Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Alex

You should rest,” Caspar said. “How many double shifts are you now?”

“I don’t know,” Alex said, leaning his back against the galley bulkhead. “But I can’t see that one more’s going to kill me.”

“Isn’t until it is,” Caspar said. “But that’s not even all of it. As hard as you’ve been working, you’re going to start making mistakes.”

Alex scowled at the boy. He knew Caspar hadn’t meant it as an insult. Knowing was what kept him from being angry. Or from showing it at least.

“When you catch me screwing up, I’ll stop taking doubles,” Alex said. “Until then …”

Caspar raised his hands in surrender, and Alex went back to his meal. Textured yeast paste and a bulb of water. It was his lunch if he was second shift, breakfast if he was third. So, in a sense, it was both.

The Storm had burned hard to get away from Laconian forces, but no one had chased it. No one dared to. To judge from the newsfeeds, most people weren’t sure what they’d done to kill the Tempest, and no one wanted to risk that they’d do it again. Which was just as well, because the more they pushed, the clearer it was how much the victory had compromised them.

Every shift found new, unexpected degradations in the Storm. Vacuum channels that weren’t transmitting power, regenerative plating that had stopped regenerating, atmosphere leaks so subtle that they couldn’t be located except as the slow and steady loss of pressure. Alex was no engineer, but he’d been on the Storm as long as any of them and in space since well before many of them had been born. When he wasn’t sleeping, he was working to keep the ship together. He stopped when exhaustion promised a fast, deep, and dreamless sleep.

It wasn’t the first time he’d used work to keep his emotions at bay. On and off his whole life, there had been times like this when the danger of feeling what he felt was too much to face. Some people got drunk or got in fights or hit the gym until they collapsed. He’d done all those things too, but with the Storm as beat up as it was, and the crew as injured and sick as many still were, this was fine. It kept him busy and it kept the ship alive.

Even so, it was imperfect. He knew he wasn’t healed, and he suspected he wasn’t even healing. The pain came in odd moments. When he was just waking up or going to sleep and his mind wandered. Then, sure. But also when he was crawling through the access spaces looking for a broken line or at the medical bay getting his daily ration of medication to keep the lining of his gut from sloughing off again. It would sneak up on him, and for a few seconds he’d be lost in his own mind, and the oceanic sorrow there.

It was about Bobbie, of course, but it spilled over. In his worst moments, he also found himself thinking about Kit’s upcoming marriage. About Holden and that terrible last run they’d had together on Medina when he’d been captured. Talissa, his first wife, and Giselle, his second one. Amos, who was the worst loss in this because he’d just vanished into the enemy lines. Alex might never know what had happened to him. All the families he’d had, and all the ways he’d lost them. It felt like too much to bear, but he bore it. And after a few minutes the worst would pass, and he could get back to work.

The passage through the ring gates into Freehold system went as well as they could have hoped. Alex let Caspar do the heavy lifting. It was going to be his job soon enough, and it was better that he get the practice. They came in hot, bent their trajectory hard for the Freehold gate, and shot back out into normal space. In theory, it was possible to hit a gate from the realspace side at the perfect angle and make the transit through the intervening space in a straight line. In practice, there was usually a little flex, but Caspar did a good job. As good as Alex could have managed. They threw a fast torpedo at the only thing that looked like a Laconian sensor array, blowing it to dust before they made their last course correction. It was as close to anonymity as they could ask without the shell game.

Freehold itself was a straightforward little system. The one habitable planet was a little smaller than Mars. Then a slightly larger one farther out with an unwelcoming atmosphere, and a series of three gas giants protecting the inner system. The Storm’s home port was there, in the shadow of the giant they called Big Brother when they were being polite and Big Fucker when they weren’t. It was a fraction larger than Jupiter back in Sol, with a blue-green swirling atmosphere and constant electrical storms that created arcs of lightning longer than the Earth was wide. Alex watched it grow close on the Storm’s scopes, saw the black dot against it that was the rocky moon where they hid. Long-dead volcanism had left lava tubes big enough to land the Storm and a small fleet like her under the lunar surface, and that’s where they were headed. Toward the permanent base of Belter engineers and underground operatives that Bobbie had called the “pit crew.”

The knock at his cabin door was polite. Even tentative. Caspar stayed in the corridor, braced with a handhold.

“Hey,” the boy said. “You coming?”

“Where to?” Alex asked.

“Bridge. You got to take us in, yeah? Tradition. A pilot retires, he takes himself to the last port.”

“What kind of tradition is that?” Alex said with a chuckle. “I’ve never heard of it before.”

“Made it up,” Caspar said. “Just now. Can’t turn that down, start your own tradition.”

“You can take us in,” Alex said. “You need the practice anyway.”

“No,” Caspar said. “It’s you or we just plow the fucking thing into the moon and call it done.”

“You’re a shit liar,” Alex said, but unbuckled himself from his crash couch all the same. “You should work on that.”

“Just like everything else,” Caspar said. And then, “You’re really going.”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “I really am.”

“You were good.”

“You will be. You don’t need me here.”

He drifted out of his cabin, the light g of the braking burn making “down” a strong suggestion more than a real weight. He headed for the central lift and up to the bridge. As he floated into it for the last time, the rest of the crew braced their feet to stand at attention. Caspar, behind him, began to clap, and the others joined in. By the time Alex reached the pilot’s station, his eyes were damp enough to obscure his display.

“On your order, Captain,” he said.

“Bring us in, Mr. Kamal,” Jillian said.

The actual landing was easy, from a technical perspective. Even as injured as it was, the Storm knew where the walls around it were, and where the encrustation of human structures would be. Alex felt a great weight falling away from his heart. The custom docking clamps they’d made back when the Storm was a recently captured prize of the war slid home with something between a sound too low to hear and a shudder.

“Welcome back, reisijad,” the Belter-inflected voice said over the comms. “Looks like you fucked your ship pretty good?”

“It’ll give you lazy fuckers something to do,” Jillian said, the way Bobbie would have. Same inflection and all. It seemed right in a way Alex couldn’t quite describe that the girl had paid so much attention to how Bobbie ran things. Even when they were gone, the next generation up would keep echoes of them.

The shuttle to Freehold was a single-hulled transport called the Drybeck. It had begun its life as an ore hauler and been retrofitted sometime in the last twenty years. The company that had owned it had a color scheme of green and yellow, and the ghost of its logo still haunted the bulkheads on the bridge. Its drive was small and touchy, prone to stutter when the burn changed, and limited by a tiny reaction mass tank. The hold was lined with crash couches, and the half dozen of the crew most compromised by the death of the Tempest were coming home more as cargo than companions.

The long fall down from the gas giants passed through the area that would have been the most trafficked space in Sol system. Hundreds of ships would have moved between Saturn and Jupiter and the inner planets. Maybe half a dozen did the same in Freehold. Alex plotted the course with a growing sense of the emptiness of the system that mere decades couldn’t fill. It was too big. All of it was too big. He’d been there from the beginning, been part of blazing humanity’s trail to the stars, and he still couldn’t quite get his mind around how vast the spaces were.

He was surprised when, a few minutes before departure, Jillian came to the little bridge and sat in the couch beside his without buckling in.

“You coming down with us?” Alex asked.

Jillian looked at him for a long moment without speaking. She looked older than he thought of her as being, as if taking command, even for so short a time as this, had aged her.

“No,” she said. “The family wants to see me, and I’d like to see them too. But there’ll be time for that when the war’s over.”

I admire your optimism, Alex almost said, but the darkness was too much. He didn’t want to bring her down with his own skepticism. Instead, he nodded and made a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat.

“There’s a fast crawler waiting for you in port,” she said. “It’s got enough water, fuel, and starter yeast to get you going.”

“That’s good of you. I appreciate it.”

“It’s not altruism. Your ship,” she said. “It’s old, but it’s a gunship. Still better than most of what the underground has burning out there.”

“Maybe,” Alex said. “It could also be a nest for whatever birds live in the desert down there. That’s part of what I’m going to find out.”

“When you do, you reach out. The only people who fly solo are slingshotters and assholes. You got to have someone with your back.”

The comms clicked up. The shuttle was clear to leave. All Alex had to do was respond. He put the message on hold.

“What are you saying?” he asked.

“We’re not done,” Jillian said. “Not just that, we’re winning. Underground is going to need every ship it can get, and yours would be a good one to have on the team. If you need a crew for her, you tell me. I’ll get you one.”

Alex didn’t know what to say. The truth was, he didn’t have a plan except to get back to the Rocinante. But she was right. There was going to be an after. An after Bobbie. An after Amos. An after Holden. Whatever he was doing, he wasn’t going out there to die. Just to recover.

“I’ll let you know what it looks like,” he said. “We’ll make a plan.”

Jillian stood and held out her hand. He shook it without unstrapping.

“It’s been good,” Jillian said. “We’ve done good work.”

“We have, haven’t we?” Alex said.

After she left, he went through one last systems check. Flying single-hulled ships was a kind of gambling he usually avoided, but even if he hit a micrometeorite, they’d probably survive it. Anyway. Life was risk.

He flipped the comms back on.

“This is Drybeck,” he said. “I am confirming clearance to launch.”

“You’re still clear, Drybeck,” the voice on the other end of the connection said. “Not blowing nothing up, and no one floating out there to run into. Ge con Gott, yeah? Draper Station out.”

Draper Station, Alex thought as he eased the ship through the lava tube on its maneuvering thrusters. It was the first time he’d heard it called that. He didn’t hate the sound.

Freehold, like most goldilocks-zone planets, had a wide variety of environments. Freehold’s salt deserts were on the same continent as the lush mountains he’d hidden in when they first came and the township that had grown to be a modest city. White dunes and mesas of red stone stretched from horizon to horizon. Tent rocks rose in some places, and knife-thick ridges that could have been artifacts of alien civilizations or just beautiful geology. The dawns were warm pink, and the sunsets were green and gold. Alex didn’t know why. At night, the desert sang. High fluting tones as the temperature shift made the sand itself ring like a wineglass.

The fast crawler was mostly autonomous, and it took its navigation from the time and the position of the sun like an ancient sea captain on Earth. There was no signal coming in or going out that would give Alex’s position away. The transport’s wide titanium-and-rubber treads made the trackless badlands easier to cover than the simplest flight in a ship. The solitude was vast and consoling. He’d expected to feel lonely on the trip, but he wasn’t. The effort of being okay around the crew of the Storm had, it turned out, been exhausting. He hadn’t even known he was making the effort until he didn’t have to anymore. He slept in the little bunk in the crawler’s belly and spent his days sitting on top of the machine watching the sun and sky and stars and didn’t even listen to the music he’d brought with him.

Twice, huge shambling animals with legs like slender trees and coats like yellow moss had walked with him for a while. The second had been with him almost half a day before it cooed three times and turned away. As far as he knew, he was the only human being who’d ever seen them.

He’d wondered more than once why Naomi had chosen to live in a hidden shipping container, but now, here, he thought he understood. The pleasure of being utterly alone made his mourning into something different and strange and humane.

The cave where they’d put the Roci was in the western quarter of the desert. He’d picked it because it was near a patchwork of radioactive ore that added a little camouflage if the enemy was looking for it and acted as a landmark for him.

The fears that haunted him now were that the Roci wouldn’t be waiting for him. That the shelf he’d parked her under had collapsed in his absence. Or that the sealants they’d put on to protect the hull plating had broken down or been compromised by desert animals, exposing a ship built for vacuum to the erosion of wind and sand and salt. As the hours fell away, his anxiety started to grow. The peace of the desert rolled past until the crawler reached the edge of its automatic course and came to a shuddering halt beside a vast outcropping of stone.

Alex took a flask of water and a cloth to tie across his mouth and dropped to the salt-rich sand. The shade under the stone was cool. He followed the tracks of glass where the Roci’s thrusters had melted the sand, it felt like lifetimes before.

And there, dark and quiet and perfectly intact at the back of the cavern, was the old Martian corvette. Something had scratched at the sealant—maybe animals, maybe the sandblasting desert wind—but nothing had broken through. It was just his imagination that made him feel like the ship was welcoming him. He knew that. It didn’t matter.

It took the better part of a day to cut through the sealing coat and get the airlock answering him, but after that, things moved faster. They’d drained the water out of the tanks before they left, but the crawler’s supplies were enough to get the ship almost halfway to capacity. Getting the recycling system back online was harder. He spent half a day checking feed lines before he found the one that had split. And it took another half a day to replace it. It would have taken Naomi or Amos or Clarissa half an hour.

He didn’t sleep in the crawler anymore, especially once the Roci’s galley was able to turn out a little food. With his limited supplies, the food was spartan and the drinks were water and green tea. The ship was lying belly-down on the ground, everything was at ninety degrees from where his mind wanted it to be, and he had to climb to get to his cabin and his crash couch.

Lost as he was in the work of hauling his old ship back to herself, he could almost pretend he was waiting for his old crew. That they’d be there in the machine shop and the flight deck, laughing and arguing and rolling their eyes like they had before. A week into the effort, he’d exhausted himself and fallen onto his couch without eating dinner. He found himself slipping between dreams and wakefulness, hearing their voices in the hallway. Clarissa’s dry whisper and Holden’s earnest concern like they were really there, and if he just concentrated, he’d be able to make out the words. The alert tone as the airlock opened and familiar footsteps in the halls.

When the silhouette bent into his doorway, he still thought he was dreaming. It was the sound of a living voice, the first since he’d left Freehold, that brought him back to himself.

“Hey,” Naomi said.