“Good to meet you,” the massive man said, enfolding Alex’s hand in his grip and shaking gently. “Thank you for everything you’ve done.”
“Betcha?” Alex said.
The bed creaked as Bobbie’s brother sat at its foot. He looked sheepishly at his sister. Now that she’d said the words, Alex could see the resemblance in them. Bobbie wore the look better.
“The doctor says you’re doing well,” Ben said. “David wanted me to tell you he’s thinking of you.”
“That’s sweet, but David doesn’t think about anything but terraforming and boobs,” Bobbie said.
“I’ve cleaned out the guest room,” Ben said. “When they release you from the hospital, you’re coming to stay with us.”
Bobbie’s smile grew sharper. “I don’t actually see that happening.”
“No,” her brother said. “No, this isn’t a discussion. I told you from the beginning that Innis Shallow was a dangerous place, especially for someone living by herself. If Alex hadn’t saved you —”
“Not sure I was actually saving anyone,” Alex said, but Ben scowled and kept right on going over the words.
“— you could have been killed. Or worse.”
“Worse than killed?” Bobbie said.
“You know what I mean.”
Bobbie leaned forward, resting her elbows on h
er knees. “Yes, I do, and I think that’s bullshit too. I am in no more danger in Innis Shallow than I would be up in Breach Candy.”
“How can you even say that?” her brother demanded, his jaw slipping forward. “After what you’ve just been through, it should be obvious that…”
Alex sidestepped toward the door. Bobbie caught his eye, and the brief smile, gone as soon as it was there, was eloquent. I’m sorry and Thank you and We’ll talk about the important stuff when he’s gone. Alex nodded and retreated to the hallway, the buzz-saw tones of siblings lecturing each other following after him.
When he got back to his recovery bed, the police were waiting, and this time he gave a statement that was, at least, coherent. Even if he left some of the background issues vague.
For the most part, family was a metaphor on long-haul ships. Now and then, there’d be a group that was actually related by blood, but that was almost always Belters. On military and corporate assignments, there might be a handful of married couples, and now and then someone would have a baby. People would wind up on the same ship who were cousins. They were the exception, and the rule was that family was a way of talking about need. The need for friendship, the need for intimacy, the need for human contact that ran so deeply into the genome that anyone without it seemed not entirely human anymore. It was camaraderie writ large, a synonym for loyalty that was stronger than the concept it echoed.
Alex’s experience of real family – of blood relations – was more like having a lot of people who had all wound up on the same mailing list without knowing quite why they signed up for it. He’d loved his parents when they were alive, and he still loved his memory of them. His cousins were always happy to see him, and he was glad of their welcome and their company. Seeing Bobbie and her brother together and feeling even in that brief moment the deep and unbridgeable mismatch of character between them drove something home to Alex.
A mother could love her daughter more than life itself the way the stories told, or she could hate the girl’s guts. Or both. A sister and brother could get along or fight each other or pass by in a kind of uncomfortable indifference.
And if real relationship-by-blood shared descent could mean any of those things, maybe family was always a metaphor.
He was still thinking about it when he got to Min’s hole. Her boys and the girl that she and her husband had adopted were all there, sharing a meal of fish and noodles when he arrived, and they all greeted him like they knew him, like his injuries were important to them, like they cared. He sat at the table for a little bit, making jokes and minimizing the assault and its aftermath, but what he wanted to do – what he did as soon as his sense of etiquette allowed – was excuse himself and head back to the guest room they’d set aside for him.
A message was waiting for him from the Roci. From Holden. Seeing the familiar blue eyes and tousled brown hair was weirdly displacing. Alex felt like part of him was already on the way back to the Rocinante, and he was a little surprised not to be there already.
“Alex. Hey, hope things are going well out there, and that Bobbie is good.”
“Yeah,” Alex said to the playback. “Funny you’d ask.”
“So, I’ve been looking into this thing with missing ships? And there’s a suspicious hit out at 434 Hungaria. Any chance you have access to a ship? If you need to rent one, feel free to pull the funds from my account. I’d like you to go see if a ship named the Pau Kant is sitting out there parked and dark. Specs on the transponder code attached to this message.”
Alex paused the playback, the skin at the back of his neck tickling. Missing ships was turning into a motif to his day, and it made him uneasy. He played the rest of Holden’s message, rubbing his chin as he did it. There was a lot less to it than he wanted to know. The records on the Pau Kant didn’t show it as a Martian vessel, or anything else in particular. Alex set his hand terminal to record, saw what he looked like in the display, combed his fingers through his hair, and started the message.
“Hey, Captain. Got your thing about the Pau Kant. I was wondering if I could get a little more information about that. I’m sort of in the middle of somethin’ a mite odd myself.”
He described what had happened to him and Bobbie in lighter tones than he actually felt. He didn’t want to scare Holden when there was nothing the man could do to protect him or Bobbie. Apart from saying that the attackers seemed to have been spooked that Alex had appeared on the scene, he left out the details of Bobbie’s investigation and Avasarala’s. It might have been paranoia, but transmitting that information without another couple levels of encryption seemed like asking for trouble. He did ask what other ships were supposed to have gone missing, and how it might relate to Mars before he signed off.
Maybe whatever Holden was looking into was just coincidence. Maybe the Pau Kant and the missing Martian warships were totally unrelated. Wasn’t where Alex would put his money, though.