“When you catch me screwing up, I’ll stop taking doubles,” Alex said. “Until then . . .”
Caspar raised his hands in surrender, and Alex went back to his meal. Textured yeast paste and a bulb of water. It was his lunch if he was second shift, breakfast if he was third. So, in a sense, it was both.
The Storm had burned hard to get away from Laconian forces, but no one had chased it. No one dared to. To judge from the newsfeeds, most people weren’t sure what they’d done to kill the Tempest, and no one wanted to risk that they’d do it again. Which was just as well, because the more they pushed, the clearer it was how much the victory had compromised them.
Every shift found new, unexpected degradations in the Storm. Vacuum channels that weren’t transmitting power, regenerative plating that had stopped regenerating, atmosphere leaks so subtle that they couldn’t be located except as the slow and steady loss of pressure. Alex was no engineer, but he’d been on the Storm as long as any of them and in space since well before many of them had been born. When he wasn’t sleeping, he was working to keep the ship together. He stopped when exhaustion promised a fast, deep, and dreamless sleep.
It wasn’t the first time he’d used work to keep his emotions at bay. On and off his whole life, there had been times like this when the danger of feeling what he felt was too much to face. Some people got drunk or got in fights or hit the gym until they collapsed. He’d done all those things too, but with the Storm as beat up as it was, and the crew as injured and sick as many still were, this was fine. It kept him busy and it kept the ship alive.
Even so, it was imperfect. He knew he wasn’t healed, and he suspected he wasn’t even healing. The pain came in odd moments. When he was just waking up or going to sleep and his mind wandered. Then, sure. But also when he was crawling through the access spaces looking for a broken line or at the medical bay getting his daily ration of medication to keep the lining of his gut from sloughing off again. It would sneak up on him, and for a few seconds he’d be lost in his own mind, and the oceanic sorrow there.
It was about Bobbie, of course, but it spilled over. In his worst moments, he also found himself thinking about Kit’s upcoming marriage. About Holden and that terrible last run they’d had together on Medina when he’d been captured. Talissa, his first wife, and Giselle, his second one. Amos, who was the worst loss in this because he’d just vanished into the enemy lines. Alex might never know what had happened to him. All the families he’d had, and all the ways he’d lost them. It felt like too much to bear, but he bore it. And after a few minutes the worst would pass, and he could get back to work.
The passage through the ring gates into Freehold system went as well as they could have hoped. Alex let Caspar do the heavy lifting. It was going to be his job soon enough, and it was better that he get the practice. They came in hot, bent their trajectory hard for the Freehold gate, and shot back out into normal space. In theory, it was possible to hit a gate from the realspace side at the perfect angle and make the transit through the intervening space in a straight line. In practice, there was usually a little flex, but Caspar did a good job. As good as Alex could have managed. They threw a fast torpedo at the only thing that looked like a Laconian sensor array, blowing it to dust before they made their last course correction. It was as close to anonymity as they could ask without the shell game.
Freehold itself was a straightforward little system. The one habitable planet was a little smaller than Mars. Then a slightly larger one farther out with an unwelcoming atmosphere, and a series of three gas giants protecting the inner system. The Storm’s home port was there, in the shadow of the giant they called Big Brother when they were being polite and Big Fucker when they weren’t. It was a fraction larger than Jupiter back in Sol, with a blue-green swirling atmosphere and constant electrical storms that created arcs of lightning longer than the Earth was wide. Alex watched it grow close on the Storm’s scopes, saw the black dot against it that was the rocky moon where they hid. Long-dead volcanism had left lava tubes big enough to land the Storm and a small fleet like her under the lunar surface, and that’s where they were headed. Toward the permanent base of Belter engineers and underground operatives that Bobbie had called the “pit crew.”
The knock at his cabin door was polite. Even tentative. Caspar stayed in the corridor, braced with a handhold.
“Hey,” the boy said. “You coming?”
“Where to?” Alex asked.
“Bridge. You got to take us in, yeah? Tradition. A pilot retires, he takes himself to the last port.”
“What kind of tradition is that?” Alex said with a chuckle. “I’ve never heard of it before.”
“Made it up,” Caspar said. “Just now. Can’t turn that down, start your own tradition.”
“You can take us in,” Alex said. “You need the practice anyway.”
“No,” Caspar said. “It’s you or we just plow the fucking thing into the moon and call it done.”
“You’re a shit liar,” Alex said, but unbuckled himself from his crash couch all the same. “You should work on that.”
“Just like everything else,” Caspar said. And then, “You’re really going.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “I really am.”
“You were good.”
“You will be. You don’t need me here.”
He drifted out of his cabin, the light g of the braking burn making “down” a strong suggestion more than a real weight. He headed for the central lift and up to the bridge. As he floated into it for the last time, the rest of the crew braced their feet to stand at attention. Caspar, behind him, began to clap, and the others joined in. By the time Alex reached the pilot’s station, his eyes were damp enough to obscure his display.
“On your order, Captain,” he said.
“Bring us in, Mr. Kamal,” Jillian said.
The actual landing was easy, from a technical perspective. Even as injured as it was, the Storm knew where the walls around it were, and where the encrustation of human structures would be. Alex felt a great weight falling away from his heart. The custom docking clamps they’d made back when the Storm was a recently captured prize of the war slid home with something between a sound too low to hear and a shudder.
“Welcome back, reisijad,” the Belter-inflected voice said over the comms. “Looks like you fucked your ship pretty good?”
“It’ll give you lazy fuckers something to do,” Jillian said, the way Bobbie would have. Same inflection and all. It seemed right in a way Alex couldn’t quite describe that the girl had paid so much attention to how Bobbie ran things. Even when they were gone, the next generation up would keep echoes of them.
The shuttle to Freehold was a single-hulled transport called the Drybeck. It had begun its life as an ore hauler and been retrofitted sometime in the last twenty years. The company that had owned it had a color scheme of green and yellow, and the ghost of its logo still haunted the bulkheads on the bridge. Its drive was small and touchy, prone to stutter when the burn changed, and limited by a tiny reaction mass tank. The hold was lined with crash couches, and the half dozen of the crew most compromised by the death of the Tempest were coming home more as cargo than companions.
The long fall down from the gas giants passed through the area that would have been the most trafficked space in Sol system. Hundreds of ships would have moved between Saturn and Jupiter and the inner planets. Maybe half a dozen did the same in Freehold. Alex plotted the course with a growing sense of the emptiness of the system that mere decades couldn’t fill. It was too big. All of it was too big. He’d been there from the beginning, been part of blazing humanity’s trail to the stars, and he still couldn’t quite get his mind around how vast the spaces were.
He was surprised when, a few minutes before departure, Jillian came to the little bridge and sat in the couch beside his without buckling in.
“You coming down with us?” Alex asked.
Jillian looked at him for a long moment without speaking. She looked older than he thought of her as being, as if taking command, even for so short a time as this, had aged her.
“No,” she said. “The family wants to see me, and I’d like to see them too. But there’ll be time for that when the war’s over.”
I admire your optimism, Alex almost said, but the darkness was too much. He didn’t want to bring her down with his own skepticism. Instead, he nodded and made a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat.
“There’s a fast crawler waiting for you in port,” she said. “It’s got enough water, fuel, and starter yeast to get you going.”
“That’s good of you. I appreciate it.”