The chime of a hand terminal saved him. Amos fished the device out of his pocket, looked at it, tapped the screen, and scowled. “I’m going to need a little privacy now.”
“Sure,” Alex said. “Not a problem.”
Outside their suite, Tycho Station stretched in long gentle curves. It was one of the crown jewels of the Outer Planets Alliance. Ceres was larger, and Medina Station held the weird null-zone between rings, but Tycho Station was what the OPA had taken pride in from the start. The wide sweeping lines, more like a sailing ship than any actual craft that she served, weren’t functional. The station’s beauty was a boast. Here are the minds that spun up Eros and Ceres; here is the shipyard that built the largest vessel in the history of humanity. The men and women who, not so many generations ago, had braved the abyss beyond Mars for the first time were smart and powerful enough to make this.
Alex made his way down a long promenade. The people who passed him were Belters, their bodies longer than Earth standard, their heads wider. Alex himself had grown up in the relatively low Martian gravity, but even he didn’t quite match the physiology that a childhood rich in null g gave.
Plants grew in the empty spaces of the wide corridors, vines crawling up against the spin gravity as they would have against the normal pull on Earth. Children scampered through the halls, ditching school the way he had back in Londres Nova. He drank his coffee and tried to cultivate the peace of being on the burn. Tycho Station was just as artificial as the Roci. The vacuum outside its hull was no more forgiving. But the calm wouldn’t come. Tycho Station wasn’t his ship, wasn’t his home. These people walking past him as he went to the common area and looked up through the massive and multilayered clear ceramic at the glittering spectacle of the shipyards weren’t his family. And he kept wondering what Tali would have thought of all this. If she could have come to a place that saw the beauty in it the way he hadn’t been able to with the life she’d wanted on Mars.
When he hit the bottom of his cup, he turned back. He ambled along with the flow of foot traffic, making way for the electric carts and exchanging the small, civilized courtesies in the polyglot linguistic catastrophe that was the Belter argot. He didn’t think too much about where he was going until he got there.
The Roci lay half-dressed in the vacuum. With the outer skin cut away and her inner hull shining fresh in the work lights, she looked small. The scars of their adventures had, for the most part, been borne by the outer hull. Those scars were gone now, and only the deeper injuries remained. He couldn’t see them from here, but he knew what they were. He’d been on the Rocinante as long as he’d been on any ship in his career, and he loved her better than any of them. Even than his first.
“I’ll be back,” he said to the ship, and as if in answer, a welding rig lit up at the curve of her drive cone, brighter for a moment than the unshielded sun in a Martian sky.
The suite Naomi and Holden shared was just down the corridor from the one where he and Amos slept, its door with the same homey fake wood texturing and the number set into the wall just as bright. Alex let himself in, stepping into the conversation already going on.
“— if you think it’s called for,” Naomi said, her voice coming from the suite’s main room. “But I think the evidence is pretty strong that you cleaned the last of that out. I mean, Miller hasn’t been back, has he?”
“No,” Holden said, nodding to Alex. “But just the idea that we had some of that goo in the ship for so long and didn’t even know it creeps me out. Doesn’t it creep you out?”
Alex held out his coffee cup, and Holden took it and filled it automatically. No sugar, room for cream.
“It does,” Naomi said, coming to the kitchen. “Just not enough to take the whole damned bulkhead out over it. The replacements are never as strong as the originals. You know that.”
Alex had met Naomi Nagata back on the Canterbury. He could still see the rawboned, angry girl who Captain McDowell had introduced as their new junior engineer. She’d hidden behind her hair for almost a year. Now, she had the first few threads of white among the black. She stood taller, more at home in her own skin. Surer of herself and stronger than he would have guessed she could be. And Holden, the swaggering, self-impressed executive officer who swept into civilian work wearing his dishonorable discharge like a boast had become this man handing him the cream and cheerfully admitting the irrationality of his fears. Time had changed all of them, he supposed. Only he wasn’t sure how he had been affected. Too close to the question, he guessed.
Except Amos. Nothing changed Amos.
“What about you, Alex?”