He lifted his left hand. A second satchel. “They paid in beer and curried goat. I’ve got a little cook fire started outside. It’s going to be great.”
Naomi started to say that she’d just eaten, but the joy in Alex’s eyes was infectious. She swung herself up to sitting. “On my way,” she said.
The moons weren’t shining in the valley when she reached the airlock, but Alex’s little cook fire was glowing happily next to the landing strut, and the stars glittered between the floating vines above them. They burned dried-out vines and the shed carapaces of huge, slow-moving animals that lived in shallow caves all up and down the valley. The smoke was pale and fragrant. The shards of carapace popped and cracked now and then, sending little sprays of spark up with the smoke to vanish as they cooled. The smoke kept away the night hoppers—tiny, nocturnal insect-like animals that usually found humans fascinating.
Alex had two skewers of meat dripping grease and curry onto the flames, and Naomi had to admit that they smelled better than kibble. She sat with her back against the landing strut. Alex took a bottle from his satchel, opened its neck, and passed it over. The beer was cold and rich and more biting than she’d expected.
“Robust,” she said.
“Danielle likes a higher proof than some brewers,” Alex said with a smile as he leaned back to look at the vines and the sky beyond them.
“Seems like you’re getting along well with the locals.”
“They’re all right,” Alex said. “Just don’t get them talking about the nature of sovereignty and you’re fine. Even then you’re all right, it’s just a conversation they’ve all had a lot. Tends to go along the ground they’ve already plowed.”
He reached over and turned the skewers. High above them, something set off one of the vine bladders, and it glowed a pale yellow-green for a moment, then went dark again.
“Good to build rapport,” Naomi said. “Freehold’s going to have to look like a polite, compliant little colony for a while.”
“No trouble. The council’s on board for an ‘enemy-of-my-enemy, hail Laconia, down with the union’ stance. For the time being anyway. I think they kind of like having us here, actually. The founding impulse of Freehold is sticking it to the government.”
“Loses some of its shine after you get elected.”
“Right?” Alex tested the curried meat with his finger, pinching and releasing fast enough that he didn’t get burned. He handed it over to Naomi. She waved it in the night air for a moment to let it cool, then took the first cube off the end and popped it in her mouth. The char on the meat was good. The spices that infused it were better. She chewed slowly, letting herself enjoy it.
“Do you think they’ll sell us out?”
“Eventually, sure,” Alex said cheerfully. “But not right away. And probably not for cheap, so long as they like us.”
Her plan was the long one. The only one, really, that made sense. Laconia’s strength seemed overwhelming. A force without weakness that nothing could ever overcome. That was an illusion. Earth had seemed like that once, when she’d been a girl scraping together a life in the Belt. It hadn’t been true then either.
They’d wait. They’d watch. They’d be small and quiet and aware. Sooner or later, Laconia would show them where it was weak. And between then and now, life. Charging batteries in exchange for beer. Making friends with the township. Working to crack open the mysteries of the Gathering Storm with Bobbie and Amos. Keeping the Rocinante in good trim, and keeping herself from falling into despair. It was enough to fill her days. It would have to be enough.
“Which one of those is Bobbie?” Alex asked.
“Hmm?”
With the second skewer, he pointed up at the night sky peeping through from behind the vines. “One of those stars isn’t a star, right? I mean, we can see her from here, can’t we?”
Naomi looked up at the little slice of stars. The galactic disk looked the same as it had in Sol system, but the constellations not quite like her own. Parallax, she knew, was how they’d started mapping which systems were on the other sides of the gates. She’d seen a map once—the splash of systems that the gates connected. Thirteen hundred stars in a galaxy with three hundred billion of them. They’d been clumped together, the gate-network stars. The two farthest systems were hardly more than a thousand light-years apart. A little more than one percent of the galaxy, and still unthinkably vast.
“Look just above the ridge there,” she said, pointing. “You see where the rock looks like a bent finger? The round knuckle?”
“Yeah, I see it.”
“Track just up from that, and to the right. There are three stars almost in a row. The middle one is Bobbie.”
“Hmm,” Alex said, then went quiet. He wasn’t singing anymore, but sometimes Naomi thought she heard a few hummed notes under his breath. It was maybe five minutes before he spoke again. “I wonder which one’s Mars.”
“Sol system?” she said. “I don’t know.”
“I think about Kit,” Alex said and took another drink of his beer. “And Giselle, I guess, but more about Kit. I have a son out there. He’s just starting his own life. His adulthood. I won’t be there for it. I don’t even know that I’d be any use if I were. I mean, when I was his age, I was getting into the navy, and Earth and Mars were the biggest things in the universe. Now … I don’t know. Everything’s different. He has to find his own way.”
“That’s always how it is,” Naomi said.
“I know. Every kid has to find who they are without Mom and Dad, but—”
“History too. Mars before Solomon Epstein. Earth before the seas came up. Before there were airplanes and then after. When we figured out how to grow our own food. Everything’s always changed.”
“But up to now it wasn’t my problem,” Alex said, with an affected disconsolate buzz in his voice. They both laughed together. A half dozen of the vine bladders lit up and faded. She didn’t know what made them do that, but it was pretty. She felt a pleasant warmth growing in her belly. The beer, probably. Or the meat, since she’d eaten almost all of it despite her expectations. Or the sense of being in midnight under stars in the middle of an ocean of air that wouldn’t run out or leak away. It really was reassuring in a way that even the best station atmosphere could never quite equal.
“I think about Jim the same way,” she said. “Not that he’s beginning his adulthood, but he always wanted to take me back to Earth. To show me what living on a planet was like. Now I’m here, and I’m finding out, and he’s not.”
“He’ll be all right,” Alex said. “He always is.”
“I know,” she said aloud, but they both knew she meant Maybe.
Something crashed through the underbrush, made a high keening sound, and crashed away. They’d heard it before often enough that they both ignored it. Alex finished off the last of his beer and tucked the empty bottle back in his satchel. He levered himself up to standing and stretched his arms above him, looking like some ancient priest in the firelight.
“I should get these things hooked up,” he said, hefting the dead batteries. “I said I’d have them back tomorrow. I’ll probably take a sleep shift in town after that, if you’re all right solo?”
“That’s fine,” she said. “Bobbie sent me a new dataset. I’ll be working on that. I wouldn’t be much company anyway.”
“Should I douse the fire?”
Naomi shook her head. “I’ll do it when I go in. I think I overate. I need to just sit for a little while.”
“Right,” Alex said, and trudged over to the airlock. He lifted himself in, and she heard him starting to sing again until the door closed behind him. She lay back.
Everything changed, and it went right on changing. A terrible thought when things were good, a comforting one now. Whatever happened, she could be certain that things wouldn’t stay the way they were now. And if she stayed smart and clever and lucky, she’d be able to affect how the next change came. Or take advantage of it. She’d find Jim again, if she could just be patient enough.
One of the vines broke loose from the mountain wall and drifted along with some high breeze that she didn’t feel. She watched it blunder away to the southwest, catching on another vine for a moment, then losing its grip and floating on. Where it had been, there was a new spray of stars now, glittering from decades and centuries ago, their light only happening to fall on her here and now.
She wondered if one of them was Laconia.
Epilogue: Duarte