“If this is what’s happening,” he said, thinking his way through each word as he said it. “If this is pick-the-last-placeyou’re-going-to-be . . . I know I’ve been a restless kind of guy, but Kit is in Nieuwestad system with his wife and their little boy. And I’m not young. If there’s no chance of me ever seeing them again on one hand, and there’s I’m-able-to-find-a-job-and-send-messages-and-swing-by-a-couple-times-a-year on the other? I don’t know that I can go back to Sol. My family’s not there.”
There was a way that his last words could have been cruel, but he didn’t know how else to say it. Naomi was family, and Jim was. And Amos. Even Teresa and her old dog, a little bit. He looked away, afraid to see hurt in Naomi’s eyes.
“If it were Filip,” she said, “I’d be going where he was.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re a lovely man.” She turned back to her comms, and a moment later Elvi was there. “Change of plans. I have to send the Roci someplace else. Can Amos and I hitch a ride?”
“Of course.”
“We have a dog.”
“That makes it the least problematic passenger I’ve had in years.”
Naomi dropped the connection and made a different one.
“What’s up, Boss?” Amos asked.
“Don’t pull in the bridge to the Falcon. Get the Roci shipshape, get whatever you want to keep, and grab a berth on the Falcon. Muskrat’s stuff too.”
Alex leaned forward, looking for the right explanation. The right apology.
“Alex going to hang out with his kid?” Amos asked.
“Yup,” Naomi said.
“It’s not that I don’t love you guys,” Alex said.
“Sure, whatever,” Amos agreed cheerfully. “If I’m not going to be on board to patch any leaks, I’ll want to change some repair priorities.”
“Use your best judgment,” Naomi said, and let the connection drop. She stretched over, squeezed Alex’s hand once, and let it go. “Get to work with the preflight. We’re under some time pressure here.”
Thirty minutes later, they were at the airlock. Naomi had a small bag under her arm. Amos had a bottle of liquor and part of Muskrat’s customized crash couch. The rest had already been moved over to the Falcon. The dog, floating between them with her tail windmilling, seemed the most anxious of them, glancing from one to the other with wide, wet, brown eyes. It was hard to believe that after all the years on the Roci, all the lives they’d lived together there, it would be so easy to gather up everything and pack it out. And yet, there they were.
The inner airlock doors were open, and the control pad said that the bridge was pressurized. Alex gripped and released the handhold even though he wasn’t drifting. This is a mistake, he thought. We shouldn’t be doing this. I was wrong.
Then he thought of Kit, and of never seeing him or hearing his voice again, and he kept his mouth shut.
“I left a list in engineering,” Amos said. “It’s all the stuff you really need to get fixed soon. I mean, don’t wait. And then a couple dozen things you ought to look at. But I’m pretty sure you’re good. I don’t know if they have a dry dock on Nieuwestad.”
“They do,” Alex said. “I checked.”
Amos’ black eyes shifted. They suddenly didn’t seem eerie at all. “You probably ought to head there first. And don’t use the rail gun. Cracked capacitor will probably blow if you charge it.”
“Don’t shoot anybody. Got it.”
“Unless you have to,” Amos said, then he tucked the dog under one arm and headed for the airlock door. Naomi, watching, smiled.
“He hasn’t changed,” Alex said. “Not really.”
“He has,” she said. “We all have.”
“Before you go, I wanted to say. . .” Naomi shook her head gently, and he trailed off.
“It was good,” she said.
“It was.”
She touched a handhold, rotated, and slid through the still air and into the lock. Muskrat barked once, and Alex was going to tell them to say goodbye to Teresa for him, but the inner door slid closed. The outer door opened, and Naomi and Amos and the dog transferred onto the bridge and across it. He saw that they were speaking to each other, but he didn’t know what they said. As the Falcon’s lock opened to accept them, the Roci’s outer door closed, and Alex was alone on the ship. He waited for a moment, telling himself that he was just listening to the hum of the docking bridge retracting. Making sure nothing went wrong. But even after it was folded in place and ready for travel, he floated there for a few more seconds before he headed back up to the controls.