He shrugged. “One thing and another. Good to be back, though.”
The lift stopped, and she stepped off. Amos followed just a step behind. “You’re different.”
“Yup,” he said, smiling amiably. It was such an unmistakably Amos-like thing to say. Such a familiar way to say it.
“Did the bomb fail?” she asked.
“Nope, it was fine.”
“So why didn’t you follow through on the mission? No blame, but . . . What was your thinking there?”
Amos went still for a moment, like he was listening to something she couldn’t hear.
“I met the kid,” Amos said. “Seemed kind of shitty killing her. I thought maybe it was the wrong call.” He shrugged.
Naomi stepped over and put her arms around him. It was like hugging a metal strut. “Good to have you back.”
Alex and Holden were at the interior door to the airlock. Alex had changed into an MCRN uniform. An artifact from another age. Jim was in a white formal shirt. He’d washed his hair and combed it back. He looked distinguished and somber.
The coffin in the airlock was just a shell, hardly more than a body bag with slightly hardened sides. And it was empty.
“This is way we always did it,” Alex said now that they were together. “When we’d lost someone and couldn’t recover the body. We’d still take the moment.”
He cast his eyes to the deck. Jim did the same. Amos put on the same somber face he always did at moments like this. A flood of complex feelings washed through her. Sorrow and joy, relief and the emptiness of a loss that would never be made whole.
Alex cleared his throat and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Bobbie Draper was one of my best friends. She was a Marine right down to her bones. Anything else she did was built on that. She was brave and honorable, and she was strong. She made a hell of a captain. I remember when Fred Johnson tried to make her into an ambassador back in the day, and she kept calling it the way she saw it instead of playing politician. She was always like that. She took on the impossible, and she made it work.”
He took a deep breath, opened his mouth like he was going to go on, then closed it again and shook his head. Jim was weeping now too. And so was she. Amos’ newly black eyes shifted like he was reading something in the air, and he lifted his chin.
“She was a badass,” he said, then paused and nodded, satisfied.
“She will be missed,” Naomi said. “From now on. And forever.”
They stood in silence for a moment, and then Jim stepped forward and cycled the exterior door. When it was open, the little chemical boosters on the coffin slid it to the edge of the lock. And then it was gone. Jim cycled the lock closed again, turned, and stepped in, putting his arms around her and Alex. A moment later, the solid mass of Amos’ arms looped around her too. The four of them held each other there with the hum and rumble of the Rocinante around them. They stayed there for a long time.
The elements of her little ragtag fleet that had been closest to the ring gate were through long before the Roci was even halfway through the system. Alex kept them at a punishing burn, balancing the reaction mass they still had and the distance to a friendly resupply depot in Gossner system. If they took breaks a little more often than during the dive into the system and burned a little less heavily, it was to conserve mass and because the Whirlwind and her cohort of destroyers were parked close in to Laconia, still knocking down the torpedoes and long-arc rocks that Naomi’s people had flung at the planet. Three days into their burn toward the gate, someone somewhere had grown the balls to issue an order, and the Whirlwind flung half a dozen torpedoes at the retreating Roci. The PDCs took them all down, and no more followed.
When they were burning, Naomi used the time to calculate a safe transit schedule and tightbeam it to the other ships. From the start of the campaign to its end, they’d lost thirty-two ships, and just shy of two hundred lives. They had retrieved Jim and Amos, taken in Teresa Duarte, and destroyed the mechanism of production that Laconia depended on for its high-powered fleet. The Whirlwind was still a massive killing machine capable of taking control of any system it chose. But it was only one ship. It couldn’t attack through any of the ring gates without leaving Laconia underprotected. It was pinned.
The Storm reached the gate and sent back a formal salute to Naomi before it passed through. Jillian Houston taking her ship back to Draper Station and waiting for new orders. That was a strange thought. Naomi had spent so much of her mental energy and focus on winning the battle she’d almost forgotten about everything that came after. Freedom from Laconia didn’t—couldn’t—mean a return to de facto rule by the Transport Union. For one thing, Medina Station was gone and no one would be setting up a permanent base in the ring space again. For another, Laconia had replaced the structures of trade and control with its own.
But still, there were ways. There wouldn’t be a choke hold on the ring space the way there had been, but there could be a network of cheap, easily replaced relays that announced incoming and outgoing traffic. Ships could know, at least, what the chances were of going dutchman before they made the transit. There weren’t many people who’d choose to go through a ring gate if they knew they wouldn’t come out the other side. Give the people enough information, and they’d be able to make the right decisions on their own. That was a problem for later, though. For the moment, she could watch the drive plumes of the ships that had broken Laconia touch the gate and escape, one after another, and think to herself, Safe. Safe. Safe.
In the breaks between the hard burns, the crew celebrated and, unfortunately, fought. In the tension before the attack, Ian Kefilwe and another young man—an engineer named Safwan Cork—had fallen into bed together and were now negotiating the difficult romantic territory of having survived. She tried to keep out of it, but once she saw Jim sitting with Ian in one of the now-empty torpedo bays, listening while the young man wept. It seemed right.
The ship was only about three hundred thousand kilometers out from the ring gates, and the remaining burns were all braking, making sure that when they did the transit, they had time on the far side to maneuver and not just slam into the other side of the sphere and vanish. The Laconian forces hadn’t come after them. Not even to throw more long-range torpedoes.
Teresa Duarte was an astounding beast of a human being. Naomi tried to make a connection with her, but only once. They were in a pause, Alex making a gentle quarter g, and Naomi was getting dinner. It still felt strange to her, seeing the galley full. In her mind, there were still only six crew on the Roci.
Teresa was by herself, leaning against one of the walls, a bowl of noodles in one hand and chopsticks in the other. Her hair was braided back, and it made her face look harsher than usual. No one was sitting with her. No one was speaking to her. Probably because no one knew what to say.
Naomi served herself a bowl of white kibble and sat down across from the girl. Teresa looked up, and there was a flash of outrage before she reined herself in.
“Is this okay?” Naomi asked.
“It’s your ship. You get to sit where you want.”
“Got to be a little strange, being someplace like this, yeah?”
Teresa nodded. Naomi took a bite of her kibble and wondered if they were going to sit in silence. Teresa shook her head. “There are people everywhere. And there’s nowhere to go. Back home I could be alone. No one’s ever alone out here.”
“There are ways,” Naomi said, thinking of her cargo container. “But there are usually fewer people here. It does get a little full.”
“You should have a crew of twenty-two.”
“We usually made do with six. Sometimes four.”
“I don’t like it here,” Teresa said, standing up. “I’ll want to find someplace else once we leave.”
She walked away without saying anything else. She didn’t put her uneaten bowl in the recycler, so when Naomi was finished with her own meal, she cleaned up after both of them, then walked down the corridor to her cabin.
To theirs.
Jim was in the crash couch. His jumpsuit was drenched in sweat at the armpits and down the back. He looked at her and shook his head.
“I will never, ever get this out of shape again,” he said. “This is miserable.”
“You’ll get better,” she said, and lay down beside him. The couch shifted to account for her added weight. Every time she saw him, she felt herself not quite trusting it. Not quite letting herself believe he was really back, in case it was all a dream or a false reprieve. As if the universe would take him away from her again. It was getting better, but she wasn’t sure it would ever completely go away.
“I saw your friend in the galley,” she said. “She’s having some trouble adjusting, I think.”