“How long?”
The big mechanic smiled. “If we’re good, half an hour. If we’re not, then it depends how bad we are.”
“Get started, and I’ll come assist as soon as I can.”
“Copy that, Boss,” Amos said. “And Tiny, right?”
“Not leaving without her,” Naomi said. “But I may be cutting the Falcon loose.”
“Let me go double-check the bridge then. You can fuck things up pretty good if you try folding those back in when they’re broken.”
“Thank you,” Naomi said, then turned to Alex. “Preflight checks. All of them, top to bottom. And keep running the diagnostics until the second we’re ready to go. If you can get through them five times, do them five times.”
“You got it,” Alex said, and hauled himself into an undamaged crash couch. “Don’t worry. The Roci’s not going to let us down now.”
“That’s because we’re not going to let it down,” Naomi said.
On the tactical display, the ships still remaining in the ring space started ticking from yellow to green as their courses changed and their drives bloomed. On the comms, half a dozen connection requests were already queued—people asking for clarification or for help. He didn’t know what to do for any of them.
Naomi ignored them for the time being and put in her own connection request to Elvi, which was accepted as soon as it was made.
“What’s the Falcon’s status?” Naomi asked.
Alex started the diagnostic run, querying each of the maneuvering thrusters for power, reaction mass feed status, pressure, and control response.
Elvi’s answer was equal parts mania and relief. “Fucked, flustered, and far from home.”
“I’m going to need something a little more technical,” Naomi said, but there was a smile in her voice. One of the port thrusters threw up an alert for low reaction mass. Alex started isolating the line and looking for pressure drops.
“We lost two crew. Harshaan Lee and David Contreras. I don’t think you met David. He was a chemist. He had a wife on Laconia.”
“Oh. Not Harshaan. I’m so sorry.”
“We sustained some damage, but not as much as last time, because I’ve been through that twice now. I never wanted to do that again. I hate it.”
“How long before you’re good to go?”
“It’ll take an hour,” Elvi said. “And then, like a bat from the depths of hell.”
Alex found the problem. A broken feed from the water tanks. In a perfect life, they’d fix it, but the Roci had been built for war. Multiple redundancies were in her nature. Her backups had backups had backups. He started flipping through alternate feeds while the diagnostic run went on ahead of him.
“Where are you going?” Naomi asked.
Alex felt a little twinge of concern at Elvi’s sigh. “Sol,” she said, quietly. “I haven’t said so yet, but Sol.”
“Not Laconia?”
“The Whirlwind’s heading that way. Even if Trejo decides to honor his amnesty, and there are literally no consequences for breaking his word, I’m pretty sure Admiral Gujarat has an enemies list. If I’m on it, and I am very much on it, a lot of my staff is going to be in for a hard run too. I’m breaking up some families, but I’m saving some lives. What about you?”
“Sol,” Naomi said. “But I can’t go until Teresa’s out of the station. I won’t make you wait for me. As soon as we can detach the ships, you get the fuck out of here.”
“Don’t need to say it twice,” Elvi said, and dropped the connection. Alex identified a feed with no pressure drop and switched to it. Naomi pulled up the first message in the queue.
“This is Captain Loftman of the Lagomorpha. We are in need of assistance. Our drive cone has suffered catastrophic damage . . .”
Naomi fell to, finding rescuers for ships in need of rescue, answering questions for ships whose command staff were in panic, checking in with Amos now and again as he worked his way through the ship. On her screen, a small window was dedicated to the visual telescopy pointed at the station, the entrance.
Alex felt himself trembling before he knew what it was about. When he did know, he pulled his hands back from the controls. The Roci went on, checking the status of the air and water recyclers, the power grid, the Epstein drive.
“Naomi,” he said, and something in his voice must have told her there was a problem, because she abandoned the comms at once and turned to him. For a moment, he remembered her the way she’d been when he first knew her back on the Canterbury, when the biggest problem he’d had was whether they could get from Ceres to Saturn and back fast enough to collect the on-time bonus. She’d been a quiet thing then. Always hiding behind her own hair and avoiding eye contact. The woman she’d become . . . Well, they were related, but they weren’t the same.