“You want a drink? The old girl’s not all the way up to snuff, but she can make you some tea. Maybe even some maté by now, depending on how the recyclers are doing.”
“I wouldn’t say no,” Naomi said, and then, because it felt stranger to leave it unsaid than to say it, “I am so sorry about Bobbie. I cried for a whole day.”
Alex looked down and away. His smile shifted invisibly into a mask of itself. “I still do sometimes. It’ll take me by surprise and it’s like it’s happening again, for the first time,” he said.
“Thinking about Jim does that to me.”
“You should have seen her, XO,” Alex said, and he did something between a laugh and a sob. “Like a fuckin’ Valkyrie, you know? Flying at that big-ass ship like she could take it down by herself.”
“She did. Take it down by herself, I mean.”
Alex nodded. “So did you have a plan now that you’re here?”
He couldn’t talk about it anymore. She understood that. She let the subject drop.
“I was following you,” she said, turning to climb up the deck to the main lift—a corridor for the moment. “Now that Medina and the Typhoon are gone, we could actually move between gates again.”
“That does open up some possibilities,” Alex said. “My to-do list has two things on it. First one’s put the old girl shipshape again, and the second’s figure out what to do next.”
“That sounds perfect,” Naomi said. They reached the galley. The tables projected from one wall, but there were built-in jump seats for times like this. She pulled two of them out. “Let’s do that.”
It turned out that Alex’s first entry gave her days of work to do. He’d gotten a decent start on the re-up process, but the Rocinante had been dry for a long time. Probably the longest since she’d been made by a Martian Navy that didn’t exist anymore. A lot of the systems were old, and the newer ones were replacements that didn’t ever fit together quite the way the originals had. There had been a little corrosion in the reactor shielding. Nothing that time and use didn’t justify, but something to keep an eye on. She felt herself falling into a rhythm she hadn’t known existed, and recognized perfectly. Normalcy. This was how life just was, and everything else she’d done, however comfortable she’d been with it, had been the aberration.
Day after day, she and Alex went through the ship, troubleshooting each system as it came back up. A full crew could have done the whole thing in ten hours, and there were only two of them. But they got it done—the reactor up, the comms, the power grid, the thrusters, the weapons. Some maintenance routines assumed there would be teams of four, but they found workarounds. One piece at a time, the Rocinante came back to life.
As they worked, she saw some of the ways Alex’s time on the Storm had changed him. Whether he knew it or not, he understood electrical systems better than he had before. And he’d learned some tricks about checking the stability of carbon-silicate lace plating that shaved half a day off her estimates.
At night, they slept in their old cabins. She didn’t know whether Alex went through his cabinets, but she went through hers. She’d never had much that she claimed as her own, but what little there was felt like the artifacts of some other, ancient Naomi. It was like coming across a favorite toy from childhood and being reminded of all the half-forgotten experiences that traveled with it. The shirts she’d worn that Jim had liked. The mag boots with the extra strap at the calf that helped stabilize her knee. A broken hand terminal she’d meant to fix before she went into hiding and hadn’t ever gotten around to.
There were other cabins in the ship, with other personal supplies. Things that had belonged to Amos and Bobbie. Maybe even Clarissa. Maybe Jim. The trivial leftovers of a life. She was tempted to go through those too, but she held back. She wasn’t sure yet that she’d be doing it for the right reasons, and it turned out that mattered to her.
As soon as the comms were up, the Roci started gathering covert communications from the underground. Three bottles had passed though Freehold gate since she’d left her shuttle. One from Sol, one from Asylum, one from Pátria. More would be coming. When she wasn’t working, she paged through the information and listened to the reports of the leaders of the underground. Of her underground.
It was a week and a half after her arrival, and Naomi was out, sitting on the desert sand as the sun set. The truth was that as much as she enjoyed complaining about being planetside, there was a kind of surreal thrill to being under a vast dome of air. After an hour or so, she had to go back inside or she started getting anxious. But for that first thirty minutes, it was beautiful. The sunlight seemed to sink into the sand, lighting it from within. And the star field that bloomed above her head was familiar, even if the high air made the steady stars seem to flicker and shimmer.
It felt very strange to be in such a quiet, peaceful, empty place and also the middle of a war.
She heard his footsteps on the sand, soft and regular as an air intake gently cycling. She sat up and dusted the sand from the backs of her arms. Alex was wearing his flight suit, and it hung a little loose on him. Even with his usual beaming smile, he seemed a little deflated. He grunted as he sat on the dune beside her.
“You holding together okay?” Alex asked.
“I’m all right,” Naomi said.
“Just asking because you’ve been spending a lot of time working the Roci with me, and then going straight to the reports and newsfeeds when you’re done. You haven’t taken much downtime.”
Naomi felt an old, familiar touch of annoyance, and it was strangely delightful. If Alex had started his mother hen habits back up, it had to mean he was feeling better. Not recovered, maybe never that, but improved.
“Doing the briefings is my downtime.”
“Coordinating a massive resistance to an authoritarian and galaxy-spanning empire is your hobby?”
“I didn’t have an option. We don’t have a golgo table, and . . . No offense? Even if we did, you play like a Martian.”
He chuckled to show he knew it was affection. “Have you got a note back for them? Another bottle to pop out into the systems?”
It was a hard question. Even when she’d had her mind on the panels and wiring of the Rocinante, a part of her had been thinking about the grand strategy of the underground. About limiting Laconian reach and power, about taking advantage of the openings left by the enemy’s mistakes.
And about the goal at the end. That was the trick of grand strategy. Knowing where the journey was ending even when you were making up all the individual steps to get there.
Working on the Roci had given the insight she’d had on the passage out from Auberon time to season. What had been a vision of a possible future had, while she worked with her hands and taken her mind elsewhere, become a bone-deep certainty. As long as Laconia had the capacity to make ships like the Tempest and the Typhoon, it could never grow past being an oppressor. The dream of empire could only die if the ancient Martian dream of independence through better technology was put to rest.
An attack on Laconia posed half a dozen unsolvable problems, and Naomi thought she had solutions to at least four of them . . .
“I’ve got some things I should send out. I can bounce a broadcast off the repeaters at Freehold and up to the Storm. Even if there aren’t any ships closer to the gate than that, they can get one of their torpedoes going. And if they’ve been doing what they’re supposed to, they’ll have some bottles already on the float near the gates.”
“Lightspeed is way better than the best drive,” Alex said, nodding sagely. “Trying to send a bottle from here would take a pretty long time. You know, though, there is a way to shave a few seconds off the time it takes to get your messages out.”
She shifted to look at him. The sun was gone, and the rose-and-gray twilight made him look younger. She lifted an eyebrow, inviting him to go on. He looked at her with feigned innocence.
“All we’ve got to do is be a few light-seconds closer, right?”
It hit her with a relief she hadn’t expected. She looked up into the Freehold sky, past it to the stars.
“Right,” she said. “Let’s do that. I’m sick of walking on walls.”
An hour later, they were strapped into their couches on the flight deck. Working the Rocinante’s displays was like singing with an old friend as she checked the maneuvering thrusters’ output profiles. The reactor was stable. The thrust was good. Even after its long rest, the Roci’s power grid was solid.
“We’re good,” Naomi said. “Take her out.”
“Oh yeah.”