“Hostiles are still—”
“If they shoot at us, do something clever. We’ve got an emergency.”
The gravity let go again. Holden’s spine lengthened. His knees felt like they were swelling. Bobbie, now carrying Fred in her arms, was on the lift, dropping toward the medical bay. Fred looked tiny cradled against her, his eyes closed. Holden told himself that the old man’s arm draped around Bobbie’s shoulder was clinging to her. Had strength. He didn’t know if it was true.
A cacophony of voices shouted in his ear. Everyone asking what had happened. What was going on.
“Steinberg!” he barked. “You’re on weapons. Patel, take the comms.” Then he pulled off his headset. The lift was coming back up for them, the gentle hum barely audible in the noises of the ship, and the only thing he had ears for. He willed it to go faster.
Naomi put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Really?”
Naomi shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know.”
The lift came. They loaded on, descending for the crew deck. If the Pella got itself back under control, it could loop around. The fight could start again at any second, catching them away from their crash couches. Holden knew they should be burning hard, rushing toward Tycho as fast as they could. He walked through the tight, military corridor, into the medical bay. It felt like he was in a different ship. Everything was just where it always was, but it seemed new. Fresh. Foreign.
Fred lay on the table, stripped to the waist. The autodoc was strapped to his arm, needles inserted into the veins. He looked weirdly vulnerable, as if he’d physically shrunk between the time he’d gotten into the crash couch and now. Bobbie stood over him, arms crossed, glowering like an angel out of the Old Testament. One of the scary kind. The kind that kept you out of paradise and killed armies in a single night. She didn’t look up as they came in.
“How bad is it?” Holden asked.
Somehow Bobbie made her shrug an expression of rage. “He’s dead.”
He didn’t know how Amos and Clarissa got the duty of preparing the body, but whatever the mechanism, it turned out to be a good fit. Amos stripped him, and Clarissa cleaned Fred’s skin with a damp cloth. Holden didn’t need to be there for it. Didn’t have to watch. Except that he did.
They didn’t talk. Didn’t make jokes. Clarissa swabbed Fred’s body with a calm, businesslike intimacy. Compassionate and unsentimental. Amos helped when Fred needed to be moved and dressed in a fresh uniform and when she needed to slide the body bag under him. It took a little less than an hour from start to finish. Holden didn’t know if that seemed like too long or not long enough. Clarissa hummed something as she worked. A soft melody he didn’t recognize, but one that didn’t seem to rest in either a major key or a minor one. Her thin, pale face and Amos’ thickness seemed perfectly matched. When the bag was sealed, Amos hefted it. Easy to do. They were still barely above a third of a g.
Clarissa nodded to Holden as they passed out of the medical bay. Her skin was bruised at the back of her neck and all along the arms where the blood had pooled during the burn. “We’ll take care of him,” she said.
“He was important,” Holden replied, and wasn’t ashamed at the catch in his voice.
Something like sorrow or amusement flickered in Clarissa’s eyes. “I’ve spent a lot of time with the dead. He’ll be okay now. You go take care of the ones that lived through it.”
Amos smiled amiably and carried the bag out. “You need to get drunk or in a fistfight later, just let me know.”
“Yeah,” Holden said. “All right.”
After they left, he stood beside the empty medical table. He’d been on it more than once. Naomi had. Alex. Amos. Amos had regrown most of a hand in this room. That death had come randomly—stupidly—seemed obscene even though it was mundane enough. People stroked out. Fred was older than he’d once been. He was dealing with high blood pressure. He’d been going without sleep, pushing himself. The juice they had was lousy. It had been a long battle and a hard burn. All of it was true. All of it made sense. And none of it did.
The others were still at their stations, but the word had gotten out by now. He was going to have to face them at some point. He didn’t know what he’d say to Fred’s crew. I’m so sorry, but after that?
He brushed his hand on the mattress, listened to the hiss of skin against plastic. It felt colder than he’d expected. It took him a second to realize it was the dampness from Clarissa’s cloth evaporating. He recognized Naomi by her footsteps.
“Do you remember when it came out he was working with the OPA?” Holden asked.
“I do.”
“It was the only thing on any of the newsfeeds for … I don’t know. A week. Everyone saying he was a traitor and a disgrace. Talking about whether there should be an investigation. Whether he could still be brought up on charges even though he’d resigned years before.”
“What I heard was more equivocal,” Naomi said. She came into the room, leaned against one of the other tables. She pulled her hair down over her eyes like a veil as she spoke, then scowled and brushed it back. “The people I knew assumed he was a mole. Earthers trying to Trojan horse their way into our organization.”
“Was it still your organization back then?”
“Yeah. It was.”
He turned, pulled himself up to sit on the table. The autodoc, sensing his weight, pulled up the start screen, glowed hopefully for a few seconds, and turned back off. “I just can’t remember a time when Fred Johnson wasn’t someone important. It’s just …”
Naomi sighed. He looked at her. The lines on her face that hadn’t been there when he’d met her. The way the line of her jaw had changed. She was beautiful. She was mortal. He didn’t want to think about it.