“You got it,” Alex said. The flight deck was dim, the way he liked to keep it, but the dark wasn’t calming. Even the sounds of the Rocinante, familiar as the face in his mirror, seemed ominous. His back and shoulders were tight enough that he’d had a low-level headache for what felt like days, and he couldn’t guess the last time he’d slept through the night. And that was before Jim and Teresa had headed into the alien station with a stone-cold killer. Before Jim had infected himself with the protomolecule. Before Duarte had started reforging humanity into a single, enormous organism that seemed like it wanted to kill him and Amos and Naomi personally.
Put that way, a little lost sleep was probably appropriate.
“Okay,” Amos said. “Try now.”
Alex tapped the test routine. “Still seeing it.”
“Good. Now the aft PDC junction.”
“Same lag.”
“Aft general?”
“That looks good.”
Amos’ sigh had a facial expression that went with it, even though the big man wasn’t on camera. Raised eyebrows, lips pulling to one side, like a father watching his kid fail at something important. Equal parts affection and disappointment. “Well, that means it’s the vacuum channel between ’em. I’ll try flushing it.”
Naomi’s voice came from the flight deck below him and the system comms at the same time. “You need a hand with that?”
“I wouldn’t say no,” Amos replied. “It ain’t exactly a one-person job.”
“On my way, then.” And then, only through the air, “Alex, keep an eye on the gates. If anything transits in—”
“I’ll sing out. Don’t worry about that.”
“Thank you.”
“Hey, Naomi? I just want you to know, whatever happens, it’s been a real honor shipping with you all this time.”
“I don’t think I can take another farewell speech, Alex.”
“No. But I wanted you to know.”
There was a pause, and then she said, “It’s been an honor for me too.” And then she was gone, heading down toward the space between the hulls with Amos to fine-tune their ship one last time.
It felt weird, not having Teresa there to help Amos out. The kid hadn’t been on the Roci for all that long, but he’d gotten so used to her presence that the change threw him a little. Jim not being there was worse. He kept wanting to check in with him, see if he was sleeping or on the scopes or down getting some coffee. There was a part of Alex’s head that just couldn’t wrap itself around the idea that Jim wasn’t on the Roci. And that Clarissa wasn’t. And that Bobbie wasn’t.
Now that it looked like their last go-round, he saw that he’d always kind of expected everyone to show up again somehow. It was silly when he thought about it, but it didn’t feel ridiculous at all. Years had passed since Clarissa died, but Alex’s heart was still patiently waiting to see her name on the duty roster. Bobbie was gone—he’d watched her go—and he still expected to hear her voice in the galley, laughing and giving Amos their peculiar kind of rough sibling grief.
The dead were still around him, because he couldn’t bring himself to believe that they weren’t. He could know it. He could understand. But like a kid who’d lost something precious, he’d never been able to shake that sense that maybe, just maybe, if he looked again, it would be there. Maybe the people he loved weren’t gone forever. Maybe the past—his past, his losses, his mistakes—were close enough for him to reach back and fix them if he stretched just right. Maybe, despite everything, it could still be okay.
“Check it now,” Amos said, and Alex ran the test.
“Well, holy shit,” he said. “That did it.”
“No lag?”
“One millisecond.”
“Yeah, well, we’re not getting better than that,” Amos agreed. “I’m packing up the toolkit and moving on to the rail gun.”
“I’ll be here,” Alex said, and it felt more like a prayer than it usually did.
He refreshed the tactical map just to see that it hadn’t changed, turned on some music and turned it off again. According to the last data they’d gotten before the repeaters shut off, the first of the incoming ships should already have been there. That they weren’t meant that the situation outside the ring space had changed, and he didn’t get to know what it had changed into. When he’d been a young man back on Mars, even before he’d joined up with the navy, one of his cousins had talked him into joining a martial arts school for a few weeks. One of the exercises the teacher had given them was to put a sack over their head and try to anticipate where the more advanced students were going to attack them from. The mixture of vulnerability, attention, and sickeningly acute anticipation wasn’t that different from what he was carrying now. He refreshed the tactical map again.