“Yeah.”
Fred stood up. His expression was hard, but not without compassion. “I was expecting this fight, Holden. But there’s more at stake here than Naomi. If the protomolecule is being weaponized, or even just set loose again —”
“That doesn’t matter,” Holden said. “Wait, no. That came out wrong. Of course that matters. It matters a lot. It just doesn’t change anything. We can’t…” He paused, swallowed. “We can’t go after her. I’ve got one ship, they’ve got half a dozen. Everything in me wants to fire up the engines and burn like hell after her, but it won’t help.”
Fred was silent. The distant sound of Sakai’s laughter filtered through from the screen. They both ignored it. Holden looked at his hands. He felt like he was confessing something. Maybe he was.
“Whatever’s going on here?” Holden said. “Whatever she’s involved with, I can’t fix it by putting on my shining armor and riding into battle. The only way I can see to do her any good at all is to do what we had planned. Get you to Luna. If you can use Dawes and Sakai and Avasarala to open some kind of communication with these sons of bitches, Naomi can be a bargaining chip. We can trade her for some of the people you’ve got in the brig. Or Sakai. Or something.”
“That’s the conclusion you’ve reached?”
“It is,” Holden said, the words tasting like ashes.
“You’ve grown up some since the first time we met,” Fred said. Holden heard the sympathy in it. The consolation. “It’s making me regret my ‘reckless’ comment.”
“I’m not convinced that’s a good thing. Have you ever done this? Loved someone like they were part of you and then left them in danger?”
Fred put a hand on Holden’s shoulder. For all the frailty that age and trouble had put in the older man’s face and body, his grip was still firm. “Son, I’ve grieved for more people than you’ve met. You can’t trust your heart on this. You have to do what you know, not what you feel.”
“Because if I do what I feel…” Holden said, thinking that the end of the sentence was something like I’d beat Sakai’s teeth in or I’d get us all killed. Fred surprised him.
“Then we lose her.”
“Course set,” Chava Lombaugh said from the cockpit. “On your order, sir.”
Holden tried to lean back into his crash couch, but without thrust gravity to give him weight, it ended up as just a straightening of the neck. His heart was racing, adrenaline ticking coolly through his veins.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The command deck felt too full. Sun-yi, serious and relaxed, was at weapons. Maura had comm controls up, monitoring them because that was what she did more than from any actual need. It should have been Alex’s voice. It should have been him and Naomi in the couches.
He shouldn’t have been scared.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s do this.”
“Sir,” Chava said. The warning light went from amber to red and Holden fell back into his couch. Tycho Station fell away behind them. It wouldn’t be an hour before it was too small to make out without assistance. Holden waited for three long, shuddering breaths. Four.
“How are we looking, Mister Ip?”
From the engineering deck, Sandra Ip – who should have been Amos – said, “All systems are within tolerance.”
“Meaning not all blowed up,” Holden said.
There was a pause on the channel. “Yes, sir. Not all blowed up, sir.”
Holden hated it that he wasn’t sure of his own ship. The Rocinante had been nothing but solid for him since the day he’d gotten aboard her. He’d trusted the ship with his life the way he trusted his heart to beat. It was more than instinct. It was automatic. To do anything else would have been strange.
But that was before. Sakai’s sabotage hadn’t killed him, but it hadn’t left him unscathed either. It would be a long time before Holden was sure that there were no more unpleasant surprises hidden in the ship. Software waiting for the right moment to evacuate the air or throw the ship into a fatal acceleration or any of the other thousand ways a ship could fail and kill its crew. They had looked everything over and found nothing, but they’d done that before and nearly died from their oversights. There was no amount of double-checking that would ever prove that nothing had been missed. From now on – maybe for a long time, maybe forever – he would wonder about things he hadn’t before. He was resentful, even angry, that his faith had been shaken.
He wondered if he was still thinking about the Rocinante.
“All right,” he said, unstrapping. “I’m going to get some coffee. You folks try not to break anything, and if you do, let me know.”
The chorus of yessirs was oddly disheartening. He wished they’d known he was joking. Or felt comfortable enough to joke back. Their formality was just another way it didn’t feel like his ship anymore.
He found Fred in the galley, talking into his hand terminal, recording a message that was clearly meant for Anderson Dawes. Holden got his coffee quietly between phrases like lines of communication and profound lack of trust. When Fred finished, he folded his hands and looked over.
“I’d take one of those too. Cream, no sugar.”
“Coming up,” Holden said. “Anything new?”