“Chow,” he said, then dumped the bags on the table in front of Holden. “Hey, Cap’n, when do I get my ship back?”
“Is that food?” Alex said in a loud, groggy voice from the living room. Amos didn’t answer; he was already taking foam cartons out of the bags and setting them around the table. Holden had thought he was too annoyed to eat, but the spicy smell of Indian food changed his mind.
“Not for a long time,” Naomi said to Amos around a mouthful of bean curd. “We bent the mount.”
“Shit,” Amos said, sitting and grabbing a pair of chopsticks. “I leave you guys alone for a couple weeks and you fuck my girl up.”
“Alien superweapons were used,” Alex said, walking into the room, sleep-sweaty hair standing out from his skull in every direction. “The laws of physics were altered, mistakes were made.”
“Same shit, different day,” Amos replied and handed the pilot a carton of curried rice. “Turn the sound up. That looks like Ilus.”
Naomi turned up the sound on the video feed, and the voice of a newscaster filled the apartment. “— partial power restored, but sources on the ground say this setback will —”
“Is that real chicken?” Alex asked, grabbing at one of the cartons. “Splurgin’ a bit, are we?”
“Shush,” Amos said. “They’re talking about the colony.”
Alex rolled his eyes, but said nothing as he piled spicy strips of chicken on his plate. “— in other news, a draft report detailing the investigation into last year’s attack on the Callisto shipyards was leaked this week. While the text is not finalized, the early reports suggest that a splinter faction of the Outer Planets Alliance was involved, and places blame for the high casualty —”
Amos shut off the sound with an angry stab at the table’s controls. “Shit, wanted to hear more about what’s going on with Ilus, not some dumbass OPA cowboys getting themselves blown up.”
“I wonder if Fred knows who was behind that,” Holden said. “The OPA hardliners are having trouble getting over their ‘us against the solar system’ theology.”
“What did they want there anyway?” Alex said. “Callisto didn’t have any of the heavy munitions. No nukes. Nothing worth a raid like that.”
“Oh, now we’re expecting this shit to make sense?” Amos asked. “Gimme that naan.”
Holden sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I know it makes me a naïve idiot, but after Ilus I actually thought we might get a moment’s peace. No one needing to blow anyone else up.”
“This is what that looks like,” Naomi said, then stifled a burp and put her chopsticks down. “Earth and Mars are in a prickly detente, the legitimate wing of the OPA is governing instead of fighting. The colonists on Ilus are working with the UN instead of everyone shooting each other. This is as good as it gets. Can’t expect everyone to be on the same page. We’re still humans after all. Some percentage of us are always going to be assholes.”
“Truer words were never spoken, boss,” Amos said.
They finished eating and sat in companionable silence for several minutes. Amos pulled beers out of the small refrigerator and handed them around. Alex picked his teeth with his pinky fingernail. Naomi went back to her repair projections.
“So,” she said after a few minutes poring over the numbers, “the good news is that even if the UN and the OPA decide that we’re responsible for our own repair bills, we’ll be able to cover them with just what we have in the ship’s emergency fund.”
“Lots of work flyin’ colonists out through the rings,” Alex said. “When we’re flyin’ again.”
“Yeah, because we can stuff so much compost in our tiny cargo hold,” Amos said with a snort. “Plus, broke-as-hell-and-desperate is maybe not the customer base we should be chasing.”
“Let’s face it,” Holden said, “if things keep going the way they are, finding work for a private warship may get pretty tough.”
Amos laughed. “Let me get a preemptive I-told-you-so in here. Since when that turns out not to be true, like it always does, I might not be there to say it.”
Chapter Two: Alex
The thing Alex Kamal liked most about the long haul was how it changed the experience of time. The weeks – sometimes months – spent on the burn were like stepping out of history into some small, separate universe. Everything narrowed down to the ship and the people in it. For long stretches, there would be nothing but the basic maintenance work to do, and so life lost all its urgency. Everything was working according to the plan, and the plan was for nothing critical to happen. Traveling through the vacuum of space gave him an irrational sense of peace and well-being. It was why he could do the job.
He’d known other people, usually young men and women, whose experience was different. Back when he’d been in the Navy there had been a pilot who’d done a lot of work in the inner planets, running between Earth, Luna, and Mars. He’d transferred in for a trip out to the Jovian moons under Alex. Just about the time an inner planet run would have ended, the young man started falling apart: getting angry over trivial slights, eating too much or not at all, passing restlessly through the ship from command center to engine room and back again like a tiger pacing its cage. By the time they’d reached Ganymede, the ship’s doctor and Alex agreed to start putting sedatives in the guy’s food just to keep things from getting out of hand. At the end of the mission, Alex had recommended the pilot never be assigned a long run again. Some kinds of pilots couldn’t be trained as much as tested for.
Not that there weren’t stresses and worries that he carried with him. Ever since the death of the Canterbury, Alex had carried a certain amount of baseline anxiety. With just the four of them, the Rocinante was structurally undercrewed. Amos and Holden were two strong masculine personalities that, if they ever locked horns, could blow the crew dynamic apart. The captain and the XO were lovers, and if they ever broke up, it would mean the end of more than just the job. It was the same sort of thing he’d always worried about, whatever crew he was with. With the Roci, it had been the same worries for years now without any of them ever being how it went off the rails, and that in itself was a kind of stability. As it was, Alex always felt relieved to get to the end of a run and he always felt relieved to start the next one. Or if not always, at least usually.
The arrival at Tycho Station should have been a relief. The Roci was as compromised as Alex had ever seen her, and the shipyards at Tycho were some of the best in the system, not to mention the friendliest. The final disposition of their prisoner from New Terra was now soundly someone else’s problem, and he was off the ship. The Edward Israel, the other half of the New Terran convoy, was burning its way safely sunward. The next six months were nothing but repair work and relaxation. By any rational standard, there should have been less to worry about.
“So what’s bugging you?” Amos asked.
Alex shrugged, opened the little food refrigeration unit that the suite provided, closed it, shrugged again.
“Something’s sure as shit bugging you.”
“I know.”
The lights had the yellow-blue clearness that mimicked early morning, but Alex hadn’t slept. Or not much. Amos sat at the counter and poured himself a cup of coffee. “We’re not doing one of those things where you need me to ask you a bunch of questions so you can get comfortable talking about your feelings, are we?”
Alex laughed. “That never works.”
“So let’s not do it.”
On the burn, Holden and Naomi tended to fold in on each other, not that either of them noticed doing it. It was a natural pattern for lovers to take more comfort in one another than in the rest of the crew. If it had been different, Alex would have been worried about it. But it left him and Amos with mostly one another as company. Alex prided himself on being able to get along with almost anyone on a crew, and Amos was no exception. Amos was a man without subtext. When he said he needed some time alone, it was because he needed some time alone. When Alex asked if he wanted to come watch th
e newly downloaded neo-noir films out of Earth that he subscribed to, the answer was always and only a response to the question. There was no sense of backbiting, no social punishment or isolation games. It just was what it was, and that was it. Alex wondered sometimes what would have happened if Amos had been the one to die on the Donnager, and he’d spent the last few years with their old medic, Shed Garvey.
It probably wouldn’t have gone as well. Or maybe Alex would have adjusted. Hard to know.
“I’ve been having dreams that… bother me,” Alex said.
“Nightmares, like?”
“No. Good dreams. Dreams that are better than the real world. Where I feel bad waking up from them.”
“Huh,” Amos said thoughtfully and drank his coffee.
“Have you ever had dreams like that?”
“Nope.”
“The thing is, Tali’s in all of them.”
“Tali?”
“Talissa.”
“Your ex-wife.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “She’s always there and things are always… good. I mean, not like we’re together. Sometimes I’m back on Mars. Sometimes she’s on the ship. She’s just present, and we’re good, and then I wake up and she’s not here and we aren’t. And…”
Amos’ brow lowered and his mouth rose, squeezing his face into something smaller and thoughtful.
“You want to hook back up with your ex?”
“No, I really don’t.”
“You horny?”
“No, they’re not sex dreams.”
“You’re on your own, then. That’s all I got.”
“It started back there,” Alex said, meaning on the other side of the rings, orbiting above New Terra. “She came up in conversation, and ever since then… I failed her.”
“Yup.”
“She spent years waiting on me, and I just wasn’t the man I wanted to be.”
“Nope. You want some coffee?”
“I really do,” Alex said.
Amos poured a cup for him. The mechanic didn’t add sugar, but knew to leave a third of the cup for cream. One of the little intimacies of crew life.
“I don’t like how I left things with her,” Alex said. It was a simple statement, and not revelation, but it had the weight of a confession.
“Nope,” Amos agreed.
“There’s a part of me that thinks this is a chance.”
“This?”
“The Roci being in dry dock for so long. I could go to Mars, see her. Apologize.”
“And then ditch her again in order to get back before the ship drive goes back online?”
Alex looked down into his coffee. “Leave things in a better place.”
Amos’ shrug was massive. “So go.”
A flood of objections crowded his mind. The four of them hadn’t been apart since they’d become a crew, and splitting the group now felt like bad luck. The repair crew on Tycho might need him or want him or make some change to the ship that he wouldn’t know about until it became a critical point somewhere down the line. Or worse, leaving might mean never coming back. If the universe had proved anything in these last few years, it was that nothing was certain.
The chime of a hand terminal saved him. Amos fished the device out of his pocket, looked at it, tapped the screen, and scowled. “I’m going to need a little privacy now.”
“Sure,” Alex said. “Not a problem.”
Outside their suite, Tycho Station stretched in long gentle curves. It was one of the crown jewels of the Outer Planets Alliance. Ceres was larger, and Medina Station held the weird null-zone between rings, but Tycho Station was what the OPA had taken pride in from the start. The wide sweeping lines, more like a sailing ship than any actual craft that she served, weren’t functional. The station’s beauty was a boast. Here are the minds that spun up Eros and Ceres; here is the shipyard that built the largest vessel in the history of humanity. The men and women who, not so many generations ago, had braved the abyss beyond Mars for the first time were smart and powerful enough to make this.
Alex made his way down a long promenade. The people who passed him were Belters, their bodies longer than Earth standard, their heads wider. Alex himself had grown up in the relatively low Martian gravity, but even he didn’t quite match the physiology that a childhood rich in null g gave.
Plants grew in the empty spaces of the wide corridors, vines crawling up against the spin gravity as they would have against the normal pull on Earth. Children scampered through the halls, ditching school the way he had back in Londres Nova. He drank his coffee and tried to cultivate the peace of being on the burn. Tycho Station was just as artificial as the Roci. The vacuum outside its hull was no more forgiving. But the calm wouldn’t come. Tycho Station wasn’t his ship, wasn’t his home. These people walking past him as he went to the common area and looked up through the massive and multilayered clear ceramic at the glittering spectacle of the shipyards weren’t his family. And he kept wondering what Tali would have thought of all this. If she could have come to a place that saw the beauty in it the way he hadn’t been able to with the life she’d wanted on Mars.
When he hit the bottom of his cup, he turned back. He ambled along with the flow of foot traffic, making way for the electric carts and exchanging the small, civilized courtesies in the polyglot linguistic catastrophe that was the Belter argot. He didn’t think too much about where he was going until he got there.
The Roci lay half-dressed in the vacuum. With the outer skin cut away and her inner hull shining fresh in the work lights, she looked small. The scars of their adventures had, for the most part, been borne by the outer hull. Those scars were gone now, and only the deeper injuries remained. He couldn’t see them from here, but he knew what they were. He’d been on the Rocinante as long as he’d been on any ship in his career, and he loved her better than any of them. Even than his first.
“I’ll be back,” he said to the ship, and as if in answer, a welding rig lit up at the curve of her drive cone, brighter for a moment than the unshielded sun in a Martian sky.
The suite Naomi and Holden shared was just down the corridor from the one where he and Amos slept, its door with the same homey fake wood texturing and the number set into the wall just as bright. Alex let himself in, stepping into the conversation already going on.
“— if you think it’s called for,” Naomi said, her voice coming from the suite’s main room. “But I think the evidence is pretty strong that you cleaned the last of that out. I mean, Miller hasn’t been back, has he?”
“No,” Holden said, nodding to Alex. “But just the idea that we had some of that goo in the ship for so long and didn’t even know it creeps me out. Doesn’t it creep you out?”
Alex held out his coffee cup, and Holden took it and filled it automatically. No sugar, room for cream.
“It does,” Naomi said, coming to the kitchen. “Just not enough to take the whole damned bulkhead out over it. The replacements are never as strong as the originals. You know that.”
Alex had met Naomi Nagata back on the Canterbury. He could still see the rawboned, angry girl who Captain McDowell had introduced as their new junior engineer. She’d hidden behind her hair for almost a year. Now, she had the first few threads of white among the black. She stood taller, more at home in her own skin. Surer of herself and stronger than he would have guessed she could be. And Holden, the swaggering, self-impressed executive officer who swept into civilian work wearing his dishonorable discharge like a boast had become this man handing him the cream and cheerfully admitting the irrationality of his fears. Time had changed all of them, he supposed. Only he wasn’t sure how he had been affected. Too close to the question, he guessed.
Except Amos. Nothing changed Amos.
“What about you, Alex?”
He grinned and let his Mariner Valley drawl thicken. “Well, shoot, I figure it didn’t kill us when it was here, it ain’t gonna kill us now it’s gone.”
“Fine,” Holden said with a sigh.
“It’ll save us money,” Naomi said, “and we’ll be better off.”
“I know,” Holden said. “But I’m still going to feel weird about it.”
“Where’s Amos?” Naomi asked. “Is he still catting around?”
“No,” Alex said. “He hit the brothels hard enough to burn through his petty cash the first few days in port. Since then, we’ve just been passing the time.”
“We’ll need to find something to keep him busy while we’re on Tycho,” Holden said. “Hell, we’ll need to find something to keep all of us busy.”
“We could look for work on the station,” Naomi said. “I don’t know what they’re hiring for.”
“We’ve got offers from a half-dozen places for paid debriefings on New Terra,” Holden said.
“So does every other person that came back through the Ring,” Naomi said, laughter in her voice. “And the feed there and back still works.”
“You’re saying we shouldn’t do it?” Holden said, his tone vaguely hurt.
“I’m saying I can find a lot of things I’d rather get paid for than talking about myself.”
Holden deflated, just a little. “Fair point. But we’re stuck here for a long time. We’re going to have to do something.”
Alex took a deep breath. Here it was. The moment. His resolve wavered. He poured the cream into the cup, the blackness of the coffee resolving into a gentle tan. The lump in his throat felt as big as an egg.
“So,” he said. “I’ve… ah… I’ve been thinking about things —”
The suite door opened and Amos stepped in. “Hey, Cap’n. I’m gonna need some time off.”
Naomi tilted her head, her brows coming together, but it was Holden who spoke.
“Time off?”
“Yeah, I got to go back to Earth for a little bit.”
Naomi sat at the stool by the breakfast bar. “What’s the matter?”
“Don’t know,” Amos said. “Maybe nothing, but I kinda need to go look to find out. Be sure. You know.”
“Is anything wrong?” Holden asked. “Because if it’s a thing, we can wait for the Roci to be fixed up, and we can all go together. I’ve been looking for an excuse to get Naomi back down to Earth so the family can meet her.”