Naomi came last and pulled herself a bulb of tea while motioning to Alex that he could start.
“So, yeah,” Alex said. “You all heard about Kit and Rohi, right?”
“You may have mentioned it,” Jim said, teasing him, but gently. Alex grinned.
“So I did the math, and I’m pretty sure that the baby’s already born. Now, I know that we’ve a lot on our plates here. The work we’re doing is really important. And risky. I didn’t sign on to any of this thinking it was like a normal contract. This has never been a normal contract.”
Amos’ sigh was almost inaudible. Alex heard it anyway, and Jim could see the old pilot dropping minutes of talking around the subject.
“Communication is dangerous, for him and for us, but I would really like to . . . to send my boy a message, you know? Maybe get a picture of my grandson. I don’t know what we have or what the underground needs from us. If we can’t . . . I just had to ask. You know, if it was something we could, and I just didn’t . . .”
Jim turned to Naomi and lifted his chin, asking. She took a sip from the bulb.
“It would mean poking our nose through the Sol gate,” she said. “We could get a tightbeam through trusted repeaters from there.”
“Any gate’s just about as far as any other one right now,” Jim said. “I mean, we’d just have to keep pretending we were on the same fake contract as before. Even if Laconia has forces in the system, there’s no better system to get lost in the traffic. Sol’s got a few centuries’ worth of ships and infrastructure to blend in with. It’s not like we’d be trying to go unnoticed in Arcadia or Farhome.”
“It would be more risk,” Alex said, but he was just trying to tell them that he wouldn’t be angry if they said no. Jim, Naomi, and Amos had all shipped with him long enough to know that was true. He wouldn’t be angry, but he would be sad. And if they were all going to die anyway, there was no reason to miss the chance.
“I think we should go,” he said.
“I was hoping we could drop Teresa off at school and then head for Firdaws,” Naomi said.
“The Sol gate’s right here,” Jim said. “A quick burn. If there aren’t any guard ships right at the ring gate, we can flip as soon as we’ve passed through the gate.”
Amos scratched his neck. “We got enough water out of Kronos. We’re not hurting for reaction mass. We could probably make up the time by burning a little longer to and from New Egypt. We are still hurting on fuel pellets and recyclers, but a little detour like that won’t matter for those.”
“Fine,” Naomi said. “Sol gate for long enough to contact Kit, then New Egypt. We resupply in Firdaws.”
“That work for you, Tiny?” Amos asked.
Teresa snapped back to the room from wherever she’d been. There was a bright sheen of tears over her eyes. Not thick, but present. “Yes. Fine. Yes.”
Alex’s relief melted him. When he spoke, his voice was reedy and thick. “Thank you. Really. If we hadn’t, I’d have lived with it, but . . . just thank you.”
“Family’s important,” Naomi said, and Jim couldn’t tell which of the thousand things she could have meant by it were in her mind.
It took less than an hour to get the Roci ready to go, even with Amos swapping and testing the repaired valve. Alex, on the flight deck above them, was singing to himself like a finch at dawn. There wasn’t a melody to speak of, just the musical lilting of pleasure and anticipation. Amos, Teresa, and Muskrat were in engineering, and Jim was thinking about all the things the girl might be feeling. Abandonment. Anger. Rejection. He hoped it wasn’t like that. Or that at least there were other things—anticipation, curiosity, hope—to leaven them. He hoped without any reason to hope that it would matter and that Teresa would by some miracle live long enough to work through the complications of her own heart.
As they started the burn for Sol ring at half a g instead of the usual third, Naomi sighed. At first, he thought her mind was on the same things as his.
“Too many fucking ships going through the rings,” she said. “And here we are, not exactly leading by example.”
He looked at the tactical. She was right, of course. Just in the time they’d been at a relative stop so that she could read through the data, ten more ships had passed through gates, burning on one errand or another that someone decided was worth the risk. Or didn’t understand that there was a risk. Or didn’t care.