“Thanks,” Holden said. Alex nodded. It was an open invitation, and only half a joke. He consulted his gut again, then pulled himself up and headed for the lift. Alex didn’t ask where he was going. He probably knew.
The galley still had the ghost of the ginger tea Clarissa drank to soothe her stomach, but neither she nor Amos was there now. The food dispenser showed their supply levels, and he saw them without really seeing them. He’d lived on the Rocinante longer than anyplace else in his life. He knew the ship better than he knew himself.
As he walked down the corridor to their room, he tried to shrug off the bitterness and the anger. The sense of guilt that was rising in his throat. Even so, he knew she’d see it.
Naomi was in the crash couch, her arm thrown over her eyes, but her breath didn’t have the deepness of sleep. Her nap was already over or else it hadn’t yet begun. She smiled, and the deep lines at the sides of her mouth were beautiful.
“How bad is it?” she asked even before she took her arm away.
Holden took a deep breath and let it hiss out through his teeth. His gut didn’t loosen, but it did shift. The anger turned toward something deeper. Grief, maybe. He crossed his arms. She shifted to look at him. The gray at her temples had started appearing a few years ago, and was slowly spreading. There were lines at the corners of her eyes that the antiaging meds they all took now weren’t going to rub away. They were beautiful, too.
“I think it may be time for us to do something else,” he said. “For me to do something else, anyway.”
She shifted, the crash couch moving to adjust to her. If there had been a joke waiting, an impulse to lighten the moment, it died when she looked at him. Seeing her reacting to him told him how serious he really was. How bad he looked.
“Walk me through it,” she said.
He gave her the basics—what Drummer had said, what he and Alex had talked about, what sense he’d made of it—and with every word, every phrase, he felt a confusion he hadn’t known he was suffering start to clear. Just saying it to her, knowing that even if he got the words or thoughts wrong, she would hear the meaning underneath them, let him find his own clarity. The tightness in his gut didn’t go away.
“When we were hunting down pirates, I could accept their surrender,” he said. “Even the Free Navy could have set down arms and we’d have arrested them. But now I’m working for a bureaucratic system that’s willing to kill people as a matter of policy. I don’t feel like I’m enforcing rules, I feel like an executioner, and … I don’t think I can do it.”
Naomi shifted, making room for him on the crash couch. He lay down beside her. The couch adjusted to their combined mass. She made a low sound, part hum and part sigh. “Tough to do our jobs, then.”
“These colonies? They’re all dependent on the Transport Union, and maybe they won’t always be. But until they’re self-sustaining, they should have a voice in how the union makes the rules. How it enforces them. They didn’t elect Drummer.”
“They didn’t elect any of them. Walker, Sanjrani, Pa.”
“The others weren’t cutting off trade. Drummer is. And yes, I know. Looking at it, this was probably inevitable. Maybe it’s a miracle it took this long to happen. But now it has happened, and …”
“And when one thing changes, other things change too.”
A voice came from the galley. Bobbie, talking to someone—Alex or Amos or Clarissa. He didn’t hear the response, but Bobbie laughed a little at it. The knot in his gut grew heavier.
“I can put out a press release,” he said, and the words seemed to sink him deeper into the gel. “Get the message out to all the colonies about what Drummer wants to do, why I think it’s wrong. Try to lead some kind of … I don’t know, reform coalition. Maybe talk to the Association of Worlds, see if they want to take it on.”
“Big fight to pick,” Naomi said, neither approving nor disapproving. Just saying it because it was true.
“It’ll mean grounding the Roci or keeping to one system for a while. There’s a lot of trade between Earth and Mars, still. Ganymede. Ceres. Maybe there are some colony worlds with enough infrastructure in place that we could find a niche there. Or make one. Or I could tell a few people what’s going on—”
“They already know,” Naomi said. “Drummer sent us out here to make a statement. Everyone’s already watching. Nothing you’ve said isn’t already on news and discussion feeds all around the colonies.”
“So maybe I could let someone else take point on this battle,” he said, closing his eyes. “Just get some in-system contracts and see what happens. It’s important. But … I don’t know. But I’m tired. Too tired to fight this one.”
“Or.”
He opened his eyes, turned to his side. Her head was tilted the way it was when she hid behind her hair, only without the hiding. Her mouth tensed. Her eyes met his.
“You remember when we first got the Roci?” she said. “We were on the run from, oh, I think everyone? Flying this stolen ship. You asked if we wanted to sell her, split the money, and all of us take an early retirement.”
He chuckled. “She was worth more back then.”
“‘Retirement’ meant more years back then too,” she said. She wasn’t laughing. “What if this isn’t a decision you need to make for everyone?”
“Meaning?”
“We both know Alex’s going to die in that pilot’s chair. Bobbie’s at home here. Clarissa’s health isn’t great. And I don’t know, but if she decides to try a skilled-nursing facility on Ceres or something, I get the feeling Amos may go with her.”
Holden let that idea sink in. He didn’t understand the bond between Amos and Clarissa except that it was fierce and platonic and had lasted through years. If it was love, it didn’t look like any version he’d ever experienced, but it didn’t look like anything else either. He ran his mind over the idea of Amos still on the Rocinante without Clarissa. He’d never considered it before. It was a melancholy prospect.
“Yeah, maybe,” Holden said. Then, a moment later, “Yeah.”
“We’re getting up to the same age Fred was when he stroked out on a burn. And you’ve been on daily anticancer meds for more than half of your life now. It doesn’t matter how good they are, that’s going to take a toll on your system. Leave you a little more fragile. So the other thing we can do? Sell our shares. Head down to Titan, pick a resort, and enjoy our retirement.”
No, Holden thought. No, I will never leave this place and these people. This is my home, and no matter what the dangers and threats and fights are, I will stand this ground. This is where I belong. Where we all belong.
Only what came spilling out of his mouth was “God, that sounds wonderful. Let’s do that.”
Naomi leaned forward, her brows furrowed. “Really? Because I’ve got a half dozen other arguments I’ve been working on for why it’s not a terrible idea.”
“Oh yeah, hold on to those,” Holden said. “I’m going to flip my opinion back and forth for weeks. But right now, living in a dome on Titan with you sounds like the single best idea anyone has ever had.”
“You wouldn’t feel like it made you less of a man?”
“Nope.”
“That you were letting the universe down by not taking on every fight there was? Because I worked on that one for a while. I’ve got some good lines practiced up.”
“Keep ’em,” Holden said. “You’ll need them later. But right now, I’m sold.”
Her face relaxed. He could still see the woman she’d been when they were on the Canterbury. Time and age, sorrow and laughter had taken some of the curve out of her cheek, left her skin a little looser at her neck. They weren’t young anymore. Maybe you could only really see that someone was beautiful when they’d grown into themselves. He moved to kiss her—
—and drifted off the crash couch.
With the thrust suddenly cut, leaning up had pushed him into the cabin, twisting as he floated. He reached back with his foot automatically, trying to hook it into one of the holds, but the ship was flipping, so it took a couple tries. Naomi had already braced herself on the frame of the crash couch.
“Well,” Holden said. “I guess Drummer changed her mind about letting Houston come to Medina. That’s disappointing.”
“Weird that Alex wouldn’t sound the alert first, though,” Naomi said, and then tapped her system console. “Alex? Everything all right?”
“I was about to ask you,” the pilot said through the speaker. “We have a change of plan?”
Holden pulled his hand terminal out of his pocket. “Amos? Did you just do a flip-and-burn?”
“Hey, Cap,” Amos’ real voice said behind him as the big man floated into the doorframe. “Wasn’t me. We got something going on?”
A chill ran down Holden’s back that had nothing to do with temperature. Naomi was already on it, querying the Roci’s logs and control systems, but Clarissa’s voice came from the speaker before she could find anything.
“I received an alert from the air recyclers,” she said, her reedy voice stronger than usual. “It got a manual command from engineering to drop oxygen output to zero and flood nitrogen.”