“Being true makes it a strong argument,” Havelock said. “Go after the Rocinante, and we look like everything they say we are. If we stand tough, we can protect ourselves and still win the long game.”
“Long game’s great if you’re around long enough to play it,” the man at the back said, but his tone of voice told Havelock that they’d seen the sense in what he said. For the time being, anyway.
~
Ivers Thorrsen was a geosensor analyst with advanced degrees from universities on Luna and Ganymede. He made more in a month than Havelock would in a year of working security. Also, he was a Belter. Growing up in microgravity hadn’t affected him as much as Havelock had seen in other people. Thorrsen’s head was maybe a little big for his body, his spine and legs maybe a little long and thin. With enough exercise and steroids, the man could almost have passed for an Earther. Not that it mattered. Everyone on the Israel knew what everyone else was. Back when they’d left home, the differences hadn’t mattered. Not much.
“In addition to the energy spikes, there are twenty heat upwellings that we’ve seen so far,” he said, pointing to the rendered sphere of New Terra on Havelock’s desk display. “They’ve all appeared in the last eighty hours, and so far we don’t have any idea what they are.”
Havelock scratched his head. The cells in the brig were empty, so there was no one to overhear them. No need to be polite.
“Were you expecting me to have a hypothesis? Because I was under the impression that we were here in order to find a bunch of stuff we didn’t know what it was. That you’ve seen something you don’t understand seems pretty much par for the course.”
The Belter’s lips pressed thin and pale.
“This could be important. It could be nothing. My point is that I have to find out. I’m busy with important work. I can’t spend all my time dealing with distractions.”
“All right,” Havelock said.
“This is the third day running that someone has sprayed urine in my locker. Three times, you understand? I’m trying to get my gear not to smell like piss instead of running the numbers.”
Havelock sighed and canceled out his display. New Terra and its mysterious hot spots vanished. “Look, I understand why you don’t like it. I’d be cheesed off too. But you have to cut them a little slack. People are bored and they’re under pressure. It’s natural to get a little rowdy. It’ll pass.”
Thorrsen folded his arms across his chest, his scowl deepening. “A little rowdy? That’s what you see? I am the only Belter on my team, and I am the only one getting —”
“No. Look, just no, all right? Things are tense already. If you want me to, I’ll put a monitor on the locker and let people know they need to cool it, but let’s not make this into a Belters against the inner planets thing.”
“I’m not making it into anything.”
“With all respect, I think you are,” Havelock said. “And the more you try to make this into a big deal, the more it’s going to come back and bite you on the ass.”
Thorrsen’s rage was palpable. Havelock shifted slightly, pushing himself higher in the direction that they’d temporarily chosen as up. It was an old trick he’d learned back when he’d worked with Star Helix. Humanity might have gone up out of the gravity wells, but the sense of being taller, of establishing dominance, was buried too deeply in the human animal for a little thing like null g to erase it. Thorrsen took a deep, shuddering breath, and for a moment Havelock wondered if he was going to take a swing at him. He didn’t want to lock the analyst in a cell for the night. But if it came to it, he wouldn’t mind.
“I’ll put a monitor on your locker, and I’ll send out a general announcement that people need to put a sock in it. No one’ll piss on your stuff again, and you can get back to work. That’s what you want, right?”
“When you write your announcement, is it going to say that they should stop pulling pranks, or that they should stop harassing Belters?”
“I think you know the answer to that.”
Thorrsen’s shoulders hunched, defeated. Havelock nodded. It struck him, not for the first time, that confrontations were like a dance. Certain moves required certain responses, and most of it happened in the lower parts of the brain that language might not even be aware of. Thorrsen’s hunch was an offer of submission, and his nod accepted it, and Thorrsen probably didn’t even know it had happened.
Certainly didn’t, in fact, because his rational mind kept on dieseling even though everything that needed talking about was already decided.
“If you were the only Earther and it was Belters doing this, you’d feel different about it.”
“Thank you for letting me know about the problem,” Havelock said. “I’ll see it’s addressed.”
Thorrsen pushed off from the desk and sailed gracefully through the air, vanishing into the corridor. Havelock sighed, opened his desk display again, and paged through the ship reports. The truth was that incidents were on the rise. Most of it was little things. Complaints of petty infractions of corporate policies. Accusations of hoarding or sexual misconduct. One of the organic chemists had been making euphorics. The ship psychiatric counselor was issuing increasingly strident warnings about something he called internal stratification, which just sounded like social politics as usual to Havelock. He signed off on all the reports.
If you were the only Earther.
The funny thing was that Havelock had been the only Earther in a Belter society, and more than once. When he’d been on a twenty-berth hauler from Luna to Ganymede for Stone & Sibbets, he’d been one of two Earthers, outnumbered and always subtly excluded. He’d worked for Star Helix on Ceres Station for the better part of a year, always getting the worst cases, the worst partner, the less-than-subtle reminders that he didn’t belong. He’d been dealt more than his fair share of shit by Belters for not having the right-shaped body or knowing the polyglot mess that passed for a kind of outer planets cant. They hadn’t pissed in his locker, mostly because it hadn’t occurred to them.
Havelock set a monitor specifically on Thorrsen’s locker, then pulled up a fresh security template. He looked at the empty field, asking him by its blankness what he wanted to say.
We’re eight billion klicks from home and a bunch of half-feral terrorists want to keep on killing us, so let’s stay calm.