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

[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?"

[roci]

"Well, first it started singing."

He closes his eyes when Jedao touches him. He's imagining it's Alex or Amos, honestly. Jedao's hands are more like Alex's, but a little broader, a little stronger, and it would be Amos. He would really like to hide behind one of them right about now. Or just have them backing him up.

He glances up, some kind of thanks in his eyes, but also a growing distance. He'd thought before this pairing announcement that they could be friends. Now he has to be something else, and he's not sure he likes it.

"Rocinante," he says, "show me the path Eros followed to Venus." The view changes, and a track places itself, a color fading from white to blue as the asteroid got faster. He moves to his feet, steps away from Jedao. "You gotta understand," he says, "we don't have exotics, we don't have faster-than-light. Getting Eros spinning for gravity inside was one of the biggest projects in human history. But we didn't just leave the thrusters on. Eros didn't have an engine."

He gestures at the track.

"But it started moving," he says. "Fast enough that it would have killed us to keep up with it." Literally. "And a guy on the surface, in a space suit? He didn't feel a damn thing. First time Eros jumped a few thousand meters, the whole thing went up by two degrees -- whatever it was doing put out the waste energy equivalent to some of the biggest bombs in the human arsenal."

He leans on his palms on the table. "It wasn't omnipotent or omniscient, though," he says. "Whatever the protomolecule is, it was expecting single-celled life on Earth to work with, and that's not what it got. It got Julie Mao. And the guy on the surface -- asshole with a hat -- managed to talk with her, because the whole damn thing built a neural network based on her mind. That was the only thing that saved Earth." He points where it swerved and went for Venus. "There. It all crashed on Venus, and we thought that part was dead." Turns out not so fucking much, probably, but since everyone thought it, Holden's fine with leaving that there. "During this process, everyone realized the threat was not each other, and the OPA, Earth and Mars all worked together. Earth launched half its entire nuclear arsenal to try and eliminate Eros. And they channeled the target lock through us, since a fucking asteroid somehow went radar-stealth."

"Roci, back to the full system view." The display flickers and changes. "Not too long before something showed up on Ganymede, after that. No one realized it at the time. But that's where the shooting started. Piecing it together later... a monster appeared on UN lines, trashed their side of Ganymede Station, and then ran across a moon of Jupiter without a spacesuit, and attacked the Martian marines on patrol. The ships overhead, which were gathered because of everything else, saw gunfire and they opened fire. Orbital mirrors fell. One of the ag domes was completely destroyed."

He shakes his head. "Cascade failure.

"So that was when the shooting started. Everyone got their samples after that. Going theory is that Ganymede was a test run, and a -- I don't know. An advertisement."

[ninefox]

Singing. It's - comforting, in a way, familiar where so much else is strange. It feels appropriate to him, it feels right, that an inexplicable and unstoppable weapon should sing, that it should be eerie and elegant while shearing the world apart.

Jedao squeezes Holden's shoulder again, then moves his hand to run through Holden's hair, neatening it in a thoughtless, oddly nurturing sort of gesture. He's so young. It doesn't matter how old he is, really, when almost everyone feels young to Jedao now. He's just - thrown into it all, watching history happen for the first time. It doesn't mean Holden isn't an adult, just -

And then Holden says a neural network based on her mind, and he goes still for a moment, fear and revulsion and hunger crashing too quickly together for him to entirely sort it out. Composites. Fucking - alien weapon composites, woven directly into something with that kind of power. The Kel Command composite has been a tiger on his heels and a weight on his neck since before he died, but something about it appeals to him, too, to the part of him that always liked the pure open horror of the winnowers, to the part of him that spent so long alone in the dark. Your gun should be an extension of your arm, one of his instructors said; I'm your gun, he said, over and over, sore knees and acid in his throat. Dissolved and put back together and free to move. He wants.

But he never could sing.

"An auction," he translates. "Someone realized it could do composites and fucked with the proportions, with the incubation parameters, trying to make something they could aim. But their center of operations was gone; whoever had access to the material needed an in with a remaining player."

It's half a question, the same almost-sure tone from the beginning of the conversation. Have I got anything wrong yet.

[roci]

Holden makes a startled noise when Jedao brushes a hand through his hair. It's pretty comical, actually, sort of like a snort, but coming from inhaling a little too fast through an orifice that wasn't expecting it. Then he catches the look on Jedao's face, and boy, he has no idea what that means.

"We took it out while Eros was becoming... whatever it was becoming," he admits. Center of operations, he means. "But there was another base, and I think it's gotta be near Jupiter. Jedao, there is no fucking way I am letting anyone on this boat get access to the protomolecule, or leave with it, so if that's in your head, it better fucking get out."

Holden is more serious than Jedao has seen him yet. If he thinks that's a risk, this thing spreading to other universes, he's gone. He's gone.

"I would rather watch my universe go down in flames than spread it somewhere else."

[ninefox]

He smiles. It's a very sad smile, lopsided not just in the curve of his mouth but in the furrows of his eyebrows, the slant of his shoulders, the tilt of his head, as though the weight of the smile is dragging his whole body out of alignment, like an old limp.

"It's not in my head," he says, not really expecting to be believed. He wouldn't believe him. It's in his liver somewhere, maybe, formless and useless, utterly impractical self-destructive longing. It's not the kind of feeling he's going to make any decisions on; it would run completely counter to every priority he has now. It's not even the kind of madness that he acts on in smashed-open watershed moments. It's just a wisp of a pure and terrible dream.

[roci]

Jedao says that, and Holden's first inclination is to wonder if Jedao has some kind of processing center installed somewhere other than his head. No, that's just paranoid. He doesn't believe Jedao, but he makes the conscious decision to trust his word, for now.

"I know you saw that Ganymede is one of the system's food producers," he says. "But it's also the safest place to have children outside of Earth, because of the magnetosphere. Lowest incidence of birth defects and genetic mutations. So the whole thing is set up to provide care for kids. Was set up." Damn. It's just so unbelievable that Ganymede could be gone. "Lotta kids with rare genetic disorders ended up there. So... we stumbled on something."

He's tempted to pull up the image of Praxideke Meng, of Mei. But it would only be to push his own buttons, make sure that he's still capable of feeling for a girl that might be a monster by now.

"A handful with the same immune disorder all went missing. We followed the breadcrumbs," beat the shit out of a hacker, did it without batting an eye, got a guy killed on his own freighter, hands going bloodier and bloodier as Holden hunted what he hoped desperately were the last remnants of the protomolecule, "and we found where they released the test."

His hands go into fists, braced on the edge of the console. "They were using the kids, Jedao," he says, desperately. "They were making them into two meter tall monsters with glowing blue eyes, so strong they could rip through metal with their bare hands, and I tell you, I didn't fucking see anything human in that. There was nothing." You can't do this, is what Holden is saying; even if you have that craving, you can't do this. It's too horrifying. It's too monstrous.

[ninefox]

But Jedao is no longer thinking of himself at all. He starts frowning, small and terse, when Holden first mentions children. By the time he gets to using them, his back is rigidly straight, even moreso than in any of the archival footage of him standing to attention. His jaw is clenched tight, his expression moving from angry to completely blank.

"Human isn't always a thing you can see," he says, very quietly, his accent thicker than usual. His hands are clenched and all his knuckles are white.

He isn't angry at Holden, despite the pointed objection. He doesn't blame him for the phrasing, for his fear or his assumptions. Maybe he's even right. But in the longer stretches in the cradle, Jedao knows he became an unrecognizable thing, nameless and thoughtless, a thrashing wraith too stripped down even to gnaw itself. But there was enough of him left to suffer it, if not to endure. There enough of him left to reel back out and feed into the hard reset of anchorage. He can't help but imagine something was left, in another unrecognizable weapon. And he got himself into that; he didn't, couldn't know what he was doing, but he did it. All this kid did was get sick.

[roci]

It pinned Holden down with a cargo crate, and he watched it for most of an hour as it burrowed into his ship, tearing out pipes and bits of bulkhead, turning back to Holden whenever they cut off the core. It was animalistic, ignoring Holden as long as he wasn't a direct threat, going mindlessly towards the only source of "food" -- the only damn sign of sentience that it displayed was digging out the explosive. The control device.

But Holden can't maneuver all of that into an explanation; the words tangle up inside him. He just makes a sound of frustration and turns away, doing his best not to remember that ice-cold feeling of his suit pumping him full of painkillers.

"It got onto my ship," he manages, after a moment or two. "Almost killed all of us." If it had gotten to the core...

"We didn't find all the kids, either." There are more out there, being transformed. While people on the Belt, in the outer planets, are gonna start starving; while a generation of mothers have children without adequate protection. While Earth and Mars maneuver and maneuver, fingers on the trigger.

[ninefox]

Jedao is watching as Holden struggles with fear and frustration; Jedao is always watching. The fox is distorted against the intersection parts and curved lines of the Roci's interior, but all the eyes are steady gold.

"Humans can lose their minds," he says, as quiet as before, but more gently, face turned slightly away. "Or have them taken." It doesn't mean Holden was wrong about whatever he was facing, or wrong about what it was capable of or what had to be done. It just - Jedao doesn't even know why it's important to say, it isn't a helpful point, he doesn't actually know anything about the situation. It's completely semantic, maybe, something about what Jedao means by the word human.

It just. Feels important to say.

He breaks his stillness, gives both of them a few moments of space as he turns, paces as much as the small area of the Ops deck allows him, hands folded behind his back, shadow slinking after.

"We're going to handle it," he says. "We're not going to fucking figure it out today, but we will figure it out."

[roci]

Jedao is probably just telling Holden what Holden desperately wants to hear. Still, it helps. Idiotic, but it helps.

"Yeah," he says. In this case, it's kind of a meaningless word; expresses ambivalence, not quite agreement. Acknowledgment of what Jedao said.

"I can get you data on the players. The Secretary-General of the UN probably doesn't matter. Only got the job because he used to be a political prisoner, kind of a martyr." Or at least that's what some of Holden's parents think, and he trusts their judgment. "In the Belt, there's Fred Johnson, and there's Anderson Dawes. I don't know about Mars. Jules-Pierre Mao matters, too."

He crosses his arms. "At first, I thought I'd just make the protomolecule never exist," he says. "Then I started trying to think of strings to pull -- Canterbury never responded to the Scopuli, the Donnager won the fight, someone else found the protomolecule, Julie Mao figured it out sooner -- but this isn't exactly a skill of mine." Rueful. "In the Navy, I was a button-pusher, and I got cashiered out for assault on a superior officer. A genius tactician, I was not."

[ninefox]

He laughs, once, a short bark of a sound. It's not that funny. It's a little funny, and he needs the laugh.

"I'm not even surprised," he mutters, but there's warmth to it.

"Can anyone ask Rocinante for files or do you have to introduce me? I'll want to do a slow crawl through a lot of boring archival material, just to get a more granular sense of - everything."

He's fairly sure, given that Jim's own provenance of the ship is rather dubious, that he could get in without permission if he had to, but that isn't how he wants to proceed here.

[roci]

Control of the ship had actually been transferred by the last Martian living -- the XO of the Donnager -- to everyone aboard at the time. Since no one had since shared that control, as far as the Roci is concerned, no one gets to command except Holden's people.

And, in this context, no one except Holden. And given the five force-recon Marine armor sets in the armory... well, he won't be sharing control with anyone. Definitely not Jedao. At least the Admiral didn't duplicate the nukes in the torpedo bays, and for that, Holden sends a brief prayer of gratitude.

"I can load some onto one of the tablets," he says. Translation: he's not making introductions. He's fiercely protective of the ship. Not as much as Alex, of course, but he can just imagine Alex-Amos-Naomi's look of disapproval at Jedao. That image makes his lips quirk. "Anything you want to focus on, or should I just have it smart-select for high activity systemwide?"

[ninefox]

Jedao swivels to stare at him, taken aback and vaguely affronted, like a snubbed cat.

"...are you serious? If I wanted piecemeal chunks of prefiltered intel with minimal reconfigure options I'd just keep talking to you."

[roci]

Jim rubs his face.

"I did offer to let you set the filters," he points out.

Indisputably, having the Roci to help sort is gonna be a lot better. But, putting her in the hands of Shuos Jedao...?

[ninefox]

"What am I going to do, fly her away?"

Bitterly sarcastic.

"You don't have to trust me. But don't ask me for help and then make me jump through stupid hoops like a cadet with homework."

[roci]

Ugh.

"Alex is gonna kill me," mutters Holden. "Rocinante. Give Jedao access to all archived information broadcast around the system, and historical files. Read-only. He can only input data on text files that he makes, and you're not to run those as programs under any circumstances, or let him modify any programs. Personal files are off-limits." He doesn't know what Naomi or Alex or Amos or Prax keep in here, but if they keep anything sensitive, he's gonna look at it first.

He pauses, giving Jedao a long look. "Physically, he can have access to the head and the mess, but he's only getting on the ops deck with me around, and he doesn't get anywhere else." A beat. "No, he can have one of the empty bunks." In case Jedao wants to sleep here. He's okay with that. "Acknowledge."

The ship gives a beep, displays a list of accesses, visibly makes a profile with a tagged image of Jedao from internal feeds.

[ninefox]

He looks both mollified and slightly exasperated, as if to say, was that so hard. He doesn't seem offended by the restrictions - he has approximately what he was asking for.

"Does having mean I get to lock it?"

It's a nonsense question, of course. Even if Jim says he can, Jim automatically has the ability to override it. But he feels like seeing how Jim answers.

[roci]

Holden frowns, but it's not because he disapproves of the notion. In fact, his automatic response would be yes, obviously. But he's taking an extra moment to think because it's Jedao, and everything seems to have six meanings right now.

Holden can open any door that ends up getting locked on the Roci, unless it's determinedly sabotaged shut, and there's no reason for Jedao to do that. But Jedao would know that, so why's he asking the question, anyway? Is it just a test?

It's a test, isn't it.

"This is a test, isn't it," says Holden, because he can feel yawning traps opening around any possible response.