Nemesis Games (Expanse 5)

He tensed a little, but kept his voice light and airy. “Like man-and-woman talk?”

“Worse,” she said. “XO and captain.”

“What’s up?”

They stepped into a lift, and she pushed the button for their deck. The lift chimed, the doors moving gently closed, as she gathered her thoughts. It wasn’t really that she didn’t know what needed to be said. He wasn’t going to like this any more than she did.

“We need to look at hiring on more crew.”

She knew enough about Jim’s silences to recognize this one. She looked up into his blank expression, his eyes blinking a fraction more quickly than usual.

“Really?” he said. “Seems to me that we’re doing just fine.”

“We are. We have been. The Roci’s a military design. Smart. A lot of automation, a lot of redundancy. That’s why we’ve been able to run her at a third of her standard crew for this long.”

“That and we’re the best damned crew in the sky.”

“That doesn’t hurt. Looking at skills and service, we’ve got a strong group. But we’re brittle.”

The lift shifted, the complex forces of station spin and car acceleration making the space feel unsteady. She was sure it was just the movement.

“I’m not sure what you mean by brittle,” Jim said.

“We’ve been on the Rocinante since we salvaged her off the Donnager. We’ve had no change in staff. No turnover. Name me one other ship you can think of where that’s true. There were runs where the Canterbury had a quarter of the staff on their first mission together. And…”

The doors slid open. They stepped out, moving aside to let another couple go in. Naomi heard the others murmuring to each other as the lift doors closed. Jim was quiet as they walked back toward their suite. When he finally spoke, his voice was low and thoughtful.

“You’re thinking one of them may not come back? Amos? Alex?”

“I’m thinking that a lot of things happen. Take a high burn, and sometimes people stroke out. The juice helps, but it’s not a guarantee. People have been known to shoot at us. Or we’ve been disabled in a decaying orbit. You remember all that happening, right?”

“Sure, but —”

“If we lose someone, we go from running at a third of a standard crew to a quarter. Add to that the loss of nonredundant skills.”

Holden stopped, his hand on the door to their rooms.

“Wait, wait, wait. If we lose someone?”

“Yes.”

His eyes were wide and shocked. Little wrinkles of distress gathered at the corners. She reached up to smooth them away, but they didn’t go.

“So you’re trying to get me prepared for one of my crew dying?”

“Historically speaking, humans are pretty much at a hundred percent on that.”

Jim started to say something, faltered, opened the suite door, and walked in. She followed, closing the door behind them. She wanted to let it drop, but if she did, she didn’t know when they’d pick it back up.

“If we were running a traditional crew, we’d have two people in every position. If anyone got killed or disabled, someone else would be right there to step in.”

“I’m not adding four more people to our ship, much less eight,” Jim said, walking into the bedroom. Running from the conversation. He wouldn’t actually leave. She waited for the silence and the distress and the worry that he’d made her angry to pull him back. It took about fifteen seconds. “We don’t run this like a regular crew because we’re not a regular crew. We got the Roci when everyone in the system was shooting at us. We had stealth ships blowing a battleship out from under us. We lost the Cant and then we lost Shed. You can’t go through that and just be normal.”

“Meaning what exactly?”

“This ship isn’t a crew. We don’t run it like a crew. We run it like a family.”

“Right,” she said. “And that’s a problem.”