“Yeah, not sleepin’,” the pilot replied, “just got my own list of shit to do.” She could hear his smile.
Bobbie closed the diagnostic screen. Verifying the status on the thrusters was the last item on her work order. And short of putting on a suit and climbing outside to physically look into the nozzles, there wasn’t much more she could do.
“I’m going to do some housekeeping, then head up,” she said.
“Mmhm.”
Bobbie put her tools away and used a mild solvent to wipe up some lubricant she’d spilled. It smelled sweet and pungent, like something she’d have cooked with back when she’d been living alone on Mars. Anxiety pushed her toward preparing more for the mission even after she was prepared. In the old days, this was when she’d have cleaned and serviced her power armor again and again and again until it became a kind of meditation. Now, she went through the ship the same way.
She’d lived on the Rocinante for more years now than anyplace else. Longer than her childhood home. Longer than her tour in the Marines.
The engineering deck was A
mos country, and the mechanic kept a tidy shop. Every tool was in its place, every surface spotless. Other than the oil and solvent, the only other smell in the compartment was the ozone scent that hinted at powerful electricity coursing nearby. The floor vibrated in time with the fusion reactor on the deck below, the ship’s beating heart.
On one bulkhead, Amos painted a sign that read:
SHE TAKES CARE OF YOU
YOU TAKE CARE OF HER
Bobbie patted the words as she walked by and climbed onto the ladder lift that ran up the center of the ship. The Roci was at a very gentle 0.2 g braking burn, and there had been a time when riding the lift instead of climbing the ladder would have felt like admitting defeat, even if the ship was burning ten times that hard. But for the last couple years Bobbie’s joints had been giving her trouble, and proving to herself that she could make the climb had stopped mattering as much.
It seemed to her that the real sign you were getting old was when you stopped needing to prove you weren’t getting old.
The hatches separating each deck slid open at the lift’s approach, and then quietly closed after she’d passed. The Roci might be a decade or two past her sell-by date, but Clarissa tolerated no sticking or squeaking on her ship. At least once a week, Claire made a complete pass through every environmental system and pressure hatch. When Bobbie had mentioned it to Holden, he’d said, Because she broke the ship once, and she’s still trying to fix it.
The lift hummed to a stop on the ops deck, and Bobbie stepped off. The hatch up to the cockpit was open. Alex’s brown and almost entirely bald head poked up over the back of the pilot’s crash couch. The crew spent most of their working time in Operations, and the air felt subtly different. Long hours spent in the crash couches meant the smell of sweat never entirely went away, no matter how hard the air recyclers worked. And, like any room James Holden spent a lot of time in, the comfortable scent of old coffee lingered.
Bobbie ran a finger along the bulkhead, feeling the anti-spalling fabric crackle under the pressure. The dark-gray color had faded, and it was getting harder to tell where the fabric didn’t match because it had been damaged and patched and where it was just aging unevenly. It would need to be replaced soon. She could live with the color, but the crunching meant that it was losing its elasticity. Getting too brittle to do its job.
Both of Bobbie’s shoulders ached, and it was getting trickier to tell the difference between the one that had been explosively dislocated during hand-to-hand training years before and the one that just hurt from decades of not being gentle with her body. She’d picked up a lot of battle scars during her life, and they were getting harder and harder to differentiate from the normal damage of wearing out. Like the discolored patches on the Roci’s bulkheads, everything was just fading to match.
She climbed the short ladder up through the hatch into the cockpit, trying to enjoy the ache in her shoulders the way she’d once enjoyed the burn after an intense workout. As an old drill sergeant had told her, pain is the warrior’s friend. Pain reminds you that you aren’t dead yet.
“Yo,” Alex said as she dropped into the gunner’s chair behind him. “How’s our girl look?”
“Old, but she can still get around.”
“I meant the ship.”
Bobbie laughed and called up the tactical display. Off in the distance, the planet Freehold. The mission. “My brother always complained I spent too much time looking for metaphors.”
“An aging Martian warrior living inside an aging Martian warrior,” Alex said, the smile audible in his voice. “Don’t have to look too hard there.”
“Not too agéd to kick your ass.” Bobbie zoomed in on Freehold on their tactical screen. A mottled marble of brown continents and green oceans, with the occasional white swirl of cloud. “How long?”
“We’ll be there in a week.”
“Talk to Jizz lately? How’s my future baby daddy doing?”
“Giselle is fine, and she says Kit is doing great. Picked planetary engineering as his major at Mariner Tech.”
“It is the hot job market right now,” Bobbie agreed.
She’d been Alex’s best man when he’d married Giselle, and she’d waited at the hospital on Ceres when Kit had been born thirteen months later. And now Kit was going into upper university, and Alex had been divorced for over a decade. He was her best friend, but he was terrible husband material. After his second failure at it Bobbie pointed out that if he just wanted something to hurt, she could break his arm for him and save everyone time.
But for all the unnecessary drama, Alex and Giselle’s short-lived trainwreck of a marriage had produced Kit, and that made the universe a better place. The boy had all of Alex’s laconic charm and all of his mother’s regal good looks. Every time he called her Aunt Bobbie, she wanted to hug him until his ribs cracked.