Frederick Lucius Johnson. Former colonel in Earth's armed forces, Butcher of Anderson Station. Thoth Station now too. Unelected prime minister of the OPA. He had faced his own mortality a dozen times, lost friends to violence and politics and betrayal. He'd lived through four assassination attempts, only two of which were on any record. He'd killed a pistol-wielding attacker using only a table knife. He'd given the orders that had ended hundreds of lives, and stood by his decisions.
And yet public speaking still made him nervous as hell. It didn't make sense, but there it was.
Ladies and gentlemen, we stand at a crossroads -
"General Sebastian will be at the reception," his personal secretary said. "Remember not to ask after her husband."
"Why? I didn't kill him, did I?"
"No, sir. He's having a very public affair, and the general's a bit touchy about it."
"So she might want me to kill him."
"You can make the offer, sir."
The "greenroom" was actually done in red and ochre, with a black leather couch, a mirrored wall, and a table laid out with hydroponic strawberries and carefully mineralized drinking water. The head of Ceres security, a dour-faced woman named Shaddid, had escorted him from the dock to the conference facilities three hours earlier. Since then, he'd been pacing - three steps in one direction, turn, three steps back - like the captain of an ancient ship of the line on his quarterdeck.
Elsewhere in the station, the representatives of the formerly warring factions were in rooms of their own, with secretaries of their own. Most of them hated Fred, which wasn't particularly a problem. Most of them feared him too. Not because of his standing in the OPA, of course. Because of the protomolecule.
The political rift between Earth and Mars was probably irreparable; the Earth forces loyal to Protogen had engineered a betrayal too deep for apologies, and too many lives had been lost on both sides for the coming peace to look anything like it had been before. The naive among the OPA thought this was a good thing: an opportunity to play one planet against the other. Fred knew better. Unless all three forces - Earth, Mars, and the Belt - could reach a real peace, they would inevitably fall back into a real war.
Now if only Earth or Mars thought of the Belt as something more than an annoyance to be squashed after their true enemy was humiliated... But in truth, anti-Mars sentiment on Earth was higher now than it had been during the shooting war, and Martian elections were only four months away. A significant shift in the Martian polity could ease the tensions or make things immeasurably worse. Both sides had to see the big picture.
Fred stopped before a mirror, adjusted his tunic for the hundredth time, and grimaced.
"When did I turn into a damned marriage counselor?" he said.
"We aren't still talking about General Sebastian, are we, sir?"
"No. Forget I said anything. What else do I need to know?"
"There's a possibility that Blue Mars will try to disrupt your presentation. Hecklers and signs, not guns. Captain Shaddid has several Blues in custody, but some may have slipped past her."
"All right."
"You have interviews scheduled with two political narrowcasts and a news source based on Europa. The Europa interviewer is likely to ask about Anderson Station."
"All right. Anything new from Venus?"
"Something's happening down there," his secretary said.
"It's not dead, then."
"Apparently not, sir."
"Great," he said bitterly.
Ladies and gentlemen, we stand at a crossroads. On one hand there is the very real threat of mutual annihilation, and on the other -
And on the other, there's the bogeyman of Venus, getting ready to crawl up out of its well and slaughter you all in your sleep. I have the live sample, which is your best, if not only, hope of divining what its intentions and capabilities are, and which I have hidden so that you can't just march over and take it from me. It's the only reason any of you are listening to me in the first place. So how about a little respect here?
His secretary's terminal chirped, and she consulted it briefly.
"It's Captain Holden, sir."
"Do I have to?"
"It would be best if he felt he was part of the effort, sir. He has a track record of amateur press releases."
"Fine. Bring him in."
The weeks that had passed since Eros Station had come apart in the thick skies of Venus had been good to Holden, but prolonged high-g dives like the one the Rocinante had sustained chasing Eros had long-lasting effects. The burst blood vessels in the man's sclera had healed; the pressure bruising was gone from around his eyes and the back of his neck. Only a little hesitation in the way he walked spoke of the deep joint pain, cartilage still on its way back to its natural form. Acceleration swagger, they'd called it, back when Fred had been a different man.
"Hey," Holden said. "You're looking pretty. Did you see the latest feed from Venus? Two-kilometer-high crystal towers. What do you think that is?"
"Your fault?" Fred suggested, keeping the tone friendly. "You could have told Miller to drive it into the sun."
"Yes, because two-kilometer-high crystal towers coming out of the sun wouldn't be creepy at all," Holden said. "Are those strawberries?"
"Have some," Fred said. He hadn't been able to eat anything since that morning.
"So," Holden said around a mouthful of fruit, "are they really going to sue me over this?"
"Unilaterally giving away all mineral and development rights to an entire planet on an open radio channel?"
"Yeah," Holden said.
"I would guess the people who actually owned those rights are probably going to sue you," Fred said. "If they ever figure out who they are."
"Could you give me a hand with that?" Holden asked.
"I'll be a character witness," Fred said. "I don't actually make the law."
"Then what exactly are you all doing here? Couldn't there be some kind of amnesty? We retrieved the protomolecule, tracked down Julie Mao on Eros, broke Protogen, and saved Earth."
"You saved Earth?"
"We helped," Holden said, but his voice had a more somber tone. Miller's death still bothered the captain. Fred knew how that felt. "It was a joint effort."
Fred's personal secretary cleared her throat and glanced toward the door. They'd need to go soon.
"I'll do what I can," Fred said. "I've got a lot of other things on the plate, but I'll do what I can."
"And Mars can't have the Roci back," Holden said. "Right of salvage says that's my ship now."
"They aren't going to see it that way, but I will do what I can."
"You keep saying that."
"It keeps being all I can do."
"And you'll tell them about him, right?" Holden said. "Miller. He deserves the credit."
"The Belter who went back into Eros of his own free will in order to save Earth? You're damn right I'm going to tell them about him."
"Not 'the Belter.' Him. Josephus Aloisus Miller."
Holden had stopped eating the free strawberries. Fred crossed his arms.
"You've been reading up," Fred said.
"Yeah. Well. I didn't know him all that well."
"Neither did anybody else," Fred said, and then softened a little. "I know it's hard, but we don't need a real man with a complex life. We need a symbol of the Belt. An icon."
"Sir," the secretary said. "We really do need to go now."
"That's what got us here," Holden said. "Icons. Symbols. People without names. All of those Protogen scientists were thinking about biomass and populations. Not Mary who worked in supply and raised flowers in her spare time. None of them killed her."
"You think they wouldn't have?"
"I think if they were going to, they owed it to her to know her name. All their names. And you owe it to Miller not to make him into something he wasn't."
Fred laughed. He couldn't help it.
"Captain," he said, "if you're saying that I should amend my address to the peace conference so that it wasn't a noble Belter sacrificing himself to save the Earth - if you're suggesting that I say something like 'We happened to have a suicidal ex-cop on-site' instead - you understand this process less than I thought you did. Miller's sacrifice is a tool, and I'm going to use it."
"Even if it makes him faceless," Holden said. "Even if it makes him something he never was?"
"Especially if it makes him something he never was," Fred said. "Do you remember what he was like?"
Holden frowned and then something flickered in his eyes. Amusement. Memory.
"He was kind of a pain in the ass, wasn't he?" Holden said.
"That man could take a visitation from God with thirty underdressed angels announcing that sex was okay after all and make it seem vaguely depressing."
"He was a good man," Holden said.
"He wasn't," Fred said. "But he did his job. And now I've got to go do mine."
"Give 'em hell," Holden said. "And amnesty. Keep talking up the amnesty."
Fred walked down the curving hallway, his secretary close behind him. The conference halls had been designed for smaller things. Petty ones. Hydroponics scientists getting away from their husbands and wives and children to get drunk and talk about raising bean sprouts. Miners coming together to lecture each other about waste minimization and tailings disposal. High school band competitions. And instead, these work carpets and brushed-stone walls were going to have to bear the fulcrum of history. It was Holden's fault that the shabby, small surroundings reminded him of the dead detective. They hadn't before.
The delegations were seated across the aisle from each other. The generals and political appointees and general secretaries of Earth and Mars, the two great powers together at his invitation to Ceres, to the Belt. Territory made neutral because neither side took it seriously enough to be concerned about their demands.
All of history had brought them here, to this moment, and now, in the next few minutes, Fred's job was to change that trajectory. The fear was gone. Smiling, he stepped up to the speaker's dais, the podium.
The pulpit.
There was a scattering of polite applause. A few smiles, and a few frowns. Fred grinned. He wasn't a man anymore. He was a symbol, an icon. A narrative about himself and about the forces at play in the solar system.
And for a moment, he was tempted. In that hesitation between drawing breath and speaking, part of him wondered what would happen if he shed the patterns of history and spoke about himself as a man, about the Joe Miller who he'd known briefly, about the responsibility they all shared to tear down the images they held of one another and find the genuine, flawed, conflicted people they actually were.
It would have been a noble way to fail.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "We stand at a crossroads. On one hand, there is the very real threat of mutual annihilation. On the other... "
He paused for effect.
"On the other, the stars."
