He did. Connecting to the Pella, trying to distract Marco, seeing Filip, disarming the torpedoes. He told it all with a sheepishness like a kid confessing that he ate the last bit of sweet. Even when she turned up the cabin lights and started pulling on her own clothes, he didn’t meet her eyes. Amos had called him on it, offered to lock him out of the torpedo controls. Jim had said no. His silence was the only sign that he was done.
Naomi stood for a moment, watching her emotions like they were objects scattered by an unexpected turn. Horror at the idea of Filip’s death. Rage at Marco for putting their child in harm’s way. Guilt, not only for Filip but for Jim too. For the position she’d put him in and the reflexive compromises he’d made on her behalf. All those she’d known to expect, but there was an impatience too. Not with Jim exactly, or herself, or Filip. With the need to mourn again what she’d mourned so many times before.
“Thank you,” she said, her heart thick and heavy. “For caring. For trying to watch out for me. But I lost Filip. I couldn’t save him when he was a baby. I couldn’t save him now that he’s essentially a man. That’s twice, and twice is always. I can’t stop hoping that he’ll be all right in all this. But if he’s going to get saved, he’s going to have to do it himself.”
She pushed away a betraying tear. Jim took a half step toward her.
“He’ll have to do it himself,” she said again, her voice a degree harder to keep him from touching her or saying something soft and consoling. “Same as everyone.”
When the Giambattista got into clear visual range, she wasn’t a pretty ship. Longer than the Canterbury had been back in the day, thicker through the middle, with a score of massive storage cells open to the vacuum where it had stored the ice harvested from Saturn’s rings or captured comets or any of the other sources around the system. Between the floodlit work shelves, the external mech storage sheds, attitude thrusters and sensor arrays and antennas, there were so many sources of drag that even the thinnest atmosphere would have ripped the ship to scrap. But no torpedo tubes. No PDCs. There were thousands of tiny boats tucked into the huge ship, and nothing more than a winsome smile and a handgun to protect them.
On the command deck, Bobbie put one hand on Naomi’s shoulder, another on Jim’s. “Freaking out yet?”
“I’m fine,” Naomi said in the same moment that Jim said, “Yes.”
Bobbie’s chuckle was warm. She was as happy as Naomi had seen her since she’d come back to the ship. She walked across the deck, mag boots clicking with each contact and release. It made Naomi nervous. If something happened to make the Roci move suddenly, either the boots would hold the deck and break her shinbones or they’d release and leave her bouncing against the walls of the ship. Not that the danger was real. It was only that, like Jim, she was probably freaking out. At least a little bit.
She watched the Giambattista’s braking pathway. The main engines turned off, the plume cooling and speeding away from the ship. It coasted toward them. Six thousand klicks. Five and three-quarters. Five and a half.
“All right,” Alex said across the ship’s comm. “Everyone hold on to your feathers. We’re maneuvering to dock.”
To Naomi’s relief, she heard Bobbie strapping into a couch behind her as Amos and Clarissa announced that they were secure.
“Can you knock?” Jim asked.
She opened a tightbeam connection. Waited a long moment, and found herself face-to-face with a man whose white beard and salt-and-pepper hair made him look like something out of a children’s story about wolves in human skin.
“Que sa, Giambattista,” she said. “Rocinante, wir. Go es gut alles la?”
The wolf grinned. “Bist bien, sera Nagata suer. Give us your warriors girl, and let us kick these cocks à l’envers a pukis.”
Naomi laughed, less at the vulgarity of the image than at the glee with which the old man said it. “Bien. Prepare for docking.” She cut the connection and called up to Alex. “We have permission to dock.”
Behind them, Bobbie was humming a melody Naomi didn’t recognize, but it was syncopated, upbeat, even playful. The Roci lurched, the couches all shifting a few degrees to compensate. They were almost in matching orbit. Only a few meters’ drift, and the thrusters under Alex’s care were drawing that down to nothing.
“He knew your name,” Jim said.
“You’re not the only one people recognize,” she said as the docking tube extended from the Roci and fixed itself to an outer airlock on the Giambattista. So close in, the hauler dwarfed the corvette. A horsefly and a horse. The scale of what they were about to try came home to her then and took her breath away. These two ships were the stealthy, small force. Easy to overlook in a system wracked with violence. Tiny to the point, they all hoped, of insignificance. And still huge.
“Are we going to be knocking around anymore?” Bobbie asked. “Because otherwise, I’m going to go get dressed and head over.”
“You wearing your power armor just walking across the tube?” Alex asked.
“You know how it is,” Bobbie said. “Never get a second chance to make a first impression.”
“Awesome,” Alex said.
“I’ll meet you in the lock,” Amos said.
Naomi looked over to Jim. He was frowning. “Say again, Amos?”
“Yeah,” Amos said. She could hear the smile in his voice. “I thought I’d head over with Bobbie. These OPA fuckers are our best buddies and all, but we’re still us and they’re still them. Someone oughta watch Bobbie’s six while she’s out among them English. Besides which, I’m going to be as good as any of them at breaking heads.”
“Might need you on the Roci, big guy,” Jim said, his voice light. “With the whole heading-into-battle thing, I’d kind of like to keep my mechanic close to hand.”
Bobbie retreated down the lift tube, pulling herself hand over hand, her floating feet disappearing last.
“That’s sweet, but you don’t need me, Cap,” Amos said. “Peaches here knows the ship as well as I do. Anything you need done, she can do it.”
Jim grunted, and she put her hand out, grabbing the edge of his couch and spinning it until they were facing. Jim saw the message in her expression. “Copy that, Amos,” he said. “Bobbie? Make sure you bring enough of him back we can regrow the missing bits.”
“Roger. Wilco,” Bobbie said. Her voice sounded close and echoing. She already had her helmet on. Naomi wanted to be reassured by the joy that Bobbie took in the anticipated violence, but she couldn’t quite manage. All she could do was hunker down and endure and see what happened next. At least she had practice with it.
Over the next hours, Bobbie and Amos inspected their new allies—the ship’s reports and logs, the ships in their berths, the OPA fighters they’d be leading on the attack—while Naomi, watching through Bobbie’s suit camera, cataloged it all. Racks of guns and boxes of ammunition. The motley assortment of boats and soldiers. Bobbie’s assessments were calm, rational, professional, and fueled the dread growing in Naomi’s gut.
Her mind wandered a little bit during the slow moments. Human violence as a kind of fractal—self-similar on all scales from bar fight to system-wide war. The buildup of insults and lost face that swelled over the course of an evening or a century. The shoving and shoving back, neither side sure they wanted to escalate and uncertain how to back down. All of that was the history of the inner planets and the Belt since the beginning. Then Marco had thrown his sucker punch and sent the system reeling back. Since then, feints and evaluations, flurries of violence that weren’t meant to end anything so much as find position, test the opponent.