She heard his footsteps on the sand, soft and regular as an air intake gently cycling. She sat up and dusted the sand from the backs of her arms. Alex was wearing his flight suit, and it hung a little loose on him. Even with his usual beaming smile, he seemed a little deflated. He grunted as he sat on the dune beside her.
“You holding together okay?” Alex asked.
“I’m all right,” Naomi said.
“Just asking because you’ve been spending a lot of time working the Roci with me, and then going straight to the reports and newsfeeds when you’re done. You haven’t taken much downtime.”
Naomi felt an old, familiar touch of annoyance, and it was strangely delightful. If Alex had started his mother hen habits back up, it had to mean he was feeling better. Not recovered, maybe never that, but improved.
“Doing the briefings is my downtime.”
“Coordinating a massive resistance to an authoritarian and galaxy-spanning empire is your hobby?”
“I didn’t have an option. We don’t have a golgo table, and… No offense? Even if we did, you play like a Martian.”
He chuckled to show he knew it was affection. “Have you got a note back for them? Another bottle to pop out into the systems?”
It was a hard question. Even when she’d had her mind on the panels and wiring of the Rocinante, a part of her had been thinking about the grand strategy of the underground. About limiting Laconian reach and power, about taking advantage of the openings left by the enemy’s mistakes.
And about the goal at the end. That was the trick of grand strategy. Knowing where the journey was ending even when you were making up all the individual steps to get there.
Working on the Roci had given the insight she’d had on the passage out from Auberon time to season. What had been a vision of a possible future had, while she worked with her hands and taken her mind elsewhere, become a bone-deep certainty. As long as Laconia had the capacity to make ships like the Tempest and the Typhoon, it could never grow past being an oppressor. The dream of empire could only die if the ancient Martian dream of independence through better technology was put to rest.
An attack on Laconia posed half a dozen unsolvable problems, and Naomi thought she had solutions to at least four of them…
“I’ve got some things I should send out. I can bounce a broadcast off the repeaters at Freehold and up to the Storm. Even if there aren’t any ships closer to the gate than that, they can get one of their torpedoes going. And if they’ve been doing what they’re supposed to, they’ll have some bottles already on the float near the gates.”
“Lightspeed is way better than the best drive,” Alex said, nodding sagely. “Trying to send a bottle from here would take a pretty long time. You know, though, there is a way to shave a few seconds off the time it takes to get your messages out.”
She shifted to look at him. The sun was gone, and the rose-and-gray twilight made him look younger. She lifted an eyebrow, inviting him to go on. He looked at her with feigned innocence.
“All we’ve got to do is be a few light-seconds closer, right?”
It hit her with a relief she hadn’t expected. She looked up into the Freehold sky, past it to the stars.
“Right,” she said. “Let’s do that. I’m sick of walking on walls.”
An hour later, they were strapped into their couches on the flight deck. Working the Rocinante’s displays was like singing with an old friend as she checked the maneuvering thrusters’ output profiles. The reactor was stable. The thrust was good. Even after its long rest, the Roci’s power grid was solid.
“We’re good,” Naomi said. “Take her out.”
“Oh yeah.”
The ship lurched, and the crash couches shifted. Naomi had the familiar sense of motion as they accelerated and then slid out of the cave on maneuvering thrusters only. The deck swung around and down until it was under her, and she sank into the gel as Alex took them higher from the ground.
When the drive kicked in, the whole ship rocked and shuddered, and Naomi felt the prick of the needle and then the coolness of the juice in her veins, keeping her from suffering the worst of the g forces. Alex was grinning like a kid on his birthday as the old gunship rose again for the great emptiness. Naomi watched the external temperature as they rose, the atmosphere growing colder and colder, but also thinner and thinner until there wasn’t enough there to conduct away heat at all. The shuddering stopped, and the only sounds were the ticking of the air recyclers and the occasional harmonic chiming of the drive passing through a resonance frequency. On her tactical display, the planet fell away behind them and they passed escape velocity. They weren’t even in a long orbit of Freehold now. They were on their own. Free.
Naomi shouted, a wide, celebratory yawp. And Alex answered back. She lay back in the couch and let herself just be home. Just for a moment.
The Roci was an old ship now. She’d never be state of the art again. But like old tools, well used and well cared for, she’d become something more than plating and wires, conduits and storage and sensor arrays. Old Rokku had said that after fifty years flying, a ship had a soul. It had seemed like a cute superstition when she was young. It seemed obvious now.
“God, I missed this,” Alex said.
“I know, right?”
An hour later, Alex put them on the float, and Naomi unstrapped. Freehold system was so empty, there was no traffic control authority. No flight plans or patrols watching for drive plumes without transponders. She started her diagnostics running, but she already knew from the sound of the drive and the taste of the air that they’d come back clean. She moved from station to station, checking the displays and controls as if there were other crew members who might be using them.
She didn’t notice the change in Alex’s mood until he spoke.