The ship lurched, and the crash couches shifted. Naomi had the familiar sense of motion as they accelerated and then slid out of the cave on maneuvering thrusters only. The deck swung around and down until it was under her, and she sank into the gel as Alex took them higher from the ground.
When the drive kicked in, the whole ship rocked and shuddered, and Naomi felt the prick of the needle and then the coolness of the juice in her veins, keeping her from suffering the worst of the g forces. Alex was grinning like a kid on his birthday as the old gunship rose again for the great emptiness. Naomi watched the external temperature as they rose, the atmosphere growing colder and colder, but also thinner and thinner until there wasn’t enough there to conduct away heat at all. The shuddering stopped, and the only sounds were the ticking of the air recyclers and the occasional harmonic chiming of the drive passing through a resonance frequency. On her tactical display, the planet fell away behind them and they passed escape velocity. They weren’t even in a long orbit of Freehold now. They were on their own. Free.
Naomi shouted, a wide, celebratory yawp. And Alex answered back. She lay back in the couch and let herself just be home. Just for a moment.
The Roci was an old ship now. She’d never be state of the art again. But like old tools, well used and well cared for, she’d become something more than plating and wires, conduits and storage and sensor arrays. Old Rokku had said that after fifty years flying, a ship had a soul. It had seemed like a cute superstition when she was young. It seemed obvious now.
“God, I missed this,” Alex said.
“I know, right?”
An hour later, Alex put them on the float, and Naomi unstrapped. Freehold system was so empty, there was no traffic control authority. No flight plans or patrols watching for drive plumes without transponders. She started her diagnostics running, but she already knew from the sound of the drive and the taste of the air that they’d come back clean. She moved from station to station, checking the displays and controls as if there were other crew members who might be using them.
She didn’t notice the change in Alex’s mood until he spoke.
“I tried to keep her alive. I really did. Right at the end, she was out there throwing rounds at that great big bastard, and I was going to take us in. Burn the Storm right in there and try to get her back on board. But there wasn’t time.” His sigh had a shudder in it. “And it would just have fucked things up if I’d done it.”
Naomi wrapped her hand around a foothold and braced. She turned to look at him, and this time he met her eyes.
“She was a hell of a woman,” Naomi said. “We were lucky to know her.”
“The thing I kept thinking all the way out was, How am I going to tell Kit his Aunt Bobbie’s gone?”
“How did you?”
“I haven’t yet. I couldn’t stand to when we were in Sol system. And now . . . I still don’t know if I can. I miss her. I miss all of them, but . . . but I watched her go, and . . . Shit.”
“I know,” Naomi said. “I was thinking about her a lot. I sent the okay for the mission.”
“Oh, Naomi. No. This isn’t your fault.”
“I know that. I don’t always feel it, but I know it. And it’s strange, but the way I comfort myself? I think of all the other ways she could have died. Like oncocidal-resistant cancer. A reactor bottle failure. Just getting old and frail until the antiaging drugs weren’t enough anymore.”
“That’s a little macabre,” Alex said. Then, a moment later, “But yeah. I know exactly what you mean.”
“It was Bobbie,” Naomi said. “She knew we don’t live forever. And if she’d gotten to choose a way to go, I bet this would have been in her top five.”
Alex was quiet for a few seconds, then sniffed. “I miss her every minute of every day, but god damn, it was just so fuckin’ right.”
“Going hand to hand with a ship the combined strength of Earth, Mars, and the Transport Union couldn’t beat and winning?”
“Yeah. If we’ve got to die, I guess that’s a pretty good way to go. Still. I’m sorry we’ve got to die.”
“Mortality does suck that way,” Naomi said.
“What would be your way?”
“I don’t know. That’s not what I think about,” she said, surprised that she knew her opinion about what aspect of her own death was important to her. “I don’t care how I go. There are just things I want done first.”
“Like what?”
“I want to see Jim again. And Amos. I want this war over with, and a real peace established. The kind where people can be angry with each other and hate each other and no one has to die over it. That’d be enough.”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “That would. I think about Amos a lot. Do you think—”
There was something like a great, soundless pop—a detonation without quite being a detonation—and Naomi fell. Would have fallen if direction still existed. Everything had gone the electric noncolor of eyes pressed too hard in the darkness. Nothingness buzzed around her like an assault. Somewhere nearby, someone was screaming. It might have been Alex. It might have been her own voice.
The bright void she fell into—falling in all directions at once—had shapes inside the light, jagged and shifting as a migraine halo. She felt something missing in herself, but couldn’t tell what it was. That frightened her worse than the suddenness and strangeness of the transition. The sense of absence without an object, of loss without knowing what had been lost. She tried to close her eyes, but nothing changed. She tried to reach out, but there was nothing to reach for. Or with. She couldn’t tell whether she’d just fallen into the light or if she’d been falling for hours.
She felt herself slipping into something else. Something like sleep but not sleep, and she resisted by instinct. A deep fear wrapped itself around her, and she held on to it as if it could save her.
And then, without any more warning than had come before, it was over. She was on the Rocinante’s flight deck. She’d drifted away from her crash couch. Behind her, Alex gagged. She grabbed a handhold and braced. Her body felt wrung out, exhausted. Like she’d been awake for too many days, and the fatigue had seeped into her muscles.
“Did we,” she said, and her voice sounded weird in her ears. She swallowed and tried again. “Did we lose time?”
The soft tap of Alex’s fingers against a control panel. She closed her eyes, grateful beyond words that the darkness came when her lids fell. A wave of nausea came over her and left again.
“We did,” Alex said. “Lost . . . almost twenty minutes.”
She pushed off, navigating her way to her couch by long instinct more than thought. She strapped in with a sense of deep gratitude. Alex’s face was grayish, like he’d just seen something horrifying.
“That wasn’t . . . that wasn’t like the other ones,” he said. “That was different.”
“It was,” Naomi said.
Alex checked over the Rocinante’s status and seemed to take some comfort in it. Naomi was tingling, the pins-and-needles feel of a pinched nerve, but without a physical location on her body. Like her mind was slowly coming back. It was a deeply unsettling feeling.
“Fucking Duarte,” she said. “Fucking Laconia and their fucking tests.”
“What do you think they did this time?”
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Elvi
Elvi’s hand terminal chimed again. It was past time for her to go, but she couldn’t pull herself away. Also, the girl in the glass cage didn’t have a chair, and so Elvi had chosen to sit on the floor beside her. The prospect of getting back up with her aching leg wasn’t pleasant.
“So,” she said, “it wasn’t a change in cognition?”
There was a moment of eerie stillness, the off-putting pause that they always seemed to have, and then Cara shook her head. “I mean, it’s hard to be sure what it was like really, but I didn’t have the feeling of being any different. Except for the library, you know.”