If they won and the passage to the colony worlds opened again, what it would mean for the Belters, for Earth, for Mars. What the shape of human history would look like if the Free Navy beat them. Anticipation soured to anxiety and fear, and then impatience and back to anticipation again. Usually, the Roci was comfortable as an old shirt. Under the guns this way, he felt closed in. Claustrophobic. He couldn’t quite forget, the way he usually could, that they were a bubble of air and metal in an unthinkably huge emptiness.
Naomi found him in their cabin after his exercise. Her hair was tied back, away from her face, and her eyes were calm and serious.
“Was looking for you,” she said.
He waved a little gamely. “Present.”
“You doing all right?”
“I don’t know. Yes?” He held out his hands, a gesture of helplessness. “I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time with this. Not like it’s the first war I’ve started.”
Her laugh was rueful and warm. She launched across the room, caught onto the handholds where she could look over his shoulder at the monitor. The two enemy ships on approach. The Giambattista and the Roci. A red field where the braking burn would start. A white line where the Roci thought the attack would come. The first attack. Violence reduced to spare and well-presented graphic design.
“You didn’t start this one,” Naomi said. “Marco did that.”
“Maybe,” Holden said. “Or maybe Duarte did. Or the protomolecule. Or Earth and Mars over the last couple of centuries of not giving a shit about the Belt. I don’t know anymore. I feel like I understand what I have to do in the next … I don’t know. Five minutes? Maybe ten? Then after that, things get muddy.”
“Next is enough,” Naomi said. “As long as you always see the next step, you can walk the whole way.”
She put a hand on his shoulder, her palm warm against his skin. He laced his fingers with hers and braced as she pulled herself down beside him. A simple maneuver they’d done a million times before. The long practice of trivial intimacy.
“I keep wondering if this was inevitable,” he said. “There are so many things we could have done differently. Maybe we could have kept this from happening.”
“We you-and-me, or we humanity?”
“I was thinking humanity. But you-and-me too. If you’d killed Marco when you were kids together. If I’d kept my temper and not gotten kicked out of the Navy. If … I don’t know. If any o
f the things that got us here hadn’t happened, would none of this be happening?”
“Don’t see how it could.”
On the screen, the two enemy ships ticked closer to them while they shifted—not as quickly—toward the red warning of the hard burn. “I keep thinking it would have, though,” Holden said. “If it wasn’t me or you or Amos or Alex, if it wasn’t the Roci, it would be someone or something else. The Belt didn’t get screwed because of you or me. Whatever it was that made the protomolecule didn’t throw it at us because of anything that we’d done.”
“Seeing as we were single cells at the time.”
“Right? The details would be different, but the … the shape of it all would be the same.”
“That’s the problem with things you can’t do twice,” Naomi said. “You can’t ever know how it would have gone if it had been the other way.”
“No. But you can say that if we don’t do something different, it’ll happen again. And again. And again, over and over until something changes the game.”
“Like the protomolecule?”
“It didn’t change anything,” Holden said. “Here we are, still doing all the same things we did before. We’ve got a bigger battleground. Some of the sides have shifted around. But it’s all the crap we’ve been doing since that first guy sharpened a rock.”
Naomi pulled herself closer, tucked her head against his shoulder. Probably people had been doing that since the dawn of time too, just not in freefall.
“You’ve changed,” she said. “The man I met on the Canterbury wouldn’t have said that it was everyone’s business. That whatever anyone did counted.”
“Well. I’ve had really a lot of people shooting at me since then.”
“And you’ve grown up some. It’s all right. I have too. We’re both still doing it. That’s not something you stop. Not until you’re dead.”
“Mm,” Holden said. Then, “So I’m guessing this kind of thing doesn’t bother you?”
“Nature of history? No, it doesn’t.”
“Why not?”