“Naomi and I are cashing out a quarter of our shares in the ship,” he said, “with a payment plan that pays out the remainder over the next ten years. That still leaves a pretty fair balance in the operating account. The payment plan has a sliding structure, so if things get a little tight at some point, we’re not going to sink you, and if things go really well, you can also pay us out early. So there’s flexibility built in.”
He thought he was being kind. That by making things formal, it would hurt the others less. Maybe he was right. Bobbie kept glancing around the room, trying to get a sense of how they were taking it. Was Alex leaning forward on his elbows because he was feeling aggressive, or did his back just ache a little? Did Amos’ affable smile mean anything? Did it ever? Would they agree to the idea? If they didn’t, what happened then? The anxiety in her gut stung like a scrape.
“So,” Holden said. “That’s the proposal at least. I know we’ve always voted on these kinds of decisions, and if there’s anything in this that anyone wants to look at or a counterproposal that anyone wants to make …”
The silence rang out louder than a bell. Bobbie clenched her fists and released them. Clenched and released. Maybe this whole thing had been a really bad idea from the start. Maybe she should have—
Alex sighed. “Well. Can’t say I didn’t see it coming, but I’m still a little sad now it’s here.”
Naomi’s smile was a ghost, barely there and unmistakable. Bobbie felt something like the beginning of relief loosening the knot in her stomach.
“As far as putting Bobbie in the captain’s chair,” Alex went on, “that’s barely going to be a change. She already bosses me around plenty. So sure. I’m good with that.”
Holden tilted his head the way he did when he was surprised and a little embarrassed, and Naomi put her hand on his shoulder. The unconscious physical grammar of long, intimate years together.
“You saw it coming?” Holden said.
Alex shrugged. “It’s not like you’re all that subtle. You’ve been getting more and more stressed for a while now.”
“Have I been an asshole and just didn’t know?” Holden asked, making it about half a joke.
“We’d have told you,” Amos said. “But there’s this thing for the last couple years, I guess, where you kept looking like you had an itch you didn’t want anybody seeing you scratch.”
“This has been a long damned tour,” Alex said. “If I’d re-upped for another twenty back in the day, I’d be out again by now.”
“Except your navy didn’t last that long,” Amos said.
“I’m just saying a good run’s a good run. I love you two, and I’m going to miss the hell out of you, but if it’s time for something new, then it is.”
Naomi’s smile grew less ambiguous. Holden rocked back a few centimeters on the bench. In her imagination, Bobbie’s best scenarios had involved weeping and hugs. The worst, anger and recriminations. This felt like relief only slightly colored by sorrow. It felt … right.
She cleared her throat. “When we get back to Medina, I’m looking to put out a call for some new hands. So, no rush, but I’m going to need to know if I’m filling more than two couches.”
Alex chuckled. “Not mine. The one thing I think my life experience has been unambiguous about is whether I’m good outside a pilot’s station. I’m here as long as you’ll have me.”
Bobbie relaxed another notch. “Good.” She shifted toward Amos.
He shrugged. “All my stuff’s here.”
“All right. Clarissa?” Claire was looking down. Her face empty and paler than usual. She put her hands on the table, palms down like she was pressing it back into place. Like there was something that could be put back. Her smile was forced, but she nodded. She would stay.
“Well,” Holden said. “Um. All right, then. That’s … I mean, I guess that’s it. Unless someone else has something they wanted to bring up?”
“Kind of a hard act to follow,” Naomi said.
“Well, yes,” Holden said, “but I mean—”
“How about this,” Alex said, standing up. “I’m going back to my cabin and getting the Scotch I’ve been saving for a special occasion. Let’s all have a toast to Holden and Nagata. Best damn command staff a ship could hope for.”
Holden’s expression shifted and his eyes took on a shine of tears, but he was grinning. “I won’t say no,” he said, then stood.
Alex went in for the hug, and then Naomi put her long arms around them both. Bobbie looked over at Amos and pointed a thumb at the knot of three. Is this a thing we should do? Amos rose and trundled over to them, and Bobbie followed. For a long time, the crew of the Rocinante stood locked together in a long, last embrace. After a few seconds, Bobbie even felt Clarissa against her side, pressing in as soft and fleeting as a moth.
Officially, nothing changed after that. The long float before the deceleration burn toward the gate and Medina Station beyond it went the way they’d planned it. Houston, in his cell, was sullen and uncomfortable but secured. Their duties and schedules, habits and customs, all had the same shape. The only thing that had altered at all was what they meant. This had become their last run together. Bobbie felt like something in her body had shifted.
James Holden had been a strange person from the start. Before she’d ever known him, he’d been the man who’d slandered Mars. Then the one who saved it. To judge from what the greater chunk of humanity thought of him, he was an opportunistic narcissist or a hero of free speech, a tool of the OPA or the UN or a loose cannon answerable to no one. She’d seen him that way too, more than she’d known, when she took her place on the Rocinante. Since then, day by day, sometimes even hour by hour, the man and his reputation had peeled away from each other. Captain James Holden of the Rocinante was a name to conjure with. The Holden she knew was a guy who drank too much coffee, got enthusiastic about weird things, and always seemed quietly worried that he would compromise his own idiosyncratic and unpredictable morality. The two versions of him were related the way a body and its shadow were. Connected, yes. Each inextricably related to the other, yes. But not the same thing.
And now he was moving on. And Naomi with him. Losing her was a strange thought too, but different. Naomi had fought against being a persona in the greater world, always letting her lover take the stage so that she wouldn’t have to. When she stepped away, it wouldn’t change the story that other people told about the Rocinante the same way, but Bobbie was going to feel her loss more. As much as Holden was the public face of the ship, Naomi was the person Bobbie had come to trust in their practical, day-to-day lives. Whatever Naomi said was true. And if that wasn’t strictly accurate, it was close enough that Bobbie and the others relied on it with confidence.
When they were gone, nothing would be the same. Bobbie felt the sorrow in that. But, to her surprise, the joy too. She found herself going through her rounds, moving through the ship to check everything that had already been checked, marking anything that looked off—a gas pressure level that was dropping a fraction too quickly, a doorway that showed wear, a power link that was past its replacement date—and the ship itself had changed too. It was hers now. When she put her palm on the bulkhead and felt the thrum of the recyclers, it was her ship. When she woke strapped into her crash couch, even the darkness felt different.
She’d been a Marine—she would always be a Marine, even after that role didn’t fit her anymore. Becoming the captain of the Rocinante felt right for her in a way she hadn’t expected. The prospect of taking the captain’s chair had the same sense of threat and anticipation that pulling on her power armor had back in the day. It was as if her old suit had changed with time—changed as much as she had—and become a ship. A worn one, yes. Out of date, but dangerous. Scarred, but solid. Not just a metaphor of who Bobbie was but also who she wanted to become.
She believed the others—Alex, Amos, Clarissa—were as comfortable with the shift as they claimed. And before, she’d have left it at that. Before it was her ship.
Now that she was going to be captain, it was her job to check.
Amos was in the machine shop, as he usually was, paging through feeds on the strategies for keeping an old gunship like theirs flying and safe. A stubble of white along the back of his skull caught the light where he hadn’t shaved it in a couple of days. They were on the float, conserving reaction mass, but he was braced against the deck like he was anticipating a sudden change. Maybe he was, even if only out of habit. His thick, scarred hands tapped at the monitor, moving from subject to subject in the feed’s tree—lace-plating structural repair, overgrowth in microflora-based air recyclers, auto-adapting power grids. All the thousand improvements that study of the alien technologies had spun off. He understood them all. It was easy to forget sometimes the depth of focus and intelligence behind Amos’ cheerful violence.
“Hey, big man,” Bobbie said, pulling herself to a stop with one of the handholds.
“Hey, Cap’n Babs,” he said.