“Right,” Alex said.
Holden was on the Rocinante. Naomi was asleep in her room. She’d been sleeping a lot since the Rocinante had plucked them all out of the vacuum. The medical system said she was getting better and that the rest was good. It worried Alex, though. Not because she needed the sleep, but because maybe she didn’t actually need it and was pretending to. Being here with Holden and Amos and Naomi was a bone-deep relief. He wanted it to be the end of their separation, everything come back into its right pl
ace like nothing had ever happened.
But it wasn’t. Even talking to Amos, Alex thought he could feel little differences in the man. A kind of abstraction, like he was thinking of something else all the time and only pretending to give Alex his undivided attention. Naomi had been in medical debriefing since they’d arrived, and the physicians hadn’t allowed anyone in to see her except Holden. If Naomi was finding excuses to stay isolated from them, that could be a very bad sign. They still didn’t know all of what she’d been through that she’d wound up with the Free Navy and then escaped from it, but that it had been a trauma seemed obvious. And so he tried to enjoy the peace and pleasure of having his crew again and ignore the anxiety growing in the back of his mind, the sense that – just like with the governments and planets and system of the solar system – things here had changed.
Amos’ hand terminal chirped. He sucked down half a glass of beer then bared his teeth. “I gotta go do a thing.”
“All right,” Alex said, pouring the rest of his beer into the sink. “Where are we going?”
Amos hesitated, but only for a fraction of a second. “Dock. Got something I need to move into my shop.”
“Great,” Alex said. “Let’s go.”
The stations on Luna were the oldest non-terrestrial habitation humanity had. They sprawled across the face of the moon and sank below its surface. The lights set into the walls glowed with a warm yellow and splashed across vaulted ceilings. The gravity – even lighter here than on Mars or Ceres or Tycho – felt strange and pleasant, like a ship ambling on without being in a rush to get anywhere. It was almost possible to forget the tragedy still playing out a little under four hundred thousand klicks over their heads. Almost, but not quite.
Amos went on about everything that had happened while he was down the well, and Alex listened with half his attention. The details of the story would be grist for a hundred conversations once they were back in the ship and going somewhere. It didn’t matter that he get all of it now, and the familiar cadences of Amos’ voice were like hearing a song he liked and hadn’t listened to in a long time.
At the dock, Amos looked up and down the halls until he saw someone he knew sitting on a plastic storage crate. The crate was blue with white curls of scrapes along the side like a painting of waves. The woman was thickly built with black cornrows, dark brown skin, and an arm in a cast.
“Hey, Butch,” Amos said.
“Big man,” the woman said. She didn’t acknowledge Alex at all. “This is this.”
“Thanks, then.”
The woman nodded and walked off, her low-g shuffle a little stiffer than the people around her. Amos rented a loading mech, grabbed the crate, and started for the Roci, Alex trotting along beside him.
“Should I ask what’s in that?” Alex said.
“Probably not,” Amos said. “So anyway, there we are on this island where all the rich people used to be before they fucked off up the well, right? And the ships are pretty much not there…”
The Rocinante had an actual hangar bay complete with atmosphere, not just a space on a pad and a tube to her airlocks. The new outer hull was titanium alloy and ceramic, the polished metal and flat black paint of the hull studded with PDCs and sensor arrays. The maw of the keel-mounted rail gun was like a little surprised o at her bow. In the artificial light of the hangar, she looked less dramatic than she had in the unfiltered light of the sun, but no less beautiful. Her scars were gone now, but it didn’t make the ship seem less herself. Amos drove the mech to the aft airlock and cycled it open without breaking the slow, easy lope of his story. Inside, Amos lowered the crate to the deck, but didn’t turn on the electromagnetic clamps that would hold it there. Instead, he slipped out of the mech and went into the ship itself. Engineering, cargo bay, the machine shop. The stern had always been Amos’ domain.
“So those others,” Amos said. “Johnson’s people? They’re done messing with my shit now, right?”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “She’s ours again. Just ours.”
“Good.” Amos shuffled into the cargo bay.
“So the servants, the maids and chauffeurs and whatever,” Alex said. “They called security and then they just changed sides? Or… I mean how did that work?”
“Well,” Amos said, popping the latches on the crate. “We had an introduction, see?”
The folds of the crate’s lid rose of their own accord. Alex jumped back, misjudged the gravity, stumbled. A dark-haired head came up over the crate’s edge, a thin ghost-pale face with ink-black eyes. Alex’s heart started going triple time. Clarissa Mao, psychopath and murderer, smiled at him tentatively.
“Hey,” she said.
Alex took a long, shuddering breath. “Ah. Hey?”
“See?” Amos said, clapping the girl’s shoulder. “Told you it wouldn’t be a problem.”
“You have to tell him,” Alex said, keeping his voice low. Bobbie was telling Holden about the work she’d been doing with veterans’ affairs in Londres Nova, so he wasn’t paying attention to them.
“I’m gonna,” Amos said.
“You have to tell him now. She’s on our ship.”