Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Forty-Nine: Naomi

Because the Rocinante was built to land on its belly, Holden stepped onto the flight-deck wall. He looked thin. More than thin, he looked like he’d been ill for months. The lines around his mouth were deeper than they’d been, and his grin looked less like his usual easy joy and more like surprise that anything good had actually happened. He looked bruised at heart, but only that. Not broken. He didn’t look broken.

He met her eyes, and something in her chest that she didn’t know could relax relaxed. She took a long, shuddering breath. Jim took her hand. She’d thought that would never happen again, and here he was, touching her again.

“Hey,” he said, too softly for anyone to hear but her.

“Hey,” she said back.

Amos, behind him, looked wrong. His skin was gray and his eyes were a uniform black. She’d seen kids on Pallas affect the same look with dyes and scleral tattooing, but on Amos it didn’t look like an edgy fashion choice.

Also, he was carrying a big black dog with a gray muzzle and a perplexed expression. The girl beside him seemed familiar, but not so much that Naomi could place her. There would be time for stories later.

Alex climbed up to his crash couch, grinning. “All right. Everybody strap in. We’re off this mudball.”

The crew cheered, not quite drunk with success, but maybe a little tipsy. Or maybe that was just her. Holden slipped into one of the other couches, staying close to the girl. Protective of her.

Slowly the ship tilted back to its normal, upright position.

“You want me to kick on the main drive?” Alex asked. “I could slag that whole palace if you want.”

Before Naomi could answer, Holden did. “No, leave it be. We still have friends there. Elvi, for one.”

“Oh. Should we go get her?”

Holden shook his head, even though Alex wasn’t looking at him. “No. She’s where she needs to be.”

He’d been on the ship for less than fifteen minutes, and he was answering like he was the captain. If she’d pointed it out, he would have been horrified. And apologetic, and maybe in some other context she would have expected the apology. She was, after all, the head of the underground, the engineer behind the campaign and a hundred other operations besides. The pleasure of having him back, of feeling herself and Alex and the ship falling into ancient patterns, was more than she could express. It was like waking up after a long and terrible dream to find that whatever it was hadn’t actually happened.

In all her long life, it was maybe the most beautiful moment she’d ever had.

It couldn’t last.

She felt Alex flying the ship inside Laconia’s atmosphere, sliding them above the landscape and rising up above it until the drive plume wouldn’t be a danger to anyone below. When the main drive kicked on, they shot up, rising through the last of the atmosphere and into the light of the Laconian sun. As Alex laid in their course for the ring gate, Naomi checked the tactical map for her fleet. The burns they were all under were punishing. By keeping on the edge of what human endurance would allow, they made it less likely that the Laconian ships would reach them. And the enemy ships themselves …

She pulled up an overlay that showed the destroyers and the Magnetar-class battleship. It was like looking over and finding a centipede on her arm. The target-lock alert came on, cutting through the merriment and joy like a scalpel.

“Alex?”

“We been target locked. We took too long. It’s the Whirlwind.”

Naomi laid down a sensor feed over her tactical display. The Magnetar was still almost nothing without magnification. Hardly more than a pale spot of darkness in the middle of the steady star that was its drive plume. With only a little magnification, though, it was the same eerie almost-organic shape as the Tempest. The bone-pale vertebra of an unimaginably huge animal. A ship like that had brought two navies to their knees. A single frigate with its supplies nearly drained already didn’t stand a chance. All her joy collapsed to ashes. She wondered whether Duarte would let her see Jim when they were both in prison. Whether they’d even be allowed the option of surrender. Fighting down through the planetary defenses had taken four ships and cost one of them. Or, depending on the next few minutes, maybe two.

At least the Whirlwind was the last Magnetar that would ever be built. She’d broken the construction platforms, so at least that. If she died in the effort—if they all did—Bobbie would still have approved. Some sacrifices were worth it.

“We have a tightbeam request incoming from the Whirlwind,” Ian said. His voice only shook a little.

“Let’s have it,” Naomi said, and Ian looked at her. The uncertainty in his eyes was clear. He didn’t know if she was going to surrender or lead them all into death. She wasn’t perfectly certain herself. “Now, Kefilwe. This won’t get better by waiting.”

He put the incoming message on every display, though only Naomi’s was live. She didn’t know if he meant to pressure her by letting the whole crew see the exchange or if he was nervous and screwed up. It didn’t make a difference.

The woman on her screen was young, with dark skin and straight, close-cropped hair. She wore Laconian blue and the rank insignia of an admiral, the same style that Mars used to use. The rage in her eyes gave Naomi very little hope.

“I am Admiral Sandrine Gujarat, commander of the Laconian battleship Voice of the Whirlwind. You have thirty seconds to drop core, deactivate your weapons systems, and open your airlock for boarding. Failure to do exactly as you are told will result in the destruction of your ship.”

Thirty seconds. Naomi raised her chin in defiance. If she was taken, they would get everything she knew eventually. The networks and contacts in dozens of systems. The long-term plans and strategies. Everything she’d built in all the time she’d spent working for Saba and then taking his place. It had made her into a perfect asset for the enemy. A ship full of her people stood breathless, waiting for her to decide whether to give them all over or let them all die. It was like being crushed under a hundred gs and weightless at the same time.

The voice that answered wasn’t hers. It wasn’t even one she knew.

“No, Admiral Gujarat. It will not end in anybody’s destruction. You will stand down at once.”

On her screen, the admiral’s eyes widened in anger, but also in confusion. Naomi craned her neck to see the girl who had spoken. She was in a crash couch, gesturing that the comms control should be transferred to her. Naomi hesitated for a moment, then went with it. When the Roci’s feed showed the girl’s face, the Laconian admiral paled.

“Do you know who I am, Admiral?”

“I don’t … The high consul—”

“Yes, I am the high consul’s daughter and heir,” the girl said. “You understand now. Good. I am on the Rocinante at my father’s request. Your threat is ridiculous and your orders are to return immediately to your assigned mission protecting the homeworld.”

The girl couldn’t be sixteen yet, but her voice had an easy arrogance. Naomi turned to Jim and mouthed, Is that true? He lifted his hands in a Belter shrug.

“Miss,” the admiral said, unconsciously bowing as she did, “you are … I was unaware … This is very irregular, miss. I’m afraid I can’t allow this ship to go anywhere.”

The girl rolled her eyes dramatically. “Is there a protocol? A security protocol?”

“I’m sorry?”

“If I am in distress, being held against my will. Threatened. Whatever. Is there a phrase I use to indicate that? Something innocuous I can slip into any conversation without my captors knowing it?”

“I … That is—”

“It’s a yes-or-no question, Admiral. This isn’t hard.” At this rate, the Whirlwind was going to nuke them to be rid of the girl.

“There is, miss,” Admiral Gujarat said.

“And have I said it?”

“You haven’t.”

“Then we can take it as given that I am not here under duress. That something is going on between the high consul and the leadership of the underground—something with which I have been entrusted and you haven’t. With that in mind? Go. Back. To. Your. Post.”

The woman on the screen squared her shoulders. “I have orders from Admiral Trejo that—”

“Stop,” the girl said. “What’s his name?”

“Whose?”

“Admiral Anton Trejo. What is his last name?”

“Trejo?”

“Yes,” the girl said, and leaned close to the camera so that her whole face filled the screen. She spoke softly and with an incandescent rage. “Mine is Duarte.”

“I’m sorry, miss,” the admiral said. “I can’t let your ship leave.”

“No?” the girl said. “Then shoot me the fuck down.” She dropped the connection and turned to Alex, staring down at her slack jawed. “We can go. That woman is scared to death right now.”

“Prepare for high burn?” Alex announced over the ship-wide channel, and the girl nodded curtly and settled back in her couch.

“Jim?” Naomi said.

“I know,” he said. “It’s been a really weird day.”

“We thought you were dead,” Naomi said as she stepped into the lift.

Amos blinked his unnerving black eyes, then shrugged. “Yeah, I can see that, Boss. What can I tell you? Sorry.”

Eight hours of high burn had taken them out of the Whirlwind’s effective range. Fifteen had increased the distance to the point that she almost felt safe. Not safe safe, but close enough that she could imagine stepping away from the ops deck and starting to make sense of everything that had happened, hearing everything that had brought Jim and Amos back. And how Teresa Duarte fit into it.

And also to tell them what had happened during their long and separate pilgrimages. What they had lost. With the four of them together, Alex had asked for the ceremony. As if the universe had given them a chance, and he was worried that if he didn’t take it now, it would somehow slip away. And she and Amos were heading to the airlock together again, as if the past had returned. But as if it had returned changed.

The changes to Amos were odd. His skin was somehow pale and dark at the same time, like a thin coat of white paint over black. His eyes were darkness, and there was something strange about the way he moved. But after so long, being able to think of him without grief and worry made the alterations only interesting. It was so much better than what she’d already carried with him. With losing him.

“I’d have called earlier, but … Well, I wasn’t ready to go. I was being patient.”

“What happened?”

He shrugged. “One thing and another. Good to be back, though.”

The lift stopped, and she stepped off. Amos followed just a step behind. “You’re different.”

“Yup,” he said, smiling amiably. It was such an unmistakably Amos-like thing to say. Such a familiar way to say it.

“Did the bomb fail?” she asked.

“Nope, it was fine.”

“So why didn’t you follow through on the mission? No blame, but … What was your thinking there?”

Amos went still for a moment, like he was listening to something she couldn’t hear.

“I met the kid,” Amos said. “Seemed kind of shitty killing her. I thought maybe it was the wrong call.” He shrugged.

Naomi stepped over and put her arms around him. It was like hugging a metal strut. “Good to have you back.”

Alex and Holden were at the interior door to the airlock. Alex had changed into an MCRN uniform. An artifact from another age. Jim was in a white formal shirt. He’d washed his hair and combed it back. He looked distinguished and somber.

The coffin in the airlock was just a shell, hardly more than a body bag with slightly hardened sides. And it was empty.

“This is way we always did it,” Alex said now that they were together. “When we’d lost someone and couldn’t recover the body. We’d still take the moment.”

He cast his eyes to the deck. Jim did the same. Amos put on the same somber face he always did at moments like this. A flood of complex feelings washed through her. Sorrow and joy, relief and the emptiness of a loss that would never be made whole.

Alex cleared his throat and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Bobbie Draper was one of my best friends. She was a Marine right down to her bones. Anything else she did was built on that. She was brave and honorable, and she was strong. She made a hell of a captain. I remember when Fred Johnson tried to make her into an ambassador back in the day, and she kept calling it the way she saw it instead of playing politician. She was always like that. She took on the impossible, and she made it work.”

He took a deep breath, opened his mouth like he was going to go on, then closed it again and shook his head. Jim was weeping now too. And so was she. Amos’ newly black eyes shifted like he was reading something in the air, and he lifted his chin.

“She was a badass,” he said, then paused and nodded, satisfied.

“She will be missed,” Naomi said. “From now on. And forever.”

They stood in silence for a moment, and then Jim stepped forward and cycled the exterior door. When it was open, the little chemical boosters on the coffin slid it to the edge of the lock. And then it was gone. Jim cycled the lock closed again, turned, and stepped in, putting his arms around her and Alex. A moment later, the solid mass of Amos’ arms looped around her too. The four of them held each other there with the hum and rumble of the Rocinante around them. They stayed there for a long time.

The elements of her little ragtag fleet that had been closest to the ring gate were through long before the Roci was even halfway through the system. Alex kept them at a punishing burn, balancing the reaction mass they still had and the distance to a friendly resupply depot in Gossner system. If they took breaks a little more often than during the dive into the system and burned a little less heavily, it was to conserve mass and because the Whirlwind and her cohort of destroyers were parked close in to Laconia, still knocking down the torpedoes and long-arc rocks that Naomi’s people had flung at the planet. Three days into their burn toward the gate, someone somewhere had grown the balls to issue an order, and the Whirlwind flung half a dozen torpedoes at the retreating Roci. The PDCs took them all down, and no more followed.

When they were burning, Naomi used the time to calculate a safe transit schedule and tightbeam it to the other ships. From the start of the campaign to its end, they’d lost thirty-two ships, and just shy of two hundred lives. They had retrieved Jim and Amos, taken in Teresa Duarte, and destroyed the mechanism of production that Laconia depended on for its high-powered fleet. The Whirlwind was still a massive killing machine capable of taking control of any system it chose. But it was only one ship. It couldn’t attack through any of the ring gates without leaving Laconia underprotected. It was pinned.

The Storm reached the gate and sent back a formal salute to Naomi before it passed through. Jillian Houston taking her ship back to Draper Station and waiting for new orders. That was a strange thought. Naomi had spent so much of her mental energy and focus on winning the battle she’d almost forgotten about everything that came after. Freedom from Laconia didn’t—couldn’t—mean a return to de facto rule by the Transport Union. For one thing, Medina Station was gone and no one would be setting up a permanent base in the ring space again. For another, Laconia had replaced the structures of trade and control with its own.

But still, there were ways. There wouldn’t be a choke hold on the ring space the way there had been, but there could be a network of cheap, easily replaced relays that announced incoming and outgoing traffic. Ships could know, at least, what the chances were of going dutchman before they made the transit. There weren’t many people who’d choose to go through a ring gate if they knew they wouldn’t come out the other side. Give the people enough information, and they’d be able to make the right decisions on their own. That was a problem for later, though. For the moment, she could watch the drive plumes of the ships that had broken Laconia touch the gate and escape, one after another, and think to herself, Safe. Safe. Safe.

In the breaks between the hard burns, the crew celebrated and, unfortunately, fought. In the tension before the attack, Ian Kefilwe and another young man—an engineer named Safwan Cork—had fallen into bed together and were now negotiating the difficult romantic territory of having survived. She tried to keep out of it, but once she saw Jim sitting with Ian in one of the now-empty torpedo bays, listening while the young man wept. It seemed right.

The ship was only about three hundred thousand kilometers out from the ring gates, and the remaining burns were all braking, making sure that when they did the transit, they had time on the far side to maneuver and not just slam into the other side of the sphere and vanish. The Laconian forces hadn’t come after them. Not even to throw more long-range torpedoes.

Teresa Duarte was an astounding beast of a human being. Naomi tried to make a connection with her, but only once. They were in a pause, Alex making a gentle quarter g, and Naomi was getting dinner. It still felt strange to her, seeing the galley full. In her mind, there were still only six crew on the Roci.

Teresa was by herself, leaning against one of the walls, a bowl of noodles in one hand and chopsticks in the other. Her hair was braided back, and it made her face look harsher than usual. No one was sitting with her. No one was speaking to her. Probably because no one knew what to say.

Naomi served herself a bowl of white kibble and sat down across from the girl. Teresa looked up, and there was a flash of outrage before she reined herself in.

“Is this okay?” Naomi asked.

“It’s your ship. You get to sit where you want.”

“Got to be a little strange, being someplace like this, yeah?”

Teresa nodded. Naomi took a bite of her kibble and wondered if they were going to sit in silence. Teresa shook her head. “There are people everywhere. And there’s nowhere to go. Back home I could be alone. No one’s ever alone out here.”

“There are ways,” Naomi said, thinking of her cargo container. “But there are usually fewer people here. It does get a little full.”

“You should have a crew of twenty-two.”

“We usually made do with six. Sometimes four.”

“I don’t like it here,” Teresa said, standing up. “I’ll want to find someplace else once we leave.”

She walked away without saying anything else. She didn’t put her uneaten bowl in the recycler, so when Naomi was finished with her own meal, she cleaned up after both of them, then walked down the corridor to her cabin.

To theirs.

Jim was in the crash couch. His jumpsuit was drenched in sweat at the armpits and down the back. He looked at her and shook his head.

“I will never, ever get this out of shape again,” he said. “This is miserable.”

“You’ll get better,” she said, and lay down beside him. The couch shifted to account for her added weight. Every time she saw him, she felt herself not quite trusting it. Not quite letting herself believe he was really back, in case it was all a dream or a false reprieve. As if the universe would take him away from her again. It was getting better, but she wasn’t sure it would ever completely go away.

“I saw your friend in the galley,” she said. “She’s having some trouble adjusting, I think.”

“Well, she was the only child of a galactic god-emperor, and now she’s eating oatmeal in a half-antique gunship. That’s got to be a hard transition.”

“What are we going to do with her once we get to the supply depot? You know she’s too important to just let her go, right?”

“I don’t know that we can make her stay. Not unless we’re talking about throwing her in a prison. But there are other options.”

“Are there?”

“There were plenty of Martians who didn’t take off with Duarte back in the day. Some of them will be cousins of hers. If we’re lucky, some of them may be counselors and therapists. Or … I don’t know. Run rehabilitation centers.”

“If not?”

“If there aren’t, some can be made. Everyone’s related to everyone, if you go back far enough. We’ll just go back until the right people are connected to her.”

“You sound like Avasarala,” Naomi said.

“I’ve been thinking about her a lot. I feel like I built a little version of her in my head. You ever have that feeling?”

“I know the one,” Naomi said. And then, “Teresa doesn’t just need a place to land and some sort-of relatives. She needs love.”

“She had love. Her father loved her. He really did. What she didn’t have was a sense of proportion.”

“And then you brought her here.”

“She brought herself,” he said. “Just like we all do. And it’s a pain in the ass for each and every one of us, every time it happens. Outgrowing your family? Hard work under the best of circumstances. Which these aren’t.”

She lay down, snuggling into his arm. He was sweat-damp, but she didn’t care. She stroked her fingertips across his forehead and down his cheek. He turned his head, pressing into her hand like a cat that wanted petting.

“Do you think she’ll be okay?” Naomi asked.

“No idea. She will or she won’t. Either way, it’s going to be up to her. I’m pretty sure she’ll be herself while she does it, though. That’s a victory for her. We’ll help if we can. If she’ll let us.”

The alert went on. Ring passage in five minutes. Jim sighed, stood, and started changing into fresh clothes.

“What about you?” Naomi said.

“What about me?”

“Will you be okay?”

Jim smiled, and there was only a little weariness in his eyes. Only a little sorrow. “I played a long, terrible, shitty game, and I won. Then after I won, I made it back home. I’m waking up in the morning next to you. I’m perfect.”