It felt odd, piloting from ops. Not that he hadn’t done it before, but when he had, it had been because there was someone with him there he wanted to talk to without shouting down. Despite all the times he’d run through the diagnostics with the others on board, he ran them again, saw nothing unexpected, and maneuvered away from the Falcon. When he lit the drive, the crash couch rose up under him, and he settled into the gel. The drive looked solid. He hadn’t caught the Falcon in the plume. He shifted up to a third of a g, then a half. Then a full g. Then more. The ship creaked, and he told himself that it was only the normal sounds. They only seemed louder because he was the only one hearing them. Two gs and he injected himself with a half dose of the juice. He stopped there. He also didn’t want to strain the ship before it could get a real once-over. He didn’t want to have a stroke when no one could get him to the autodoc.
“Trade-offs,” he said out loud. “It’s always trade-offs.”
No one answered. He took a moment, feeling the emptiness of the ship. Just him and the Rocinante and the starless void of the ring space. He opened the ship-wide comm.
“If anybody’s in here, this is your last chance. Say it now, or you’re part of the crew from now on.”
It was just a joke, and he was the only one who could appreciate it. He checked the drive. It was running fine. The course was inside tolerance, but there was enough noise that he’d want to adjust a time or two before the transit. The time until he reached the gate . . . He upped the drive to three gs. His bones could handle it. He wasn’t that old.
For the first half hour, he sat in the crash couch, shifting between diagnostic screens, waiting and watching for a sign of malfunction. Then he cut thrust to a third g for a few minutes, went down to the galley, and got a cup of tea. He wanted a beer, but maybe not until after the transit. But he could put on some music, so he did. Old Martian rai-fusion rang through the corridors and cabins. It was both beautiful and melancholy.
He got back in the chair and put the spurs in again.
It wasn’t long before other ships reached the gates. The list of vessels in the ring space, formatted for reporting just the way Naomi had designed, lost one name. Then another. The rubric showed that it was safe to go, that they were at very low risk of going dutchman, with the profile ticking up almost imperceptibly with every ship that left. The Duffy, heading for Bara Gaon. The Kaivalya for Auberon. Even the poor, busted-up Lagomorpha with its bad drive cone made it through Sol gate. When the Whirlwind passed into Laconia, the model shifted for almost a minute, ready to warn any incoming ships to slow their approach. It would have been a good system.
Slowly, and yet with all due haste, the ring space emptied.
Pressed into his couch, he started thinking about what came next. Here he was, a pilot with an old, broken ship and no crew. He didn’t know much about Nieuwestad, other than it was a corporate holding. That wasn’t going to mean much. But there wasn’t a large military presence. Having a gunship would either ensure his independence or make the local authorities anxious about him. But that was borrowing trouble before it came. The Roci was a good ship, and rated for atmosphere. Once he got it fixed up and found a crew, they could carry scientific survey teams through the system. Maybe do a little prospecting of his own. He imagined Kit and his wife shipping out with him on some microclimate engineering mission. Or something. Or just a little family vacation. He imagined being Grampa Alex, and grinned to himself. Then he imagined being Grampa Alex without Giselle there to make comments about his belly, and let himself smile just a little bit more. There were good lives out there for him. Possibilities.
The alarm sounded when he was still a hundred thousand klicks from the gate. A misfeed in the fuel supply to the reactor. Maybe nothing, maybe the first sign of a real problem. He pulled up the logs, running down them with a fingertip to help his eyes keep focus. This wasn’t the time to miss anything. He was glad now he hadn’t gone for the beer, or the ones after it.
“Come on,” he cooed to the ship. “We can do this. Just a little further down the trail now.”
Chapter Forty-Nine: Naomi and Jim
Somewhere, Holden was burning. Fever within his body. Heat without. Somewhere, he was in misery, but it wasn’t here. Here, he was aware—seeing without sight—of the Rocinante shifting away from the Falcon, away from the station. Turning away and burning. If he’d made the effort, he could have gone closer. Known more. He let it go.
“Probably the smart move,” Miller said. “Don’t want to tire yourself out.”