“Your girl?” Alex said.
“Not this time,” Holden replied, pointing out the damaged bulkheads in the engineering bay to her. “Bomb went off in the cargo bay, burned a hole there and threw some shrapnel into the power junction there.”
Sam whistled. “Either that shrapnel took the long way around, or your reactor knows how to duck.”
“How long, you think?”
“Bulkhead’s simple,” she said, punching something into her terminal, then tapping her front teeth with its corner. “We can bring a patch in through the cargo bay in a single piece. Makes the job a lot easier. Power junction takes longer, but not a lot. Say four days if I get my crew on it right now.”
“Well,” Holden said, wincing like a man who had to keep admitting to new wrongdoings. “We also have a damaged cargo bay door that will either have to be fixed or replaced. And our cargo bay airlock is kind of messed up.”
“Couple more days, then,” Sam said, then knelt down and began pulling things out of her toolbox. “Mind if I start taking some measurements?”
Holden waved at the wall. “Be my guest.”
“Been watching the news a lot?” Sam said, pointing at the talking heads on the wall monitor. “Ganymede is fucked, right?”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Pretty much.”
“But it’s only Ganymede so far,” Holden said. “So that means something I haven’t quite figured out yet.”
“Naomi’s staying with me right now,” Sam said as if they’d been talking about that all along. Holden felt his face go still and tried to fight against it, forcing himself to smile.
“Oh. Cool.”
“She won’t talk about it, but if I find out you did something shitty to her, I’m using this on your dick,” she said, holding up a torque wrench. Alex laughed nervously for a second, then trailed off and just looked uncomfortable.
“I consider myself fairly warned,” Holden said. “How is she?”
“Quiet,” Sam said. “Okay, got what I need. Gonna scoot now and get fabrication to work on cutting this bulkhead patch. See you boys around.”
“Bye, Sam,” Alex said, watching her ride the ladder-lift until the pressure door closed behind her. “I’m twenty years too old, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got the wrong plumbin’, but I like that gal.”
“You and Amos just trade this crush back and forth?” Holden said. “Or should I be worried about you two doing pistols at dawn over her?”
“My love is a pure love,” Alex said with a grin. “I wouldn’t sully it by actually, you know, doin’ anything about it.”
“The kind poets write about, then.”
“So,” Alex said, leaning against a wall and looking at his nails. “Let’s talk about the XO situation.”
“Let’s not.”
“Oh, let’s do,” Alex said, then took a step forward and crossed his arms like a man who was not going to give any ground. “I’ve been flyin’ this boat solo for over a year now. That only works because Naomi is a brilliant ops officer and takes up a whole lotta slack. If we lose her, we don’t fly. And that’s a fact.”
Holden dropped the hand terminal he’d been using into his pocket and slumped back against the reactor shielding.
“I know. I know. I never thought she’d actually do this.”
“Leave,” Alex said.
“Yeah.”
“We’ve never talked about pay,” Alex said. “We don’t get salaries.”
“Pay?” Holden frowned at Alex and banged out a quick drumbeat on the reactor behind him. It echoed like a metal tomb. “Every dime that Fred’s given us that hasn’t gone to pay for operating the ship is in the account I set up. If you need some of it, twenty-five percent of that money belongs to you.”
Alex shook his head and waved his hands. “No, don’t get me wrong. I don’t need money, and I don’t think you’re stealin’ from us. Just pointing out that we never talked about pay.”
“So?”
“So that means we aren’t a normal crew. We aren’t workin’ the ship for money, or because a government drafted us. We’re here because we want to be. That’s all you’ve got over us. We believe in the cause, and we want to be part of what you’re doing. The minute we lose that, we might as well take a real payin’ job.”
“But Naomi—” Holden started.
“Was your girlfriend,” Alex said with a laugh. “Damn, Jim, have you seen her? She can get another boyfriend. In fact, you mind if I—”
“I take your point. I hear you. I fucked it up, it’s my fault. I know that. All of it. I need to go see Fred and start thinking about how to put it all back together again.”
“Unless Fred actually did do it.”
“Yeah. Unless that.”