“He was heading home last time I saw him,” Jillian said.
Home meant the Gathering Storm. The window for their escape was coming soon. That might have been the reason he’d gone to the ship. Or he might have been avoiding her. She’d pushed him harder than usual last time they’d talked, and she knew he avoided conflict when he could. She’d never have said it aloud, but she wished Amos or Naomi were still with them. Or even Holden. She was always a little worried that she’d break Alex without meaning to.
“I’m out,” she said, then left the shitty bar and the Laconian propaganda channel behind. Everyone else stayed behind to finish their beer and gossip. They could sense she wasn’t looking for company.
She walked through the public corridors of the station, her hands deep in her pockets, her eye on the floor ahead of her. Between her physical size and training almost from the cradle to control the space she occupied, it wasn’t easy for her to back down and look unremarkable. But it was important. They’d already been on Callisto longer than she liked, and she saw that the crew was getting used to it. They were developing favorite shitty bars, favorite brothels, barbers and coffee shops and pachinko parlors. It was normal to fit in after a while. Normal to make a life wherever you found yourself. But it was dangerous for them, because it was also how you became known, and being known too well meant they were all in prison or the pens or the grave.
At the turnoff, she used her hand terminal to unlock the service passage and ducked down into the infrastructure of the shipyard. It was a long walk through poorly heated hallways to the old OPA smugglers’ den. Her footsteps echoed along with the unsteady drip of condensate and the hum of the air recyclers. The graffiti on the walls here was ancient, much of it written in Belter creole or cipher. What little she could make out was wishing ill on the UN and the MCR. The hatreds of the past seemed almost quaint now. Just being authentic made it better than Laconia.
What are my victories? Will I leave the universe a better place than I found it?
When she was a girl, she’d thought she understood what the future would be. Improvement. Progress. She expected to serve her nation, protect the terraforming effort from the resentful Earth and the feral Belt. She knew from the time she could speak that she wouldn’t live to see humanity walking freely on the surface of Mars, but she believed she would die on a world with the spreading green of engineered moss and the aurora of a magnetosphere. The life she’d actually lived was unrecognizably different from the dream she’d had. More astounding, and more disappointing. And her sense of having a place in it was gone. She had her role, first on the Rocinante, now on the Storm. She had her people and her duty. It was Mars that had changed and darkened. It had metastasized into an empire and a grand project she wanted no part of.
She still had decades in her, if she kept her treatments and exercise regimen up. The universe she died in might still be better than the one she lived in now, but she had a hard time believing it would be better than the one she’d been born into. Too much had been lost, and what wasn’t lost was changed beyond her ability to understand it.
Her hand terminal chimed. A message from Jillian, still back at the bar. Bobbie looked at it with distrust. Jillian was a smart woman and a good fighter. Another couple decades of life might eventually convince her to build up her team instead of undermining them. The way she felt at the moment, Bobbie wasn’t sure she was in the mood to hear whatever Jillian was about to say. But she was captain, and Jillian was her XO. She thumbed the connection open. The recording had a tag that read THOUGHT YOU’D WANT TO SEE THIS. Bobbie started playing it.
The screen from the bar jumped to life. The refresh rate of the image there and the recording made a moiré pattern over the newsfeed host’s face, but not so badly that Bobbie couldn’t make her out. Or the man in the window beside her. The old man was gone, and a familiar face had replaced him. Admiral Anton Trejo of the Tempest, de facto governor of Sol system.
Bobbie stopped walking.
“—planned for months,” Trejo said.
“So your return to Laconia isn’t related to the events in the ring space?” the host
asked.
“Not at all,” Trejo said with a smile. He was about a thousand times better at lying than the host. “But I see how people would come to that conclusion. What happened with Medina was a tragedy, and I mourn the loss of life as deeply as anyone. But I have been assured by the Science Directorate and the high consul himself that the situation is under control. I’m just an old sailor heading for his next post. Nothing more dramatic than that. Vice Admiral Hogan is a good man and ready to take command. I have absolute faith in him.”
A third window opened on the screen, pushing Trejo and the host a little smaller and more masked by the interference. Vice Admiral Hogan was a serious-faced young man in Laconian blue. He could have been Caspar’s older brother.
“Well, speaking for the citizens of Sol system, I’d like to thank you for—”
The recording ended. Bobbie typed up a response with one thumb. THAT’S INTERESTING. She leaned against the wall. Trejo was leaving Sol system. Maybe was already on his way. A new officer—a Laconian officer, not an MCRN veteran—was taking command of the Tempest. It might have been enough to convince her, if she hadn’t already decided.
The Storm sat on a mobile landing platform wide enough to fit three more like her. The platform’s treads were taller than Bobbie, and designed to roll it through the massive cavern it was hiding in. Half a klick into the darkness, the passage angled up to a concealed hangar on the moon’s surface. For the moment, the ship stood tall as a tower in its gantry crane, the drive cones almost resting on the platform and the top of the ship lost in the shadows above her.
She made her way up the crane to the airlock, climbing the metal ladder hand over hand rather than calling the powered lift. When the airlock cycled open and she stepped in, she disconnected her hand terminal from the Callisto system before she synced up with the Storm. It wasn’t likely that a dual connection would give them away, but it wasn’t impossible, and every unnecessary risk was unnecessary.
The ship told her Alex was in the machine shop, and that four of her crew besides him were in various parts of the ship. All that mattered to her at the moment was that Alex was alone. This wasn’t a conversation she needed the others to hear. Not yet, anyway.
The machine shop looked less like the manufacturing workshop that the Rocinante had and more like a showroom or a spa. The cabinets were set into gently curving walls, the seams too fine to see. The light came from the walls themselves, the skin of the ship glowing softly and uniformly to make the space gentle and shadowless. Alex stood at one of the benches with a manufacturing printer that looked like it had been grown from a seed more than built. He was thinner about the middle than he’d been when he was married. What was left of his hair had gone white, and a stubble of pale whiskers marked his dark cheeks. He reminded her of the man who’d run the ice cream shop by her school when she’d been a child. He looked up at her and nodded, and the memory faded. He was only Alex again.
“Something broken?” she asked, and pointed to the printer with her chin.
“The center brace on my crash couch was showing some wear. I broke down the old piece and I’m printing up a replacement,” he said. “What brings you back to the ship?”
“I was looking for you,” she said. “We need to have a conversation.”
“I thought we might.”
“The things you said before? About why I was… reaching for something. You may have been right.”
“Thank you.”
“But you aren’t now,” she said. “The situation’s changed on us. The calculus shifted when they closed the gates.”
“There are still Transport Union ships we could meet with. The gates will open at some point. I mean, they can’t keep them closed forever, I don’t care what happened out there.”