First Warden-Inmate Meeting w/ Jedao

[roci]

The file does show up, as promised. It's actual paper, not milled stone but milled wood, and it's folded into some kind of off-white wobbly cardstock. It actually takes Jim a second to realize that's a fucking file folder. He takes it up into the ops deck, and starts reading. Might be that some people are delicate about it, ask their inmate before reading the file, but Holden doesn't have time to fence around, and he doesn't want to get into games with Jedao.

Which turns out to be a pretty ironic thought, as he reads about the game Jedao created as a cadet, the one that led to the suicide of a friend. He's barely even begun when the Roci lets out a completely unexpected chirp, an information downloading notification coming up on all screens.

That should definitely not be happening, not without authorization. "Rocinante," he says, "Cut off download." A negative chirp -- damn, what could he -- "Quarantine the download," he tries, but it's too late, the message wipes out, and a whole tree of files appears in the air above the center ops console.

He absorbs a few of the file names, dates and details that don't have any context, then he realizes what this is.

"Holy shit," he breathes. "How much did we just get?"

The Roci displays a number. Terabytes. Terabytes of information, video files and text and audio, thousands, and all of them about Jedao. Four hundred years, he realizes, of someone's fucking records. Way more than he could possibly review before Jedao contacts him to have a conversation. In fact, Jedao probably already has.

"Holy shit," he mutters, again, under his breath. "Can you index that?" A positive chirp. "How about -- by names, dates, locations -- if it has a location, and, uh. Actually, proper nouns. And tag them by category, type of file, if it's video, audio, text, hologram--" he wouldn't leave that out of the question -- "Or any other identifiable type." A beat. "And game. If there are any games, pull those out first."

The computer informs him that it would take actual days to go through all of it and create an interactive indexing system.

"Well," he sighs, "get started. But leave the files open for me to access."

The computer begins processing.

Holden returns to the file, and reads through the rest. It's thin. Ridiculously thin, for someone 400 years old, or 400 years dead, or whatever he is. He can't stop muttering curses and pausing, sometimes, to stare blankly ahead. Jedao killed millions -- an inconceivable number. And they kept him trapped in the dark, an inconceivable amount of time. He is a genius, resistant to mental coercion, brilliant, insane, but not as insane as people thought.

When he looks up, there is a game file that the computer has pulled out. With a gesture, he pulls it up. It's the game, the one Jedao made as a cadet, though as he opens the file, there are seventeen more games that the computer finds and populates into a list.

It's not hard to understand the rules, but it's very hard to figure out the context. Holden has to page back and forth, try it out in his head, twist the scenarios around before he realizes that the point is heresy. This whole thing, it's an obsession with heresy. Heresy as a game.

Not that Holden blames him. In a society like that, Holden would be obsessed with heresy too.

He sits back in the crash couch. He needs a way to get more time on this. He isn't processing half of what he just read, and there's a lot more here to unpack. This data might include a lot more information on Shuos and Kel and, what was it, Liozh?, as well as threshold winnowers and mothdrives and the High Calendar, and he wants to be a lot better informed before he goes into this conversation. So he needs a distraction. Something that'll buy him a day.

Games.

"Pause index," he tells the Roci. "Do you have any games on board?"

The computer brings up the list of -- twenty-one, now.

"No," he says, "I mean games like -- games from Earth, or Mars, or the Belt."

There's a pause, and an affirmative beep. Several of the crew apparently had personal game files, plus there's a few wargames that are part of the ship, probably for training purposes. Holden dismisses those with a swipe, and starts going through the rest. Most are pointless, shooting games or variants of chess, solitaire, blackjack, poker. He's not entirely sure what he's looking for, but then he finds it. A pandemic game, simulating disease spread throughout the solar system. It's an old one, that he remembers from when he was a kid -- probably some Martian from Earth kept it for nostalgia factor. It's a good one, too, simple rules and simple mechanics, but a new challenge every time.

"Are you able to unpack this?" he asks. "Reprogram it?"

The affirmative beep sounds, somehow, a little sarcastic.

"Okay. I want you to replace all mentions of disease with heresy. Physical symptoms to psychological things, like rebelliousness. You can draw symptoms from the DSM-70. It should still spread physically, but..." Radio. Heresy could travel at the speed of light. And it would; it would be impossible to stop. But that wouldn't make the game useful.

He keeps talking. "Win conditions are that you've wiped out heresy. Lose conditions... you're down to less than ten percent of the population, or you lose Ganymede, Earth, and Mars." Everywhere that can grow decent crops and produce oxygen in any quantity. "Or you start a war. Randomized what faction you're playing as, but it can be Earth, Mars, or Belters."

The faster-than-light is still a problem.

"What if the heretics were trying to keep it secret?" he asks, out loud. "Spread it slowly, at first, and then when they get caught, go all-out?"

The computer flashes a lack of understanding.

"If all ports that are infected with heresy are quarantined," says Holden, "they all broadcast at once. Heresy starts spreading at the speed of light, and the longer it goes on before you jam it, the more people are infected at once, everywhere."

The computer starts displaying dozens of questions, decision trees for the programming. Holden has to get down into that for a few minutes, straightening out the true/false conditions. He ends up adding in Ceres as the best vector for infection for the Belt. Cringes a little, but Eros is one that's a port of call for tourists everywhere, so that one's got the most far-flung connections. It's hard to spread through the Belt, but hard to eradicate all the little asteroids where heresy colonizes. It's easier to spread across Earth, because of the hundreds of network connections across the ocean can't all be severed, and trade and travel are so ubiquitous. It's hard to get onto Mars, because the vector is most likely to be diplomats or military vessels, but once you've got Mars, they spread it onto every ship they inspect. You can absolutely without question eliminate any place with heresy, but don't drop the population too far...

He spends actual hours on this, and it's a pretty clumsy effort, but thankfully the base game is simple enough and solid enough that it's not too broken. He makes it very hard to win. There are a few more twists, similar to the broadcasts: Belters can hide heresy better, because their language is difficult for outsiders to understand and they're already so independent, Mars has a tendency to strike back if any of its facilities are struck, and Earth has internal variation and borders that mess with transmissions. Something can spread easier from China to Mars than North America to Mars.

"One last thing," he says. "If you open your ports, and let the heresy in, then I want a way to win without bloodshed."

And this ends up being a very narrow path, too, and dependent on Mars not getting provoked, but it can work.

Finally, it's done -- or, as done as it can get, and he downloads it to one of the portable devices from the ship. He ducks outside, and places the little tablet outside Jedao's place, and thankfully makes it back before Jedao sees. On the way back, he drops a note on the network: Look outside your door.

And now he gets to work.

A few searches ("Shuos" turns up most of the files, "Kel" only slightly fewer, but combining the names of all seven of the factions brings up only about a hundred, easy enough to screen through them) gets him to a sort of treatise about the factions, describing roles and traits as though to a child. It's probably some kind of brainwashing material, but it gives him a good place to start. Liozh aren't mentioned anywhere; that means he has to search again and screen through those results before he can figure out that Liozh were philosophers and ethicists, idealists, and, wow, no fucking kidding they were wiped out from this society.

Next, the High Calendar, and every image that Jim sees is worse than the last. Some of it isn't so bad; base six numerical system, a year is this long, this is how you tell time, but then he gets into the cultural components. Every holiday that he pulls up more information on has a bloody and awful history, and some of them come with graphic images of torture and dismemberment. He has to steel himself against it, try to pull back from it, distance it from what he's personally witnessed. And he knew there was ritual torture, but the extent of it, how widespread and often, the way it's used as a common and acknowledged and normal tool, appalls him. He's starting to wish he pushed a little harder on the do you think it's worth it, instead of backing down the second he realized he was thinking more about the protomolecule than Jedao.

But, he remembers the conversation about the geese -- bite their hands off -- and he thinks, no, Jedao doesn't believe this is worth it.

But he slaughtered millions to get in a possible position to take it down. Just possible; not guaranteed. And as far as Holden can tell, mostly what he did was get himself killed at the Fortress of Scattered Needles. Weird name. Maybe it sounds better in the native language.

The scale of it is literally unthinkable. And Holden is tempted, several times, to call up the Admiral and call this whole thing off. How the hell is he even supposed to attempt to redeem someone a dozen times more clever, more thorough, more experienced, and a cold-hearted bastard on top of it?

He keeps reading, though. Because a lot more than millions are gonna be at risk if he doesn't manage this task. Humanity could get wiped out. It's already on the verge. He has to.

All of this crap is long on info and short on analysis. The file had some, but not enough. It's all just so thin. And Holden has never been good at connecting dots like this, seeing inside someone's head. Most people that he's dealt with in his life had pretty straightforward problems, things that could be eased or solved by listening and doing some pretty simple stuff.

This problem compounds the longer he reads. He goes through the battles at Scattered Needles over and over until he gets the basic gist of the technologies involved, and grasps most of the strategy (though the propaganda game is beyond him; how are you supposed to convince anyone to be on your side with images like that?). And then there's... shit. There's documentation of the threshold winnower.

Image after image. It takes him a shocked second to realize that he's looking at people, otherworldly tears in their flesh, not just blood and scars but horrific immediate mutations. People who clawed their own eyes out, or ripped flesh off the bone. One body that convulsed so hard its spine was at a horrible, wrong angle.

And, when he touches the screen at the wrong moment, one body is isolated and a picture pulls up. A short summary. A name.

Holden stumbles to his feet and the next thing he knows, he's in the head, vomiting up... well, acid, mostly, because he hasn't really eaten in a while. He puts his head between his knees, curled against the cool wall, and breathes, breathes, breathes. The minutes tick away, endless.

Maybe he falls asleep, because he gradually becomes aware of a soreness in his neck that wasn't there before.

He washes out his mouth, and gets back up to the ops deck, and goes back in -- dismissing the images of the winnower.

The rest isn't even fully indexed yet. He starts looking through some of what Jedao was pulled out to do during his centuries of death, and he can't focus. He's on the verge of asking the ship for some juice, when he stops.

He's approaching this totally the wrong way.

He leans back in the crash couch, eyes on the ceiling. He's pretty sure his communicator pinged a while ago. It's long past the time he should have fallen asleep -- starting to approach the time he should be waking up. There's no rush on this and he shouldn't have pulled an all-nighter, but hey, he just had an epiphany, and maybe it required a half-conscious mind to make that happen.

He's been doing this wrong. He's been trying to figure out Jedao from the details of his life, but Jedao's been doing all he can, for hundreds of years, to obscure his thoughts by adding noise to those details. The big-picture stuff isn't the problem.

-- Which is fucking unbelievable, given how awful the big-picture stuff is. Even Jim, though, can understand how people can get driven to do insane things in an insane world. Doesn't mean he's going to let Jedao off the hook for it, of course.

The problem is the way Jedao treats individuals.

And once he thinks this thought directly, the Admiral's reasoning clicks into focus. Jedao purports to be someone who is good -- or, no, purports to be someone who's crazy, but underneath, he's trying to do good, or so it seems to Jim. That doesn't gel with the way he terrorizes people near him, people who aren't innocent, but only insofar as they participate in an un-innocent system. The key to this is going to be breaking Jedao down so he can connect. Start to heal, from being fucking raped and brutalized himself, from causing his friend's suicide and being trapped in a box for 400 years and being driven to the point where he felt he had to commit mass murder in order to have a hope of being good in a society like this.

Jedao didn't succeed. He isn't good, and the threshold winnower is a perfect example of that. But he didn't just knuckle under, and Jim can work with that.

For the first time, Jim feels a stirring of hope. He's still totally out of his depth, stranded in the black, but at least he knows which way to go.

So he goes, and he sleeps for a while, and after he gets up and shaves and has something to eat, he pulls out the communicator. He checks for messages first, but, regardless of what's there, he texts: My cabin?

There's literally no way in hell he could conceal the fact that the Roci's a military ship of the line, on the inside. Might as well get it over with, because Jedao's gonna know that sooner or later. Jim's just picked over a significant part of Jedao's life, and he already owed Jedao one anyway.

Comments

[ninefox]

"I spent several lifetimes dwelling on the matter of how, but I thought you might appreciate a more concise version," he says cooly, a little waspishly. No, that isn't all. But it is, he assumes, the heart of the matter. Millions of deaths is rather the obvious candidate; and if thought about the people close to him at all - about Ruo, about Gized, about his mother and Sereset and Cheris - he would have dismissed the entire idea as woefully self-indulgent.

[roci]

Jim sits back against the wall, at a loss.

"I guess I should enjoy this," he says, "because it's probably the only time I'm gonna feel smarter than you."

But he's not. He's just feeling the magnitude of the task in front of him. How the hell did he ever think he was gonna be able to do this?

Okay. He has to start somewhere.

"Jedao," he says, shifting forward again. "You lived in a world where it's impossible to be a good person. You're either complicit, or you're dead, or you're actively evil." He says 'evil' without a trace of irony; he really believes in it. "You tried anyway. And you did a pretty bad job. But you didn't do a bad job because you tried, and you sure as hell didn't do a bad job because you didn't burn everything down when you had half a chance."

He feels like he's trying to speak another foreign language here.

"Deciding to fight them was the right thing to do." He can't put it any more clearly than that.

[ninefox]

A species of relief, he said, so lightly, but it's different, to hear it straight out, to get it from - from the person who's supposed to help him, supposed to be his guide, and it doesn't have to be about trust if it's just a matter of who is in a position to know, to have the right intel - who must have been chosen for that position, that perspective -

It hurts. It hurts in ways he doesn't understand and doesn't have words for, like when his nerves started coming back online for the chunks of his ribs medical had to reconstruct after he got shot with burrower ammunition. He's spent so long being the terror, the traitor, the madman, notorious and reviled. There were so many people - good people, or as good as he ever knew anyone could be, loyal and honest and brave - that couldn't see the things he saw, that he couldn't trust or convince without getting them killed, too. All the things that were worse because he tried, all the consequences he ever saw - you did a pretty bad job, Holden says, and he can't dispute it, but it was all he had; and worse, he knew it was a long shot, knew he didn't have the right tools without the fucking math, knew it was going to be a mess. So he's never, ever been able to separate it from trying from the way that he tried, from the choices he willfully made, the only ones he could find.

If he were alone, he'd cry, with confusion and hurt and relief, but he's not alone, he can't do that, he can't fall apart over - over -

No one has ever told him he did the right thing, any right thing, not since he was alive and lying constantly to everyone and getting feted and promoted for being the shining star in Kel Command's talons, for strengthening everything he wanted to tear down.

Complicit, dead, or evil. He did know it - could see it, sideways, out of the corner of his eye, could make out the inexorable and terrible and inescapable shape of it, the way the system ruined people, without ever having seen what people might look like, unruined. He knew it without having any sense of the details or the alternatives, but he saw just enough to know he had to force a change. Some way. Any way.

Complicit, dead, or evil.

"I guess I got the hat trick," he says, chokes out, not meeting Holden's eyes.

[roci]

Jim gets it. The whole mess of emotions, he gets it, because he felt it not too long ago.

"Few days ago," he says, "the thing I didn't want to talk about? I was pinned by a cargo crate and I was dying, and this guy on my crew -- you know, a year ago, I would've said I didn't know him, and six months ago I'd've said he scared me shitless, but somewhere in the meantime, he became family. And so there I was, poison from my own crushed bones getting into my blood, and he talks to me. He says thank you."

This is gonna sound like I'm bragging, thinks Jim.

"He said thank you for trying," Jim says. "That I'd done a lot of stupid things since I took over as captain -- those were his words, 'a lot of stupid things' -- but that I always tried to be a good man, and that he was grateful, because it felt good not to have to worry about being on the right team."

He's really not trying to brag here. That was one of the best things anyone had ever said to him, and it made Jim feel full up and brimming over; it made him want to try a thousand times harder, this time to be smart and good, so Amos wouldn't ever have to worry about it again.

"So I'm pretty good at trying," he says, "and you're pretty good at doing the smart thing. So here's hoping the Admiral knows what he -- or she -- is doing." And that's about as close as he's going to get, right now, to admitting that Jedao has something to teach him back.

[ninefox]

There's a bitter twist to his mouth - an awful cocktail of jealousy and contempt, at the idea of it being that easy, to just find someone who could try. At the idea of believing there was a good team, somewhere, at all. But he likes the story at the same time, likes all of Holden's rueful microtells. He's intimately familiar with the particular awkwardness of this is going to sound like bragging, given his battle record. He feels an inevitable sense of kinship over it.

He thinks about his own last, quiet thank you, and suddenly he misses Cheris like his chest was blasted open again; they would have been so good together, he thinks, they would have been something, if only he hadn't gambled wrong and tipped their hand. If only they'd had more time.

"Research suggests pairings are more productive than most of his decisions." Tiffany had said it was the one thing she trusted the Admiral to do; and his own grid-diving backed up the idea. Even unsuccessful pairings often seemed to develop rapport and some behavior modification before one member vanished.

[roci]

"They told me it would be more than a month." It's almost a complaint, exasperated and a little frazzled. "And then that I'd get a temporary inmate."

He's so rushed into this. And it's funny, it's hilarious, how lost he feels at this and how he's feeling more and more that it'll be okay.

"So." The coffee mug is empty, and he sighs, thinking that he probably shouldn't have another cup. (He really wants another cup.) "You want to take a turn interrogating me, or...?" It's an offer. He's ready enough to get into it, why he's here. Jedao has a right to know what it is his redemption is going to buy.

[ninefox]

He huffs out a breath, the sort of soft rush that might have been a laugh, if he weren't already dealing with so much. It's probably his fault, haranguing the Admiral for a permanent warden, which he decides not to mention, because it's tied up directly with what he wants to leave the barge to do. Which he doesn't actually think Holden would disapprove of, exactly, but he doesn't want to talk about it yet. It's too much, it's too important, and they've managed to completely sidestep the original question which is - just fine by him.

"You're afraid that your world is about to change," he says, more because he is just curious, than because he thinks he has to know for their relationship to work, picking out what he knows from Holden's original sloppy projection on the promenade. "A lot of potential reward, a lot of potential harm. And something about it scares the shit out of you in a way that doesn't actually have anything to do with astropolitics." He pauses. "And you feel responsible for it. You think your choices are going to matter, even aside from the deal, which you're still internalizing as a real thing."

He doesn't say it as though he thinks Holden is wrong. He knows perfectly well how much difference the person on the spot can make when a new system comes together.

"Have I got anything wrong yet?" Which doesn't put Holden on the spot as directly as what scares you or what did you do; it gives him the freedom to say whatever he thinks is the most important part of the situation.

[roci]

Jim's lips are pressed together. He shakes his head; nothing wrong yet.

"Not about to change," he corrects. Jedao wasn't wrong about that, exactly, but -- "Cascade failure's already started." Everything that they knew is about to go. World's already changed, it just hasn't realized it yet.

And that change is going to be a shooting war between Earth and Mars and the Belt, thinks Holden, fears Holden. He can imagine Fred Johnson opening up the warhead with the protomolecule inside, twisting open the casing, and there it is, blue glow and all, a material a billion times more explosive than uranium was to the 20th century.

[ninefox]

"It's such a small system," he says, and means it, thinks it must be terrifyingly vulnerable. It was all there in the game: only three food-producers, and no real way to develop more; belters with so little to lose and plugged into every transit system, with access to everyone; the military volatility from the martian side, knowing it's their only real point card.

(He does not think: a thousand food producers don't do any good if surplus and population are lightyears apart; he doesn't think about how vulnerable they have always been, if he dared to think about threatening the mothdrive.)

"Anything worth shooting for everyone goes down. So what do people think is worth it?"

[roci]

His stomach clenches. Such a small system; fragile in so many different ways. He's so afraid for the fate of humanity.

He moves to his feet. Movement will help; he wants to pace, wants to stand. "Come on," he says, and he leads Jedao up another level of the ladder, to the ops deck. There's a console there flickering through files, indexing, but he dismisses it with a wave of his hand.

"Rocinante," he says, "show me a simulation of the system."

A hologram fades into existence over the center table, about an armspan wide. It's not to scale; simplified for ease. Jim reaches in and zooms to Phoebe. "One of the moons of Saturn," he says. "It was an extrasolar capture, a few billion years ago. Turns out it's not a coincidence that it ended up in this solar system. Group of research scientists were on it, and they found something they were not looking for. They called it the 'protomolecule.'" His voice is tight and angry; something like that, and their first reaction was to give it a brand name. Even more aggravating is that it's caught on.

"We don't know what it was supposed to do," he says. "But they figured out that it does something. A molecular structure packed with instructions. It can..." The words stick in his throat. He forces one out: "Reprogram."

[ninefox]

There are a lot of pieces he knows he isn't getting yet; he doesn't know if reprogramming means people, or matter, or logic, or some more perverse combination of those and other things. He thinks of fungal canisters, the way they can break down an ecosystem in hours; he thinks of the Vidona with their whispers and veils. His shoulder-blade itches.

One thing doesn't quite -

"Not a coincidence. So it chose to come to this system, or it was drawn there by some attractor, or it was sent."

[roci]

"It's not sentient," he says. So: drawn, sent, whichever, but something made it. Aliens, he doesn't say. "Whatever it is, it makes something that's anaerobic, that feeds off of radiation. It takes whatever life is present, and it," he swallows, leans heavily on his palms over the console. The light shines, flickers where it would pass through him. "It takes it apart and uses it."

He stares at the solar system model for a moment, and pulls back. Moves just to move, to reassure himself that he's not frozen and still. The panic is back, but it's not as fresh as it was, he thinks, and he's in familiar surroundings, and Jedao deserves to know. All those reasons mean he has to push through it.

"Protogen was the company, the place that employed the scientists," he tells Jedao. Protogen; protomolecule. "They thought their researchers weren't that useful because, I don't know, they had personalities and consciences, so they magnetically bombed the area of the brain that makes people sociopaths. They created a whole facility of scientists who didn't give a shit about individuals, and those scientists decided the best way to figure out what the protomolecule did was to let it try."

His fists are clenched.

"They used Eros."

[ninefox]

What he thinks is: nice torch. He always appreciates when a weapon can do two things at once; the idea that something could be recouped off planets that would otherwise be just glassed is appealing, although probably bad incentive.

It reminds him a little of a few Hafn weapons he saw in the new tech files - but not enough to be useful.

It's the matter of the researchers that makes his head jerk around to stare at Holden.

"That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard." It isn't that hard to find monsters, he thinks. Or maybe in Holden's world it is, and they went and made themselves a whole batch of Kujens, ready to eat their way through his soft little system like a Borer beetle through fruit, like an invasive species, like burrower ammunition. "You need to kill them. You need to kill all of them, or one asteroid will be -" nothing, he doesn't say. "- just the beginning."

[roci]

Holden has the sudden and spectacular urge to laugh, and the simultaneous urge to punch Jedao in the face. Neither of these things are actually Jedao's fault; they're Miller-related reactions, and Holden is able to go still and blink a couple times until both of them pass.

"All you need is the hat," he mutters. Breathes in, and straightens up. "We raided their main outpost, and." Well. "Almost all of those are dead."

Saving the one, who's currently in the fantastically unreliable custody of Anderson Dawes.

"Their leader is dead," he says. "But there were more, off that station, and they've."

It's just not even worth it, going through it chronologically, unless he goes through everything. So he summarizes, succinctly: "Earth and Mars have shot at each other. Eros is gone. Ganymede is dead. Earth, Mars and the Belt all have the protomolecule. And it's all so fucked up that I honestly came here looking for a miracle to fix it."

[ninefox]

"If you ever throw that punch," Jedao says, grinning just a little at the dual reaction. They could use a puncture for the tension, probably. "I promise to try not to break your arm."

He runs a half-gloved hand through his hair. Well, at least they're both motivated.

"Does this thing have personnel files at all? Archival copy of public grid records, even? I'm going to need to know the individual players."

[roci]

Holden rolls his eyes. "You break my arm," he says, "you're the one who gets to track down that kid in the Infirmary and make him fix it."

Jedao's already working on the problem. Holden likes that, and he thinks it'll do the both of them good.

"I can get you news stories," he says. "And I can tell you what I know." Which is a fair amount, actually, since he ended up at the center of everything. Over and over again. Trouble just seems to follow you around, huh, kid? Miller said, the first time Holden ever met him.

He coughs. "You might want to know my role in this, first." He has enough self-awareness to be anxious about this. 'Embarrassed' isn't quite the right word. He did what he thought was right, what he thought was best, and what he thought would save the rest of the Canterbury's crew. Regretting the consequences wasn't the same as regretting the action.

[ninefox]

He knew Holden felt responsible, but that could come from a dozen angles; the certainty and ambivalence he feels at once now is - less unfamiliar than perhaps it should be.

"Okay," he replies, serious again, just listening. Almost says hit me before changing it. "Go ahead."

[roci]

And now he has no idea where to start on this.

Maybe just where this story began. On the bridge of the Canterbury, listening to someone whisper is anyone out there? Help me, please...

He draws over one of the tablet interfaces for the ship's systems, and starts tapping on it, going through files.

"I was second offi-- XO on a ship called the Canterbury," he says. He never really accepted the XO pins, did he? But the XO was gone, and as second officer... really, he more or less took it over. Makes it simpler not to explain. "It was a water hauler. Did multiple-month trips out into the asteroid field, hooked something that was more ice than rock, then ripped it apart, took the ice, and got it back into Ceres. We were on our way back when we got a distress call from a ship anchored to an asteroid outside the Belt. Only ship within a few million klicks."

He looks up at Jedao. "The rule in space is that if you get a distress signal, you go and you rescue," he says. "The law backs it up. Because sooner or later, it might be you out there, and you better hope someone rescues your ass from vacuum before your air runs out." He grimaces. "But... we had a berth on Ceres waiting, and early return bonuses, and this took us two days out of our way. Besides, more often than we like to admit, that kind of thing's just pirate bait. So we wiped the logs and kept going."

He's found the video, and so he drops his hand from the controls.

"Except I restored them," he says, "and logged receipt of the message with corporate. Means that we now had liability if something happened to the survivors of that wreck, if we passed on by." He doesn't tell Jedao how he wrestled with that, how he listened, alone, in the dark, on the bridge. Night shift. Took over from someone, because he couldn't sleep. "We hauled ass, burned a whole day to get there, and then sent out a rescue mission. Me. Engineer. Mechanic. Medic. Pilot."

It's easier to tell it this way, rather than the huge consequences. Naomi, Amos, Shed, Alex. He was there.

"We boarded," he says. "Found bodies, no survivors. There was something on the bridge, a piece of military-grade tech -- that was where the distress beacon came from. Then we got into the engine room."

A pause. He struggles.

"There was a layer of... flesh around the shut-down core," he says. "Arms, torsos, heads, fused and... repatterned. Nautilus spirals." He shakes his head. "I only caught a glance. And then we hauled ass right on out of there." Already shaking his head. "But something showed up on the way back, patch of space a few degrees warmer than the surroundings. A stealth ship. We thought it was pirates, just well-equipped ones, and I was telling the Cant that we'd try to negotiate their release when the torpedoes hit. Only they weren't shells. They were nukes. And the ship was gone, just like that."

He's staring off, now, seeing it again. The utter shock. Jim, there's something you need to know, and then Ade dissolving. Canterbury, dissolving.

He pulls himself back, with an effort. "We didn't have much air. Before we ran out, we got approached by a Martian ship -- and the tech we found on the bridge, that was Martian too."

He taps the tablet, again, and swipes the video up onto a larger screen. Himself.

"We thought they'd just pick us up and kill us." No, he should shut up; now he's just trying to justify it. He sighs, and he hits play.

My name is James Holden...

After the monologue is done, he taps pause.

"We thought they jammed us," he says, dryly. "Turns out that video got received and resent, and it hit everywhere from Earth to Ganymede." And he stops there, leaving it up to Jedao's imagination, and what limited information he has on the political situation in the Belt, what happened next.

[ninefox]

"In the fucking clear," he says eventually, with a soft, stunned sort of awe. "Fox and hound."

"I'm going to decide, for what's left of my own sanity, that you already know exactly where you fucked up because someone must have informed you, and move on without trying to put together a coherent critique. How long ago was this?"

[roci]

A critique? Seriously? On what, the propaganda value of the video?

Holden decides not to ask.

"About six months," he says. "The ship that picked us up, it was the Martian flagship, the Donnager. Few days later, that's getting bombed to pieces from this fleet of ships that came from what looked like the Belt. And they thought it was the Belt, until their weapons started tearing state-of-the-art equipment apart. They were holding us prisoner, but the captain decided that since I had witnessed the Cant, and was witness to this, that I had to survive. Somehow, in the chaos, I managed to get the Marines to rescue my people -- but Shed was already dead. The medic."

And he hadn't even been there.

Funny, that they were his people already, by then.

"So we ended up in their gunboat." He waves around them. "The last Martian that got us there died as we got out of there, and they hit the self-destruct after we got out. Meanwhile, communications were jammed."

It's getting a little habitual to lay out the dots and let Jedao connect them. Holden does it, tentatively, again -- leaving it to Jedao to realize that there was no one who could possibly have realized that Holden and his people were on the ship legitimately, no one to say that they weren't involved in the destruction of the flagship of the Martian military.

Leaving them the only witnesses to the Canterbury, and to the Donnager.

[ninefox]

"So you turned rogue, renamed her after your story horse, and went tilting at actual giants," he murmurs - because, yeah, he read Don Quixote after they left port. Not that sufficient notoriety makes an entirely unserviceable lance.

"Was it just Protogen pushing the war as cover, or did they have collaborators with other motives?"

Holden already told him the ending of this story, after all. He's honestly surprised they lasted six months - but then, inorganic wars can be truculent sometimes, especially if the only side with nothing to lose also has only so much to threaten.

[roci]

Wow. That was more of a leap of logic than Holden even expected, and he's honestly stymied for a moment or two.

"You get better read pretty fast, don't you?" he asks, just to have something to say, re: Quixote. Jedao's not wrong, though. Holden sort of took on everyone in the system at once.

"Actually, I don't know," he admits. "It's pretty clear Protogen's rooted in Mao-Kwikowski Mercantile, which owns interests all over the system, and it's an Earth corporation. But how much Earth was in on it? And then how much Mars was in on it?" There was a shifting pattern of alliances, he thinks, but he doesn't have much to back that up.

[ninefox]

He shrugs. He has so little context for Earth and the library has so much. Any indication of relevance is a strong priority cue.

"You gave me all the pieces, they were just out of order. Bracket that for now. If the planets didn't take the bait right off, or make their own escalations after the false banners, there's probably no one compromised too high up, or there are cooler heads to stop them. I'd keep an eye out for convenient assassinations but you aren't really positioned to worry about that - and they can't have moved too quickly or you wouldn't have lasted this long. You said shots fired - after Eros? Before everyone got their samples or after? What was the immediate trigger?"

[roci]

He doesn't respond immediately. His brain doesn't work at the speed of Jedao's, and he's been stuck reacting to what's immediately in front of him for a little too long now. He has to play back what was going on, and he's not sure he has the overall context right, but he's reasonably sure.

"Right after this," he says, after a moment, "there was a lot of posturing and some skirmishes with Mars and the Belt. Mars was pissed because its facility on Phoebe had been wiped out, and then the Donnager. The Belt was pissed about the Cant. Earth was staying quiet." Which could either be an indication of guilt or of complete fucking confusion, and he has no idea which. It occurs to him, reluctantly, that a lot of the credit for lack of escalation can be laid at the feet of Fred Johnson.

He sighs. "One of the major Belter centers of power didn't make a move," he says. "Colonel Fred Johnson. He wasn't interested in a war, he just wanted a seat at the table. At the UN." He'll give Johnson credit, even if it feels a little like pulling teeth since Naomi gave over the protomolecule to him.

"Except then he did. Because we had data from the attack on the Donnager, and he extracted it, and it turned out that those ships were manufactured in Earth shipyards. He made that information public."

Holden reserves judgment, because, honestly, he would have done the same thing, if he'd gotten his hands on the decoded information first.

"So Earth and Mars were having a standoff," he recalls. He takes a figurative step back, and explains one of those things that everyone knows, but no one really knows who came up with it: "Conventional wisdom, in the Navy, was that if it ever went to a full-on shooting war between Earth and Mars, the victory would go to Mars, unless Earth hit first and hit hard. Mars's civilian population is vulnerable; its military is smaller, but better trained and equipped." He'd always hated that, the idea that it was worth it to take out a civilian population, in order to win. "But that hadn't happened yet. Nobody was shooting."

Then: Eros.

"That was when we found out the scout ship -- the original distress call, remember? The Scopuli -- that was a Belt ship, sent by Fred Johnson, to try and intercept something being shipped from Phoebe. Seemed like they didn't know exactly what it was, just that it was important, because they had Jules-Pierre Mao's daughter recruited by the OPA -- Outer Planets Alliance, Belters. Her name was Julie Mao, she was giving them their information."

This is a little chaotic. Holden tries to organize it in his head before he says it, then gives up.

"Fred Johnson said that a survivor from the Scopuli was on Eros, sending out a signal, so he sent us to take a look. We got there, and more weird shit kept happening. Someone tried to ambush us outside the flophouse the signal was coming from. We ran into this detective -- Miller -- who was supposed to run a kidnap job on Julie Mao, get her back to her father. And then..."

Eros fell apart.

"We found her," he says. "She looked dead. She was in the shower, in the room of the flophouse. There were these growths -- bone spurs, and black things blooming, and there was this black vomit on the floor. And we recognized it. It was the same kind of thing that was in the Scopuli. But we were too late."

He rubs at his face. Details, come up with the details.

"It was planned," he says. "They recruited criminals as security forces, months and months in advance. They already had Eros half taken over. And there was a procedure: they must have taken samples from Julie Mao's body, and exposed people. Radiation alarms went off; they got everyone into shelters. And they used the shelters as incubators." The terrible, tight bleakness in Jim's eyes speaks to personal witness. "We didn't realize until we opened it up."

Details. Details. "They weren't letting anyone off the station," he says. "People from the shelters were being rushed into the trains, and then those were used to spread it. They were turning into -- looked like zombies, vomiting up this black stuff. It was chaos, riots, and they pulled out their professional security forces, left the new recruits behind. We barely made it out."

He lets go of that memory. There's not much else he can milk out of it, unless it's in response to specific questions. He breathes, for a long moment, head down, in his hands.

[ninefox]

Protogen, Mao-Kwikowski, the neo-Kujens. The one thing he doesn't see is an endgame. A clear objective, a goal. A cover for the test, sure, but backing the whole system into a standoff leaves them with far fewer options for using anything they discovered. But then, business is supposed to be an infinite game; if Earth mercantiles are anything like Andan ones, they won't be in the habit of thinking that way at all.

But he really doesn't think, now, that they had real political backing. It's such an obviously lose-lose situation; if any one political power were in on it, they should have declared they had the gun before the others got hold of it. The Eros operation sounds deft, intricate - but having to bring in outside criminals betrays a certain limitation of resources - wealth and stealth, sure, but low on fodder who wouldn't ask questions, which meant no legitimate access to real soldiers. All the original instigators will be fragmented now, colluding with whoever snapped them up first while the public institutions are stripped down, a fraying thread to hang a balance on but enough that Holden is here, instead of spirals or ashes.

Cascade failure. Slow, but still accelerating.

He moves around the table, not sure exactly what would work best. If it were Nico, he would sit quietly, give him space, maybe solid limited options. Tea or water, stay or go. If it were Fives Jedao would wrap an arm around him, press his forehead into the back of his neck, run his fingers through his hair, breathe with him slowly. Holden isn't used to touch, but he likes it, has more boundaries that Jedao hasn't learned yet than Fives, with his total comfort now that Jedao has been accepted as a brother.

He grips Holden's shoulder, warm, steady.

"I don't need to know how." He doesn't think that really matters, unless he got some kind of intervention from someone inside, which seems both highly unlikely and something Holden would have mentioned. "They picked Eros for scale, didn't they? To see if it made more than a distorted mess." He thinks, inevitably, of winnowers; but not only them.

It isn't sentient, Holden said, but it was designed. A legacy that must have reset the entire game, an entirely new parameter.

"What did it make?"