Teresa had looked at pictures of the campus filled with smiling young people her age and a little older. She tried to imagine herself among them. Tried to imagine who she would be if she were in those images. This is going to be my home now. Unless something goes wrong.
And it seemed like something might be going wrong.
The whole crew was gathered at a screen on the ops deck that showed the tactical display of the New Egypt system. Their focus—and so Teresa’s focus too—was the ship that had just passed through the ring gate 6 AU behind them and was burning hard for Abbassia.
“I don’t have it on any of the transit schedules from the underground,” Naomi said. “But that’s exactly the problem. There isn’t a single coordinated set of flight plans, and even if there were, people are smuggling all the time now.”
“Nothing on the drive signature?” Jim asked.
“Doesn’t match anything in the records,” Alex said. “But that doesn’t mean much either. Could be something that was built or had the drive swapped out at a shipyard in Bara Gaon or Auberon. There’s more and more decent yards in other systems too. It’s not like it was back when everything was just Sol system.”
“I know,” Jim said.
Alex increased the size of the image, but the ship was still too small to make out—a black dot against the brightness of its drive plume. A few dozen meters of ceramic and carbon-silicate lace as seen from almost nine hundred million kilometers. It was a miracle they could make out as much as they could. “Chances are decent that its coming through now is just coincidence.”
“Yeah,” Jim said in a voice that meant he disagreed. Amos crossed his thick arms over his chest and smiled. He wasn’t smiling about anything. Teresa still thought of him as Timothy sometimes. Timothy always smiled, even when he’d been hiding in a cave. Jim hauled in a wide sigh and let it out again. “But if it is a Laconian ship—”
“It still probably wouldn’t be tracking us,” Naomi said. “We’ve kept radio silence. We’re not even passing data with the local repeater network. They’d have to know we were coming here.”
“Probably it’s what it looks like,” Amos said. “Freighter hauling freight. Or a pirate. Pirates are good too.”
“It’s not the chances that bother me,” Jim said. “It’s the stakes. I don’t want them tracking us down to the surface.”
“I can make landfall when the site’s on the far side of the planet,” Alex said. “Zip in, drop Teresa and the pup off, and get back up above atmosphere before they’d see us taking off. Even if they’re watching, they won’t know where we went. Might not even know we landed at all.”
Teresa listened with a sensation growing in her belly. It was like a tightness. Or a stone. It had a taste too. She unbuckled herself from the crash couch and pulled herself down the lift. She wasn’t sure where she was going, but the crew of the Rocinante talking through the details of how they were going to drop her off made staying in place unbearable.
She passed by the galley to the crew quarters, including her own. She heard Muskrat bark an inquiry as she passed, but she didn’t answer, just kept going down. The machine shop was as close to a safe and comfortable place as she had anymore. She had a list of tasks from Amos and she pulled it up. It was time to check the water supply’s chemical sensors. She’d never done it before, but the instructions were linked to the entry. She read them, gathered up the tools, and made her way to the tank feeds. Her jaw ached. She made herself stop clenching her teeth.
Travel between systems was slow. The Rocinante didn’t have any of the breathable-fluid crash couches that would let bodies sustain long, very high-g burns. The duties that Amos assigned her to keep her engaged filled the gap that Ilich and other tutors had left, and she clung to them now not because she particularly enjoyed them, but because they were familiar. And because it felt like laying claim to something.
She was about halfway done with a bubble of escaped water the size of her fist adhering to her arm when Amos pulled himself in beside her. He didn’t say anything, just took a little hand vacuum and cleaned the spilled water off her wrist. He handed her tools when she needed them and stowed them for her when she didn’t. It went faster with him there. In the end, she found that two sensors out of sixty were showing periodic faults. Low-voltage shorts. Harmless. And they could be down half the sensors and not really have to worry about water quality. She tagged both of them for replacement anyway. Amos’ philosophy was to replace things before you needed to, not after. She found it a sensible rule.