“Peaches!” Amos shouted. “Your six!”
Clarissa spun. The Azure Dragon loomed behind her, the sun high above. She’d run back so far, she’d looped. And arcing up over the enemy ship, two bright, moving shapes. The crew of the Azure Dragon wouldn’t be able to force their way onto the Rocinante, but they could have some small vengeance here. There was no place for her to take cover. She could only stand here and face the remnants of the boarding party descending toward her or charge into the guns of the remaining mech.
“Amos?” she said.
“Go to the airlock! Get back inside!”
She raised her gun, aimed at one of the incoming figures. When she fired, they shifted out of the bullet’s path. Her HUD reported fast-movers. It was time to go. She turned toward the drive cone. It seemed farther away than she expected. The suit thrusters kicked in, and she skimmed along, a meter above the hull like a bird flying just above the surface of a lake. Something exploded in her arm, spinning her. Her HUD told her what she already knew. Another wound. The suit was already squeezing at her shoulder to hold as much blood in as it could. To her left, a flash of yellow. The mech, riding plumes of its own thrusters, and coming closer. She dropped her rifle, and it fell away behind her. With one arm, she couldn’t aim it anyway, and a little less mass meant a little more speed.
This was it. This was how she died. The idea was weirdly consoling. She’d end here, under billions of stars. In the unending, unshielded light of the sun, fighting for her friends. It felt bright, like a hero’s death. Not the cold fading away on a hard, gray cot in the prison infirmary she’d expected. How strange that this should feel like victory. Time seemed to slow, and she wondered if maybe she’d triggered her implants by mistake. That would be silly. Amping up her nervous system would do her exactly no good when all her speed came from the thruster’s nozzle. But no. It was only fear and the certainty that she was rushing to her death.
Naomi and Alex were shouting in her ears. Amos too. She couldn’t make sense of any of it. It occurred to her like a conclusion she was watching someone else make that Amos might feel bad when she was gone. She should have told him how grateful she was for every day he’d given her outside the hole. Her helmet alerted. She had to start braking or she’d overshoot the ship. She killed the thrusters and flipped, more from a sense of obligation than from any real hope of living. One of two boarders was spinning away sunward, arms and legs flailing and out of control. The other was above her with their back turned, facing a fast-moving body that had to be Amos. The mech flickered, drawing closer. When she started braking, it seemed to surge toward her, an illusion of relative velocity, but with enough truth to end her.
And then, inexplicably, the mech driver slumped against his harness. The mech arms waved, suddenly uncontrolled. One reached down, gouging the hull and sending the great yellow machine spinning away from the Rocinante and toward the stars. She watched, uncomprehending, until a hand grabbed her uninjured shoulder and an arm looped across her back. In the bright sunlight, the other suit’s helmet was opaque. She didn’t understand what had happened until she heard the voice over her radio.
“It’s all right,” Holden said. “I’ve got you.”
Amos woke her. His wide face and bald head seemed like a dream. But that was likely just the drugs playing with her perceptions.
The regrowth cocktail did strange things to her mind, even if the painkillers didn’t. Given the choice of feeling numb and stupid or alert and in pain, she chose pain. Wide elastic restraints held her to the bed of the medical bay. The autodoc fed her body what it needed, and only occasionally threw out errors, confused by the leakage from her after-market endocrine system. Her humerus was shattered, but growing back together. The first bullet had carved a groove ten centimeters long through the muscles of her thigh and shocked the bone, but didn’t break it.
“You okay, Peaches? I brought you some food, and I was just going to leave it for you, but you were … You looked …” He waved a hand.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I mean all shot up, but I’m fine.”
He sat on the side of her bed, and she realized they were under thrust. The smell of artificial peach cobbler was inviting and nauseating at the same time. She undid her restraints and sat up on her good elbow.
“Did we win?” she asked.
“Oh hell yeah. Two prisoners. Data core off the Azure Dragon. They tried to scrub it, but between Naomi and the Roci, we’ll put it back together. Bobbie’s straight-up pissed that she missed the action.”
“Maybe next time,” she said, and Holden came into the room.
He and Amos nodded to each other. The big man left.
“We should probably have had this talk before,” Holden said.
The Roci’s captain stood at the bedside, looking like he wasn’t sure whether to sit. She couldn’t say whether it was the trauma or the drugs, but she was surprised to notice that he didn’t look like her mental image of him. In her mind, his cheeks were higher, his jaw wider. The blue of his eyes more icy. This man looked—not older. Only different. His hair was messy. There were lines forming around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. Not there yet, but coming. His temples were touched with gray. That wasn’t what made him look different, though. The James Holden who was king of her personal mythology was sure of himself, and this man was profoundly ill at ease.
“Okay,” she said, not certain what else to say.
Holden crossed his arms. “I … um. Yeah, I didn’t really expect you to come on this ship. I’m not comfortable with it.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He waved the comment away. “It’s made me skip this part, and I shouldn’t have. That’s on me, okay? I know you and Amos trekked across a big part of North America after the rocks came down, and I know that you handled yourself just fine then. And you have experience on ships.”
Experience as a terrorist and murderer, he didn’t say.
“The thing is,” he went on, “you aren’t trained for this kind of action. Going out on the float with a gun in your hand is different from being on the ground. Or being a technician inside a ship. You’ve got those implants, but using them out there, you’d have wound up crashing out and choking to death on your own vomit, right?”
“Probably,” she said.
“So going out again like that’s not something you should do. Amos took you because … because he wants you to know you belong here.”
“But I don’t,” she said. “That’s what you’re saying.”
“Not everyplace Amos goes, no,” Holden said. He met her gaze for the first time. He looked almost sad. She couldn’t understand why. “But as long as you’re on my ship, you’re crew. And it’s my job to protect you. I screwed that up. You don’t go into battle in a vac suit anymore. At least not until I think you’re trained. That’s an order. Understood?”
“Understood,” she said. And then, trying the word out to see how it felt in her mouth, “Understood, sir.”
He had been her sworn enemy. He had been the symbol of her failure. He’d even become a symbol, somehow, of the life she could have had if she’d made different choices. He was only a man in his early middle age that she barely knew, though they had some friends in common. He tried a smile, and she returned it. It was so little. It was something.
She finished her cobbler after he left, then closed her eyes to rest them and didn’t know she’d fallen asleep until the dream came.
She was digging through slick, black mud-sticky shit, trying to get down to where someone was buried. She had to hurry, because they were running out of air. In the dream, she could feel the wet cold against her fingers, the disgust welling up at the back of her throat. And the fear. And the heartbreaking loss that came from knowing she wouldn’t make it in time.