“What kind of tradition is that?” Alex said with a chuckle. “I’ve never heard of it before.”
“Made it up,” Caspar said. “Just now. Can’t turn that down, start your own tradition.”
“You can take us in,” Alex said. “You need the practice anyway.”
“No,” Caspar said. “It’s you or we just plow the fucking thing into the moon and call it done.”
“You’re a shit liar,” Alex said, but unbuckled himself from his crash couch all the same. “You should work on that.”
“Just like everything else,” Caspar said. And then, “You’re really going.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “I really am.”
“You were good.”
“You will be. You don’t need me here.”
He drifted out of his cabin, the light g of the braking burn making “down” a strong suggestion more than a real weight. He headed for the central lift and up to the bridge. As he floated into it for the last time, the rest of the crew braced their feet to stand at attention. Caspar, behind him, began to clap, and the others joined in. By the time Alex reached the pilot’s station, his eyes were damp enough to obscure his display.
“On your order, Captain,” he said.
“Bring us in, Mr. Kamal,” Jillian said.
The actual landing was easy, from a technical perspective. Even as injured as it was, the Storm knew where the walls around it were, and where the encrustation of human structures would be. Alex felt a great weight falling away from his heart. The custom docking clamps they’d made back when the Storm was a recently captured prize of the war slid home with something between a sound too low to hear and a shudder.
“Welcome back, reisijad,” the Belter-inflected voice said over the comms. “Looks like you fucked your ship pretty good?”
“It’ll give you lazy fuckers something to do,” Jillian said, the way Bobbie would have. Same inflection and all. It seemed right in a way Alex couldn’t quite describe that the girl had paid so much attention to how Bobbie ran things. Even when they were gone, the next generation up would keep echoes of them.
The shuttle to Freehold was a single-hulled transport called the Drybeck. It had begun its life as an ore hauler and been retrofitted sometime in the last twenty years. The company that had owned it had a color scheme of green and yellow, and the ghost of its logo still haunted the bulkheads on the bridge. Its drive was small and touchy, prone to stutter when the burn changed, and limited by a tiny reaction mass tank. The hold was lined with crash couches, and the half dozen of the crew most compromised by the death of the Tempest were coming home more as cargo than companions.
The long fall down from the gas giants passed through the area that would have been the most trafficked space in Sol system. Hundreds of ships would have moved between Saturn and Jupiter and the inner planets. Maybe half a dozen did the same in Freehold. Alex plotted the course with a growing sense of the emptiness of the system that mere decades couldn’t fill. It was too big. All of it was too big. He’d been there from the beginning, been part of blazing humanity’s trail to the stars, and he still couldn’t quite get his mind around how vast the spaces were.
He was surprised when, a few minutes before departure, Jillian came to the little bridge and sat in the couch beside his without buckling in.
“You coming down with us?” Alex asked.
Jillian looked at him for a long moment without speaking. She looked older than he thought of her as being, as if taking command, even for so short a time as this, had aged her.
“No,” she said. “The family wants to see me, and I’d like to see them too. But there’ll be time for that when the war’s over.”
I admire your optimism, Alex almost said, but the darkness was too much. He didn’t want to bring her down with his own skepticism. Instead, he nodded and made a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat.
“There’s a fast crawler waiting for you in port,” she said. “It’s got enough water, fuel, and starter yeast to get you going.”
“That’s good of you. I appreciate it.”
“It’s not altruism. Your ship,” she said. “It’s old, but it’s a gunship. Still better than most of what the underground has burning out there.”
“Maybe,” Alex said. “It could also be a nest for whatever birds live in the desert down there. That’s part of what I’m going to find out.”
“When you do, you reach out. The only people who fly solo are slingshotters and assholes. You got to have someone with your back.”
The comms clicked up. The shuttle was clear to leave. All Alex had to do was respond. He put the message on hold.
“What are you saying?” he asked.
“We’re not done,” Jillian said. “Not just that, we’re winning. Underground is going to need every ship it can get, and yours would be a good one to have on the team. If you need a crew for her, you tell me. I’ll get you one.”