Babylon's Ashes (Expanse 6)

Holden turned to Bobbie. “You should get some rest. I’ll fire off our notes. If we get enough sleep and eat breakfast after, we might even get some replies back.”

“Fair enough,” Bobbie said. “You’re going to sleep too, right?”

“Like the dead,” Holden said. “Just got to finish the stuff first.”

Bobbie rose up and headed out, tapping Amos’ shoulder with her knuckles as she passed. A silent Thanks for having my back. He liked her, but that’s not why he’d agreed with her. When you got a nail to drive, use the fucking hammer. Just made sense.

Amos sat down in her vacated spot, but sideways, with his back against the wall and one leg running along the bench. His hand terminal chimed. Some update that Peaches had been running sending its system clear message to the team. As he watched, the Roci updated him: Alex was back on board. Amos shut the alerts off.

Holden looked like shit. Not just tired, exactly. His skin got waxy and his eyes sort of sank back in the sockets when that happened. Not exhaustion, then. Something else. He looked like a kid who just realized he’d jumped in the deep end of the pool and was trying to figure out whether he should embarrass himself by shouting for help or drown with a little dignity.

“You doing all right?” Holden asked before Amos had quite gathered his thoughts.

“Me? Sure, Cap’n. Last man standing. That’s me. What about you?”

Holden gestured, hands out to the walls and bulkheads, the dock and station beyond it. The universe. “Fine?”

“Yeah, so. Peaches and I were doing the post-fight spit and polish.”

“Yeah?”

“I went over the battle data. You know, usual thing. Make sure the Roci was doing all the stuff we expected her to do. Didn’t need anything pinched or crimped or whatever. And, you know, part of that’s looking at the armament performance.”

Holden’s jaw shifted just a little. It wasn’t much. Probably wouldn’t even have lost him a hand of poker, except Amos had known when to look for it. So that was something to remember. He took another spoonful of his soup.

“Those torpedoes that Bobbie fired off at the end,” he said. “One of ’em scored a direct hit.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Okay.”

“I didn’t check.”

“It hit,” Amos said. “But it didn’t go off. A dud is a serious problem. So I started looking at why it failed.”

“I disarmed them,” Holden said.

Amos put down his bowl, abandoned his spoon in it. The display Holden and Bobbie had been looking over shifted, trying to guess what Holden wanted to be shown.

“But that was the righteous thing to do,” Amos said. He didn’t make it a question, exactly. Just a statement that Holden could agree with or not. He didn’t want it to sound like anything was riding on it. Holden ran his hands through his hair. He looked like he was seeing something that wasn’t in the room. Amos didn’t know what it was.

“He showed me her kid,” Holden said. “Marco? He showed me Naomi’s son. Showed me that he was on the ship right then. Right there. And … I don’t know. He looks like her. Not like her like her, but family resemblance. In the moment, I couldn’t take that away from her. I couldn’t kill him.”

“I get that. She’s one of us. We take care of us,” Amos said. “I’m only asking because those are the bad guys we’re planning to go up against again. If we’re not willing to win the fight, I’m not sure what we’re doing in the cage.”

Holden nodded, swallowed. The display gave up and shut down, leaving the galley just a little bit darker. “That was before we got here.”

“Yeah,” Amos said carefully. “Who your tribe is got kind of weird all of a sudden. If you’re the new Fred Johnson, that’s going to change what it means when you decide not to blow people up.”

“It is,” Holden said. The distress in his expression was like the growl of a power coupler starting to fail. “I don’t know that I’d do it differently if we were back there, in that same moment. I don’t regret what I did. But I know next time can’t be like that.”

“Naomi should probably be good with that too.”

“I was planning to talk to her about it,” Holden said. “I may have been putting it off.”

“So I gotta ask this,” Amos said.

“Shoot.”