Cibola Burn (Expanse 4)

“Yeah,” Alex said. “You really fucked that one up, didn’t you?”

Alex tapped something on his screen, and the words RAIL GUN ARMED glowed red for a second over the image of the Edward Israel.

“I need to call over to that ship in a sec,” Alex said.

“Warn them.”

“More like threaten them,” Alex said. “Pretty much the shittiest thing we have to offer for someone we all love, but it’s what we got left.” He reached out and fiddled with something on the bulkhead and a stream of cool air shot out of the vent. It ruffled the pilot’s thinning black hair and dried the sweat accumulating on his scalp. He closed his eyes and sighed.

“I don’t even have threats,” Basia said. It sounded like whining even to him. “I don’t even have that.”

“Yeah. So I flew for the Mars navy for twenty years,” Alex said, his eyes still closed.

“Oh?” Basia said. He wasn’t sure what the correct response was.

“I was married,” Alex continued, moving his head around to let the cool air strike every part of his neck and face. Basia didn’t reply. It had the feeling of a story, not a conversation. Alex would tell it or he wouldn’t.

“Life for a naval spouse is, frankly, pretty shitty,” Alex said after a few moments. “Typical tour on an MCRN boat can go from ninety days to four, maybe five hundred days. Depending on your MOS and fleet locations.”

“MOS?” Basia asked before he could stop himself.

“Your job. Anyway, while you’re out on a boat, your partner is back home, doin’ whatever they do. Lot of folks do plural marriages, group partnerships, things like that. But I’m a one-woman kind of guy, and I guess she was a one-man kind of woman. So we did it the old-fashioned way.”

Basia nodded, even though Alex couldn’t see him. When they were building new domes Basia had done work that kept him at a surface camp for four or five days straight. His wife’s medical practice wouldn’t have let her travel with him, even if they hadn’t had children. Those were long weeks. Basia tried to imagine stringing ten or twenty of those weeks in a row and failed.

“But that meant she stayed home while I flew,” Alex said after a quiet moment. “She had her own work. Software engineer. Good one, too. So it’s not like she was pinin’ away at home for me. But still, if you love somebody you want to be with ’em, and we loved each other. Faithful to each other, if you can imagine that. My tours were tough on us both. I’d get home and we’d break the bed.”

Alex reached out and turned down the air vent, then spun his chair to face Basia. His broad dark face held a sad smile. “It was a crap situation, but she stuck with me. Through twenty years of me bein’ on ships she stuck with me. And when I was in port things were good. She’d work from home and I’d take a lot of leave, and we’d wake up late and make breakfast together. Work in the garden.”

Alex closed his eyes again, and for a moment Basia thought he might have fallen asleep. “Ever been to Mars?”

“No,” Basia replied. “But my wife has.”

“The newer areas, the ones built after we had some idea of what folks need to feel happy, were built different. No more narrow stone corridors. They built wide corridors with lots of green space down the middle for plants.”

“Like on Ceres,” Basia said. “I’ve been to Ceres.”

“Yeah, that’s right. They do that on Ceres too. Anyway, you could apply for a permit to care for a section of that space. Plant what you wanted. We had a little chunk in the corridor outside our home. My wife planted an herb garden, some flowers, a few hot pepper plants. We’d work in it.”

“Sounds nice,” Basia said.

“Yeah.” Alex nodded, eyes still closed. “I didn’t know it at the time. But it really was. I kinda thought it was a pain in the ass, to be honest. Never been much for gardening. But she liked it and I liked her and back then that was enough.”

“Did she die?” Basia asked.

“What? Goodness, no.”

“So what happened?”

“What happened is that she waited twenty years for me to retire. And I did, and then we didn’t have to spend time apart anymore. She went to part-time with her work, I took a part-time gig flying suborbital shuttles. We spent a lot of time in bed.”

Alex opened his eyes and winked. He seemed to be waiting for a response, so Basia said, “And then?”

“And then one day I put into port at the Mariner orbital transit, and while they were unloadin’ my cargo I almost walked into an MCRN recruiting office and signed up again.”

“Do they take —”

“No, I didn’t do it, and yeah, I was too damn old anyway. But when I landed we had a big fight over something stupid. I don’t even remember what. Hell, I didn’t know what we were fightin’ about even at the time, except I sorta did.”

“Leaving.”

“No, actually, it was never about leavin’ her. I never stopped wanting to be with her. But I needed to fly. She’d waited twenty years for me, and she’d done it thinkin’ we’d have all the time in the world after I was through. She’d done her tour, just as much as I had, and she deserved the part that came after.”

Basia felt what was coming like a punch in the stomach, unable to avoid comparing it to his own situation. “But you left anyway.”

Alex didn’t reply for a time, didn’t move, just floated in the straps of his pilot’s chair like a corpse in water. When he spoke again, his voice was strained and quiet, like a man admitting something shameful. Hoping no one will hear.

“One day I left work at the transit office and I walked across the street to the Pur’n’Kleen Water Company and I signed a five-year contract to fly long-haul freighters out to Saturn and back. That’s who I am. I’m not a gardener, or a shuttle pilot, or – turns out – a husband. I’m a long-flight pilot. Pushing a little bubble of air-filled metal across an ocean of nothing is what I was born to do.”

“You can’t blame yourself for what happened,” Basia started.

“No,” Alex said, a deep frown cutting into his forehead. “A person can fail the people they love just by being who they are. I’m who I am, and it wasn’t what my wife wanted me to be, and somethin’ had to break. You decided to do what you did down on that planet, and it put you up here with me instead of with your family.”