“Every time Holden takes a breath, Marco Inaros suffers,” Dawes said. And that was probably as close to truth as anything he’d said in the last two days.
Micah nodded slowly, then stood, wavering drunkenly, and threw his arms around Dawes. The embrace went on longer than Dawes felt comfortable with. Just as he began to wonder if the other man was starting to black out, Micah stepped back, gave a sharp OPA salute, and walked out of the chapel, wiping his eye against the inside of his wrist. Dawes sat back down.
It was midshift, and almost midnight for him. The three Fred Johnsons still graced the front wall. The child, the adult, and the man who, all unknowingly, was at the end of his struggles. Fred Johnson as he had been. The way Dawe
s remembered him best was tied up and spitting angry the first time they’d met, and the flicker of disappointment in the man’s eye when he realized Dawes wasn’t going to kill him.
They’d fought a hell of a fight together, against each other and side by side. And then against each other again. The clash of empires, only he wasn’t sure what the empires were any longer. Everything they’d done had brought them here, one dead, the other living a life he barely recognized or understood.
Humanity hadn’t changed, but it had. The venality and the nobility, the cruelty and the grace. They were all still there. It was just the particulars he felt shifting away from under him. Everything he’d fought for seemed to belong to a different man in a different time. Well. It was in the nature of torches to be passed. Nothing to be sad about in that. Except that he was sad.
“Well, there you have it,” he said to the empty air. “The kingmaker’s last hurrah. I hope to hell you knew what you were doing. I hope James Holden is what you thought he could be.”
It was almost an hour later that the door opened and a young man came in. Tight dark curls, wide-set warm eyes, a thin apologetic mustache. Dawes nodded to him, and the man nodded back. For a moment, they were both silent.
“Perdón,” the man said. “Not rushing, me. It’s only I’m supposed to take this one down now. It’s … it’s on the schedule.”
Dawes nodded and waved him forward. The man moved hesitantly at first, then reached a point of commitment where the work was just the work. The corporal came down first, then the head of the OPA. The young boy with the book and the grin stayed until last.
There had been a moment when that child had waved into a camera, decades ago, not knowing the gesture was also his last. The boy and the Butcher were both gone now. The man took the picture down, rolled it together with the others, and slid them all into a sleeve of cheap green plastic.
He stopped on his way out. “You all right, you? Need something?”
“Fine,” Dawes said. “I’m just going to stay here a little longer. If that’s all right.”
Chapter Thirty-Five: Amos
Sex was one of those things where the way it was supposed to work and the way it worked for him didn’t always match up real well. He knew all the stuff about love and affection, and that just seemed like making shit up. He understood making shit up. He also understood how people talked about it, and he could talk about it that way, just to fit in.
In practice, he recognized there was power in being with another living body, and he respected it. The pressure built up over the weeks or months on the burn kind of like hunger or thirst, only slower and it wouldn’t kill you if you ignored it. He didn’t fight against it. For one thing, that was stupid. For another it didn’t help. He just noticed it, kept an eye on it. Acknowledged it was there the same way he would anything powerful and dangerous that was sharing his workspace.
When they got into port someplace big enough to have a licensed brothel, he’d go there. Not because it was safe so much as it was an environment where he knew what all the dangers looked like. Could recognize them and not be surprised. Then he’d take care of what needed to be taken care of, and afterward, it wouldn’t bother him for a while.
Maybe that was different from everyone else, but it worked for him.
The thing was, he’d usually be able to sleep afterward. Really sleep. Deep and dreamless and hard to pull up out of until he was done. And right now, he was mostly just looking at the ceiling. The last girl—the one called Maddie—was curled up next to him, the sheets draped around her legs, her arm under one pillow, snoring a little. One of the good things about getting a room for the whole night is they’d give you a quiet one away from the front. Maddie was someone he’d used and been used by before when the Roci’d been on Tycho, and he liked her as much as he liked anyone that wasn’t in his tribe. That she felt safe sleeping next to him warmed something in his stomach that usually stayed cold.
She had a little gap between her front teeth and skin as pale as anyone he’d ever met. She could blush on command, which was a pretty good trick, and she’d been in the life since she was a kid. Before she’d come to Tycho for the legal trade. His own childhood in the illegal trade meant they had context that made the talk before and after more comfortable for him, and she knew he wouldn’t pull any of that “you’re better than this” soul-saving bullshit. He also wouldn’t start calling her a bitch and being abusive out of shame the way some johns did. He liked shooting the shit with her afterward, and usually the way she snored just a little didn’t keep him from drifting off.
Only that wasn’t what was keeping him awake. He knew what was keeping him awake.
He got out of bed quietly so as not to wake her up. He’d paid her and rented the room for the whole night, and the house wasn’t about to give him a refund for leaving early, so she might as well get the rest herself. He gathered up his clothes and slipped out into the hallway to get dressed. A john on his way out passed by as he was pulling on his jumpsuit, made brief and awkward eye contact, nodded curtly. Amos smiled his amiable smile and made room for the guy to go past before he zipped himself in and headed out toward the docks.
The Roci had spent more time in Tycho than any other port, usually getting put back together after the last whatever went wrong. It wasn’t home—nowhere outside the Roci was home—but it was familiar enough that he could feel the differences. It was in the way people talked to each other in the hallways. The kinds of images that played on the newsfeeds. He’d seen what it was like for a place to change in ways that didn’t change back. Earth was like that. Now Tycho. Kind of like a big, slow wave coming out from where the rocks had hit Earth and spreading through everyplace humans were.
There were people on Tycho who recognized him too. Not like they knew Holden. Holden, he couldn’t walk through a room anymore without people staring at him and pointing and making a fuss. Amos had the sense that was going to be a problem eventually, but it wasn’t one he knew how to fix. He wasn’t even sure what it implied at this point.
Back at the ship, he headed down to the machine shop and his workstation. The Roci told him that Holden was in the galley with Babs, Naomi was catching some bunk time, and Peaches was at work replacing the hatch seals they’d been talking about. He made a note on his work schedule to double-check them when she was done, even though he knew they’d be fine. Peaches turned out to be a pretty good worker. Smart, focused, seemed to really enjoy fixing things, and never bitched about the stresses of shipboard life. Perspective, he figured. Shittiest ship there was still had to be better than the best cell in the pit, if only because you got to pick that you were in it.
He shrugged into his couch, pulled up the technical reports, and spooled through the way he had before. Not that he expected to find anything different. Just to see if there was any reaction when he got to the weird bit. He got to it and looked at the data for a while. The torpedoes Bobbie had fired off. Their trajectories. The error logs. And he had the same reaction. It was bugging him.
He shut the workstation down.
“Hey,” Peaches said, coming up from engineering with an ARL polymer tank slung over one shoulder.
“Hey,” he said. “How’s it going?”
She was still too skinny. The smallest standard jumpsuit still left her swimming in it. They’d had to adjust the code to convince the Roci that anyone flying on her could be so slight. Working made her look healthier, though.