She’d been afraid of him when he’d been her father’s prisoner. Now that she was on Jim’s ship, the fear seemed to have evaporated. He’d been her enemy then, but he wasn’t sure that he was her friend now. The emotional complexity of an adolescent girl socialized in isolation was probably more than he could ever really understand.
The dispenser finished both his bulb and Alex’s, and Jim took them, appreciating the warmth against his palms. The shuddering was almost gone now, and the bitterness of the coffee was more calming than tea would have been.
“We’re going to need a resupply before much longer,” Amos said.
“Really?”
“We’re okay on water, but we could stand to re-up the fuel pellets. And the recyclers ain’t what they used to be.”
“How bad?”
“We’re solid for a few weeks yet,” Amos said.
Jim nodded. His first impulse was to dismiss it as a problem for another day. That was wrong, though. Fuck-it-if-it’s-not-happeningright-now was crisis thinking, and if he couldn’t break out of it, it would only lead to more crises later on.
“I’ll talk to Naomi,” he said. “We’ll figure something out.” Assuming the Laconians don’t find us. Assuming the gate entities don’t kill us. Assuming that any of the thousand other catastrophes I haven’t even thought of don’t kill us all before it matters. He took another sip of his coffee.
“How’re you doing, Cap’n?” Amos asked. “You seem a little twitchy.”
“Fine,” Jim said. “Just covering near-constant panic with light humor, same as anyone.”
Amos had a moment of eerie stillness—one of the hallmarks of his new self—and then smiled a little wider. “All right then.”
Alex broke in over the ship comms. “We got something.”
“Something good?”
“Something,” Alex said. “The Perishable Harvest just dumped some kind of liquid, and it’s burning like hell for the big trade station in the outer Belt.”
“Copy that,” Naomi said—also over the comms—in the new staccato calm that Jim thought of as her Commander Nagata voice. “Confirming.”
“The Black Kite?” Jim asked the wall.
Alex and Naomi were silent for a moment, then Alex said, “Looks like they’re going after them.”
“Moving away from the ring gate?”
“Yes indeed,” Alex said, and the pleasure in his voice was unmistakable.
Jim felt a surge of relief, but it didn’t last more than a moment. He was already thinking about the ways it might be a trap. If the Roci turned toward the ring too soon, it would draw attention to them. Even if the Roci evaded the Black Kite, there might be another Laconian ship risking itself by waiting inside the ring space, ready to intercept any ship fleeing the system.
“Why are they running?” Teresa asked. “They don’t think they’re going to get away, do they? Because that would be stupid.”
“They aren’t trying to save the ship,” Amos said. He had the same patient, almost philosophical tone as when he was walking her through how to do a good weld in microgravity or checking the seal on a pipe. It was the voice of a teacher walking his student through a lesson in how the world worked. “Whatever they had on that ship that Laconia was going to get pissed about, they can’t hide it. Not in a system as thin as this one. And there’s no way they’re slipping off and swapping transponders, so their ship’s fucked. The trade station’s big enough they can maybe get the crew off and sneak onto other ships or pretend they were on the station all along.”
“Running to where the hiding places are,” Teresa said.
“And the more lead time they have, the better the chances they can find a good spot,” Amos said.
That could be us, Jim thought. If the Black Kite had decided that we looked a little sketchier than the Perishable Harvest, we would be sacrificing the Roci and hoping we could get small enough to overlook. Only it wasn’t true. There was no hiding place in Kronos or anywhere small enough that Laconia wouldn’t look there. Plain sight was their best hope, because their plan B was violence.
He didn’t think he’d said anything aloud or made any kind of noise that would show his distress, but maybe he had, because Teresa looked at him with something between annoyance and sympathy. “You know I won’t let them hurt you.”
“I know that you’ll try,” Jim said.