She hit Record.
“Captain Holden,” she said. “I’m linking you through to the data on an unauthorized transit from Freehold to Auberon that occurred today. I’m also giving you access to the security review of the Freehold system. It’s not much. One habitable planet a little smaller than Mars, another one that’s exploitable as long as you don’t mind too much nitrogen and cyanide in your air. The governor of Freehold is named ….”
She checked the records and coughed with contempt and laughter.
“Payne Houston. I’m assuming that’s his own choice and not what his mommy called him. Either way, I’m sending you under an executive mandate so that you can get going right now. I’ll get Emily Santos-Baca and the security committee to genuflect over this well before you get there, so we’ll be fine with that.
“Your official mission is to carry the message that Freehold’s repeated violations of Transportation Union guidelines have triggered punitive action, and that I’m banning all traffic in and out of Freehold for three years. When he asks whether it’s Earth years, the answer is yes. He’s going to make a point of that, because that’s the kind of idiot he is.
“Your unofficial mission is not to hurry. I want Freehold and all the systems like it to see a gunship moseying toward them for weeks without knowing what it’s going to do when it gets there. I’ll have my staff draw up the usual work agreement. If you can’t take the job, let me know as soon as possible. Otherwise, I’ll have you on the roster to fuel up and make transit in the next fifteen hours.”
She reviewed the message, then sent it out with a copy to Ahmed McCahill, the chair of the security committee. Then it was an executive request to push the Rocinante to the head of the resupply and transit authorization queues. And then Vaughn was knocking discreetly at her door.
He took her grunt as permission to come in, which it was.
“Secretary-General Li is asking whether you’re indisposed, ma’am,” he said. “He’s getting concerned.”
She checked the time. Her hour’s respite had ended twenty minutes ago.
“Tell him I’m on my way,” she said. “And do I have a change of clothes?”
“In the closet, ma’am,” Vaughn said as he slipped out the door again, quiet as a phantom. Drummer changed quickly, shedding the formal jacket and slacks for a bamboo-silk blouse and self-tailoring skirt with a neural net woven into it that was about as intelligent as an insect just to keep the drape right. She considered herself in the mirror with a certain satisfaction. She only wished Saba were here to accompany her. But he’d probably make too many consort-of-the-queen jokes. She shut down the mirror, its screen defaulting back to the image of Earth.
The planet was over half in darkness now, a crescent of white and blue. Belters had tried to kill the Earth, but here it was still spinning. They’d tried to burn the inner planets’ ships, and here was the EMC navy, scraped back together and flying.
And on the other hand, Earth had tried to choke the Belters under its boot for generations, and here was Drummer. Time had made them allies in the great expansion of civilization out to the stars.
At least until something else changed.
Chapter Two: Bobbie
The transit from the slow zone was behind them and Freehold was still weeks away, but an atmospheric landing in a ship as old as the Rocinante wasn’t the trivial thing it had once been. Age showed up in unexpected ways. Things that had always worked before failed. It was something you prepared for as much as you could.
Bobbie squinted at a wall panel on the engineering deck and watched as a long list of data scrolled by, ending with the ship’s reassurance that it could handle at least one more descent without burning up.
“All greens on the atmospheric braking thrusters,” Bobbie said.
“Hmmm?” Alex’s sleepy drawl replied from the panel.
“You awake up there? This is your damn landing prep list. I’m down here doing the work. Could at least seem interested.”
“Yeah, not sleepin’,” the pilot replied, “just got my own list of shit to do.” She could hear his smile.
Bobbie closed the diagnostic screen. Verifying the status on the thrusters was the last item on her work order. And short of putting on a suit and climbing outside to physically look into the nozzles, there wasn’t much more she could do.
“I’m going to do some housekeeping, then head up,” she said.
“Mmhm.”
Bobbie put her tools away and used a mild solvent to wipe up some lubricant she’d spilled. It smelled sweet and pungent, like something she’d have cooked with back when she’d been living alone on Mars. Anxiety pushed her toward preparing more for the mission even after she was prepared. In the old days, this was when she’d have cleaned and serviced her power armor again and again and again until it became a kind of meditation. Now, she went through the ship the same way.
She’d lived on the Rocinante for more years now than anyplace else. Longer than her childhood home. Longer than her tour in the Marines.
The engineering deck was Amos country, and the mechanic kept a tidy shop. Every tool was in its place, every surface spotless. Other than the oil and solvent, the only other smell in the compartment was the ozone scent that hinted at powerful electricity coursing nearby. The floor vibrated in time with the fusion reactor on the deck below, the ship’s beating heart.
On one bulkhead, Amos painted a sign that read:
SHE TAKES CARE OF YOU
YOU TAKE CARE OF HER
Bobbie patted the words as she walked by and climbed onto the ladder lift that ran up the center of the ship. The Roci was at a very gentle 0.2 g braking burn, and there had been a time when riding the lift instead of climbing the ladder would have felt like admitting defeat, even if the ship was burning ten times that hard. But for the last couple years Bobbie’s joints had been giving her trouble, and proving to herself that she could make the climb had stopped mattering as much.
It seemed to her that the real sign you were getting old was when you stopped needing to prove you weren’t getting old.
The hatches separating each deck slid open at the lift’s approach, and then quietly closed after she’d passed. The Roci might be a decade or two past her sell-by date, but Clarissa tolerated no sticking or squeaking on her ship. At least once a week, Claire made a complete pass through every environmental system and pressure hatch. When Bobbie had mentioned it to Holden, he’d said, Because she broke the ship once, and she’s still trying to fix it.
The lift hummed to a stop on the ops deck, and Bobbie stepped off. The hatch up to the cockpit was open. Alex’s brown and almost entirely bald head poked up over the back of the pilot’s crash couch. The crew spent most of their working time in Operations, and the air felt subtly different. Long hours spent in the crash couches meant the smell of sweat never entirely went away, no matter how hard the air recyclers worked. And, like any room James Holden spent a lot of time in, the comfortable scent of old coffee lingered.
Bobbie ran a finger along the bulkhead, feeling the anti-spalling fabric crackle under the pressure. The dark-gray color had faded, and it was getting harder to tell where the fabric didn’t match because it had been damaged and patched and where it was just aging unevenly. It would need to be replaced soon. She could live with the color, but the crunching meant that it was losing its elasticity. Getting too brittle to do its job.
Both of Bobbie’s shoulders ached, and it was getting trickier to tell the difference between the one that had been explosively dislocated during hand-to-hand training years before and the one that just hurt from decades of not being gentle with her body. She’d picked up a lot of battle scars during her life, and they were getting harder and harder to differentiate from the normal damage of wearing out. Like the discolored patches on the Roci’s bulkheads, everything was just fading to match.
She climbed the short ladder up through the hatch into the cockpit, trying to enjoy the ache in her shoulders the way she’d once enjoyed the burn after an intense workout. As an old drill sergeant had told her, pain is the warrior’s friend. Pain reminds you that you aren’t dead yet.
“Yo,” Alex said as she dropped into the gunner’s chair behind him. “How’s our girl look?”
“Old, but she can still get around.”
“I meant the ship.”
Bobbie laughed and called up the tactical display. Off in the distance, the planet Freehold. The mission. “My brother always complained I spent too much time looking for metaphors.”
“An aging Martian warrior living inside an aging Martian warrior,” Alex said, the smile audible in his voice. “Don’t have to look too hard there.”
“Not too agéd to kick your ass.” Bobbie zoomed in on Freehold on their tactical screen. A mottled marble of brown continents and green oceans, with the occasional white swirl of cloud. “How long?”