Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

“You’re not a stranger,” the chief engineer said. “You’re the reason I’m an engineer. My dad was a kid on Ceres when the Free Navy stripped it. You and your crew? You put your hands out in peace in the middle of a civil war. You built the Transport Union. As far as I’m concerned, we should kick the captain out of his quarters and give them to you. You more than earned them.”

Naomi reached for her hair, trying to pluck it down over her face, but Emma’s haircut didn’t leave enough for that. “You know who I am, then.”

The chief engineer coughed out a laugh. “Of course I do. Anyone in the Belt’s going to know Naomi fucking Nagata. It’s just these Laconian fucks who can’t see what they’re looking at. And again, it’s a real honor.”

“Chuck,” Emma said, and her tone made the word a warning.

“I won’t say it again,” the chief engineer—Chuck—said, lifting a hand. “But don’t either one of you worry. I’ll get you shuttle access as soon as we’re close to port. You’re safe with me.”

Naomi nodded her thanks, and Chuck beamed. She saw now how young he was. His delight with himself made her heart ache a little. He’d gotten away with something, and his pride was bright enough to read by. She even had a sense of what she must look like through his eyes—a demigod. A figure from myth appearing in his life. A celebrity. God knew she’d seen enough people look at Jim with that expression. This must be what it had been like for him all those times.

It was a feeling she could easily learn to hate.

Chapter Sixteen: Elvi

The ships were old transports that had been hauling people and supplies around Sol system’s asteroid belt for a generation before the first gate opened. Elvi watched them being positioned near the surface of the Tecoma ring gate with the Falcon’s highest-power optical telescopes, and the images were still fuzzy. Both vessels were at most a few dozen meters top to bottom, and they were almost a billion kilometers away. If the Falcon’s sensor arrays hadn’t been orders of magnitude more sensitive than her eyes, they wouldn’t have been anything close to visible. But she could make out the mechs and drones crawling over them, making the automated checks and last-minute verifications. Maneuvering thrusters bloomed and vanished as they shifted along the plating and drive cones, checking and double-checking that nothing would go wrong. There was deep irony in that, but if she thought about it too much, she just got angry.

“Hey, sweetie,” Fayez said from the doorway. “Can I get you anything?

“Still no. Just like three minutes ago,” she snapped. She grunted, regret jumping into her throat just behind the words. “Sorry. That was shitty.”

“No, I see where you’re coming from,” her husband and intellectual companion of decades said. “I’m hovering. Look.”

He let go of the handhold and floated free for a moment, grinning at his own physical pun. She laughed more at the grin than the joke.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Really. Perfectly fine.”

“Good. That’s good. Because some people, when they almost die from being semidrowned in half-alien goo while under a sustained high-g burn, get a little rash. Or zits. Near death can really do terrible things for acne.”

“I’m sorry I scared you,” she said. “I didn’t mean to. Really. But I’m fine now.”

Fayez pulled himself into the room, twisting ungracefully to hook his ankles around the wall footholds and absorb the momentum with his knees. He stood on the wall beside her, looking down at the images on her screen.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “that my deep existential panic at the prospect of your death hasn’t faded as quickly as yours.”

“It’s okay. I probably wouldn’t be as calm about it if it had been you. By the time I found out about it, I already wasn’t dead. Doesn’t really have the same punch when you miss all the will-she-or-won’t-she clinging-to-life thing.”

“Yeah,” Fayez said. “I didn’t love that part. I mean, in fairness, I don’t love this part either.”

She put up her hand, and he wrapped his fingers in hers. It was how they always were. Decades of habit shrouded what they meant in humor and wit, but she knew his distress was real. And that her resentment of it wasn’t really about him as much as the raw idiocy playing out near the transit ring. She took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly between her teeth.

“I feel stupid,” she said. “I really thought we were a scientific mission.”

“Aren’t we?”

She pointed one thumb toward the monitor. “That’s not science. ‘Light shit on fire and see what happens’ isn’t science. This is throwing dynamite into a pond to see if any fish float to the top.”

“So… natural philosophy?”

“Military bullshit. Solving every problem by trying to blow it up.”

“Yeah,” Fayez said. “Almost makes you wish you could quit, doesn’t it?”

Elvi pushed back from the monitor. In free fall, it was only a gesture that she was disengaging. Fayez’s dark eyes didn’t leave hers. “It wouldn’t be the first thing that made me think that.”

“But.”

“I know. If it wasn’t us,” she said, “it would be someone else. Someone who didn’t know as much as we do. It’s just…”