer planets. It was the center of everything that made human expansion into the solar system possible. Their work was as precious as it was fragile, and the people in charge would never let the war come here.
Thorsson gave her his creepy smile, but Bobbie had learned that it was just the way the man’s face worked. He seemed to lack the muscles necessary for normal smiling.
That was Admiral Nguyen, youngest of the men present. Hawkish. Impressed with himself in the way that successful young men tended to be.
“Fuck him,” she said. “Tell him the Afghanis have been resisting external rule since before my ancestors were kicking out the British. As soon as I figure out how to change that, I’ll let him know.”
“I also need an updated summary paper on Venus. The latest. And I don’t have time to get another PhD to read it, so if it’s not in clear, concise language, fire the sonofabitch and get someone who knows how to write.”
“The generals. They’re all fucking men.” “I thought Souther was the only—” “I don’t mean that they all fuck men. I mean they’re all men, the fuckers. How long has it been since a woman was in charge of the armed forces? Not since I came here. So instead, we wind up with another example of what happens to policy when there’s too much testosterone in the room.
“One: Mars made it. That’s just war. We can handle that. Two: Someone else made it. Unpleasant and dangerous, but solvable. Three: It made itself. And we don’t have anything.”
He’d never tried to grow one before, and was disappointed to discover that his facial hair grew in patches of varying length and curl. Amos had grown a beard as well in an act of solidarity and now had a lush lion’s mane, which he was considering keeping because it looked so good.
Holden closed his eyes and started sending psychic messages to Amos to shut up. It didn’t work.
“You’re a good captain, and you can have my back in a fight anytime. But you’re a crap criminal. You just don’t know how to act like anyone but yourself.”
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.
But the data was clear. The attack on Ganymede and the spike in the energy expended on Venus had come at exactly the same time. And no one knew why.
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. “I know what’s in the briefing. I know everything,” she said, standing up. “This is a fucking test. I’m asking what you think is important about him.”
He wore his age like a statement that fighting the ravages of time and mortality was beneath his notice.
“I’ve worked with government before,” he said. He had a European accent that would have melted butter.
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.
“What happened to his face?” she asked. “The reporting officer suggested the beard was intended as a disguise.” She snorted. “Well, thank God he didn’t put on a pair of glasses, we might never have figured it out. What the fuck is James Holden doing on Ganymede?”
Otherwise stay out of their way and try not to get noticed. Holden’s an idiot, but he’s not stupid. If he realizes he’s being watched, he’ll start broadcasting pictures of all our Ganymede sources or something. Do not underestimate his capacity to fuck things up.”
Humans can be better than they are, so let’s do that.
It’s a simple complex system. That’s the technical name for it. Because it’s simple, it’s prone to cascades, and because it’s complex, you can’t predict what’s going to fail. Or how. It’s computationally impossible.”
Sitting next to him was someone’s grandmother in a bright sari, a splash of yellow in the middle of all the dark brown and dark blue and charcoal gray.
when Bobbie met Avasarala :D
Yellow-sari placed a hand on the agenda reader’s arm, and he instantly stopped talking. Okay, that one is the boss, Bobbie decided.
Mars, there was virtually no unemployment. The entire population was engaged either directly or indirectly in the greatest engineering feat in human history: the terraforming of a planet. It gave everyone a sense of purpose, a shared vision of the future.
The assumption that she’d give it a second try instantly won Bobbie over, and she actually looked at the guard for the first time. Earther short, but with beautiful skin so dark it was almost blue. He had a compact, athletic frame and lovely gray eyes. He was smiling at her without a trace of mockery.
A world no longer of the haves and the have-nots, but of the engaged and the apathetic.
She added a nice tip for the blue-haired girl who wanted more from life than basic support.
If Martians didn’t have to fight every day to make enough resources to survive, would they turn into this? A culture where you could actually choose if you wanted to contribute? The work hours and collective intelligence of fifteen billion humans just tossed away as acceptable losses for the system. It made Bobbie sad to think of. All that effort to get to a point where they could live like this.
“Cap? You okay?” Amos was staring at him. “Yeah,” Holden said, “I just need a different job.” “Might not be the best moment for a career change, Cap.”
The mechanic was restraining him with one arm in a grip that was halfway between a wrestling hold and an embrace.
She’d stopped looking tired a while ago and had moved on to whatever tired turns into when it became a lifestyle.
The lord of the Mao-Kwik empire towered over Avasarala. He had the kind of handsome face that made Bobbie instinctively want to like him, and medically untreated male-pattern hair loss that said he didn’t care whether she did. Choosing not to use his wealth to fix a problem as treatable as thinning hair actually made him seem even more in control.
he wrote MORE COFFEE FILTERS on his list of needed supplies.
“She won’t talk about it, but if I find out you did something shitty to her, I’m using this on your dick,” she said, holding up a torque wrench. Alex laughed nervously for a second, then trailed off and just looked uncomfortable.
“So that means we aren’t a normal crew. We aren’t workin’ the ship for money, or because a government drafted us. We’re here because we want to be. That’s all you’ve got over us. We believe in the cause, and we want to be part of what you’re doing. The minute we lose that, we might as well take a real payin’ job.”
“This idea you have that the universe owes you answers. This righteous indignation you wield like a club at everyone around you. But I don’t have to put up with your shit. “Do you know why that is?” Holden shook his
This righteous indignation you wield like a club at everyone around you.
“She’s got a fine daddy, Doc. You give a shit, and that’s more than a lot of people ever do.”
“A near-fatal case of scurvy being the only reason I can imagine drinking something with grapefruit juice in it.”
Holden had switched to reading a column about the state of Mars-Earth relations by a political humorist when his terminal buzzed at him, and a call came through from Amos.
The Daily News of The Expanse universe?
Stagnating in a quagmire of petty ethical constraints. He didn’t need Moynahan to tell him which company would snatch a man like that up. He’d heard almost those exact words spoken by Antony Dresden, the architect of the Eros project that had killed a million and a half people as part of a grand biology experiment.
Not the betrayal itself; betrayal was an occupational hazard. If she started getting her feelings hurt by that, she really should retire. No, it was that she hadn’t seen it. She’d let herself have a blind spot, and Errinwright had known how to use it.
“I think Holden has a long history of blabbing whatever he knows or thinks he knows all over creation. True or not, he believes it.”
