Alex blinked, closed his eyes, cracked open just the left one. He’d been in the middle of a dream where apple juice had gotten into the coolant feeds on a ship that was both the Rocinante and his first ship back when he’d been in the Martian Navy. The sense that he was supposed to fix something lingered even as the details faded. Sandra, naked, smiled down at him and he stopped trying to hold on to the dream.
“Hey to you too, Pookie,” he growled. The night’s sleep left his voice deep and gravelly. He stretched up his arms, palms flat against her headboard, and pressed to stretch down between his shoulder blades. His toes reached out past the edge of the blanket, and she pinched them playfully as she walked back toward the shower. He lifted his head to watch her retreat, and she looked back to watch him watch her.
“Where you headed?” he asked, partly because he wanted to know, partly just to keep her in the room a few seconds more.
“I’ve got a shift on the Jammy Rakshasa today,” she said. “Drummer’s making sure all these OPA bigwigs feel like we’re taking care of them.”
“Jammy Rakshasa,” Alex said, laying his head back down. “That’s a weird name for a ship.”
“It think it’s some kind of in-joke with Goodfortune’s people. Decent ship, though.” Her voice echoed a little from the bathroom. “The weirdest ship I ever worked was called the Inverted Loop. Gravel miner made out of a salvaged luxury yacht. The captain had this thing about open space, so they’d cut all nonstructural walls and decking out.”
Alex frowned up at the ceiling. “Seriously?”
“When that thing was under thrust, you could drop a bearing in the cockpit and listen to it hit every deck down to the reactor. It was like flying in a balloon full of sticks.”
“That ain’t right.”
“The captain was a guy named Yeats Pratkanis. He had some issues, but his crew loved him. Nothing like the stupid shit people do for a captain when they’re really invested in not seeing how fucked up he is.”
“S’pose that’s true.”
The sound of water splashing against metal announced the shower, but Alex could tell by the music of it that her body wasn’t in the flow yet. He looked up again, found her in the doorway, her arms lifted above her to rest against the frame. She was only a little younger than him, and the years showed on her body. Silver ghosts of stretch marks just visible along her belly and breasts. The fuzzy tattoo of a waterfall down the side of her left leg. A jagged scar that puckered the flesh of her right arm. Hers was not the beauty of youth but of experience, same as his. Still, he could see the girl she’d been in the way she lifted her eyebrows, shifted her weight into her hip.
“You want to take a shower, Sunshine?” she asked with false innocence.
“Oh hell yes,” Alex said, hauling himself up from the bed. “Yes, I do.”
Ever since that first night on Ceres, he and Sandra had been spending a chunk of their off hours in each other’s company this way. When they’d been on the Roci, they’d split their time between his cabin and hers. Here on Tycho, her quarters had become their default. She’d been on the station long enough for her seniority and union rules to land her two rooms, a private bath, and a bed that was a lot more comfortable for two than trying to fit into the same crash couch.
As love affairs went, Alex had been surprised at first and a little wary. Sandra’s sexuality was joyful and unrestrained. It had taken him a little time to knock the rust off and join her in it. He’d had a few lovers before he’d gotten married, one—shamefully—while he was, and a couple dalliances afterward. A woman’s full and delighted attention wasn’t something he’d ever expected to have again. Once he convinced himself that, yes, this was really happening, he fell into it like he was sixteen.
After the shower, they toweled each other dry and he helped put lotion on her back where she couldn’t reach, and a little where she probably could too. She put on her uniform, tied back her hair, then brushed and gargled while he crawled back into the bed.
“Another day of sloth for you?” she asked.
“I’m a pilot with nowhere to go,” he said, stretching his arms out in a gesture that said, It’s not my fault. She laughed.
“This is why I’m not one,” she said. “Engineers always have something to do.”
“You need to learn to relax.”
“Well,” she said, her voice taking on a low purr that was come-on and laughing at the come-on both, “you keep setting me an example and maybe some of it’ll rub off on me.”
“Maybe when your shift’s over, we could order in.”
“It’s a plan,” she said, then checked the time on her hand terminal and grunted. “Okay. I’ve got to run.”
“I’ll lock up when I go,” Alex said.
“You’ll sleep in my bed all day like a lion.”
“Or that.”
She kissed him before she left. He let himself sink into the pillows after the door closed, rested there for a long moment, then stood up and gathered his clothes from the floor. Sandra’s quarters were soft and welcoming in a way he wasn’t used to. The comforter wadded and shaped at the foot of the bed was a pale blue with a pattern of lace at the edges. Sandra had hung draping cloth at the corners of the room to soften the light and disguise the edges. Her desk had a small glass vase with dried roses arranged in it. The peppery smell of spent perfume sank into his clothes when he was here, so that hours later he’d walk through a draft and be suddenly and viscerally reminded of her. The women he’d lived with these last years—Naomi, Bobbie, even Clarissa Mao now—weren’t the sort for frills and softness. Plush pillows and rosewater. Being around that particular kind of femininity was familiar enough to be comfortable, exotic enough to make this time, this moment, this relationship something all his own. Turned out some part of him had wanted something all his own.
Or maybe—pulling on the same sock he’d worn yesterday—it wasn’t even that. Maybe it was only that he knew how much the war might take from them all, and Sandra Ip was his chance to refill some cistern of his heart and body that there wasn’t going to be time for later. A place of gentleness and affection and pleasure like a hurricane eye. He hoped she felt the same about him. That they were stocking up good memories, him and Sandra both, against the history that was about to unfold around them.
It was getting harder and harder to shrug off the sense of dread back on the Rocinante. The days since they’d arrived on Tycho had been one endless meeting for Holden. When he wasn’t fencing with Carlos Walker about what supplies and support the OPA could provide, he was trading long recorded messages with Michio Pa about the firing rate of the Free Navy’s rail gun artillery in the slow zone. When he wasn’t reporting to or getting reports from Avasarala, he and Naomi and Bobbie were comparing positional maps of the system with Aimee Ostman and Micah al-Dujaili. Holden never seemed to lose his temper, never seemed to rest. Every time Alex saw him, Holden smiled and was pleasant and upbeat. If he hadn’t spent years with the man, he might almost have been fooled into thinking things were going well.
But the man in the meetings, pacing the corridors of the Rocinante or the docks outside them, sitting hunched over his flickering hand terminal, wasn’t really James Holden at all. It was like Holden had become an actor and his role was James Holden. The surface was whatever it needed to be at the moment. That wasn’t the man he knew. Alex could feel the howling void of desperation and despair behind everything he said.