“Does it bother you?” she asked.
He looked over, his dark eyes wide and strangely innocent. Like a stuffed animal’s. She pointed at his chest as the countdown to transit began. Alex’s voice, professional with just the barest hint of anxiety.
“I don’t know,” Amos said. “Not really. I don’t like being dead, so . . .” He shrugged. “It is different, though.”
Alex reached zero, and Teresa imagined she felt a moment’s vertigo, but it was almost certainly psychosomatic. When Amos spoke again, his voice was calm and amiable. One of the things she liked about him was that he never had the faint condescension of generic concern. “You’re thinking about your dad?”
“You didn’t choose what happened to you. How you changed. He did. And I don’t know which of you I’m more like, you know? I chose to leave. To be here. But there are so many things that I can’t—”
“We have a problem,” Naomi said over the ship-wide. “Stand by, and stay strapped.”
“Got you,” Amos said, but he was already pulling a mirror of the tactical controls onto the wall screen. Freehold system appeared, simplified by the shorthand of graphic design into something comprehensible. The sun. Freehold itself and the single other inner planet. The three gas giants. A dozen prospecting ships, mostly in the asteroid belt or the gas giant’s moons. Teresa looked for what had made Naomi’s voice so hard, and it took her a moment to find it.
The Gathering Storm was a Laconian destroyer, stolen by Roberta Draper. It was the flagship of the underground’s clandestine fleet, the tip of the spear during the siege of Laconia that had been Teresa’s own escape. To Admiral Trejo and the rest of the Laconian Navy, it was a humiliation and a thorn. A reminder of a string of losses. To the underground, it was a symbol of the empire’s vulnerability. It was the ship that might slip through any gate at any time, bringing the underground’s power to bear on any lesser ship, almost more powerful as a story than as a fighting vessel.
But the Laconian destroyer on the tactical display in low orbit around Freehold wasn’t the Gathering Storm.
Chapter Sixteen: Tanaka
The school medic looked like his voice had broken about half an hour before. If Tanaka hadn’t known better, she’d have thought he was a student, not staff. He had dark skin, full lips, and hair cut close to the skull. In other circumstances, she’d have found him very pretty. As it was, she kind of hated him. For one thing, he was nervous with her. Every sentence he spoke rose at the end, so no matter how straightforward or obvious the statement, he bent it into a question. Also, some part of her limbic system had noticed that every time he was around, something happened that hurt or annoyed her. Changing dressings on her ruined cheek, needle sticks for the blood draws and support meds, scans in the school’s antiquated autodoc. Something.
Worst of all, she probably owed her life to him.
Her men—Mugabo’s strike team that she’d appropriated— were stripped of their equipment and buried already. Winston Duarte himself had ended the custom of bringing the dead back to Laconia for burial. All soil is Laconian soil had been the message then. Even with the profuse bleeding of head and face wounds, it would have been hard for her to hemorrhage to death on the dirt of Abbassia. But if someone had come and put a bullet in her, they’d have had a pretty good chance of blaming the murder on Holden and whatever the fuck his ship mechanic had become. She didn’t remember being found or brought into the medical station. She didn’t know if the medic had hesitated or if he’d been resolute to his Hippocratic oath. She did know without doubt that she had been vulnerable before him, that he had held her life in his young, unscarred hands. She hated him for that.
“I would very much recommend against any high-g maneuvers for at least three weeks?” he said as she packed her few remaining belongings into a sack. “Regrowth gel is very difficult on something that moves as much as a cheek?”
“I will have the very best care available,” she said, enunciating each word separately through the numbed ruins of her mouth. Holden’s bullet had cost her three upper teeth on the left side and most of her right cheek. There were microfractures from her palate up to her left orbital, and she was having headaches that left her swimming with pain. Those might have come from the fight with the black-eyed mechanic, though. Once enough things got fucked up in her skull, there wasn’t much point assigning an origin story to each of them.