“We’re seeing all enemy weapons platforms in the hemisphere disabled,” a young man said. “We have a half-hour window before anything cycles to this side of the planet.”
“Go,” Naomi said. “We have a pickup to make on the surface.”
They were silent long enough Naomi thought she might have lost the connection.
“We’re your escort, Rocinante. Do what you need to do, we’ll be here. If we were rated for atmo, we’d go with you.”
“Negative, Quinn,” Naomi said. “Burn for the gates. That’s an order.”
A moment later, the Quinn’s drive plume bloomed out bright and huge, and the Rocinante was left alone in the wide sky over Laconia. Naomi looked around her. There was smoke in the air, but no alarms were going off. Her crash couch had pushed one of her medical alarms back to normal, but the other two showed elevated cortisol and blood pressure. No one was shooting at her, and it felt strange.
“Alex?” she said. “Are we ready to go down?”
“Checking,” he said. “That debris hit fucked up our aerodynamics, but… I can make it work. It’ll be choppy as hell.”
“Can’t scare me,” Naomi said. “Get us down. As soon as you can.”
Below them, Laconia was in night. There was a beauty to it. Apart from a faint bioluminescence where the distant sea met the shore, the land was dark. The only light was shrouded by clouds. This was what Earth would have looked like, more or less, before the first electric light. Before the first satellite, the first orbital shuttle. Before Mars. Before Ceres. Before the Belt. It was the heart of a galactic empire, and still as bare as wilderness. Auberon and Bara Gaon had more cities. Earth had more history. Every place had the dream of what it could become.
Dreams were fragile things to build with. Titanium and ceramic lasted longer.
“Captain?”
She looked over at Ian. He was a boy. He was probably older than she’d been when the Canterbury died and she’d first set foot on the Rocinante, and he was just a boy.
“Kefilwe,” she said.
“I was wondering if I could take the comms controls back,” he said. “I… It’s my duty. If you…”
“Sorry,” Naomi said, shifting them back to his station. “Old habit. That was rude.”
“Just trying to feel useful,” he said through a tentative smile.
“All right,” Alex said. “We’re as close as we’re going to get. And more time won’t help us.”
“Take us down,” Naomi said. The maneuvering thrusters fired, slowing the ship and letting it drop. Alex turned them back toward the cloud-blanketed city already carried hundreds of klicks away by the planet’s rotation, tilted down the nose, and tapped his controls. The maneuvering thrusters roared again.
Less than a minute later, the Rocinante hit air.
Chapter Forty-Eight: Teresa
Teresa pushed through the cold and the darkness of the flood channel, hunched down. A slush of almost frozen water and slime soaked her shoes and the hem of her pants. Clearing the entrance had numbed her hands, and now her fingers were starting to hurt. Not bringing gloves when she left only felt like the most recent in a long line of terrible choices.
Behind her, Muskrat whined.
“I told you to go back,” Teresa said, but the dog ignored her. If anything she stayed closer. And behind Muskrat, the heavy footsteps and rough breath of James Holden.
The slush under her feet grew thicker, more solid. A few more steps, and she was standing on solid ice.
“We’re almost there,” she said.
“There?”
“The other side of the flood channel.”
“Is that the pickup?”
“No, we have to get to the mountain.”