“It’s not altruism. Your ship,” she said. “It’s old, but it’s a gunship. Still better than most of what the underground has burning out there.”
“Maybe,” Alex said. “It could also be a nest for whatever birds live in the desert down there. That’s part of what I’m going to find out.”
“When you do, you reach out. The only people who fly solo are slingshotters and assholes. You got to have someone with your back.”
The comms clicked up. The shuttle was clear to leave. All Alex had to do was respond. He put the message on hold.
“What are you saying?” he asked.
“We’re not done,” Jillian said. “Not just that, we’re winning. Underground is going to need every ship it can get, and yours would be a good one to have on the team. If you need a crew for her, you tell me. I’ll get you one.”
Alex didn’t know what to say. The truth was, he didn’t have a plan except to get back to the Rocinante. But she was right. There was going to be an after. An after Bobbie. An after Amos. An after Holden. Whatever he was doing, he wasn’t going out there to die. Just to recover.
“I’ll let you know what it looks like,” he said. “We’ll make a plan.”
Jillian stood and held out her hand. He shook it without unstrapping.
“It’s been good,” Jillian said. “We’ve done good work.”
“We have, haven’t we?” Alex said.
After she left, he went through one last systems check. Flying single-hulled ships was a kind of gambling he usually avoided, but even if he hit a micrometeorite, they’d probably survive it. Anyway. Life was risk.
He flipped the comms back on.
“This is Drybeck,” he said. “I am confirming clearance to launch.”
“You’re still clear, Drybeck,” the voice on the other end of the connection said. “Not blowing nothing up, and no one floating out there to run into. Ge con Gott, yeah? Draper Station out.”
Draper Station, Alex thought as he eased the ship through the lava tube on its maneuvering thrusters. It was the first time he’d heard it called that. He didn’t hate the sound.
Freehold, like most goldilocks-zone planets, had a wide variety of environments. Freehold’s salt deserts were on the same continent as the lush mountains he’d hidden in when they first came and the township that had grown to be a modest city. White dunes and mesas of red stone stretched from horizon to horizon. Tent rocks rose in some places, and knife-thick ridges that could have been artifacts of alien civilizations or just beautiful geology. The dawns were warm pink, and the sunsets were green and gold. Alex didn’t know why. At night, the desert sang. High fluting tones as the temperature shift made the sand itself ring like a wineglass.
The fast crawler was mostly autonomous, and it took its navigation from the time and the position of the sun like an ancient sea captain on Earth. There was no signal coming in or going out that would give Alex’s position away. The transport’s wide titanium-and-rubber treads made the trackless badlands easier to cover than the simplest flight in a ship. The solitude was vast and consoling. He’d expected to feel lonely on the trip, but he wasn’t. The effort of being okay around the crew of the Storm had, it turned out, been exhausting. He hadn’t even known he was making the effort until he didn’t have to anymore. He slept in the little bunk in the crawler’s belly and spent his days sitting on top of the machine watching the sun and sky and stars and didn’t even listen to the music he’d brought with him.
Twice, huge shambling animals with legs like slender trees and coats like yellow moss had walked with him for a while. The second had been with him almost half a day before it cooed three times and turned away. As far as he knew, he was the only human being who’d ever seen them.
He’d wondered more than once why Naomi had chosen to live in a hidden shipping container, but now, here, he thought he understood. The pleasure of being utterly alone made his mourning into something different and strange and humane.
The cave where they’d put the Roci was in the western quarter of the desert. He’d picked it because it was near a patchwork of radioactive ore that added a little camouflage if the enemy was looking for it and acted as a landmark for him.
The fears that haunted him now were that the Roci wouldn’t be waiting for him. That the shelf he’d parked her under had collapsed in his absence. Or that the sealants they’d put on to protect the hull plating had broken down or been compromised by desert animals, exposing a ship built for vacuum to the erosion of wind and sand and salt. As the hours fell away, his anxiety started to grow. The peace of the desert rolled past until the crawler reached the edge of its automatic course and came to a shuddering halt beside a vast outcropping of stone.
Alex took a flask of water and a cloth to tie across his mouth and dropped to the salt-rich sand. The shade under the stone was cool. He followed the tracks of glass where the Roci’s thrusters had melted the sand, it felt like lifetimes before.
And there, dark and quiet and perfectly intact at the back of the cavern, was the old Martian corvette. Something had scratched at the sealant—maybe animals, maybe the sandblasting desert wind—but nothing had broken through. It was just his imagination that made him feel like the ship was welcoming him. He knew that. It didn’t matter.
It took the better part of a day to cut through the sealing coat and get the airlock answering him, but after that, things moved faster. They’d drained the water out of the tanks before they left, but the crawler’s supplies were enough to get the ship almost halfway to capacity. Getting the recycling system back online was harder. He spent half a day checking feed lines before he found the one that had split. And it took another half a day to replace it. It would have taken Naomi or Amos or Clarissa half an hour.
He didn’t sleep in the crawler anymore, especially once the Roci’s galley was able to turn out a little food. With his limited supplies, the food was spartan and the drinks were water and green tea. The ship was lying belly-down on the ground, everything was at ninety degrees from where his mind wanted it to be, and he had to climb to get to his cabin and his crash couch.
Lost as he was in the work of hauling his old ship back to herself, he could almost pretend he was waiting for his old crew. That they’d be there in the machine shop and the flight deck, laughing and arguing and rolling their eyes like they had before. A week into the effort, he’d exhausted himself and fallen onto his couch without eating dinner. He found himself slipping between dreams and wakefulness, hearing their voices in the hallway. Clarissa’s dry whisper and Holden’s earnest concern like they were really there, and if he just concentrated, he’d be able to make out the words. The alert tone as the airlock opened and familiar footsteps in the halls.
When the silhouette bent into his doorway, he still thought he was dreaming. It was the sound of a living voice, the first since he’d left Freehold, that brought him back to himself.
“Hey,” Naomi said.
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Naomi
Hey,” Naomi said.
Alex shifted in his crash couch, and the hiss of the gimbals was like something made from memory. He blinked at her, confused and sleep drunk.
“No shit?” he said.
“No shit,” Naomi said.
“No, no, no. I just . . . I didn’t know you were coming.” They were simple words. Commonplace. They carried a heavy weight.
Time and tragedy had thinned Alex’s face and darkened the skin under his eyes. His smile was joyful, but it was a bruised kind of joy. The pleasure and delight that could only come to someone who understood how precious they were, and how fragile. She figured that she looked the same.
“I got your message about heading back here, and . . . well, I had some other plans, but the more I thought about it, the more sense coming back to the Roci made.”
“Thought about it a lot, eh?”
“Ten, maybe fifteen whole seconds,” she said.
Alex barked out a laugh and hauled himself up. She stepped into the cabin, and they embraced. The last time they’d touched had been on the deep transfer station back in Sol. There had been three of them.
After a moment, they stepped back. She was surprised by how good it felt to see Alex in the familiar environment of the Rocinante, even if the ship was ninety degrees from her usual orientation.
“How’d you get here?” he asked, still grinning.
“I have a crackerbox with an Epstein,” Naomi said. “From Auberon to here. It’s not rated for atmosphere, though, so I parked it at the transfer station and hitched a lift down on a shuttle.”
“Planetside again.”
“And my knees already hate it. But I’m in a ship, so it’s not too strange,” she said. “You’re never going to convince me that this whole ‘sky’ thing isn’t fucking creepy. I like my air held in by something I can see, thank you very much.”