“Are you the right guy for this job?”
“No,” Holden said. “But I’m the guy who got it. So I’m going to do it.”
Amos waited for a few moments, seeing how that answer sat with him.
“Okay,” he said, and stood up. The soup had gotten cold enough to have a little film forming on the top. He dropped it and the spoon into the recycler. “Glad we got that cleared up. Anything me and Peaches need to put on the schedule? Feeling like we should maybe give Bobbie’s stuff the once-over.”
“Pretty sure she’s already done that a few hundred times,” Holden said, forcing a smile.
“Probably true,” Amos said. “Well, all right, then.”
He started out the door. Holden’s voice stopped him. “Thank you.”
He looked back. Holden looked like he was hunched, protecting something. Or like someone had kicked him in the chest. Funny how everyone else’s image of the guy got bigger and it made the real one seem small. Like there was only so much food to share between the two of them. “Sure,” he said, not certain what he was being thanked for, but pretty solid this was a good answer. “And hey. If you want, I can change the permissions so that you can’t disarm the torpedoes next time. If taking it out of your hands would help.”
“No,” Holden said. “My hands are fine.”
“Cool, then.” He headed out.
In the machine shop, Peaches was putting away her tools and running the closing sequences for her diagnostics. “Tested the new seals,” she said.
“They good?”
“Within toleranc
e,” she said, which was as close as she was probably ever going to get to saying they were good. “I’ll check them again tomorrow when the polymerization’s totally done.”
“Okay.”
The system chirped. She checked the readout, okayed it, and closed the display. “You heading out to the station?”
“Nope,” Amos said. Now that he bothered to notice, his body was feeling heavy and slow. Like coming out of a hot bath he’d stayed in a little too long. He wondered if Maddie was awake yet. If he got there quick enough, maybe he could finish up his night there. Except no. She’d be going on shift again about the time he was nodding off, and then it wouldn’t be clear if he’d come back to screw again, and that’d just be awkward. Unless … He considered intellectually whether he wanted to screw again, then shook his head. “Nah, I’m just coming in. Going to grab some sack time now.”
Peaches cocked her head. “You came back early?”
“Yeah. I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “But I can now.”
Chapter Thirty-Six: Filip
Fixing your ship was what it meant to be a Belter. Earthers lived lives eating off the government dole and fucking each other into torpor by exploiting the Belt. Dusters sacrificed themselves and anyone else they could get their hands on for the dream of making Mars into a new Earth, even while they hated the old one. And Belters? They fixed their ships. They mined the asteroids and moons of the system. They made every scrap go longer than it was designed to. They used their cleverness and resourcefulness and reliance on each other to thrive in the vacuum like a handful of flowers blooming in an unimaginably vast desert. Putting hand to the Pella was as natural and proper as breathing in after breathing out.
Filip hated that he didn’t want to do it.
In the first days, it was simple on-the-float work. Even then, he felt the eyes of the others on him, heard their conversations go quiet when he came in earshot. Josie and Sárta welding in the space between the hulls had said something about the dangers of nepotism, not knowing he was on the frequency, and then pretended they hadn’t when he showed up. In the galley, newsfeeds from the crippled Earth were his best companions. His father didn’t call for him or restrict his duties. Either would have been better than this nameless limbo. If he’d been cast down, he could at least have taken some pride in having been wronged. Instead, he woke for his shift, went to help with the repairs, and wished that he could be someplace else.
It was only when it came clear that the dead thruster was going to need a new housing that they burned for a shipyard. In other lives, they’d have tried for Ceres or Tycho, but the second-string yards were still decent. Rhea. Pallas. Vesta. They didn’t use any of those. When his father’s order came down, it was for Callisto.
A new escort came, guns bared, to keep the Pella safe from the torpedoes and attack ships of the enemy. But while Earth and Mars and Fred Johnson’s OPA probably had their eyes on the Pella, they didn’t let themselves be pulled out from their bases and fleets. They were a prize, but not one worth risking for.
Lying in his crash couch, watching feeds of neo-taarab bands from Europa and half a dozen bad sex comedies because Sylvie Kai had roles in them, Filip fantasized that there would be an attack. Maybe a little fleet led by the Rocinante. James fucking Holden and Filip’s own traitorous whore of a mother in command, screaming out after him with their rail gun and torpedoes. Sometimes the fantasy ended with someone else getting the Pella beat up even worse and everyone seeing how hard it was to win that fight. Sometimes it ended with them killing the Rocinante, blowing it into glowing gas and shards of metal. Sometimes he imagined that they’d lose and die. And the twin points of light in that last and darkest daydream fit together like a clamp bolt in its housing: It would be an end to working on the ship, and also they would never reach Callisto.
The surviving shipyard on Callisto stood on the side permanently locked facing away from Jupiter. Its floodlights cast long, permanent shadows across the moon’s landscape and the ruins of its sister yard, a Martian base shattered years ago. Shattered in one of the first actions by the Free Navy. In Filip’s first command. The dust and fines stirred up by the actions of human commerce fell slowly on Callisto, giving an illusion of mist where there was no free water and only the most tenuous atmosphere to carry it. He watched the scattering of floodlights on the moon’s surface grow larger as they came in, white and bright and random like a handful of the star field had been grabbed and mashed into the dirt. When the Pella tipped down into a repair berth, the sound of the clamps coming into place was deep as a punch. Filip unstrapped and made his way to the airlock as soon as he could.
Josie was there—long, graying hair pulled back from his narrow, yellow-toothed face. Josie who’d been on the Callisto raid with him. Who’d been under Filip’s command. He lifted his eyebrows as Filip started to cycle the lock.
“Not wearing tués uniform,” Josie said, only the smallest sneer in his voice.
“Not on duty.”