“But it’ll pass,” Amos went on. “Maybe it doesn’t go all the way back to what it was before you put your head in that thing, but it’ll get better than this.”
“I am supposed to be in there! They’re supposed to tell me things! I want it, and you fucked it up for me. Now you need to fix it.”
“This is what fixed looks like now.”
“We’re dead anyway!” She was fighting against sobs now. “It doesn’t matter if we’re all dead anyway.”
“We should get you back to Little Man. He’s worried about you.”
“Stay out of our heads!” Cara screamed, and launched herself at Amos. The impact of their bodies was deeper and more violent than Alex had expected, like they were both weighted with lead. Cara’s attack wasn’t balanced or braced, and Amos was. She flailed, losing her orientation. Her heel, swinging, hit the bulkhead with a sound like a hammer strike. Where she hit, the fabric and foam had a deep dent.
The screams and sobs grew more violent and then, like a candle guttering out, faded suddenly into nothing. Amos looked back over his shoulder, first at Jim and Teresa, then back up toward Alex. A black streak across his right cheek showed where Cara had struck him.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Amos said.
“Take your time,” Alex replied, and then felt stupid for saying it. But Amos only nodded and passed from handhold to handhold until he reached Cara where she floated, curled tightly into herself, her whole body a fist. Amos said something to the girl that Alex couldn’t hear, and then tucked her in one broad, pale arm and pulled her with him out the airlock door and across the docking bridge.
Jim and Teresa rose up as Alex floated down, and the three of them watched Amos cross to the Falcon and pass into it.
“Well, shit,” Alex said. “Looks like Elvi told her about us dropping the whole library thing.”
“He knew it would be ugly,” Teresa said. “He’s been waiting for this to happen. He told Dr. Okoye to put responsibility for shutting the experiments down on him.”
“Because he can take the punch?” Alex asked.
“Have you seen Elvi?” Jim said. “She looks like she’d break if you breathed on her too hard.”
“Well, good on Amos, I guess,” Alex said. For a moment, he had the sense that someone else was in the airlock with them— some fourth person watching alongside them. He looked back toward the lift, expecting to see Naomi, but no one was there.
Once the order came, getting the Rocinante ready to evacuate Adro system didn’t take long at all. Alex had been over the flight checks with the experience of a lifetime lifting him through the process. The maneuvering thrusters were all reporting back solid. The water supply was still pretty healthy, especially compared with the Falcon, which rode drier than Alex would have been comfortable with. The air recyclers were working at better-thanspec. The Epstein drive would need a refit sometime in the next year, if things went well enough that they were all still alive and recognizably human by then.
Alex had heard the idea that a tool, used long enough and cared for well enough, developed a soul. He’d never been a religious man, but even without going to the supernatural, he felt like there was some truth in that. The Rocinante and Alex had spent a lot of years in each other’s company, and he understood the ship the way he would a friend. It was probably just normal primate subliminal pattern matching, but he experienced it as the ship having moods and needs. He could tell when a thruster wanted to have its feed lines replaced by the way the ship turned, knew when they were low on reaction mass by the sound of the drive echoing in the halls. Getting ready for another burn out toward the gates was like pulling on his socks. He didn’t even think about it anymore. The ship and her crew were intimate enough that it all just happened.
The Falcon was a newer ship with a younger crew, and breaking it down for a trip—especially after months on the float—took longer. Elvi’s people had been running a lab without any particular need to worry about arcane ideas like up and down. Now, everything had to be unmade, stowed, and packed away. Alex had the sense that some of the crew over there hadn’t expected to ever leave Adro.
The last decision was whether to leave the docking bridge in place and coordinate their drives. It wasn’t that hard a maneuver. It just meant letting the Falcon and the Rocinante talk to each other as they burned so that their drives stayed in sync. The bridge from one ship to the other could remain in place, and they could go back and forth easily. Alex liked the idea. He didn’t want the Falcon’s crew coming over, and he didn’t have any particular interest in making the crossing himself, but there was an equality that driving in tandem like that carried. The Rocinante was an old gunship from before the gates had opened. The Falcon was Laconia’s state-of-the-art science vessel with even more advanced technology than the Gathering Storm had boasted. Putting the two of them into a single unit made Alex feel like the Roci was getting the correct level of respect.