He and Naomi were on the ops deck, in couches next to each other. Alex, above them on the flight deck. Amos, Teresa, and Muskrat were all down in the machine shop, in theory ready to leap into action if something in the ship failed. And maybe that was true. Amos was still a hell of a mechanic. Teresa was young, smart, and she’d been training under him almost since they’d fled Laconia.
Still, he really hoped that nothing failed.
He’d lost track of how many hours they’d been speeding out toward the Freehold gate and how many meals he’d skipped in the rush between hard burns, when a message popped up on his screen. It took effort to focus on it. It was from ALEX: SAFE TO STOP RABBITING?
Jim shifted his hands on the old, familiar controls and pulled up the Roci’s tactical display. Freehold system was vast and empty. If the display had been to scale, none of the ships would have earned a pixel big enough to see, but he’d been making sense of the semi-abstract designs on the Roci’s interface for decades. He didn’t have to translate any of it. The red acute triangle was a Laconian destroyer falling away behind them. It wasn’t chasing. It was on a braking burn toward Draper Station. The white triangle was the corpse of the Sparrowhawk, receding from them, but only at the speed of the Roci’s escape run. And the green, blinking indicator was the debris field that had been the Gathering Storm—flagship of the underground’s forces.
It was a simple enough map. There weren’t enough ships or bases in Freehold to allow much subterfuge. He ran the math of transit times—how far ahead of the enemy they could be when they reached the ring gate if they kept to the present hard burn, how far ahead if they didn’t, how much of a lead they would need to get through the ring space and into some other system unfollowed. He ran a ladar sweep of a couple light-minutes ahead of them all the same before he let himself come to the conclusion he’d wanted to reach as soon as he read the question.
LOOKS CLEAR. WE CAN SPARK IT UP AGAIN IF WE HAVE TO.
In response, the thrust gravity eased back to half a g, and Jim’s spine cracked just above his sacrum as something slid back into place. He shifted carefully like he was waking from a long, restless sleep, and rolled to his side.
Naomi had already locked her couch and sat up. Her mouth was a thin, grim line. Her screen was an engineering report of the Roci’s core systems—reactor, recyclers, water tanks, missiles and PDCs, power. She went through it value by value, making sure that everything was where it should be, since their lives depended on the ship not failing. He wanted to reach out to her, take her hand in his, but that would have been for his comfort. She was already doing the thing that would make her feel better.
He opened a channel to the machine shop.
“How’s it looking down there? Everything good?”
The eerie hesitation in Amos’ voice had grown so familiar it was hardly eerie anymore. “Looking solid, except the dog’s got a little limp in her hindquarters. We’re going to give her a couple minutes to walk it off. If that doesn’t do it, we might take her to med bay and pop a little steroid in her hip.”
“Okay.” He dropped the connection.
Naomi had shifted her screen to a playback of the battle. Of the death of the Storm. Its destruction of the Sparrowhawk. The doomed dive into the teeth of the approaching Derecho. He had to think Alex was watching it too and seeing something very different. He’d served on the Storm for years. He knew the people who’d just died on it. Jim watched it on Naomi’s screen, trying to think how everyone else would make sense of it. How he did.
The two Laconian destroyers hurtled at each other, flinging torpedoes and PDC rounds until the resulting explosions blocked everything from view. The Derecho reappeared first, still under thrust, but its hull showing many glowing scars from Jillian’s furious assault. Then, when the Storm’s broken hull finally spun out the other side of the blinding cloud of violence, Jim heaved a sigh. It was the death of the underground, captured in low-resolution video. A glorious, ferocious death. But death all the same.
“Goodbye, Jillian,” Naomi said, whispering it like a prayer.
“We collect the most astonishingly brave people, don’t we?” Jim said. “And then we watch them die.”
Naomi smoothed her hair back and looked at him. “I thought Trejo was a man of his word.”
“He is,” Jim said. “I mean, he’s perfectly willing to commit atrocities. He’s not the good guys. But what happened back there, that wasn’t him.”