Chapter Text
Even though the transmission time shrinks by the second as the Roci nears Luna, Arvasala is irritated at the hour-plus correspondence time. 72 minutes there and 72 back is the same as going to a mailbox - not counting the time it takes to formulate a response. Getting just four messages a day makes conversations disjointed and fucking annoying. The content of all these messages further her budding migraine - the misinformation surrounding the clusterfuck of New Terra grows exponentially with each and every wanna-be-journalist son of a bitch. She can hardly leave her office without being jumped by paparazzi and anxious, sweating aides desperate to get her to reply to their bosses. In the interim, she'd taken to getting her food delivered. Dinner tonight was a cold, rubbery mystery. It'd be more appetizing to eat a plate of boiled condoms than whatever this restaurant justified calling bolognese.
Her desk was a warzone - papers stacked on take-out containers, stacked on papers; printouts, maps, and confidential correspondences not trusted to the net. She even had to have a third monitor installed. The scramble to develop legal and institutional precedence for the disaster had consumed her, and she was desperate for good news. If not good news, then perhaps a sedative.
The message from The Rocinante pinged cheerfully and she took a moment to reorient herself to this particular thread of bullshit. Right, The Rocinante's latest reports on the flight from New Terra.
Holden flashed onto her largest screen - magnified to terrifying proportions of pores and dark circles on her projector. His eyes focus on something to the left as he fiddles with the terminal settings. It's clear he doesn't realize it's recording as he takes a deep breath, straightens his oil-stained shirt, and transforms into the cocky, charming James Holden she is always so thankful and disgusted to see. The fact that he failed to trim his message is a minor oversight but a breach of etiquette that bristled her nonetheless.
"Chrisjen - we are still getting some video data from the civvie ship to get a better picture of exactly when the tethering failed. We hope it didn't cause serious structural damage, but of course, we can't see that now." His posture begins to sag ever so slightly as he rattles off a summary of the Ilus planetside data collected by the surviving scientists. Chrisjen gratefully accepts the cup of steaming tea the nameless, faceless intern drops off and lets herself tune out the overly technical jargon.
How the fuck does Holden continually forget that I do not need to waste time on statistics about the ship recycler and the stability of the reactor bottle? Yet, she couldn't bring herself to end the message early - because of the need to verify she knew all the information or from the sick desire to work herself into a lather, she could not tell.
"Anyways, that's all I got for now, but I am sending out The Roci's latest diagnostics with this message. You'll let me know once your engineers have some insight, ok?" He unceremoniously disconnected the video. Her hand terminal pinged, and 16GBs of plain text attempted to download on her overworked computers.
The first lines of his data streamed by. Even to her untrained eyes, she knew this was not the data her team of engineers needed. This is the exact same file he had sent her last time and so is essentially useless to her team. Chrisjen puffs herself up, unconsciously preparing to offload two weeks' worth of irritation, exhaustion, and fear, and turns her camera on. She starts without preamble:
"Holden, are you fucking kidding me with this? This data is useless to us and I have the distinct impression you are not as invested into this crisis as I am. You shit the bed, yet I am the one changing the sheets under these infantile Illians. Where is the stick-his-nose-in-everything-solve-the-worlds-problems Holden ? Get your shit together because this data sets me back a full day until the next government meeting you goat fucking twat. Drink some coffee and wake the fuck up Holden, I will not abide by anymore delays, making me look like I have my thumb up my ass to the council."
Chrisjen furiously waved away the message, imagining it transferred into radio waves traveling at an agonizingly slow 300,000 km/s to the crippled Rocinante. She heaved a breath, cracked her neck, and took a sip of her tea - it had cooled enough to form a sickly film on it. Her handheld was miraculously silent, no one knocking at her door. In the unanticipated moment of silence, a trickle of doubt seeped in; had I been too hard on Holden? He looked like someone had killed him, embalmed him and then reanimated him... and he had just spent months rationing his medication to save the New Terra residents. She'd never admit it, least of all to him, but she felt a stab of guilt at her harsh words. I need to find a way to apologize later, she added it to her mental list of "things to do if the world doesn't end."