This was the life he’d dreamed of during his imprisonment. This was what he thought he’d lost forever: suffering a little insomnia while his lover of decades rested at his side. That the universe had given it back to him after he’d given up hope flooded him with a profound gratitude when it didn’t frighten him. This was so small, so precious, and so fragile.
They were both mortal. The one thing he knew for certain was that this couldn’t last forever. Someday, there would be a last meal with Naomi. Someday there would be a last sleepless night for him. A last moment hearing the Roci’s drive humming around him. He might know when it came, or it might only be clear in retrospect, or it might end for him so quickly that he never had time to notice all the beautiful, small moments that he was losing.
Naomi jerked, went still, and then the low, soft rumble of her snore began. Jim grinned through his weariness, counted her breaths up to two hundred to give her time to fully commit to slumber, and then pulled himself up out of the couch and dressed in the gloom. When he opened the door to the corridor, Naomi turned to look at him. Even though her eyes were open, she wasn’t awake.
“No troubles,” he said. “Keep sleeping.”
She smiled. She was beautiful when she smiled. She was always beautiful. He closed the door.
They’d made it almost three-quarters of the way to the Falcon, and were in the earliest part of their braking burn. Elvi’s messages to them—that they could dock, that she’d see to it that there wasn’t a security problem, that they were welcome—had a sense of normalcy that didn’t match the situation at all. Even as Naomi had responded with their flight path and expected intercept coordinates, Jim had been struck with the absurdity of treating it like popping over to someone’s apartment for dinner, when in reality it was more like conspiracy to commit treason. But the Derecho hadn’t followed them through the gate, and there was literally no place else for a ship to hide. At some point, Adro had been a solar system capable of sustaining life. Now it was a star, a green diamond the size of a gas giant, the Falcon, and the Rocinante.
Jim reached the lift and rode it slowly up through the quiet ship until he reached the ops deck. Alex was standing beside a crash couch, a bulb in his hand and the bright gate on the screen in front of him. They were far enough from it now that, if he’d gone outside, Jim wouldn’t have been able to distinguish it from the billions of stars. On the scopes, it radiated swirling waves of aurora-like energy.
“Hey,” he said.
Alex looked over his shoulder. “What’re you doing up?”
“Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d see if you wanted me to take watch.”
“I’m fine,” Alex said. “I’m shifted over. This feels like midafternoon to me. You want a beer?”
“A midafternoon beer?”
“I didn’t say it was morning,” Alex said, and scooped another bulb off the crash couch. Jim caught it, broke the seal, and took a long swallow.
“I’ve never understood people who like beer without gravity,” Alex said. “That’s not a drink. That’s a vaguely alcoholic kind of foam.”
“No argument,” Jim said, then nodded toward the screen. “Anything?”
“Nothing new, but . . .” Alex gestured at the bright ring. “I don’t know. I keep looking at it. Wondering what the hell it’s doing.”
“Well, it hasn’t killed us. That seems like a good start.”
“Could definitely be worse. But . . . You think you know something, right? Then it turns out you were only used to it. It does something, and it does something, and then after a while, you think that’s what it does. Then it turns out there was this whole other thing, maybe.”
“Using a microwave as a lamp, because it has a light in it,” Jim said. He tried to remember where he’d heard that analogy.
“Yeah, exactly,” Alex said. “You thought you knew it, but you were only familiar with it.”
Jim took another sip of the beer. The hops tasted like mushroom, for good reason. “I’m hoping that Elvi has figured some things out. I mean, she’ll know better than we do.”
“We can hope,” Alex agreed, then squeezed the last of the beer out of his bulb and tossed it into the recycler. His belch was deep and satisfied.
“How many of these did you have?” Jim asked.
“A few.”
“Are you drunk?”
Alex considered the question. “A little, I guess.” He lowered himself into the crash couch. “There was this time when I was a kid, I had a really crap babysitter. I was maybe nine? She was sixteen. And we watched this monster film. A huge cat monster that lived underground, and it got pissed off by some seismic surveys. Came to the top and started tearing up cities and collapsing tunnels. Scared the shit out of me.”